SOURCE: Perry, B. E. “Chariton and His Romance from a Literary-Historical Point of View.” American Journal of Philology 51, no. 2 (April-June 1930): 93-134.

[In the following essay, Perry discusses the impact of ancient writers on the work of Chariton and praises his style, plotting, characterization, and use of irony.]

Owing partly to accident and partly to various misconceptions, Chariton's story of Chaereas and Kallirhoe has received less attention in the past than it deserves, both in respect to its comparative literary value and to its significance in the history of the genre. In the first place, the text was not published until 1750, at a time when Heliodorus, Achilles Tatius, and Longus had already become for moderns the standard and best known representatives of the Greek romance; and in the second place, previous to 1900, Chariton was erroneously assumed by most critics to be the latest of the extant ancient romancers instead of belonging, as we now know, among the earliest.¹ The misconception about the date led to an undue disparagement of Chariton's literary merits;² and the fact that Heliodorus and Achilles Tatius, who were supposed to have preceded Chariton, had long been regarded as standard³ was largely responsible for what has turned out to be a perverted orientation of the whole problem of the Greek romance. For Rohde, influenced by the prevailing conceptions of his day, placed Heliodorus and the other ‘sophistic’ romances in the center of his system, assuming that they were more or less typical of the romance in its pristine character and that consequently the peculiar features of Chariton's work were merely so many aberrations from the original sophistic norm. Thus, for example, the simplicity of Chariton's plot was a deficiency, due to lack of imagination, and the historical background was only a bit of arbitrary decoration added to an otherwise purely plasmatic story. In Rohde's theory of development the romance passes from Antonius Diogenes at one pole to Chariton at the opposite, from the complex, unreal and sophistic at the beginning of its career, to the simple, naïve, and quasi-historical at the end.⁴ And although this theory, in the exact form in which it was propounded, has now been entirely abandoned even by Rohde's most ardent followers, yet it will probably be a long time before the numerous misconceptions and errors of method to which it has given rise will have disappeared. It is one of the objects of this essay to disentangle Chariton from these obsolete conceptions and to present him in the light of our new knowledge about the Greek romance. If the present generation of critics is wiser than Rohde, it is largely owing to the discovery of new material among the papyri, material which has not only yielded new texts and dates but which has given a different meaning to much of the older data. From this source we have learned that the older a romance is the more likely it is to be historical or legendary in theory and setting, that the earlier romances were of a less sophistic character than the later ones, and that the environment in which the species flourished in its early stage was more popular and plebeian than had been supposed by Rohde and others who sought to interpret it entirely in terms of formal sophistic literature.⁵ Each of these points, especially the last, is of prime importance for the understanding of the origin, nature, and development of the ancient romance; and each of them, as I shall attempt to show, is significantly exemplified in Chariton.

The great importance of the cultural factor in the birth of romance is not yet realized. It has been the fashion in the past, and still is among perfunctory critics, to regard the precise outward form and content of a piece of writing as the all-important clues to its origin; after which, having compared all antecedent forms and having found them all disconcertingly different, though often close, they conclude that the problem is not to be solved, and that fools ought not to rush in where angels have trodden with such meticulous precision. One may object to this method as practiced on the ground that it is too external and too much concerned with details of subject matter or style, which are often either arbitrary or due to later conventions; but above all because it fails to recognize the generative and transforming power inherent in the spiritual impulses of large masses of society in a given period, a power which is bound to find expression in spite of formal traditions, and which is easily capable of molding history, let us say, or biography into romance by a shift of emphasis and by the wresting of the most convenient antecedent form into a shape which will serve its own purposes.⁶ Whatever may be its form-prototype, a literary species is normally created and thrives primarily by virtue of the spiritual impulse or the idea that lies back of it, not by the mere shell in which this spirit is encased, nor by any purely formal motive; and, conversely, the relative prominence given to purely technical and external matters, to form or embellishment rather than to spirit, increases more or less directly with the distance from the acme in the direction of decline. This will be apparent to anyone who considers for a moment the history of epic, drama, oratory, elegy, history, or the essay; and it must be kept in mind in studying the romance.

Here, however, it is necessary to take into account the important difference in cultural level between the romance on the one hand and the formal and higher literature on the other; to realize that the former cannot be explained solely in terms of the latter, as has been so often attempted, but that it is an expression of the ideals of the masses which, in the official and more intellectual literary circles most familiar to us, was completely ignored,⁷ just as Diamond Dick or the Alger books, in many essential respects the modern counterparts of the ancient romances, are usually ignored in the history of American literature. The gap between the popular and the intellectual writings of later antiquity is greater than it appears to be at first sight, because it is spiritual rather than stylistic; we are likely to be deceived by the external resemblances in phrase and rhetorical mannerism, due to the fact that familiarity with, and imitation of classical texts was more widespread and penetrated further into the common levels of society in antiquity than has been the case with such literature in modern times. But if the stylistic resemblances between the romancers and the intellectuals fail to teach us much, yet the cultural and psychological differences between them are both wide and significant; for it is precisely in the pious, sentimental, childishly naïve, optimistic, passive, and conventionally ideal Weltanschauung of such writers as Chariton that we discover in a relatively pure form the living force that must have created and fostered the Greek romance of love and adventure. In the romance, as in very few other ancient documents, we have the vox populi, amplified no doubt by some of the authors and reproduced in falsetto by others, but a valuable index nevertheless to the soul of the middle and lower class people of the Graeco-Roman world.⁸

Even the casual reader must see that Chariton is more genuinely endowed with this culture than his followers,⁹ and that is one good reason why he is historically more significant than they. He is a bona fide romancer at heart, whereas the others lay more stress upon external or irrelevant matters and seldom write from a truly sentimental inspiration. By the nature of his story, as well as by his date, Chariton belongs to a comparatively early and vigorous stage in the development of ancient romance; and this is further manifested in his comparative literary health, that is to say, his freedom from much that is artificial or conceited in the later romances, and his closer approach to classical methods and ideals.

Concerning the literary aspects of Chariton's work, little has been said in the past apart from incidental comments which are either misleading, for the reasons stated above, or else inadequate. A thoroughgoing study of the subject is impossible within the present limits, but there are certain features of Chaereas and Kallirhoe the value or the significance of which deserve special emphasis, while some of them are here heralded for the first time. The topics I have chosen for brief comment are: (1) the influence of the historical background, (2) the nature of Chariton's imitation of the ancients, (3) style in general, (4) simplicity and coherence of the plot, (5) character drawing, (6) irony. In sketching the essential points under these heads, any one of which would repay an exhaustive study in comparison with other romances, we shall have occasion to note here and there a certain dualism in Chariton's own practice brought about by the encroachment, in a mild form, of those rhetorical conventions which came to dominate and impair the later romances, and to which our author surrenders at times when his native inspiration or better precedents fail to guide him.¹⁰

(1) The significance of the historical setting in the development of romance has already been alluded to; it remains to consider the influence of this feature upon the art of composition in Chariton. There are many reasons which might lead one to believe that the plot of Chaereas and Kallirhoe was based in the main upon a genuine, popular saga; but, however this may be, it is certain that in Chariton legend and history have determined in a greater degree than in any of the other extant erotic romances, not only the choice of dramatis personae, but also the character of the episodes and of the style.¹¹ This acts as a check upon that irresponsible plasmatic license which makes the fortune and behavior of the characters in the later romances so extravagantly and automatically ideal and so unreal. By being closer to legend Chariton is closer to nature and reality. If he had been making up his plot out of his own imagination and had felt disposed to cut loose from tradition entirely, it is unlikely that he would have represented Chaereas as kicking his bride in the brutal manner that he does, or that he would have allowed the heroine Kallirhoe to marry another man in the absence of her beloved husband. In order to keep the heroine from the arms of any but her original lover, there is almost no device or mechanical trick, however arbitrary or miraculous, to which Heliodorus, Xenophon, or Achilles Tatius will not readily resort. With them it is an unwritten law that the heroine must remain faithful to one man at all costs, and not merely faithful at heart but, above all, in person. Fortune must never be allowed to triumph even externally. To this end they arrange all outward circumstances accordingly and in a very arbitrary manner. But Chariton does not. Instead, he accepts in the main what he found either in a popular biography of Hermokrates' daughter, or in some other legend or legends which he chooses to take as his model; and, having formed his plot on this basis, which is bound to be more real and lifelike than the arbitrary fictions of conventional rhetoric, he turns his attention to the effect of the given circumstances upon his characters. That is one reason why there is more psychological interest in Chaereas and Kallirhoe than in any of the other romances except Daphnis and Chloe. The hard circumstances which induce, though they do not compel, Kallirhoe to marry Dionysius remain unalterable, and our heroine has to make the best of them and find her salvation in things as they are. Here no deus ex machina intervenes; but for twenty Teubner pages the interest of the story, which keeps steadily moving, is centered entirely in the inner resolves and emotions of the characters themselves. Kallirhoe's marriage to Dionysius is a real calamity from the sentimental point of view and, as such, the only thing of its kind in the Greek erotic romance. Again when Chaereas, near the end of the book, finds that King Artaxerxes has departed for the war and has taken Kallirhoe and Dionysius with him, he does not give up in the conventional manner. Instead, he crosses over to the enemy's camp, becomes one of their trusted generals, and, having defeated the king's forces and captured his women, thus wins possession of his wife by his own heroic efforts. How different this is from the behavior of Habrokomes or Klitophon! And how strangely different from the same Chaereas in the first part of Chariton's own narrative. Here in the portrayal of a single character we may see exemplified in a significant way the difference between the purely plasmatic convention which dominates the later romances and the historical style of narrative which is more characteristic of the earlier type. There are two very different Chaereases. One, like Habrokomes and the rest, is the stereotyped and unreal product of the plasmatic technique and has little or no positive character; he is before us most of the time in the first six books. The other, who steps in toward the end, is modelled after the figures of history, particularly Xenophon, and is thereby more vigorous and real, not only in the deeds he is made to perform, but in the spirit with which he carries them through. Thus in general we have, on the one hand, episodes which are influenced more or less directly by genuinely traditional or popular material or by broad imitation of the ancient historians, and, on the other hand, a great deal that has nothing back of it except the formal Chariton and the gradually stiffening conventions of his school. To the latter type of composition we owe, among other incidental matters, the Chaereas of the first six books and his colorless satellite Polycharmus;¹² to the former the unideal assault on the bride,¹³ the second marriage of Kallirhoe and her real if not ardent affection for Dionysius, her stepmotherly conduct toward her child (supra, n. 11 ad fin.), the Xenophontean Chaereas, and various other features of character drawing and incident.¹⁴ This dualism shows the nature of the transition that was taking place in the romance in Chariton's day; his surrender to the more purely plasmatic and ideal conventions of the later romance is as yet only partial.

