Most pertinent of all, perhaps, although “the sweet odor of vaguely illicit pleasure hangs about” all the extant romance texts,16 both Longus and Achilles Tatius have been specifically accused of “dirty talk.” The often quoted remarks of Erwin Rohde about Longus are a bitter complaint:
One may grant validity to the treatment of the love of this youthful herdsman pair as something hardly more than a sweet sensual youthful herdsman pair as something hardly more than a sweet sensual desire. But the way in which the author whips up this desire and through lascivious experiment keeps on bringing it to point just short of gratification—this betrays a revolting, hypocritical sophistication and makes us most unpleasantly aware that all the naïveté of this idyllist is only an artificial concoction, and that he himself is in fact nothing more than a sophist.17
As for Achilles Tatius, as long ago as the ninth century CE, the bishop Photius (Bibl. 87), for all his admiration of the style, diction, and inventiveness of the love episodes, declared that all these excellences were vitiated by the fact that it was extremely obscene (hyperaischron) and impure (akatharton). It takes sôphrosynê to resist sophist temptation, as we learn from the narrator in Longus, who at the end of his proem, prays for self-control in the writing of his erotic tale, or in the case of Achilles Tatius, we might heed the advice of a Byzantine epigrammatist (Anth. Pal. 9.203), who urges readers, who desire to sôphronein, to look to the ending of the narrative in Achilles Tatius rather than revel in its so-called (sexy) “marginal sights” along the way.
In addition to the opening frames of these narratives, there are parallels too when it comes to the endings, beyond their happy outcomes. Each dénouement revolves around the resolution of a stubborn mystery: for Longus, the issue is the most familiar and the most profound—the identity of the two foundlings who were exposed as infants in the countryside that now makes them eligible for marriage; for Achilles Tatius, the stakes seem smaller, but not in the light of the obsessions of the first-person narrator—the explanation of the second and most puzzling Scheintod he witnessed with his own eyes in book 5, which accounts for all the misadventures in the rest of the plot.
Moreover, in both works, there is an emphasis on theater and theatricality, in keeping with the spectatorial interests of the period, and in both, this aspect is adumbrated in the first part but fully developed in the second. Daphnis performs his musical and herdsman’s skills for the city folk in the fourth and last book in counterpoint to the rustic spontaneous celebration of mimetic narrative, song, and dance after the vintage in book 2 (Pan and Syrinx), while in L&C, the latter half, more allusively (after the ploy of the actor’s trick of a fake sword in book 3) offers disguise, costume, and histrionics in the law court and in the temple in Ephesus, with references to both dramatic genres.18
Certain recurrent motifs are also common to both: in addition to horticultural descriptions, there is the prominence of the rapturous first kiss in the economy of the text, and the device of strategically placed dreams that influence (and shape) the course of the plot with predictive, sometimes prescriptive, authority—even as in AT, where their meaning may be far from clear. With few exceptions, the dreams are all god-sent, no matter the identity of the dreamer: Eros again and again in Longus along with an epiphanic vision of Pan; Aphrodite and Artemis (twice) in AT. Even more conspicuous is the role of myth and the frequent recourse to storytelling: In the first instance, Cleitophon declares to the unnamed interlocutor at the beginning of the narrative that his erotic travails are more akin to muthoi than logoi (1.2),19 while Pan in D&C proclaims that he intends to make a muthos out of Chloe (2.27). The ambiguity of the term suggests a hesitation between fiction (invented) and myth (a traditional story), between a creative self-consciousness and a justified appeal to an established repertory of tales.20 This is a topic that requires further discussion. I point out merely in this brief survey the numerous embedded myths that are related in the course of these narratives that quite often have an exegetical function and give evidence of the authors’ paideia. In the case of Longus, the figure of Pan features in the first three myths (Pitys, Syrinx, Echo), with Chloe taking the last place as the probable mythos, as mentioned above, while the temple of Dionysus, located in the sumptuous garden park, in book 4 is adorned with other, quite different myths of that god that gesture to another nonpastoral sphere of influence (and import) altogether. An inventory of myths in Achilles Tatius would need to be far more extensive. They are sometimes quite brief, often aetiological, and at times represented in pictorial form. As the most relevant, I single out, in addition to the painting of Europa and the bull (book 1), the diptych of Andromeda and Prometheus (book 3) and the picture of Procne, Philomela, and Tereus (book 5), while the stories of two other mythical figures (Syrinx, Rhodopis) are the basis for the chastity tests that both Leucippe and Melite are required to undergo (book 8). The myth of Pan and Syrinx, we may note, is common to both texts, although with entirely different implications (and a different placement in the narrative). Even so, while Pan in his myths is the sexually aggressive deity, he is also in the context of epiphany (Longus) or ritual (Achilles) protective of a maiden’s integrity.
