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The Romance of Genre
The previous chapter sought to sketch a large-scale narrative of the development of Greek prose fiction, a venture that involved setting aside the paradigm of the “imperial romance.” Cultural history cannot proceed by reverse engineering: we cannot comprehend ideas of fiction in the classical and Hellenistic periods if we view them simply as proleptic of later developments. That is teleological thinking of the most unhelpful kind. The previous chapter, then, sought to provide a narrative with no metanarrative, in which developments occur locally and adventitiously rather than according to some higher plan.
This book as a whole is about experimenting with precisely that kind of decentering motion. If we adjust the parameters, if we rewrite some of the received “certainties,” if we explore alternative literary genealogies, what kind of picture do we come up with? Yet while my interest elsewhere in the book is exclusively in the noncanonical, it seems unthinkable to present an account of prose fiction that ignores the imperial romance.1 In this chapter I consider how this particular galaxy might be located within the complex firmament of Greek fiction. There is, I believe, an answer to this question. But the crucial point (in view of the themes of this book) is a larger one, which should be borne in mind throughout: among Greek fictional texts the coherence of the romances as a body of texts is an exception rather than the norm.
Whatever phrase we use—my imperial romance corresponds to others’ ideal novel, ideal romance, or even just Greek novel—there is little ambiguity as to what we are talking of. Almost all scholars recognize a discrete grouping of texts, within the wider field of the ancient novel, consisting of the five surviving Greek prose romances: Xenophon of Ephesus’s Anthia and Habrocomes, Chariton’s Callirhoe (both probably first century C.E.), Achilles Tatius’s Leucippe and Clitophon (probably second century C.E.), Longus’s Daphnis and Chloe (second or perhaps early third century C.E.), and Heliodorus’s Charicleia and Theagenes (probably fourth century C.E.); there are also a number of now-fragmentary novels such as those known to modern scholars as Metiochus and Parthenope and Ninus. Yet to be able to itemize individual examples of the form is not the same thing, as Socrates might have said, as giving an account of it. How do we know, as readers, that these texts belong to the same category? What difference does this make to the reading experience? These are the questions that I aim to address in this chapter.
Let us begin with the much-debated issue of genre.2 For a long time it was simply taken for granted that these five surviving texts, and probably much of the fragmentary material, operate generically. All are built around an aristocratic, gorgeous, heterosexual pair, who undergo trials and separations of various kinds before being reunited at the end. Marriage plays a central role, whether at the start (in Chariton and Xenophon) or at the end (in Achilles, Longus, and Heliodorus). They are all set in a classicizing world, sometimes an explicitly classical one (in Chariton and Heliodorus). As has often been noted, moreover, the romances recycle a number of set-piece topoi: love at first sight (preferably at a festival), separation, kidnap by pirates, intense experience of conflicting emotions, the false appearance of death (Scheintod), courtroom scenes.3 Further evidence for genericity can be sought in the titling conventions, which (I have argued) take a distinctive form: “Events concerning [ta kata or ta peri] x girl,” or more usually “… x girl and y boy.”4
Because of the relative consistency of the form over some three hundred years, critics have sometimes presented the generic identity of the romance in terms of adherence to a schematic narrative template.5 This approach, however, risks downplaying the degree of variation. Each of the surviving five romances is actually very different: if Chariton, quite possibly the earliest, represents the “norm,” then Xenophon contrasts with his low-grade style, Achilles with his first-person narrative and emphasis on gore and lechery, Longus with the pastoral setting, and Heliodorus with his sanctity and African location. With repetition of narrative motifs, moreover, come improvisation and variation too: so, for example, Longus’s miniaturized pastoral romance has a failed kidnapping in which the abductors do not make it out of the bay (1.30.2), while Achilles’s exuberantly over-the-top text features three different false deaths (each of which his credulous protagonist and narrator believe in), and so forth. Genres are not schematic; more recent commentators have, instead, preferred the language of “family resemblance,” a Wittgensteinian term first applied to genre theory by Alastair Fowler in 1982.6 Members of a family are often visibly identifiable as related without sharing identical features; the same model might be used for the romances. The family analogy is also useful in that it gives a role to genetic admixture. Families, if they are not entirely incestuous, propagate themselves by mixing in new DNA; similarly, new texts within literary genres show difference as well as sameness.