(2) If one examines the description of Chaereas' career as soldier (VII, 3 ff.; VIII, 2), he will find that the imitation of Xenophon, though somewhat naïve in its general conception, is nevertheless broad and not confined to mere words. Here Chaereas for the time being is a soldier first and a lover afterwards. Indeed, in this part of his narrative, Chariton has managed to transfer to his own pages something of both the style and the spirit of the author he imitates.¹⁵ The same is true also of the career and utterances of Theron, which reproduce a great deal of the spirit and manner of the New Comedy, especially in the soliloquies.¹⁶ The speeches of the two pirates in I, 10 (infra p. 120) are remarkable for their Thucydidean irony; they imitate successfully the critical realism of the great historian without any attempt to copy his sentence structure or, so far as I am aware, his words.¹⁷

In these passages and in several of the speeches and monologues, Chariton's imitation is at its best, but it is not always so broad. He is in the habit of employing the words of ancient writers freely and without acknowledgment in order to heighten or amplify the idea or emotion with which he is occupied. But these quotations and plagiarisms are regularly called forth by the subject matter at hand and are seldom due to the mere desire of the rhetorician to plume himself. There is nothing in Chaereas and Kallirhoe, for example, so labored and affected as the banter between Knemon and Nausikles in Heliodorus VI, 2, which is a tissue of unusual words and phrases transferred to a humorless narrative from the stylistic wardrobe of Lucian and the Cynic dialogues. Of this sort of thing Chariton, though often influenced momentarily by formal convention, is on the whole comparatively free. … Chariton's quotations are nearly always spontaneous and relevant, however exaggerated or incongruous the effect may be in the eyes of the sophisticated reader who cannot share the author's naïve sense of the sublime. One may feel little sympathy with the persons in his story who, when disappointed in love, faint regularly according to the Homeric formula, … but when Chaereas, in the extremity of his fortune, announces his genuine resolve to stake everything on the chances of war and exclaims whole-heartedly … the gesture is not an empty one and the situation is such that the reader can feel with Chariton the beauty and heroism of Homer's lines without being unduly reminded of the incongruity between Chaereas and Hector. And there are other passages where the adaptation is equally successful (cf. 69, 16; 92, 6; 104, 21; 112, 14; 139, 11). The mixture of prose and poetry in this fashion is a naïve informality of style which has its closest counterpart not in the Menippean satire, as Schmid explains, but in such folk books as the Arabian Nights, the medieval Aucassin and Nicolette, the Alexander romance and Apollonius of Tyre.¹⁸ Nor is it only in the Homeric quotations that Chariton employs poetry; his prose is full of reminiscences of the iambic lines of New Comedy and sometimes of Sophocles and Euripides; so that, as Cobet demonstrates, it is often very easy to turn Chariton's sentences into verse. Being a sentimentalist rather than a sophist at heart, and being innocently unconscious of the differences in spiritual level between his own narrative and the writings of the ancients, Chariton attempts many flights of a sort to which his fellow romancers never aspire. As a result he makes more errors than they by wavering between the sublime and the ridiculous; but he also reaches some high levels now and then of which they, for the most part, are quite incapable. We shall meet with examples of this later on. It is not my purpose, however, to discuss at length the degree of success with which Chariton imitates the ancients, though I think that in this respect he has been unduly disparaged. What is important to note here is that he sometimes makes a whole-hearted attempt to assimilate their spirit and ideas as well as their words, and that, unlike his followers, he is more concerned with the sentiment of his narrative than with rhetoric or verbal finery. The naïve extravagance which appears here and there in his imitation as elsewhere is an indication not of the senility of the genre, but of its earlier and healthier stage. The romance was a childish thing in the beginning.

(3) Chariton's narrative style is remarkably simple and straightforward. The sentences are uniformly shorter and less involved than those of Heliodorus and there is less affectation in the diction.¹⁹ The speeches, which are sometimes really eloquent and diversified, have all the directness and clarity of those in Xenophon and the Attic orators.²⁰ They are not characterized by Phrasenfunkeln; they derive their force from the matter instead of from words or pretty conceits. Again, there is more lively dramatic dialogue in this romance than in any of the others except Apollonius of Tyre, where it is less artistic. By the use of stage terms Heliodorus is continually assuring us that his story is dramatic, but what he has in mind nearly always is the strange combination of outward circumstances, … not the style of presentation, which with him is far from ‘dramatic’; he and most of the others emulate only the externals of drama, the paradoxical events and complications of plot, whereas Chariton devotes his attention much more to the interplay of character upon character and to the psychological or picturesque interest involved in ordinary situations, wherein his portrayal is often realistic and effective.²¹ When Dionysius and Kallirhoe met for the first time, there was an awkward silence at first, but at length Dionysius spoke (34, 28 ff.): “‘My personal identity, lady, must be quite clear to you. I am Dionysius, the foremost citizen of Miletus and of practically all Ionia, well known for my piety and humanity. It is right that you too should tell me the truth about yourself; those who sold you to me said that you were a Sybarite and that, owing to jealousy, your mistress had offered you for sale.’ At this Kallirhoe blushed and, bowing her head, said quietly, ‘This is the first time that I have been sold; I have never seen Sybaris.’ ‘I told you,’ said Dionysius, looking over at Leonas, ‘that she is no slave; and I predict furthermore that she comes from a good family. Tell me everything, lady, and first of all your name.’ ‘Kallirhoe,’ said she. Dionysius was pleased with the name, but for the rest she was silent. When, however, he persisted with his inquiries, she said, ‘I beg of you, master, allow me to remain silent on the subject of my fortune. All that went before was a dream and a myth; I am now that which I have become, a slave and a foreigner.’ In saying this she tried not to attract any notice, but the tears ran down her cheeks.” etc. Besides its picturesque quality, we observe in this passage, as elsewhere,²² a sincerity of feeling and a dignified restraint which is quite unusual in the Greek romance, where [éthopoiia] regularly takes the form of sophistic display, either in rhetorically artificial monologues or in dry analytical observations on the part of the author.²³ Chariton, however, is thoroughly interested in his subject most of the time, and writes with his mind on the matter rather than on his style. …

(4) Some critics have complained that Chariton's invention is slim, and that the baldness of his plot shows poverty of imagination.²⁴ Whether we praise or condemn depends largely upon our sense of what constitutes literary value. Chariton is certainly no rival of Heliodorus in respect to intricacies of plot, the involution of stories within stories, abundance of paradox and surprises (especially for the reader), miraculous escapes via the deus ex machina, and the crafty deceits of such incorrigible tricksters as Kalasiris. … On the contrary, the plot of Chaereas and Kallirhoe is the most simple, straightforward and closely knit of all the romance plots with the partial exception of Daphnis and Chloe. The scene is changed less frequently than in most of the other romances; the episodes and the connection between them are more probable and natural; the characters are fewer in number and consequently stand out more distinctly; and the time of the action is comparatively short. In its nature, moreover, as well as in its simplicity, the plot is relatively close to the basic type of legends on which the first romances were in all probability founded.²⁵ The following is its general scheme:

I, 1-11	Marriage of Chaereas and Kallirhoe at Syracuse, and the abduction of the latter by pirates.
I, 12 - III, 2	The courting of Kallirhoe by Dionysius in Miletus, and their marriage.
III, 3-4	The Syracusans pursue and capture the pirate Theron,26 who confesses that he sold Kallirhoe in Miletus. They vote to send an embassy to Miletus, in which Chaereas is included.
III, 5 - V, 2	Departure of Chaereas for Miletus. He falls into the hands of Mithridates, satrap of Caria. Complications arise between these two and Dionysius over their love of Kallirhoe. All are summoned to Babylon for trial.
V, 3 - VIII, 8	Arrival in Babylon. Pleading of the case of Dionysius vs. Mithridates, the result of which is to eliminate Mithridates and to introduce Chaereas as the real opponent of Dionysius. The trial of their case, being postponed, is forestalled by the outbreak of the war. Triumph of Chaereas over Artaxerxes' fleet, restoration of Kallirhoe, and triumphant return to Syracuse.

The close inner connection between the episodes in this romance, their natural character, and the gradual leading up through a series of plausible complications to the main climax toward the end, will be more or less apparent even from the brief sketch given above.²⁷ In most other romances the effect of the main climax, when there is one, is greatly weakened by the large number of crises that have arisen and been disposed of in the preceding narrative; but in Chariton the trial of Dionysius vs. Mithridates overshadows in interest and importance everything that has preceded, and what follows consists in the unravelling of the situation thereby developed. When it comes to real dramatic climax, upon which Heliodorus lays so much stress, there is nothing either in his Aethiopica or in any of the other romances that can compare favorably with this trial scene in Chariton. It is the culminating point of a suspense which has been gathering momentum for the space of an entire book. From IV, 3 to V, 6 everything converges toward this climax; the fortunes of all the principal characters in the story are directly involved. There is no irrelevant matter and no purely fortuitous incident, but the interest is steadily intensified by the centering of attention upon the two principal actors, Dionysius and Mithridates, and by the lively description of the preparations for the approaching trial (V, 3-6).