Above all, let me stress the playful humor of both works that is the cue to recognizing their value as programmatic texts about the nature of eros as about the epistemological and ontological bases of perception and self-identity. True, the comic aspects of Longus depend on the gap between the sophisticated urban narrator and the unschooled naïveté of the young pair, whose path to understanding is nevertheless thick with referential density to earlier literary works and generic conventions, which they express but cannot possibly know. In the case of Achilles Tatius, items such as mistaken identity, farcical confusions, juridical parody, and pompous sophistic discourse have led some critics to characterize the work as a species of comic realism.21 Yet, comedy and philosophy (however ironically the latter is treated in Achilles) are not mismatched consorts. Whether in Aristophanes’s Thesmophoriazusae or Euripides’s Helen, we see the same mixture of serious and comic, where ventures into dangerous terrain can be protected through cuddling up to both parodistic and profound tonalities and where mimesis meets up with playful and flirtatious elements that mask more serious levels of intellectual inquiry.
Finally, each work may be said to play with the very conventions of the novel itself, each depending for its effects on a prior acquaintance with the rules of the genre. The pastoral simplicity of Longus transposes the usual series of romance adventures into a small compass, ruled by an opposition between town and country rather than the more typical one between home and abroad, and exploits the innocence of its characters to probe an entire inheritance of Greek ideas about eros in a cunning pastiche of literary and philosophical allusions (e.g., Sappho, Theocritus, Homer, Plato). Achilles Tatius, at the opposite end of the spectrum, for all his deployment of the usual topoi (travel, kidnapping by pirates, enslavement, imprisonment, storm, shipwreck, court trial, attempted seduction by powerful rivals) skews the expected symmetry of the couple by the use of a first-person (often unreliable) narrator, who veers between sophistic erudition and naïve self-deception. He is at first a seducer rather than a lover, with a penchant for voyeurism and a taste for graphic images that join with his larger shortcomings as a more typical romance “hero.” The novel revels in devious subplots, exploits such narrative devices as the Scheintod (which is used not once, but three times), questions the very meaning of parthenia (maidenhood) in applying the term to both sexes, and subjects such paramount ideas as paideia and philosophia to cheerful subversion. Parody and pastiche are charges often leveled against this “slippery and subtle work,”22 along with its mischievous sendup, at times, of the expected moral values that are promoted in the rest of the genre, made more complicated by the need to read between the lines of Cleitophon’s self-representation and thereby to gauge the levels of narrative identity (and sincerity). Unlike the case of Longus, whose novel is generally admired (pace Rohde) as
a masterful achievement “that manages to be both detached and sympathetic, ironic and sincere, sophisticated and religiose,”23 critical consensus is difficult to achieve in Achilles Tatius, which is said to “hover between an emotional overload and hypersophisticated knowingness,”24 and breaks every sort of taboo in its graphic erotic descriptions, whether of sensual pleasure or sexual violence. Above all, however, are the substantial differences in their erotic programs as the route to final satisfaction and enlightenment.