This model, however, raises new problems. Families are social constructs rather than straightforward mirrors of biological truth: not all children are the natural offspring of those whom society recognizes as their fathers and mothers. Similarly, identifying the “ancestry” of literary texts can be a more complex issue than it initially appears. This is all the more so in relation to the imperial romances, which are radically intertextual, cannibalizing other forms voraciously: they absorb features from classical epic, tragedy, historiography, New Comedy, rhetoric, lyric, and so forth. What is more, they have numerous points of contact with other “nonclassical” varieties of contemporary literature: a case in point are Christian martyrologies, which often follow a similar pattern of quasi-erotic infatuation leading to obstacles and challenges and finally redemption (although in the self-denying world of early Christianity, it is death rather than sex that marks the telos).7 For some, the romance’s innumerable points of literary reference point to an absence of coherent generic identity. For Steve Nimis, for example, the romance is “anti-generic, unable to be specified as a single style of discourse.”8 Helen Morales has recently developed this claim at greater length. “The evidence that we have suggests that there was no ‘traditional genre’ of the ancient novel,” she argues, using Anders Petterson’s phrase denoting “a type of literary work which is generally recognised within a culture, as a special type of work.”9 Rather than defining genre in formalist terms, she argues, we should be viewing the “novel” as an “imaginative mode” with various recurrent features: a concern with boundaries and limits, an attempt to map out morality, an opposition between chastity and prostitution. A “ ‘novelistic’ mode of imagination is one that both heightens and exaggerates things, that simultaneously reveres and degrades women, and that suggests that the domestic . . . as opposed to the mythic is a place for the instauration of significance.”10 Once we view “the novelistic” in this way, then we can begin to see new points of connection with, for example, Nonnus’s Dionysiaca and Musaeus’s Hero and Leander, and with Roman declamations.
This approach, I think, offers both opportunities and risks. Opportunities, because it challenges the misleading view that genres are somehow ontologically nonnegotiable, a view that the disciplinary practices of the modern academy perpetuate. How many undergraduate courses on the ancient novel include Seneca the Elder, Christian martyrology, and Nonnus? Yet as Morales rightly observes, there are all sorts of points of contact between these different works, and a rich cultural history of the imperial age would need to map out the contraflowing traffic between these many different types of text. That very formulation, however, points to the problem: we need to account for difference as well as identity, for it is intuitively implausible to imagine that ancient readers would turn from Longus to a declamation to a hexameter epic without registering any generic jolt. It might be countered that this jolt occurs because of the generically determined nature of declamation and epic and not of novel/romance, which lacks decisive formal (e.g., epic’s meter and diction) and contextual markers (e.g., a sophistic auditorium, in the case of declamation). Here I would agree up to a point: novelistic writing in general is uniquely fluid and multifarious, generically speaking. But within the broad category of “the novelistic,” the romance is, I think, coherently generic. This, indeed, is precisely why we can feel the hybridity of an erotic epic like Musaeus’s Hero and Leander, which imports motifs (and the titling convention) from the romance:11 the effect depends on the reader’s ability to perceive that process of generic cross-pollination, which itself implies an awareness of romance as a distinct literary identity. My argument, then—yet to be fully substantiated—is that Morales is right about “the novelistic” as a general category, but that romance operates according to tighter generic rules. This does not mean that there are no ambiguous cases: clearly Iamblichus’s Babyloniaca, for example, was a heterosexual romance but also a radical experiment in setting and content (and length). But as with Hero and Leander, the fact of the Babyloniaca’s generic experimentation reinforces the argument that there was a genre to experiment with.
My discussion above has, in fact, effected a small but significant shift in definition. What Morales resists, quite rightly, is a conservative, rigid, formalist conception of genre. Yet genre should not be thought of in this way, as an intrinsic property of individual texts, like a gene that can be sequenced; it is, rather, a relationship between texts, a relationship invoked for specific, tactical reasons and to shape the reader’s literary reception of the work in question. It is—this is Fowler’s central point—a communicative device rather than a classificatory one.12 Indeed, it might be said that genre is essential to all human communication, to the extent that (as Mikhail Bakhtin argued) speech has its own genres, each with their own sets of expectations that can be met, intermixed, flouted, or rewritten (greeting, thanking, joking, etc.)13 Literature, in a similar but arguably much more complex way, rests on a contract of accepted rules between author and reader: a contract that is unwritten, certainly, and can be reneged on or rewritten, but is always there. It is this contract that dictates whether a particular action or utterance within a text is received as vraisemblable or transgressive. “Our intuitive sense of this vraisemblance is extremely powerful,” writes Jonathan Culler. “We know, for example, that it would be totally inappropriate for one of Corneille’s heroes to say, ‘I’m fed up with all these problems and shall go and become a silversmith in a provincial town.’ Actions are plausible or implausible with respect to the norms of a group of works.”14 Corneille’s fed-up hero would be acting in much the same way as a real-life person who, when offered a hand to shake, responded with a punch to the belly: both would be in effect breaching a generic contract (or perhaps in the second case refusing to accept one).