For Chariton's dramatic method it is significant that, unlike Heliodorus and Achilles Tatius, he makes no attempt to surprise the reader, or to keep him in ignorance of the true state of affairs. The variety of incident in his story suffices to keep up a certain interest in the plot, but always, as in the trial scene, it is one or more of the characters who are ignorant of the real situation and not the reader. Chariton puts his readers in the same position as the spectators of an ancient tragedy; they see all the factors involved in the action and are thereby able to appreciate its ironies. While Heliodorus and Achilles Tatius seek to entertain us by sensational surprises, as in a mystery story, Chariton, in the manner of the Greek dramatists, appeals primarily to our contemplative sense.²⁸

In Chariton many features common to the later romances are conspicuous by their absence; the subplot,²⁹ the sophistic digressions on ethnological and pseudo-scientific subjects, numerous deceits and resulting complications, miraculous incidents, devices elaborately contrived to keep the reader in ignorance of the true state of affairs and to take him by surprise, great variety of scenery, and the multiplicity of paradoxical happenings and intrigue to which we have already referred. From the point of view of classical drama, the absence of these features in Chariton is decidedly a virtue; certainly no intelligent critic would complain of their absence in the Greek tragedians, and why should not Chariton emulate those classic principles? Why may not a prose narrative, like a drama, be built upon comparatively severe lines, with the interest on the inside instead of seeking its main appeal in its bizarre features and in a maximum of technical ingenuity, paradox, and surprise? If Chariton's romance leaves a “cold impression”, it is owing more to the theme than to the broad principles of its composition, and to the fact that a man of cultivated taste cannot share the author's plebeian sentimentality. Assume his naïve sense of human values, which are those of the Greek romance in its true character, and you will find that he has given expression to them in a manner that approaches the classical, even though the general effect of his story is often marred by childish exaggeration and by the encroachment of some of those rhetorical conventions which permeate the writings of his successors. Chaereas and Kallirhoe belongs to an early type of romance in which the mere accidents of fortune have not yet become the main thing, as they are in the plots of Xenophon, Jamblichus, Heliodorus, and Achilles Tatius.

(5) In his capacity for character drawing, for irony, and for subtle humor, Chariton has no peer among the Greek romancers; and yet these features of his work have been almost completely ignored by critics in the past.³⁰ It is my aim in the following paragraphs to give the reader some idea of Chariton's virtuosity in these respects, not that its intrinsic value is considerable, but because it is so unusual in works of this type.

In most Greek romances it is only the lovers whose [éthos], or rather whose [páthos], the writer attempts to describe; and the value of such description is nullified both by the deliberate, sophistic nature of the would-be [ethopoiia] and by the stereotyped conception of the lovers themselves as the mere puppets of circumstance, mechanically endowed with the saccharine virtues of chastity and readiness to die whenever they get into trouble. Chariton's lovers are not far from being already molded to this conventional pattern, although, as we observed above, the nearness to legend has prevented the complete standardization of both Chaereas and Kallirhoe, and the style of presentation is mimetic on the whole rather than sophistic. But the difference between Chariton and his fellows is more marked in the treatment of the minor characters; for whereas in most romances a king, a pirate, a master, or a slave is of value only for his external acts and no interest attaches to his character for its own sake, in Chariton on the other hand these figures are given a picturesque, ethical value of their own. Theron, Dionysius, Leonas, Plango, Artaxates, Statira, and Artaxerxes—all have something definite and colorful about them which is due to the author's creative fancy and not merely to their function in the story. Chariton likes to dwell upon the psychology of these characters for the independent interest of the thing; he likes to contemplate it, especially in action; and while there is nothing unusual in the conception, yet he takes considerable pains to make the portrait clear and forceful by the addition of picturesque details which have no other purpose, and by the copious use of dramatic dialogue or spirited soliloquy. Dionysius has a long struggle with his conscience when he finds himself in love with Kallirhoe, although the latter is entirely within his power. He is an educated man endowed with much self-control and very humane and law-abiding instincts. In his heart prudence and self-respect, though unable to triumph over passion …, nevertheless exert a very strong influence upon the conduct of his love affair. His overtures to Kallirhoe are marked by scrupulous delicacy and regard for her feelings at every turn. He would like to convince Hermokrates that he is a gentleman at heart and worthy of his daughter's love (48, 32). He would not have ordered Phokas to slay Chaereas, but after this has been done for his own salvation he will not blame his servant's zeal (67, 7). His courtship of Kallirhoe is the central theme throughout book II, where the interest of the story is almost entirely ethical. Towards the end he shows himself a valiant soldier in the service of his king, and [eństathés] (for once) in the presence of tragedy (148, 30). Artaxerxes is far from being the mere Märchenkönig which one meets in Xenophon, Jamblichus, or Heliodorus; like Dionysius, he hearkens to the voice of prudence even when assailed by love, and he makes every effort to be just in his dealing with Dionysius and Chaereas, though he envies them both and they stand in the way of his passion for Kallirhoe. He respects the laws which he himself laid down and does not want to mistreat a foreign woman (110, 29 ff.). He will not speak of Kallirhoe in time of war lest he be thought [paidariódēs pantápasin] (121, 15). He shows princely generosity and gratitude towards Dionysius and, like a true oriental, is filled with ten thousand emotions on reading the letter from Chaereas (148, 9). Plango, the loyal servant woman of Dionysius, who be-friends Kallirhoe, is shrewd, practical, and shows such helpful sympathy and understanding towards her new acquaintance as only an experienced woman can show to one of her own sex (cf. II, 10). Dionysius' chief steward, Leonas, is all business. He is anxious to do things in a legally correct way; he has none of his master's fine feelings. With him a woman is a woman and a servant a servant regardless of any sentimental or polite considerations (cf. 33, 28 ff.). “You have the woman in your power,” he says to Dionysius in referring to Kallirhoe, “and she will do as you wish willingly or no. I paid a talent for her” (37, 3 ff.). Thus while Dionysius is literally worrying himself to death with the ethics of the situation, his steward is seeking to console him by talking entirely in terms of money and practical advantage. Here as elsewhere there is an irony in the situation which is not altogether unworthy of the Greek dramatists, at least of the New Comedy. The portrayal of Artaxates, the king's eunuch, is also lively and amusing. Like others in his position, he is very studious of doing and saying just what will please the king. Unfortunately, however, he is not always able to anticipate his master's moods, especially when they are moral, but on one occasion is compelled to back up in the midst of his flattering counsels, when he sees that he has made a false start, and to proceed immediately in the opposite direction. When summoned before the king, he pretends not to know with whom the latter is in love, and he says: “What beauty, O king, can prevail over thy soul?—thou to whom all fair things belong, gold, silver, raiment, horses, cities and nations, and thousands of beautiful women, yea, and Statira herself, the most beautiful of all beneath the sun, of whom thou alone art lord and master. Such felicity leaves no room for love, unless perhaps some immortal has come down from the heavens above, or another Thetis risen from the sea. For I am persuaded that the gods themselves do long for thy society.” Artaxerxes is not so sure about this, and he wonders how the eunuch could praise Statira so highly after beholding Kallirhoe. His purpose in summoning Artaxates was to find some cure for his passion. … This, however, is no problem at all for the eunuch, who promptly assures his master that there is no cure for this other than the possession of the beloved … in this case a very simple matter. But Artaxerxes, whose ethical motives are not suspected by the eunuch, is greatly shocked at these insinuations and remonstrates emphatically; whereupon Artaxates, seeing that he has made a faux pas, changes the tenor of his advice and exclaims, “How lofty, O king, is thy purpose! Do not thou yield to love in the manner of ordinary men, but take up arms against thine own soul in kingly fashion; since thou alone art able to prevail even over a god” etc. (VI, 3). And again when the eunuch makes overtures to Kallirhoe in behalf of the king and congratulates her enthusiastically upon having attracted his love, the dialogues between the two bring out in a truly dramatic fashion the contrast in the standards of value and ways of thinking between an oriental slave and a free Greek woman; see VI, 5 and 7.

I do not know that any critic has commented upon Theron, but in my opinion he comes close to being the most picturesque of all the characters in the Greek erotic romance, although the Melitta of Achilles Tatius is more real and more subtly drawn. Most pirates are bloodthirsty and impersonal, but Theron has a soul; it is a bad man's soul as conceived by a pious and middle class mind, and the author outdoes himself in describing it. By following up the career and utterances of Theron, we shall not only see Chariton's portrayal of character at its best, but we shall also note a rich vein of ironical humor; and the passages translated will furnish documentation for many of the statements made above.