EROTIC PROGRAMS
Longus
Daphnis and Chloe is unique in the entire corpus for the explicit way in which it foregrounds the value of Eros as an all-encompassing guide to life, not just for the characters but for all readers alike. The narrator in the proem promises that the story he is about to tell “will heal the [love]sick and comfort the sufferer [in love], remind the one who has loved and teach in advance the one who has not.” The reason is that “no one has ever escaped Eros or ever shall, as long as beauty exists and eyes can see.” The book, as a verbal transcription of an artwork, answers to the narrator’s own desire to respond to the painting (antigrapsai) in words25 and to disseminate its message as a “delightful possession for all mankind,” even as he dedicates his work to the local divinities: Eros, the Nymphs, and Pan. From the start, Longus intertwines the erotic and aesthetic as he does with the relations between nature and artifice. Because the work makes erotic education into the most elementary and essential of lessons, it suggests the utterly “natural” experience of Eros as a founding paradigm, but one supported everywhere with reference to previous texts and attitudes to create a “hallucinatory echo text” of all the erotic literature that has proceeded it. Children naturally imitate what they see and feel though what they imitate is expressed through a mimetic rehearsal of an entire tradition, but recreated as though for the first time. As the narrator-lover imitates the painting, and the narrative in turn works its mimetic effects upon its readers, so in their way the children learn about Eros through a mimesis that extends throughout their entire world in their relations to nature, animals, gods, parents, elders, and themselves.26 Another set of apparent antitheses is the one between physis (nature) and technê (knowhow). Philetas, emblem of pastoral wisdom, can instruct the ignorant young pair about the power of Eros, leaving them with the final advice to lie together naked, but it takes the city-woman, Lycaenion, to instruct an eager Daphnis on the mechanics of sex, a lesson that on their wedding night he teaches Chloe in turn. This emphasis on paideia as a necessary supplement to the instinct of nature inscribes human sexuality in the social sphere and regulates the stages and conditions under which it may be properly accomplished. In so doing, Eros, the Nymphs, and Pan conspire to expand the erotic paradigm itself from its literal sense of sexual desire and its consummation to represent a broader vision of the world in which both art and nature have a place in both local and universal terms.27 Poised between the suggestion of an archetypal myth and a purposeful literary creation, Longus’s singular accomplishment stands alone in the history of Greek literature, however its merits may be judged.
ACHILLES TATIUS
In Longus, it is the young couple’s innocent ignorance about sexuality that sustains the forward thrust of the narrative and justifies the novel’s educational program of life and learning that revolves around Eros, to be fulfilled, all in due time. While Daphnis in the last book is obliged to vouch for the virginal status of Chloe to ensure her marriageability, once his identity as the son of Dionysophanes, the lord of the estate, is revealed, the matter is quickly resolved in a brief private conversation with his newly found father. The opposite holds true for Achilles Tatius in every respect. His characters know all about the “facts of life,” we might say, from the start, and it is their preliminary violation of the social (and romance) protocols in a failed assignation that determines what happens thereafter in the price that each must pay for their willful sexual desires. To this extent, therefore, we might speak of an erotic education of sorts, one that consists of one ordeal after another as a penance until they achieve redemption and the couple is reunited at the end.