Let us at this stage dispose of a potential objection. It is true that extant Greek lacks any consistently attested word for designating the ideal romance.15 In fact, there is not even any consistent word for novel: the best candidate, dramatikon (diēgēma) (dramatic [story]), does not appear before Photius in the ninth century C.E. and even then seems to refer to the “dramatic” aspects of the plot (sufferings and reversals of fortune) rather than to anything distinctive to this kind of text.16 At first blush the absence of any name for or theorization of the novels or the romances would seem to support the view that the boundaries of the genre were not clearly defined. Yet we can plausibly explain the absence of any explicit label in our pre-Byzantine sources by other means. As one recent critic has observed (in the context of a different kind of argument), the labor of classification was the legacy of Hellenistic Alexandria, an earlier phase in the cultural history of Greek literature. Genre names are not attached to other innovations of the imperial period either: for example Lucian’s comic dialogues and Aristides’s prose hymns.17 The absence of an attested ancient name, therefore, is not decisive, and we can proceed with the hypothesis that ideal romance thus constitutes a genre in much the same way that (e.g.) Latin love elegy does: although undertheorized in ancient criticism, indiscriminately cannibalistic in its approach to other literatures (in respect to both form and content), and tolerant of all kinds of hybridizations (e.g., Ovid’s Fasti), it nevertheless rests on distinctive and recognizable conventions of generic vraisemblance.
So what is the positive evidence for a romance genre? The answer lies in the texts themselves, but we shall not find it through exhaustive itemization of lieux communs. The best place to look for generic thinking is, as I have already intimated, in those moments where the generic contract is transgressed: where the effect depends on perceptible refusal to meet readerly expectations or on contamination of different generic codes. Indeed, I would submit that it is here, at the borders, that generic identities are at once most securely determined and most open to revision. They are securely determined, on the one hand, in that acts of transgression reinforce our awareness of the very norms they transgress. Let’s return to Culler’s example of the fed-up hero of Corneille who wishes to retrain as a silversmith: this example highlights the classicizing, aristocratic conventions of action in the French tragic theater. But at the same time (this is where the revision comes in) such an instance would effectively rewrite the rules of the genre for future tragedians. Such cases of aggressively ostentatious rule breaking are relatively rare: Euripides’s Alcestis represents one example from literary history. But minor adjustments of generic codes happen all the time: this is what makes literature fresh, nimble, and inventive rather than repetitively hidebound. And as a result, generic codes are always in process. “Every literary work,” writes Fowler, “changes the genres it relates to. . . . Consequently, all genres are continuously undergoing metamorphosis.”18
This, I think, is the crucial point, and it bears emphasizing. Classicists have been far too prone to assess the validity of the romance genre synchronically, as though we should be asking the same questions of the earliest texts as of the later ones. It is (to exaggerate, but only marginally) as if we were to put together a magic lantern show, Casablanca, and Avatar and ask whether the category “Hollywood blockbuster” worked for all of them. What we need instead is an account of genre that respects the diachronic fluctuations and the way in which each new novel both projects its predecessors as paradigmatic and signals its own generic reinventions.
I cannot, in the compass of a single chapter, map out this process in its entirety, but let me make some general observations and visit some particular instances. For the remainder of this chapter, I shall consider three stages in the history of the romance: the initial phase, namely Chariton’s Callirhoe and Xenophon’s Anthia and Habrocomes; Achilles Tatius’s subversive Leucippe and Clitophon; and finally Heliodorus’s Charicleia and Theagenes, the last of the surviving romances. (Longus, for present purposes, is a marginal case.) I shall proceed not with exhaustive analyses but with a few exemplary discussions of key passages.