Theron is introduced (I, 7) as a wicked and lawless fellow who, under the pretense of running a ferry business, heads a band of robbers who make their headquarters around the docks of Syracuse. When Kallirhoe is buried, along with a great deal of treasure, Theron takes note of it … and becomes very much interested. “That night, lying in bed, he was unable to sleep but said to himself, ‘Here I am risking my neck in fighting on the sea and killing live men for the sake of paltry gains, when I might just as well get rich quick from a single corpse. Let the die be cast! I'll not let go this chance of profit. Well then, what men shall I pick for the enterprise? Stop and think, Theron, who is the most suitable of those you know. Zenophanes the Thurian? He is a clever fellow but a coward. Menon the Messenian? A bold man but not to be trusted.’ And so he went on in his reckoning, considering and rejecting many possible candidates, like a money-changer eliminating the false coins.” At length, however, he chooses his companions and, after making them a short speech, completes his plans. He will break into the sepulchre on the following night and carry the booty away on the sea; which he eventually does. “Waiting until the very hour of midnight, Theron silently and with muffled oars drew near the tomb.” Then he disembarked and gave detailed orders to his sixteen companions. The first of them to put his head inside the sepulchre catches sight of the living Kallirhoe and, taking her to be a ghost, retreats in panic haste. Thereupon Theron laughs at him, but finding that his other men are equally afraid, he at length enters himself and discovers the true situation: Kallirhoe has been buried alive. So “he stood there and pondered, and at first he planned to kill the woman as being a hindrance to the whole project, but repentance came swiftly when he thought of the profit that was involved and he said to himself, ‘Let her be part of the treasure. There is much silver here and much gold, but more valuable than all is the beauty of this woman.’ Then he took her by the hand and led her out and, calling his fellow worker, said, ‘Behold the ghost of which you stood in fear. You are a fine robber indeed to be afraid of a mere woman. Now then, you keep watch over her carefully, for I intend to give her back to her parents, and meanwhile the rest of us will carry out the booty since it is no longer guarded, not even by a corpse.’” The last thing that Theron intended to do was to give Kallirhoe back to her parents. His remarks are sardonic, but in the debate that follows among his men concerning the disposition of Kallirhoe, one of them makes this very proposal in full earnest. His speech and the one that follows it are worth quoting in full for the sake of their quasi Thucydidean irony. The first man said: “We came here on a different errand, fellow soldiers, but fortune has given us something better than we expected. Let us make use of it. We can go about our work without any risk. It is my opinion that we ought to leave the treasure where it is and give back Kallirhoe to her husband and father, telling them that we happened to drop anchor opposite the tomb in the course of our daily fishing and that, hearing a voice, we opened the sepulchre from a philanthropic motive, in order to save her who had been shut inside. Let us bind the woman by an oath to testify to this story; she will be glad to do so, as being grateful to her benefactors through whom she has been saved. Just think with what joy we will fill the whole land of Sicily! What rewards will we not receive! And at the same time we shall be doing what is just and holy in the eyes of gods and men.” While this well-meaning pirate was still speaking another rose and said, “You untimely fool, in this crisis do you bid us philosophize? Has the business of grave-robbing made us respectable citizens? Shall we pity her whom not even her own husband pitied, but slew? He has never done us any injury, you may say,—no, but he will do us plenty hereafter. In the first place, if we give her back to her kinsmen, we do not know what they will think of this affair; they cannot help suspecting the real reason for our coming to the tomb; and even if they are so kind as not to prosecute us, yet the magistrates and the people will not let off grave-robbers who come laden with the evidence of their own guilt. Some one may say that it is more profitable to sell this woman, since she will bring a good price on account of her beauty. But this too is dangerous. The gold indeed has no voice, neither will the silver speak and say whence we got it. In such matters we can frame a story to suit our purpose. But a cargo that has eyes and ears and tongue, who can conceal it?” etc. The speaker then concludes by advising that Kallirhoe be put to death, but in the end Theron has his way and carries her off to Miletus with the intention of selling her. On arriving there, he surrounds Kallirhoe with all possible comforts and luxuries, “not from a philanthropic motive,” Chariton assures us, “but for the sake of profit, as a shrewd merchant rather than as a pirate.” Theron then leaves his ship and his companions in a harbor some distance outside the city, while he himself goes about town looking for a buyer for Kallirhoe. But he experiences some difficulty in finding one and the delay keeps him awake nights worrying about it and talking to himself: “You're a fool, Theron, to leave gold and silver in that deserted spot all this time as if you were the only pirate in the world. Don't you know that other pirates sail the sea? I am even afraid of my own men lest they leave me and sail away. For certainly, Theron, it wasn't the most just of men that you enlisted for this campaign that they might keep faith with you, but the greatest rascals known to your experience” etc. (I, 12). On the next day he makes arrangements to sell Kallirhoe to the agent of Dionysius, but he does not let her know what is going on. Forsooth he is too delicate for that. He says: “‘It was my purpose, daughter, to restore you immediately to your kinsmen, but an unfavorable wind arising I was prevented from doing so by the sea itself. You understand, however, what great concern I have had for your welfare and, best of all, I have preserved your chastity. Chaereas shall receive you back unharmed as having been saved by us from the marriage chamber of death. Now then, there is no need of your travelling on with us clear to Lycia, nor suffering further discomforts of seasickness. Here in Miletus I shall commend you to the care of trusted friends and on my return I shall take you back to Syracuse with the greatest solicitude. Take what you wish of the treasure and we will guard the rest for you.’ At this Kallirhoe laughed to herself, though sorely grieved, because Theron thought her such a fool. Already she knew that she was being sold, but she answered him and said, ‘I thank you, father, for your kindness to me, and may the gods give unto you all the rewards that you so well deserve! I consider it ill-omened to make use of the treasures that were buried with me, but you will guard everything for me right well. One little ring is enough for me, one that I wore while a corpse.’ Then she covered up her head and said, ‘Take me wherever you please, Theron, for any place is better than the sea and the grave.’”³¹ When the Syracusans discovered that the tomb had been robbed, they sent out searching parties in many directions with the hope of capturing the pirates. “But human effort,” says Chariton, “was altogether weak, and it was only good fortune that finally solved the problem, as may be inferred from what happened. The robbers, after disposing of the woman in Miletus, set sail for Crete, where they hoped to sell the rest of their cargo very easily.” But a heavy wind came upon them and drove them out into the midst of the Ionian Sea, where they drifted about aimlessly thereafter. “Then thunder and lightning and a long night overtook the unholy rascals, Providence revealing thereby that their previous fair sailing had been due to the presence of Kallirhoe. Though they were often on the verge of death, yet God would not free them from the fear of it, but prolonged their distress. Earth would give no welcome to these unholy men; but being tossed about upon the sea for a long time, they found themselves in sore need of provisions and especially of drink. Their unjust wealth availed them naught; they were dying of thirst in the midst of gold. Slowly they repented of what they had done, and made accusations one against the other; but it was too late. Now all the rest were perishing of thirst, but Theron, even in this crisis, proved himself a villain, for he kept filching the drink apportioned to his companions and he robbed even his fellow robbers. In this he fancied he was doing a neat little bit of professional work; but in reality it seems that this was the will of Providence in order that the man might be spared for torture and for crucifixion” (III, 3). Meanwhile the Syracusan trireme with Chaereas on board was approaching. Their main purpose was to recover the body or person of Kallirhoe. When they saw that the pirate ship was being tossed about at random with no steersman at the helm, one of them called out, “‘She has no crew, let us not be afraid but draw near and investigate’—so they came up alongside; and at first they called out to those on board, but when no one answered, one of the Syracusans went aboard in person; he saw nothing but gold and dead bodies. He told his fellow sailors. They rejoiced. They thought themselves lucky, as men who have found a treasure on the sea.” But Chaereas was thinking only of Kallirhoe—and going on board the pirate ship and recognizing the personal belongings of his wife, he broke out into a loud apostrophe to Kallirhoe. “Theron heard him. He was lying there like one of the corpses, for he was indeed half dead. He had firmly resolved not to utter a word nor make a move. But man is by nature a life-loving creature and not even in the extremities of misfortune does he give up hope for the better, the Creator having played this trick upon all mankind to the end that they may not escape from a wretched life. And so Theron, overcome by thirst, at length broke into speech and uttered this one word, ‘Water!’ When it was brought to him and when all his bodily needs had been looked after, Chaereas sat down beside him and questioned him: ‘Who are you? Whither are you bound? Where did you get these things? What did you do with the owner of them?’ And Theron, the rogue, did not forget himself but said, ‘I am a Cretan on my way to Ionia. I am going to look for my brother who is in the army. I was left behind by the crew of my ship in Cephallenia and thereafter took passage on this yacht which chanced to be sailing by opportunely. But we were driven by unfavorable winds to this part of the sea, and then a prolonged calm came upon us and all my companions died of thirst. I alone was spared, owing to my piety’” (III, 3). Thereafter Theron is taken before the assembly of the Syracusans where he is again questioned and where he repeats the same story, adding that he did not know that the ship he was on was manned by pirates and that among them he alone was saved because he “had never done anything wrong in his life.” But in spite of these protestations, he is found out and crucified, much to the gentle reader's edification. “For,” says Chariton, “if he had succeeded in persuading the Syracusans that he was innocent, as he came very near doing, it would have been the most outrageous thing that ever happened.”

(6) Irony, as opposed to mere paradox, involves restraint from rhetorical effusion and is a good index to the intellectual and artistic temperament. What would Greek tragedy be without it? If we measure Chariton by this classical standard, we shall find him far superior to his colleagues.³²

Chariton has what may be loosely called the irony of character, irony brought about by motives and dispositions nullifying each other or being strongly contrasted, as when the thoroughly business-like and faithful Leonas earnestly tries to allay his master's ethical scruples, which he does not realize to be such, by pointing out the legality of his arrangements (cf. supra, p. 117); or when the eunuch Artaxates tries wholeheartedly to convince Kallirhoe that she is a lucky woman for having attracted the king's passion (VI, 5). The joy of the sailors when they find gold on Theron's ship stands in ironical contrast to the grief and anxiety of Chaereas (foregoing page). The plan of action proposed by the well-meaning pirate is very plausible on the surface and engagingly moral; like Nicias, it deserves to succeed; but it becomes pitiable folly when matched with the Realpolitik of practical piracy. Leonas, acting on his own initiative and inspired with a noble purpose, purchases Kallirhoe for Dionysius in order to allay the latter's grief for his recently deceased wife. Dionysius, however, scorns such comfort and will have nothing to do with a slave girl. She could not be beautiful unless well-born. But the reader knows that Kallirhoe is of noble birth and that her charms would be irresistible, especially to Dionysius who is [philogúnēs]; and so the irony becomes quite effective when Leonas tries to persuade his master to retire to his country estate, where Kallirhoe is being kept, in order to assuage his grief by turning attention “to the fruits of the soil and to country life. And if you should wish to reward some cowherd of yours or some shepherd, you can give him the newly purchased woman” (30, 15). … Statira and her women are very confident that no Greek beauty can rival that of the Persian women, and they give expression to this feeling very emphatically (V, 3); but the reader knows very well that this optimism is doomed to be shattered. King Artaxerxes has been sorely in love with Kallirhoe all along. When his wife Statira is restored to him he asks whom he has to thank for her safety and the reply is, “You have me as a present from Kallirhoe,” whereupon the king exclaims, “Lead me to Kallirhoe, that I may thank her!” But Statira replies, “You shall learn everything from me.”