Three dreams, one by Leucippe’s mother (book 2) and those of Leucippe and Cleitophon (book 4) augur the events to come. The mother’s dream that “a bandit with a naked sword seized her daughter, dragged her away, threw her down on her back, and sliced her in two all the way up from her belly, making his first insertion at her private parts” (2.23.3) sets the stage for all that follows—the interrupted tryst of the lovers at home, which prompts their hasty escape from Tyre, then a journey by sea, shipwreck, and capture by bandits in Egypt. What the mother thought was a metaphor of her daughter’s defloration turned out to be quite literally true in the “sacrifice” she undergoes at the bandits’ hands (the first Scheintod). But the scare tactics of the dream to enforce the rule of an intact body until the lovers’ dangerous erotic impulses can be channeled into the social institution of marriage are not. The breach of the rules, once sinisterly exposed in the mother’s terrible vision, ensures that the novel will subsequently exploit to the fullest the other side of sexuality, in assaults upon the body, the site of desire—sacrifice, abduction, physical violence, bondage, attempted rape, images of mutilation, slavery, and death (or at least apparent death), but now under the sign of resistance. When after Leucippe’s “resurrection” in the first Scheintod, engineered through a clever trick, Cleitophon again had urged her to yield herself to him, she now demurs: “it is not themis,” for Artemis had appeared to her, enjoining her to remain a virgin “until I adorn you as a bride, and none other than Cleitophon shall wed you” (4.1.3–4). What could be more explicit than this divine injunction with its promised reward? On the other hand, Cleitophon’s dream is more ambiguous, although at first it seems to parallel hers: “I saw before me Aphrodite’s temple and the goddess’s cult image within it, but the doors were shut. Instead a woman appeared looking just like the statue, saying “At present you cannot enter the temple, but if you wait for a short time, I will not only open it to you but make you a priest of the goddess” (4.1.5–8). What this will mean in fact is that after Leucippe’s second Scheintod (on a ship off the coast of Alexandria), the look-alike Aphrodite will be none other than the figure of the Ephesian widow, Melite, who wields a sophist’s persuasion to seduce him in direct counterpoint to (or retaliation for) his previous efforts with Leucippe. Cleitophon will later suffer severely for adultery at her husband Thersandros’s hands for his marriage to Melite, when the latter unexpectedly returns alive from a shipwreck to Ephesus, where, as previously mentioned, all the characters in question are now located. Beaten, imprisoned, brought to trial, fed a false story of yet another murder of Leucippe, this time by Melite, no less, and wounded by grief and remorse, he accuses himself of her death and is determined to die. Made ready for the rack, the fire, and the lash, and sentenced to execution, the male protagonist too is ready to pay the price on his body, if initially at first for opposite reasons, that Leucippe, now the slave of Thersandros, had paid on hers.28 This initial violation of the conventions, therefore, constitutes the very motor of the plot, accounting for the assaults upon and subsequent passionate defense of the body’s integrity on the part of Leucippe, and the initial counterexperience of Cleitophon with Melite that tests (and challenges) the hero’s masculine virtue (even identity) as well as that of the heroine. At the end, Cleitophon can claim to Leucippe’s father in the last book (with some disingenuousness, it must be admitted): “Leucippe and I have acted like sage philosophers, Father, while we have been away from home. . . . Eros was pursuing us, and we fled as lover and beloved, but in our exile we were like brother and sister. If one can speak of such a thing as male virginity [andros parthenia, 8.5.7], this is my relationship to Leucippe up to now.” Even so, the chastity test in the grotto of Pan, that follows, to which I earlier alluded, proclaims the need for a public validation of her virtue, with the entire populace of Ephesus as witness, to put the matter to rest, once and
for all.
To drive home the import of virginal honor with even greater force is the coda to the novel that resolves the story of another couple, that of Calligone (Cleitophon’s half-sister) and Callisthenes, that began in book 2. The latter, a young elite wastrel, had abducted the girl on the occasion of her wedding (to Cleitophon),29 thinking she was Leucippe (having fallen in love with her only through repute of her beauty). Now in book 8 we hear of Callisthenes’s remarkable transformation (thaumastê metabolê) from an impetuous youth into the perfect gentleman, the brave warrior, and the ideal suitor, who put aside lust to fall in love with Calligone, and maintained all the necessary protocols (including the heartfelt appeal to her father) to win his bride, whose chastity he had zealously guarded. John Morgan comments that Cleitophon and Callisthenes are narrative doublets (as are the two girls in question) but insists that the latter’s serious conversion only redounds to Cleitophon’s discredit in respect to paideia and self-knowledge.30 Nevertheless, the emphasis on Calligone’s chastity (against apparently all odds) once again reinforces the basic message, and the ending of the novel that results in a double wedding (one in Byzantium, one in Tyre) brings the two stories together in the properly achieved nuptials of two virgin brides.
The Oxford Handbook of the Second Sophistic Page 66