There are two enormous questions that confront anyone considering the earliest romances. The first is “Where did they come from?” The second is “Who came first, Xenophon or Chariton?” Let us come to the first via the second, although I do not propose a conclusive answer (which would call for fresh evidence). One recent scholar, Stefan Tilg, has assembled all of the arguments and asserted strenuously that Chariton belongs in the mid-first century.19 That may well be right, but none of the evidence is conclusive: the linguistic criteria are imprecise (and who says that Atticism spread at the same rate everywhere across the empire?), the supposed references to real people implausible, the identification of the addressee Athenagoras hypothetical, and the claimed relationships between Chariton and other first-century writers unconvincing.20 All we can say is that one papyrus from the mid-second century (P.Mich. 1) offers a terminus ante quem. The evidence for dating Xenophon, meanwhile, is even more exiguous. Far too much has been made of the apparent mention of an eirenarch (“the man in charge of peace [eirēnēs],” 2.13.3; see also 3.9.5), an office first attested epigraphically under Trajan. It should not need saying that the first inscriptional mention of such an office does not necessarily mark its first institution.21
It is, however, possible to model the implications, in generic terms, of imagining precedence. Let us consider the well-known fact that (among the many similarities between them)22 the two texts open in very similar ways, with a meeting contrived by Eros between the two beautiful young people at or near a festival. The similarities of motif and even language are so close that it is unthinkable that there is no connection23—but what is the nature of that connection? There is in fact a long and inglorious history of scholarship exploring the question, but in a desperately naïve fashion: ultimately what is at issue is simply establishing chronological priority, which critics determine according to their aesthetic preconceptions about the process of literary succession, or—to use a particularly misleading word beloved of this kind of criticism—imitation.24 According to most critics of this school (and indeed to romantic literary criticism, to which it is indebted), an imitation is inherently inferior to an original. The challenge is thus to demonstrate which text is consistently “better” in those areas of similarity and posit it as the prior one.
This model is evidently outdated, both methodologically and in its estimation of the romances’ sophistication: nowadays we speak not of (passive) imitation but of (dynamic) allusion. The effect generated by the later text depends on the reader’s ability to acknowledge the similarity and to explore the tension between generic identification and local deviation from the model. Let me take just one example, perhaps the best-known point of convergence between Xenophon and Chariton. In both texts, there is a public festival: in Xenophon the phrase is epikhōrios heortē (1.2.2), in Chariton heortē dēmotelēs (1.1.4). This in itself is not surprising: infatuation at a festival is found widely in New Comedy, in Hellenistic love poetry (e.g., in Callimachus’s story of Acontius and Cydippe: Aetia 1.67.6), and indeed already at Lysias 1.20.25 But note that Chariton gives the topos a tweak. The lovers do not meet at the festival, but they bump into each other afterward: “By chance [ek tukhēs] the two met in a passageway at a corner and fell into each other” (1.1.6). This reorientation is, indeed, significant and programmatic: as has often been noted, Chariton tends to minimize direct divine intervention, preferring instead to offer psychological motivations.26 If we interpret Chariton in this way, then the little phrase by chance takes on additional resonances. First, it is heavily ironic: the festival encounter is, of course, so far from being accidentally, instead generically predetermined. Tukhē (fortune), readers of Callirhoe will discover, is a marker of self-conscious authorial intervention in the plot.27 Alternatively, the “accidental” nature of the collision can be read as a commentary on the misfiring topos: one would expect a meeting at the festival proper, but “by chance” they meet elsewhere.
None of this proves that Xenophon is prior to Chariton (though it is of course consistent with that claim). Chariton, indeed, could be playing with the topical status of the amorous meeting at a festival in preromance texts. But if we do hypothesize Xenophon’s priority, or at least the priority of another romance featuring a festival meeting, then we can see instantly how the model of genre bending that I have been proposing may work. Chariton treats the festival encounter as characteristic of the romance au degré zéro and self-consciously marks his own innovation within that frame.28