Among other noteworthy examples of irony, especially of irony in words, we may note the conversation between Kallirhoe and Theron as translated above (p. 121) and Theron's talk about his piety. See also the flattering speech of the crafty parasite to the honest young Chaereas in I, 4. …

Finally, an effective use is made of an irony conditioned primarily by circumstances or by ignorance on the part of one of the characters of something well known to the reader. Dionysius believes that Kallirhoe's child by Chaereas (his rival) is of his own begetting, and in his bitter disappointment after the trial (103, 6 ff.) addresses it as follows, “Thou art a child and yet not unwitting of the ills thy father suffers … go now and entreat thy mother in thy father's behalf. Weep and kiss her, and say, ‘Mother, my father loves thee,’ but do not censure her in aught. What's that, pedagogue? You won't be allowed to enter the palace? Oh, cruel tyranny!” When Arados is captured, Kallirhoe, who is being kept there along with the Persian women, does not know that Chaereas is the victorious general, but supposes that she has fallen into alien hands. Under these circumstances, one of Chaereas' Egyptian subordinates, who has been instructed to summon the women before the commander³³ and to use every ingratiating means in so doing, seeks to reassure Kallirhoe by promising her that the commander will marry her, “for he is naturally fond of women.” On hearing this, Kallirhoe wailed and tore her hair and exclaimed: “Now in very truth am I made a captive. Do thou kill me rather than tell me this. I shall not abide this marriage. I pray for death.” After this the Egyptian goes back to Chaereas and reports his difficulty, whereupon Chaereas chides him jokingly for his clumsy methods in handling women. He has probably been too rough; he ought to flatter the woman and make her think that she is loved; thus is a woman won over. To this the Egyptian replies that he did his best, and even made a false promise to her that the commander would marry her but, strange to say, that made things worse than ever. Then says Chaereas, “I must indeed be a handsome and lovable fellow if this woman has fallen to hating me without ever seeing me! … But let her have her way. I ought to honor chastity. Perhaps she too is mourning for a husband.” And in the instant before Chaereas and Kallirhoe recognize each other he reassures her with the words, “Be of good cheer, woman, whoever you are, for we shall do you no injury. You shall have the man whom you desire” (137, 16). The speech of Dionysius at the trial is especially noteworthy for its dramatic irony. Chaereas, befriended by Mithridates, had sent a letter to Kallirhoe at Miletus which had fallen into the hands of Dionysius. The latter, believing Chaereas to be dead, is accusing Mithridates of intended adultery before the king, but Mithridates, as the reader knows, has brought Chaereas to Babylon with him and is ready to produce him when necessary. Dionysius speaks in part as follows (96, 21 ff.): “I have stated the the case under trial. The demonstration is sure. One of two things must be; either Chaereas is living or else Mithridates is proved an adulterer. He cannot say that he is unaware of Chaereas' death, for he was in Miletus when we built his tomb and he joined in mourning with us. But when Mithridates wishes to commit adultery, he brings the dead to life.³⁴ I will conclude by reading the letter which he sent by his own slaves from Caria to Miletus. Take it and read, ‘I, Chaereas, am living.’ Let Mithridates prove this and he may be let off. But consider, O king, how shameless this adulterer is who belies even a corpse.”

It should be clear from the illustrations cited above that Chariton's irony, besides being abundant, is of a high order and not to be classed along with the mere rhetorical paradox which abounds in the other Greek romances.³⁵ Chariton was either a lawyer himself or a lawyer's secretary,³⁶ and his legal mind has endowed him with a capacity for irony which is unusual in a romancer. The pleasure that he takes in the encounters between his characters is the same sort that one may fancy an Athenian juryman would take in a play of Sophocles. It is the pleasure of watching a serious contest from the outside and from the standpoint of a superior knowledge of the factors involved, without being prejudiced in favor of either party. I have no doubt that Chariton could have appreciated the great Attic tragedians far better than Heliodorus or the others who emulate only the external trappings of Euripidean drama and the New Comedy.

In the foregoing sketch of Chariton's literary art I have tried to show that the principles upon which his romance is composed are more sane and more classical than those which underlie the writings of Xenophon, Jamblichus, Heliodorus, Longus, and Achilles Tatius, and that there is more real literary value in it than is commonly supposed. We noted that the plot of Chaereas and Kallirhoe is probably closer to legend than that of any of the other erotic romances, that its incidents are comparatively few and plausible, that it makes a minimum use of the deus ex machina, and that it leads steadily up to one main climax and gathers interest and suspense as it moves along. While in most romances a great premium is put upon such external attractions as pirates, shipwreck, narrow escapes of all kinds, coercion by unscrupulous masters, etc., and upon the elements of surprise and novelty generally, in Chariton, on the other hand, such incidents are comparatively few and by no means the main attraction. The interest of his story is on the inside to a much greater extent than in any of the other erotic romances save Daphnis and Chloe. … The unusual amount of attention devoted to the finer psychological values in Chariton's story is evidenced by the author's interest in the characters for their own sake (cf. supra p. 116), in his remarkable capacity for irony of a high order in place of mere paradox, and in his abundance of subtle humor. In general, his artistic inspiration is drawn from the classical rather than from the later literature. His ideal is not a rhetorical one but a truly dramatic one. He employs [mimesis] in the portrayal of character rather than deliberate description. He imitates as well as he can the spirit and thought of the classical historians and dramatists, and the essence of their style rather than their mere words and phrases (cf. supra pp. 104 ff.). He is the only one of the romancers who is naïve enough to aim thus high, and although his imitation is childish at times, it is often nevertheless successful, at least to the extent of being spontaneous and sincere. On the other hand, the whole outlook of Heliodorus, Longus and Achilles Tatius is Alexandrian and sophistic. For Heliodorus, drama is only a series of external [peripéteiai]. Longus and Achilles are full of trite Alexandrian conceits and mannerisms taken from the later exponents of belles lettres and prosaically elaborated; and in general the stylistic ideal of all three writers, as well as of Xenophon and Jamblichus, is that of the later and more formal rhetoric. To be sure, some of the artificial features which predominate in the later romances are already making their appearance in Chariton, but as we have observed, it is only in a comparatively mild form.

Our praise of Chariton, be it understood, is mainly relative. His romance contains a few passages of real literary value and much that is entertaining, but his subject matter on the whole is too puerile and sentimental to appeal to the cultivated reader. If, however, we do not like this sort of thing, it is because we have no sympathy with the Greek romance in its true character. The defects in Chariton are mainly those of the species itself. Except for his exaggerations and his partial surrender to the growing conventions, he writes Greek romance as it should be written. He is spiritually en rapport with his subject and with the type of theme which all the other romancers likewise handle, though less sympathetically. It is unfair to complain because he is not above his subject; a sentimental story needs to be written by a sentimental author, not by a sophist.³⁷

The romance began to decay as soon as the writing of it was usurped by authors who were more sophisticated than Chariton and less genuinely inspired with its naïve ideals. As in the history of other literary forms, so in the romance we observe a gradual shifting of emphasis from the inside to the outside, from the ideal, sentimental impulse that was the soul of the thing and that gave it life, to the purely external attractions of style and incident. In Chariton the species is still in its prime, though on the verge of decline; in Achilles Tatius it has reached an advanced stage of decay. The hollow love affair of Klitophon and Leukippe serves only as a conventional framework into which are woven the numerous elements congenial to the author's unsentimental mind, namely, the bizarre incidents, the sophistic digressions … and the picturesque but “Milesian” story about Melitta of Ephesus—a story which would do some credit to an Apuleius or an Aristaenetus, but which is totally off color in the Greek erotic romance. The stage of decline represented by Achilles Tatius, in so far as it was uniform in the species, was probably not reached all at once. The tendency in this general direction would vary, however, with individual authors and must have been begun as early as the time of Chariton. Jamblichus, who lived in the second century, is apparently as cold as Achilles Tatius, or more so, and he puts an immense premium upon mere sensationalism and external circumstance. He also has many digressions on learned and pseudo-scientific subjects; his romance was very long (39 books according to Suidas); and, to judge by the citations in Suidas, he must have had the reputation as well as the temperament of a professional sophist. Suidas says that he was reported to be [apò doulōn],³⁸ and that may partly account for his combining the profession of a sophist with the writing of romance, a procedure not at all fashionable in the second century and more to be expected in an Asiatic upstart than in a writer of more classical or academic background and environment. Jamblichus was an alarming symptom of the sort of thing that was to follow. We can hardly suppose, however, that there were many writers of romance like him in the second century a.d., for he is too barbaric and too empty hearted to be representative of middle-class taste. Chariton and Xenophon of Ephesus are much more in accord with the spirit of the age as we know it from other sources. Xenophon has some of the naïveté and enthusiasm of Chariton and his work is pervaded by an atmosphere of genuine romance and idealism. At the same time, however, he is further on the road to decline than Chariton; his plot is far more extravagant and more arbitrarily composed, and the preoccupation with exciting incidents has left the characters vague and impersonal. That which the author intends to be [ethopoia] is served up at very regular intervals in the form of rhetorical soliloquies which are much more artificial, stereotyped and unreal, on the whole, than are those of Chariton.³⁹ Kallirhoe's beauty is brought home to us entirely by the effect that it produces upon others, but in describing Antheia, Xenophon has recourse to many concrete adjectives (I, 2). There is no evidence of any sophistic digressions in Xenophon, though that may possibly be due to the fact that we have only an abridgement of his original work. His style is clear and simple, but much too sophisticated to allow verbal imitations and borrowing from the ancients in the crude but ingenuous manner of Chariton. In both style and subject matter Xenophon has moved away in the direction of externality and artificiality. Heliodorus has gone much farther still. What virtues he may possess are those of the sophist and the ingenious contriver of plot-machinery, not those of the genuine romancer. Longus has had the good sense to address his romance to sophisticated readers like himself without trying to keep up the conventional machinery and ideals that were appropriate only to a bourgeois or juvenile story, and which in a sophisticated writer could amount to nothing more than a hollow pretense.