My second example comes from Achilles Tatius, who wrote in the next generation (a second-century papyrus confirms the terminus ante quem).29 In book 5 of Leucippe and Clitophon, the hero Clitophon—now remarried to Melite—discovers by letter that Leucippe is still alive (5.18.4–5). In a parallel episode in Chariton, as commentators have noted, Callirhoe—now remarried to Dionysius—learns from a letter from Chaereas that he is still alive (4.4.7–10).30 Although it serves a similar narrative function, however, Leucippe’s letter shows no signs of intertextual engagement with Chaereas’s: stylistically speaking, it is ambitious and rhetorical where Chaereas’s letter is sparse and pared down, following (as Konstantin Doulamis has shown) the rhetorical theorists’ precepts of saphēneia, or clarity.31 In terms of vocabulary and phrasing, Leucippe’s letter in fact reworks and amplifies a slightly earlier passage in Chariton, where Chaereas addresses an imaginary reproach to Callirhoe. I give the two passages here in English translation, with the key similarities identified:32
Thanks to you [dia se], I left my mother and took up a life of wandering; thanks to you [dia se], I was shipwrecked and put up with bandits; thanks to you [dia se], I was sacrificed as an expiation and have now died a second time; thanks to you [dia se], I have been sold [pepramai] and bound in iron, I have wielded [ebastasa] a mattock, dug the earth, been whipped—was all this for me to become to another man what you have become to another woman [gegonas allēi gunaiki]? Never! No, I [egō men] had the strength to hold out in the midst of so many trials—while you [su de], unenslaved and unwhipped, you are married! (Ach. Tat. 5.18.4–5)
I [egō men] have been sold [eprathēn] thanks to you [dia se], have dug, have wielded [ebastasa] a cross and been delivered into the hands of the executioner. And you [su de] were living in luxury and celebrating your marriage while I was in chains! It was not enough for you to become the wife of another [gunē gegonas allou] while Chaereas was still alive, but you had to become a mother as well! (Chariton 4.3.10)
Now, clearly speeches and letters of reproach are to an extent generic in themselves. Powerful contrasts between one person’s claims to fidelity and the other’s perceived betrayal, particularly in erotic contexts, can be found all over Greek literature, for example in Medea’s speech to Jason in Euripides’s play (Med. 483–89).33 Moreover, certain elements in Chariton’s original (“egō men,” “dia se”) seem to allude to Stryangaeus’s reproachful letter to Zarinaea in Ctesias, a fact that I shall presently argue to be significant.34 Yet the overall density of similarities between the two passages strongly suggests that Achilles wishes his reader to bear Chariton’s passage in mind and read his own against it. This in turn suggests that Achilles is identifying the “lover’s reproach” as a signpost of romance genre, so his negotiations of this model can also be taken as indicators of his claimed position at once within and against the genre.
The first point to make is that Leucippe’s letter is markedly more elaborate than Chaereas’s monologue: it repeats “Thanks to you [dia se]” three times, in accordance with Achilles’s taste for rhetorical and thematic overkill (compare Leucippe’s three false deaths, mentioned above). Chaereas’s sufferings are limited (!) to enslavement and crucifixion, whereas Leucippe is shipwrecked, delivered to bandits, sacrificed, enslaved, bound in iron, forced into manual labor, and whipped. The excess of lurid detail, inflicted on a woman, betokens Achilles’s transformation of the genre into an exuberantly sexist fantasia.35 There is more, indeed, to be said about gender. At one level, we can read Achilles’s passage as a corrective of Chariton’s use of Ctesias: by replacing Chariton’s monologue with a letter, Achilles is being truer to his Ctesian source. The choice of a letter, then, is an implicit dig at Chariton and marker of Achilles’s sophistication. But where Achilles departs from both Chariton and Ctesias is in giving the reproach to a woman. This is all the more striking in that Achilles’s romance is narrated almost entirely by Clitophon, in flashback. The reproach is thus a rare occasion where as readers we hear Leucippe’s voice (though mediated by Clitophon); in general she speaks very little. The force of the letter—it has a profound impact on Clitophon, who (like the incautious reader) believes her to be dead at this point—lies precisely in this irruptive power. The miraculous reanimation of Leucippe is figured by her authorship of a new text, a female-centered text protesting vigorously against the androcentric worldview of Clitophon’s (and Achilles’s) monopolized narrative, wherein self-absorbed males turn a blind eye to the horrendous violence inflicted on women. Leucippe’s letter, then, turns out to be more than just a claim on Achilles’s part of generic proximity to Chariton; it also articulates Achilles’s most important revision of the genre, the limiting (more or less) of narrative authority and subjectivity to a single male.
Let me turn finally to Heliodorus—arguably the most intertextual of all the romancers, particularly in his use of other romances36—and once more to festival encounters. In Charicleia and Theagenes, the lovers again meet and fall in love at a festival, but the event is ingeniously postponed to the third book, where the narrator-priest Calasiris tells it in flashback (3.1–6). Heliodorus’s account of the festival procession clearly draws heavily on Xenophon’s Ephesian procession (1.2): the linguistic parallels are many and close.37 Once more this is not simply a case of a later writer covertly recycling another’s words; Heliodorus surely expects his readers to identify his use of Xenophon and to explore the dynamic relationship between the two texts. In particular, we are to register the disjunction between Xenophon’s bald, terse style and Heliodorus’s rich, complex description.38 Here, by way of illustration, are the two accounts of the female protagonists:
Heading the line of girls was Anthia, the daughter of two locals, Megamedes and Euippe. Anthia was wondrously beautiful, far beyond the other girls. She was fourteen, her body blooming with shapeliness, and her comeliness was increased by the rich adornment of her costume. Her hair was blond, mostly [hē pollē] free-flowing (though some was plaited), moving as the wind took it. Her eyes were gorgeous, clear like a beautiful girl’s but forbidding like a virtuous girl’s. Her clothing was a purple tunic [khitōn alourgēs], girdled [zōstos] and knee length, loose down the arms, with a fawn skin draped around, a quiver fitted with bows, arrows, javelins in her hand, dogs in train. (Anthia and Habrocomes 1.2.5–6)
[Charicleia] was conveyed on a chariot drawn by a pack of white cows, dressed in a purple tunic [khitōna alourgon] down to her feet, embroidered with golden sunbeams. Her chest was encircled with a girdle [zōnēn], which the creator had imbued with all his skill: he had never before forged such a thing, nor would he ever be able to again. [For brevity’s sake I omit the long description of the girdle.] . . . Her hair was neither completely braided nor unbound; most of it [hē . . . pollē] fell down her neck and billowed over her shoulder and back, while the remainder, on her head and her brow, was garlanded with tender twigs of laurel, which bound her rosy, sun-colored locks and would not permit them to flutter in the breeze more than was decorous. In her left hand she bore a golden bow, while a quiver hung from her right shoulder. In her right [hand], she carried a lit torch, but in that state her eyes were blazing more light than the flames were. (Charicleia and Theagenes 3.4.2–6)
This example shows how Heliodorus extends and amplifies Xenophon’s description, filling it out not only with extra details (the cow-drawn chariot and the twigs bound in the hair, for example) but also with narratorial commentary: the observations on the girdle’s creator, for example, and on the differential amounts of light coming from the torch and Charicleia’s eyes. This tactic is conscious and deliberate, as we can tell from a crucial passage at the start of book 3. Book 2 ends with the Delphians “all aflutter in their eagerness to see the magnificently arrayed procession” (2.36.2), a clear prompt to readers (and to Calasiris’s internal addressee Cnemon) that they are to expect a showcase description in the following book. Book 3, however, begins, “When the procession and the entire sacrifice was over . . .” (3.1.1)—at which point Cnemon butts in and asks for a full description and to be made a “viewer [theatēs].”39 The amplification of description and the focus on vivid, visual depiction are therefore highlighted before the procession proper. Heliodorus’s intertextual use of Xenophon, then, implicitly casts their relationship in terms of a contest of descriptive prowess, a contest that Heliodorus of course wins. One small detail corroborates this reading. When Calasiris refers to the skill (tekhnē) of the artist (ho tekhnēsamenos) who created Charicleia’s girdle, it is surely a prompt to think about the process of literary creation too. In this context, the claim that “he had never before forged such a thing, nor would he ever be able to again” takes on a new light: in the context of an intertextual dialogue with a predecessor in the genre, it points to the uniqueness of Heliodorus’s description at exactly the point where it is also most generic.
There is much more that could be said about intrageneric reference in the romances; a full study is needed, one moreover that moves beyond the naïve, nineteenth-century accounts of “imitation” and brings in new methodologies of allusion and intertextuality. Enough has been said, however, to show that ancient writers did work with a sense of romance as genre. Let me finish by reemphasizing the point that genre is not a static, synchronic template that can be mapped out typologically but a dynamic relationship between texts, a relationship that shifts and develops over time. Heliodorus’s use of Xenophon’s procession scene exemplifies this excellently. He casts as naïve, bare, and primitive the generic reference point that he invokes intertextually, but he reinvents the motif sensationally, and with that the genre itself. The genre transforms before our very eyes.