School-boy rhetoric with its formal flourishes appears to have been present in the romance from the start, though in a subordinate capacity. If the occasional formalism in such early specimens as Ninus seems to stand out here and there more conspicuously than in the works of an able sophist, it is probably because the authors of this popular genre were men of more meager intellectual and artistic equipment. The poor in spirit are wont to imitate their superiors as well as they can, and what they imitate is generally the externals. The early romancers were not Livys nor Dios. The rhetoric which they learned in school was probably their only claim to any sort of literary recognition and accordingly they made the most of it, without, however, losing their sentimental inspiration. But rhetoric, as such and for its own sake, in the Greek romance (as in oratory, drama, and various other forms) may be regarded as a sort of congenital infection, the symptoms of which became more aggravated and manifold as time went on, and as the romances came to be written no longer by naïvely and genuinely inspired men of middle or lower class minds, like Chariton, but by second and third rate sophists whose interests were only in the externals whether of style or of subject matter.

I have described what happened to the romance but not why it happened. The latter question, of course, is more difficult to answer. A little speculation, however, may not be out of place. By the second century a.d. the romance must have acquired a considerable popularity, as the papyrus finds dating from this period indicate and as we should infer for other reasons. In all probability, therefore, there was a good market for books of this kind, and the writing of them was presumably a profitable business.⁴⁰ As belles lettres they were hopelessly beneath the fashion, and could make no bid for praise or recognition at the bar of literary criticism presided over by the intellectual and artistic leaders of the age. Accordingly, the inducement for writing them must have become to a large extent pecuniary; and it would be natural under such circumstances that many writers who were neither successful in the first rank of literature nor qualified by nature to write a sentimental story, but who had nevertheless acquired some rhetorical technique, would turn to the writing of popular romances for the sake of the profit involved and with the hope of gaining a popularity with the masses which they could not get in higher circles. Supposing this to be the case, we can easily see how many romances would be spoiled; but we still have to ask ourselves what became of the more genuine romancers. Were they simply crowded out or put to shame by their more sophisticated competitors, or did the culture itself which fostered them and their public pass away? I suppose both causes were operative. While there was probably always a romantic public in the later centuries, still it must have been more disintegrated and less able to assert itself than during the age of the Antonines, and it was probably of a different, less conventional, temper. Various sub-literary versions of the Alexander romance were produced after the second century, the Life of Aesop was popular, and the Latin version of Apollonius of Tyre, composed some time before the 6th century, seems to represent a popularization of what was originally a more sophistic romance. But these are all folk-books rather than romances of the conventional bourgeois pattern, and they are märchenhaft to a greater degree than Chariton and his fellow Erotici. In short, there is not extant any genuine sentimental love romance of later date than the second century.⁴¹ The type of romance represented by Chariton seems to presuppose a lawabiding, well-established, optimistic, tender and conventionally-minded, middle-class, pagan gentry; but after the second century this class of society must have been greatly disturbed and broken up amid the hard and bloody internal wars, the barbarian invasions, and the general economic decline. The spread of Christianity, moreover, and the rise of saints' legends, like that of Clement, would tend to lessen the interest in pagan stories whose plots were presided over by Eros or [Túkhē] and which put so huge a premium upon marriage and the beauty of the flesh, and to leave the composition of such books to antiquaries and pedants. This was precisely the state of affairs in Byzantine times, and it probably began as soon as Christianity was well established. On the other hand, the Märchen, the hero of chivalry, the generous prince, and the wise man (whether he be Homer, Aesop, Solomon, Marcolfus, or Sindbad) remain popular at all times among the simple folk, regardless of religious or social conditions.

Notes

1. He is not later than the beginning of third century a.d. and in all probability dates well back into the second; see Fayum Towns and Their Papyri, by Grenfell, Hunt and Hogarth, London, 1900, p. 75; Ow. Pap. VII (1910), no. 1019. W. Schmid (Pauly-Wissowa, R. E., s. v. Chariton, 1899) deserves credit for being the first scholar to refute, on the basis of style and content, a dating for which there had never been any good support.

2. Under the assumption that they were dealing with an early Byzantine product, it was natural for critics to exaggerate the weaknesses of Chaereas and Kallirhoe and to minimize its virtues. The later an author's date so much the worse his composition was presumed to be. D'Orville, for example, after declaring that all the other romancers wrote in a purer style than Chariton—a palpable falsehood—proceeded to contradict himself in the same sentence by adding that there are very few expressions in the text which cannot be paralleled by the usage of good authors elsewhere. Cobet, in a spirit of lofty disdain, with which any lover of the great classics may well sympathize, said he did not believe any story could be found that was more insipid and puerile than Chaereas and Kallirhoe; but surely he must have forgotten about the Byzantine romances, which are far worse, and he was judging Chariton not with reference to his fellows but to the classical writers Herodotus, Thucydides, and Xenophon. “Est aliquid inter Charitonem et Thucydidem”, he observes with sarcasm, and that is true enough; but it does not help us to rate Chariton among his peers, nor to see him in his true perspective. Likewise Rohde's remarks are somewhat contradictory; for he makes it evident that he saw more good points in Chariton's work than his prepossessions about the date and about the sophistic nature of the Greek romance would allow him to recognize as such.

3. This, of course, was due to taste as well as to circumstance; but the obscurity in which Chariton has remained may be inferred from the fact that no English translation of him has been made, to my knowledge, since the 18th century.

4. Cf. Gr. Rom.³ p. 526.

5. Realization of the popular character of the ancient romances has come about partly by the revelation, through papyri, of the lower strata in Hellenistic literature, not all of which literature, it appears, was addressed to the ‘intelligentsia’, as the commonly received texts had led us to suppose. The Ninus fragment, which belongs to the first century a.d., shows the popular nature of the species very clearly; for here Ninus, who is a purely national figure in formal historiography, becomes in the romance a seventeen year old lover with very conventional morals, while Semiramis, instead of being semi-divine and already married, is Ninus's own virgin cousin and entirely human. The atmosphere of the popular saga is likewise abundantly present in the early romances of Alexander and Apollonius of Tyre; and those naïve elements in Chariton which Rohde attributed to the author's late date and to Christianity are now seen to belong to second century paganism. The discovery since 1890 of the papyrus fragments of ten or more new romances, all relatively early, and of three of Chariton alone, shows that this type of literature must have been widely read; and its demotic character is attested not only by the nature of the subject matter but by the fact hat in all the volumes of grammar and criticism up to the time of Photius there has scarcely been found a single passage which can be said with certainty to have any specific reference to the serious romances as such. We should conclude from this that the romance was regarded as beneath the notice of the higher literary circles, with whose products we have hitherto been so exclusively familiar. See further note 7. That the earlier romances were based on history or legend and not on mere freie Erfindung is indicated by several papyrus fragments as well as by Ninus, by Chariton, and by the title of one of the lost romances mentioned by Suidas (s. v. Xenophon). See further, B. Lavagnini, Le Origini del Romanzo Greco, Pisa, 1921; id., Eroticorum Frag. Papyracea, Leipzig, 1922; P. S. I. VIII (1927) no. 981 (compared with Lucian's Toxaris, 51 and 54). An illuminating discussion of the nature of the Greek romance and its connections with history will be found in J. Ludvíkovský's Recký Román, Dobrodružný (Prague, 1925) which has a twelve-page résumé in French at the end. Concerning the absence of the rhetorical point of view in the early romances, see below, note 10; p. 132; and passim.

6. Ludvíkovský aptly applies to the romance the principle of Brunetière, according to which a literary form is to be regarded as in its origin a démembrement and in its development an extension of an antecedent form.

7. Cf. supra, n. 5. In accepting in whole or part the fantastic deductions of Thiele, according to which Cicero (De Invent. I, 27) and the Auctor. ad Herenn. (I, 12) are speaking of the Greek romance while illustrating it by Terence (dagegen Rohde, Kl. Schr. II, pp. 36-37), Reitzenstein, W. Schmid, and Kérenyi are repeating Rohde's error in method and aggravating it. These passages have nothing to do with the Greek romance and have been totally misunderstood; for clear and convincing proof of which see K. Barwick in Hermes LXIII (1928), 261 ff. I think it very probable that the Chariton addressed by Philostratus in epistle 66 is the author of Chaereas and Kallirhoe; but, however this may be, the attitude of the sophist toward this popular writer is precisely what we should expect were he addressing our romancer. … This may be taken as a fair sample of the way in which the ancient ‘intelligentsia’ must have regarded the romance writers and their reading public,—as nobodies. In the preceding epistle (65) Philostratus addresses the slave-born Epictetus in the same spirit of contempt and jealousy for his popularity with the masses …, similarly ep. 69. Since Epictetus and others addressed in these epistles had long been dead, we need not infer from this passage that Chariton was a contemporary.

8. The historians have apparently not yet come to realize the value of these romances as documents in the history of ancient culture. That is probably owing to the fact that in the past the romance has been erroneously viewed as a purely sophistic product representing the decay of ancient letters, instead of as the symbol of a new culture in its heyday. Its rhetorical poses may be old, but its spirit is new and significant.

9. Cf. infra, note 43.

10. Preoccupation with rhetoric, which is at a minimum in Chariton, Apollonius of Tyre and most of the papyri fragments, becomes increasingly pronounced in Xenophon, Jamblichus, Heliodorus, Longus, Achilles Tatius, and the Byzantines; and this progression suggests what is probable on other grounds, namely, that formal rhetoric, instead of being the generative force that created the romance, as Schmid supposes, was the very agent that did most to bring about its decay. The earliest romances, like other contemporary forms including historiography, were no doubt often written by men who had some training in formal rhetoric; but the rhetoric is only a necessary instrument, as in any composition, and there is nothing in the early romances to indicate that they were composed like the controversiae and suasoriae for the sake of academic exercise. The theory that the romance grew out of the school exercises might account for the extravagance of some of the situations, although this too is more pronounced in the later romances; but it would leave entirely unexplained the sentimental and naïve character of the theme, its great partiality to a pair of lovers, and its ignorance or disregard of history. The school exercises, when they were not confined to imitating or paraphrasing passages from the ancient poets and prose writers (cf. Theon in Spengel, Rhet. Graec. II, pp. 87 ff.; Barwick, op. cit., pp. 284 ff.), were at least concerned with formal subjects—fictitious and extravagant perhaps for the sake of eliciting oratory, but not saccharine nor ignorant. A school boy or a rhetorician might argue a hypothetical case involving pirates standing on the seashore, or he might urge Sulla into a deep retirement, but we have no reason to suppose that he would, in his ambition to write in the approved style, transform the warlike Ninus into an adolescent lover, any more than he would do the same with Agamemnon or Achilles. In the school, mythology and history are more or less the same from the earliest period to the latest. For Chariton's ignorance or disregard of history, see below, n. 11.