By the time when Heliodorus wrote, there was, I submit, a well-established sense of the romance genre: he could expect his readers to notice his modifications, innovations, and amplifications and interpret them as generic transformations. It is hard to find such traces of generic self-consciousness in Xenophon (although that may of course be simply because he is a less self-conscious writer). Chariton, I have argued, can already be seen to be manipulating topoi self-reflexively, but whether he sees such topoi as constitutive of romance as an independent genre is a more difficult question. The difficulty lies partly in the uncertainty of dates: if Xenophon is older, then Chariton will have had at least one romance to play with.40 But in any case, lying behind Callirhoe is a rich hinterland of Hellenistic narrative erotica embedded in nonromance genres, of which only a few traces survive. Ctesias’s famous story of Zarinaea and Stryangaeus, for example, was evidently an important reference point for Chariton (and hence for later romancers). When Nicolaus of Damascus, writing in the Augustan era, produced a version of it, he already larded it richly with motifs that would later be thought of as distinctive to the romance: a weepy, dispirited male threatens suicide and writes a reproachful letter to his beloved, while a counselor attempts to dissuade him from his course.41 Whether or not he had read anything approximating to what we call prose romances, Chariton was evidently responding to this broader range of narrative material as well. In other words, he is likely to have worked with a much looser and more fissiparous sense of generic identity than the later romancers did, or, to put it another way, Callirhoe probably became a “romance” only thanks to the co-optation of later romancers. This much is speculation, inevitably so given the uncertainties of dating and the limited amount of surviving Hellenistic prose fiction. Yet what is clear, it seems to me, is that the romance really did develop a strong sense of generic identity, and that fact sets them apart from the more amorphous body of prose fiction to which I turn in the subsequent chapters.
1. I return to the romance, from a different perspective, in ch. 8.
2. For recent sharp discussion of the genre question (discussed in more detail later) see Goldhill 2008 and Morales 2009.
3. Létoublon 1993 offers a full catalogue.
4. Whitmarsh 2005b. The recent Loeb editor of Xenophon and Longus accepts my arguments (Jeffrey Henderson 2009, 200). Tilg 2010, 2 n. 1, by contrast, declares himself “not convinced” but offers no explanation or counterargument. Henrichs 2011 also registers some skepticism, but his grounds do not seem secure. His claim at 308 n. 23 that I do not “distinguish adequately between pre-Byzantine and Byzantine conventions of quoting or fabricating such titles” is, I think, misleading, since the principal evidence is securely ancient—the texts themselves (e.g., the endings of Chariton and Heliodorus), as well as P.Mich. 1, a second-century papyrus of Callirhoe, which carries a colophon: “tōn peri Ka[llirhoēn / diēgēm[a]tō[n logos b’.” I do not deny that Ephesiaka and Aithiopika were fully integral to the titles of Xenophon and Heliodorus, but here they were used in conjunction with the name formula; nor, incidentally, do I deny that certain kinds of nonromantic fiction such as Petronius’s Satyrica and Lollianius’s Phoenicica had titles only of this form (see Henrichs 2011, 314–15, with n. 37, where a casual reader might deduce that I have not accepted this point). My claim is rather that the romances really are in a category of their own vis-à-vis other works of ancient fiction when it comes to titling conventions and (I hope to make clear in this chapter) to other features. Henrichs’s claim that Lollianus’s Phoinikika is “the one attested title” (314) is contradicted by P.Mich. 1 (quoted above), which he himself elsewhere accepts as transmitting Chariton’s correct title (311).
5. E.g., Holzberg 1995, 9: “Such fixed notions meant that, within the framework of the story, their choice both of individual motifs and of the various devices by which these were to be represented followed an almost stereotype pattern. . . . The mere presence of elements which are recurrent in all examples of this literary form itself also provides a basis for our attempt to define the genre.” See also Lalanne 2006, 47: “All the Greek romances tell the same story of love and adventures, with variations that (for all their number) do not affect the structure as a whole.”
6. A. Fowler 1982, followed by, e.g., S. Heath 2004. For the general point see, e.g., Reardon 1991, 3: “Romance will not necessarily follow a recipe, rather it will exhibit typical features.”
7. See now Konstan 2009.
8. Nimis 1994, 398. Fusillo 1989 tracks the romances’ many intertextualities; see also Zimmermann 1997.
9. Morales 2009, 9–10.
10. Ibid., 10–11.
11. For the influence of Achilles on Musaeus, see Kost 1971, 29–30, and more fully Lehmann 1910, 12–25; also Morales 1999, 42–43, and Bowie 2003, 95, both with further references. Orsini 1968, xv–xvii, also discerns the influence of Chariton. The generic affiliation to the novel suggested by the title is noted by Kost 1971, 117–18; Schmid at Rohde 1914, 618; Hopkinson 1994, 138; Whitmarsh 2005b, 603.
12. A. Fowler 1982.
13. Bakhtin 1986.
14. Culler 1975, 145.
15. See, e.g., Morales 2009, 9–10; Henrichs 2011, 303–5.
16. See, e.g., Bibl. cod. 73 = Hld. test. IV Colonna; 87 = Ach. Tat. test. 2 Vilborg. See further Rohde 1914, 376–79; Agapitos 1998, 128–30.
17. Bowie 1994, 442.
18. A. Fowler 1982, 23.
19. Tilg 2010.
20. I am in particular unconvinced that the Neronian poet Persius refers to our text at 1.134: “His mane edictum, post prandia Calliroen do”; see Tilg 2010, 69–78, which cautiously accepts the reference. I argue at Whitmarsh 2005b, 590 n. 14, that some kind of poetic text is needed to make sense of the passage, specifically a competitor to Persius’s aggressive satire. It is not impossible, however, that Calliroe was a pantomime, a genre introduced to Rome with great fanfare under Augustus: note the story at Paus. 7.21.1 about the Calydonian Coresus, who kills himself for love of Callirhoe. There is another Callirhoe story at 8.24.9–10.
21. So, rightly, J. N. O’Sullivan 1995, 4–9, and Bowie 2002a, 57. Ruiz Montero 2003 argues persuasively that Xenophon shows stylistic similarities with archaizing local legends of the kind found in the second-century pseudo-Plutarch’s Love Stories and Pausanias, but this affinity cannot date him absolutely since we lack comparable material from earlier periods.
22. See especially Garin 1909, 423–29; Gärtner 1967, 2081–87; J. N. O’Sullivan 1995, 145–70.
23. I tabulate the similarities at Whitmarsh 2011a, 35. There is, of course, the possibility of a common shared source (so, e.g., Hägg 1983, 20–21), but this seems to me unlikely given the extent of the echoing (see above, n. 21).
24. For criticism of the romance along these lines see, e.g., Schnepf 1887; Garin 1909. For this older material, www.archive.org is invaluable, but I have not been able to access either a print or an electronic copy of Kekkos 1890. More recent criticism tends to take Chariton as the prior text (e.g., Bowie 2002a, 56–57; Tilg 2010, 85–92; but contrast J. N. O’Sullivan 1995, 145–70), but there is no real basis for this assumption.
25. Harder 2012, 2.555, gives primary and secondary sources; discussion at Whitmarsh 2011a, 37, with n. 62.
26. Weissenberger 1997; Whitmarsh 2011a, 27.
27. See Whitmarsh 2011a, 246–51, on aleatory tukhē versus teleological plotting.
28. Additional, albeit indirect, evidence for the connection between the festival topos and the romance genre comes from Josephus’s account of the Potiphar story, where he levers in this extrabiblical detail (Ant. 2.45) as part of his program of eroticizing biblical narrative. See Braun 1934 on this process of Erotisierung; Whitmarsh 2007a, 88–89, on the passage in question.
29. P.Oxy. 3836, which as Henrichs 2011, 308–9, observes is now the only papyrus of Achilles that can be securely dated to the second century.
30. Hunter 1994, 1059–60. More generally on correspondences between Achilles and Chariton see Garin 1909, 433–37.
31. Doulamis 2002, 209–16.
32. Some of the similarities are noted by Garin 1909, 435–36, and Yatromanolakis 1990, 673. My list here is modeled on Whitmarsh 2011a, 165.
33. McClure 1999 discusses the play’s remarkable preoccupation with blaming.
34. P.Oxy. 2330 = FGrH 688F8b = Ctesias fr. 8b in Stronk 2010.
35. See Morales 2004, especially 156–83, on Achilles’s fantasies of misogynistic violence.
36. See Neimke 1889, 22–57, on Heliodorus and Achilles, although he wrongly posits the latter as the later “imitator.”
37. Listed and discussed at Schnepf 1887, 10–14; Gärtner 1967, 2080; Whitmarsh 2011a, 117.
38. Schnepf 1887, 11, contrasts Xenophon’s and Heliodorus’s festival descriptions in these terms (“The one writes simply. . . . The other is verbose”).
39. For more on this episode and the scholarship on it see my discussion at Whitmarsh 2011a, 172–76.
40. Mention should also be made of the biblical romance Joseph and Aseneth, which some scholars (e.g., S. West 1974; Bohak 1996) date as early as the second century B.C.E. If that dating is right, some form of prose romance evidently long preexisted Chariton and Xenophon.
41. Recent books have accepted as Ctesian the five fragments of Nicolaus preserved in the tenth-century Excerpta de virtutibus et vitiis: for example, the Zarinaea story appears as fr. 8c in Stronk 2010.