11. The most famous of the historical characters are Hermokrates, the Syracusan general (father of Kallirhoe), and King Artaxerxes Mnemon, who are falsely represented as contemporaries in power. The latter's wife, Statira, plays a conspicuous part and is well drawn. Concerning the revolt of Egypt, which confuses two different wars, see Rohde, Gr. Rom.³, 523. We are told by Diodorus (XV, 90, 92) that there were many Spartan and other Greek soldiers in Egypt in the reign of Artaxerxes, and this makes plausible the career of Chaereas and his Spartan friends in the service of the Egyptian king (Rohde, l. c.). Chaereas as commander of the Egyptian naval force was no doubt suggested by the analogy of the Athenian Chabrias who played that very rôle in history, according to Diodorus (XV, 92), and who, like Chaereas, was not sent by his government as were some others, but was fighting on his own account. … At the same time, however, the military career of Chaereas is full of echoes from Xenophon's Anabasis. Ariston, the father of Chaereas, who is said to be second only to Hermokrates in Syracuse, is probably a reflection of Ariston the Corinthian. … Chariton shows familiarity with Thucydides throughout his romance. Dionysius of Miletus, like the tyrant of Syracuse, an educated man and the husband of Hermokrates' daughter, was perhaps thought cf by Chariton as the foster-father of that ruler (cf. infra). Mithridates, satrap of Caria (IV, 1) is apparently not historical for the time of Artaxerxes Mnemon, when Mausolus ruled in Caria (Rohde); but our author may have had in mind the tradition reported by Ktesias (ed. Müller, p. 56 b) that a certain Mithridates was made satrap—of what is not stated—by Statira. The beautiful Rhodogyne, who is said to be the daughter of Zopyrus and wife of Megabyzus (V, 3), was evidently suggested by Rhodogoune, the daughter of Artaxerxes Mnemon (Plut. Artax. 27); but she has been confused with an earlier Rhodogoune, the contemporary of Zopyrus, who according to Ktesias (p. 50 a) was the daughter of Xerxes, and whose sister Amytis married Megabyzus. Other characters suggested by history are Bias, sτρατηγòς Πριηνεων (IV, 5) and Menon the treacherous pirate (I, 6). The central figure throughout is Kallirhoe. The name is common in myth and legend; cf. Pausanias VII, 21, 1-5. Persius (1, 134) uses it proverbially for a beautiful woman. Plutarch (Amat. Narr. 4) tells of a Boeotian Kallirhoe who, like the one in Chariton, had many suitors who brought her to grief though by a different means. Our heroine's journey to Babylon and the passion she excites in Artaxerxes was perhaps suggested by the career of the Ionian Aspasia who became the favorite of that king and who, like Kallirhoe, being a high-spirited and free Greek woman, was a novelty at the Persian court (Plut. Artax. 26). The violence done to Kallirhoe by her jealous husband may have been due to a recollection of the assault made by soldiers upon that daughter of Hermokrates who married Dionysius the Elder and who is reported to have died of her injuries; see Plut. Dion. 3; Diod. XIII, 112, and compare the mock death of Kallirhoe. The latter is obviously intended to be this same daughter, who is not given a name in the histories. W. Schmid (Bursian's Jahresb. CXXIX, 292) suggests that the nucleus of an Hermokrates legend may have been found in Timaeus or Philistus, the ‘pusillus Thucydides.’ There are some loose ends in the story which are hard to account for otherwise than on the assumption of a preexisting popular tradition. For example, we are assured that the infant son of Chaereas and Kallirhoe shall one day sail to Syracuse, when he grows up, and see Hermokrates (II, 9 and 11; VIII, 4 and 5); and great hopes are held out for his future (II, 11; and III, 8); he is to be a [diádoxos] to Hermokrates, as was the famous Dionysius I. But it is very odd that this child should have been sent to Miletus to be brought up by Dionysius when his parents, after the capture of Arados, could just as well have taken him with them to Syracuse. This incident is so contrary to Chariton's tender idealism, so unlike Kallirhoe, and so purposeless as far as the story is concerned, that we cannot regard it as pure invention. Our author must have been following some tradition that obliged him to make this concession. Naber (Mnem. 1901, p. 98) suggests very plausibly that Chariton was thinking of this child as the future Dionysius I of Syracuse, who was said to have been the son (instead of grandson) of an Hermokrates … and who won his way into power by championing the faction of the famous Hermokrates. The tyrant's literary inclinations may have suggested the intellectual qualities of his presumable Milesian foster-father; and the tradition that he was of low birth and obscure origin may easily have led to the creation of some such myth as Chariton seems to have in mind. I think Naber is mistaken in assuming that this myth was invented by Chariton, since it is not his wont to intrude such speculations at the expense of his story, and since he says nothing about it explicitly. At the beginning of the story the hostile rivalry between the parents of the lovers is represented as a great bar to their union; yet this obstacle is so quickly overcome and in so improbable a way (the whole populace acts as go-between for the sake of the lovers of one day's standing) that we may suspect an underlying legend in which this hostility between the two parents, as in Romeo and Juliet, was a more important motif. A similar motif may be noted in the romance of Chione (Lavagnini, Erot. Frag. Pap. p. 27).

12. As D'Orville observes, Polycharmus is a name made up to match Chaereas, and to signify his function in the story, which is to cheer up Chaereas and forestall his numerous attempts at suicide.

13. Cf. supra, n. 11.

14. The greater naturalness of the early quasi-historical romances is well exemplified by the Ninus fragment; here the girl apparently stays at home while her lover goes abroad, not by mere accident nor at the advice of an arbitrary oracle, but as a matter of duty, and the lovers have known each other from infancy (cf. Levi, Riv. di Fil. XXIII, 17 ff.). The real and vigorous, if exaggerated, personality which legend gave to the early heroines of romance is well illustrated by the fragment dealing with Kalligone among the Scythians (P. S. I. VIII, 1927, no. 981, 2nd Cent.), where our heroine, though she declares she is no Amazon but a Greek, threatens to strangle her captor after he had disarmed her of her sword.

15. Ludvikovský (op. cit., résumé, p. 155) has made clearer than anyone else the nature of the connection between Xenophon and the Greek romance. The fundamental link between them, so far as the formal conception goes, is the biographical point of view. The Ninuss story, as H. Weil pointed out (Études de littérature et de rythmique greoques, pp. 104 ff.), looks like a veritable Ninopedia. The same point of view, i. e. the education of the hero in the Xenophontean sense, is conspicuous in the “romances” of Alexander, Aesop, and Clement, and has left distinct traces in Chariton and Xenophon of Ephesus. A recent papyrus find, apparently not available to Ludvíkovský, is described by the editors (Grenfell and Hunt, Ox. Pap. XV (1922), no. 1826) as the “Romance of King Sesonchosis”. … In Ninus, Ludvíkovský rightly sees an intermediate stage in the shifting of emphasis from a military career to one of love and adventure. Chariton has both, with increased prominence given to the latter features, and yet with more of the military and political in his terminology, thought, and episodes than any of the later romancers. For the bourgeoisie love and marriage, not war and conquest, are the great things in a man's life, and biography becomes a vehicle not for philosophical or ethical interpretation, as in Xenophon or Plutarch, but for popular sentiment. Xenophon, with his comparatively commonplace ideals and his interest in the love affair (still incidental) of Abradates and Pantheia, was naturally better understood and more often emulated by the popular romancers of later times than were the other more intellectual classical writers. It is probably no accident that three different romancers bore the name Xenophon, one from Ephesus, one from Cyprus, and one from Antioch, the last two known only through Suidas. … The name Xenophon appears to have been assumed by the romancers as a literary nom de plume. Arrian also was fond of calling himself Xenophon. For the great popularity of Xenophon in later times, see K. Münscher, Xenophon in der griechisch-römischen Literatur, Leipzig, 1920 (= Philol. Supplementband XIII, 2).

16. See below, pp. 118, 119, 121.

17. A number of verbal imitations of Thucydides and others are pointed out by Cobet in Mnem. VIII (1859), 229 ff. The most obvious mannerism that I have noted is in VII, 3 (Hercher, p. 127, l. 31). … But the remarkable thing is that Chariton shows some appreciation of the critical thought of Thucydides, or at any rate of the type of thought congenial to that great mind, whereas the other romancers tend to confine their philosophical comments to love and women according to Alexandrian teaching. In I, 2 the tyrant of Agrigentum, one of the rejected suitors, objects to using violence against Chaereas “not through sympathy for Chaereas but for the sake of expediency, etc.”… When Mithridates would dissuade the headstrong Chaereas from immediately demanding back his wife from Dionysius (IV, 4), he reminds him in graphic terms how helpless he is as a lone stranger against a rich, powerful citizen, and that Hermokrates and Mithridates will be a long way off and “better able to mourn for you than to bring you aid.”… Like Thucydides, Chariton is fond of balancing the alleged motive against the real one; he enjoys the irony involved; cf. 31, 26; 36, 17; 94, 27; 121, 6; 147, 3; and elsewhere. He also likes to make brief observations on human nature, as …(113, 19; 65, 9; from Dem., 3rd Olynthiac, 19); or that “kings are made by nature as in a beehive” (32, 4; cf. Xen. Cyr. V, 1, 24); or that “man is a life-loving creature who not even in extreme adversity gives up hope for the better, the Creator having played this trick upon all mankind to the end that they may not escape from a wretched life” 53, 25). Most of these reflections are no doubt secondhand, but there is a real sententiousness about them, in their contexts, and Chariton has some right to say with Seneca, quod verum est meum est. …

18. See the interesting article of O. Immisch, “Über eine volkstümliche Darstellungsform in der antiken Literatur”, Neue Jahrb. XLVII (1921), 409 ff. In Seneca, Petronius, and Lucian, and hence probably in the writings of the Cynic Menippus, poetry is inserted mainly for comic or mock-heroic effect; though Petronius sometimes uses the form to support and screen his own more or less serious poetic experiments. …

19. Cf. Rohde, Gr. Rom., p. 528: “Man wird, nach dem Bombast und der leeren Feierlichkeit des Heliodor, dem unleidlichen Gewitzel und schillernden Phrasenfunkeln des Achilles Tatius nicht unangenehm berührt durch die einfache und klare Sprache des Chariton.”

20. Cf. I, 2, 10; IV, 4; V, 6, 7; VII, 3; VIII, 2.

21. For further illustration of this more or less lively mimetic style see the passages quoted below, pp. 121, 123; Theron in a shop at Miletus gossiping with the bystanders about Dionysius, 21, 13 ff.; the conversation between Dionysius and Leonas, 33, 7 ff.; between Plango and Kallirhoe, 43, 2 ff.; Theron before the Syracusan assembly, 55, 22 ff.; the priestess and Kallirhoe, 64, 21 ff.; Dionysius and Phokas, 65, 25 ff.; Statira among her women, 88, 31 ff.; the quarrel between Chaereas and Dionysius, 99, 25 ff.; the gossip in Babylon about the coming trial, 105, 5 ff.; the king and the eunuch, 109, 15 ff.; the eunuch and Kallirhoe, VI, 5 and 7. When Artaxerxes is about to depart for the war, he attempts to conceal his great interest in Kallirhoe by ending a long series of official instructions with the ostensibly casual remark: “And that stranger wench, the one whose trial I undertook, let her follow along with the rest of the women” (121, 28).

22. Compare, for example, the speech of Kallirhoe to Theron as quoted below, pp. 121 f.

23. Cf. S. L. Wolff, Greek Romances in Elizabethan Prose Fiction, pp. 143 ff. …

24. Rohde says the invention is armselig in the sense that it has no novelties of adventure except what are common to other romances, and that the plain structure of his work makes a pretty cold impression (Gr. Rom.³ 522, 526). Kekkos and Jacob express a similar view, considering Chariton in this respect inferior to Heliodorus. Dunlop, on the other hand, rightly praises the simplicity, economy, and general probability of Chariton's story, and its gradual working up to a climax (Hist. of Fiction, I, 58); and F. M. Warren comments in the same vein, adding that Chariton's romance is “more natural, more definite, more modern in a word, than any of its companions” (Hist. of the Novel Previous to the Seventeenth Cent., p. 68).

25. See the summary given below. In its broad outlines Chariton's romance is not much more than a “Milesian” tale, incidentally analogous in some of its main features to the story of the Milesian Erippe in Parthenius (no. 8). In both cases the woman, as often in Ionian lore, is the center of interest; in both Milesian characters play a leading rôle; like Erippe, Kallirhoe is carried abroad by kidnappers, marries a foreigner and cherishes him; and in both stories the first husband follows his wife to her new abode. The comparative realism, moreover, in the biography of Kallirhoe is more suggestive of the typical woman of the Ionian tale than of the saccharine and puppet-like lovers of the Erotici Scriptores. Divest Kallirhoe of some of the idealization which Chariton has given her and she might easily take her place alongside Erippe and the matron of Ephesus. As it is, she is more human and natural than most of the other romance heroines and her history much simpler. It is a reasonable inference that many of the early romances were only elaborations of what we have been wont to call Milesian tales. Legends having to do with the personal experiences of women were very common in the Hellenistic world, and the popular interest in them was such that they were often, like the personal tales in Herodotus, incorporated into the serious history of nations. Such stories, whether they were Ionian, Scythian, Babylonian, or what not, furnished the original raw material on which the early romances were built. They might be purely mythical or quasi-historical, their range is well indicated by the selections in Parthenius. And just as Gallus was expected to fill in these bare outlines in epyllia, so the romance writers, who thought of themselves as essentially historians or biographers, could very easily make a ‘romance’ out of one of the common legends. For one aspect of the process of elaboration, see the explicit remarks of Lucian in Toxaris 42, Quom. Hist. Conscr. 19. Rohde's decree, backed by Schmid (Gr. Rom.³, p. 606), that a “romance” can never be made out of a novella shows how far dogmatism (or is it narrowness of definition?) can go; it is rendered meaningless by the case of Lucian's 'Ονος (cf. Class. Phil. XX, 40); and the Ninus romance, though its basis was not what Rohde would call a novella, nevertheless shows the same process of evolution from an organically similar nucleus. So far as its [ethos] is concerned, a story like that of Kallirhoe is essentially neutral; if the worldly and realistic side is emphasized or exaggerated, it may become droll or sensational; but if the story is treated by a sentimentalist like Chariton, it may just as well become edifying and ideal without many changes in the given incidents.

26. Concerning this incident D'Orville remarks: “hic fere unicus locus ubi deum ex machina advocat.” Chariton himself is conscious of it and apologizes, implicitly, by calling attention to it; see below p. 122.

27. Fuller outlines of the story may be consulted in Dunlop, Rohde, or Warren. A detailed comparative study of motivation in the Greek romance would be worth while, though it cannot be attempted here. As one typical instance, however, of the difference in this respect between Chariton and his successors, we may note the circumstances which bring Chaereas to Miletus: the pirates have been pursued and captured and are forced to tell where Kallirhoe has been taken. In Xenophon and Heliodorus, on the other hand, the main characters are often made to find each other by mere accident; one happens to be travelling for no good reason in the same distant region whither the other has been taken.

28. See further the remarks on irony below, pp. 123 ff.

29. The marriage at the end of the story of Polycharmus to the hitherto unmentioned sister of Chaereas may be regarded as a subplot in embryo.

30. Dunlop (Hist. of Fiction I, p. 59) observes that Chariton is the “first writer of romance who has introduced an interesting male character.” The reference is to Dionysius, and by “the first writer of romance” Dunlop means the only one among the Greeks, since he regards Chariton along with Xenophon as later than all the rest. Rohde (Gr. Rom., p. 527) notes a certain mildness, reasonableness, and humanity in all the characters, especially the good Dionysius and King Artaxerxes, and also a remarkable passivity and tendency to renunciation on the part of Chaereas, Dionysius, Mithridates and others, especially when disappointed in love. But this last is almost equally prominent in other romances. Concerning irony, no writer on Chariton so far as I can discover has even mentioned it, except J. Jakob, who devotes a short paragraph to what he calls epische Ironie (Studien zu Chariton dem Erotiker, Programm 1903, pp. 33-34). But Jakob seems determined to read into Chariton all the shortcomings that he supposes the latest of the romancers should have (he was not yet aware of the new dating), and the little he has to say of Chariton's irony gives no idea of its real value or meaning. Cf. infra, n. 41. So far as I am aware, no one has ever intimated that Chariton had a sense of humor, but see the passages quoted below. …

31. I, 13. Note the dignity and restraint of this speech, something quite unusual in the Greek romance.

32. In the later romances real irony is scarce. When it has not, by the influence of the rhetorical impulse, degenerated into empty paradox, it is likely to be over-subtle and hidden, as in Heliodorus, and more the irony of chance than of anything else—a type of irony that loses much of its force owing to the endless extravagance of Fortune's behavior in these arbitrary and highly artificial plots. If the reader of Heliodorus, like the spectator of an ancient tragedy, could realize what was bound to happen and could grasp the whole plot clearly beforehand, he would be able to appreciate the irony of chance or Providence such as it is, but instead he is almost as much in the dark as the characters themselves. In Achilles Tatius (V, 11) Satyrus, in telling how Klitophon has declined Melitta's offers, remarks, “He seems to think Leukippe will come to life again.” This is virtually what happens (V, 16), but the reader is not supposed to know this any more than is Satyrus. For a general discussion of irony and paradox in Heliodorus, Achilles, and Longus, see Wolff, op. cit., pp. 213-217.

33. There is a lacuna in the text of this passage (probably after ανòρειος in 134, 28) which amounts to a paragraph or even a page, but the situation is quite clear from the context; see Hilberg in Philol. XXXIII, 696.

34. This is true in the sense that Mithridates had spared the life of Chaereas as a means of ultimately gaining possession of Kallirhoe (see IV, 3-4); but Dionysius knows nothing of it.

35. After citing three good examples of Chariton's epische Ironie which belie his subsequent remarks, Jakob adds (op. cit., p. 34): “Freilich wird bei solchen Stellen unser Autor bei seinen Lesern nicht die Wirkung erwartet haben, wie ein Sophokles bei seinen Zuhörern: ihm ist die epische Ironie gewiss nur ein spezielles Mittel zur Hervorbringung des bei ihm so beliebten [parádoxon].” But Chariton has less mere paradox than any of the other romancers, and an easy refutation of Jakob's statement is afforded by the passages quoted above. In this criticism the prejudice against Chariton as a supposedly late writer assumes a virulent form.

36. He … shows a very decided interest in legal particulars throughout his romance, especially in connection with the disposal of Kallirhoe at Miletus.

37. Chariton writes more subjectively than any of the other romancers. His psychology, which we may assume to be essentially that of his readers, manifests itself in many ways: in naïve exaggeration, in prominence given to the popular belief in sea deities and to the actual epiphany of Aphrodite (cf. Rohde, Gr. Rom., p. 525), in adherence to popular saga as against history, in putting marriage above all the prizes of life, in great enthusiasm for the happy ending and for a childish theme generally, in the desire to be completely edifying, in moral indignation explicitly declared against bad men and outlaws (cf. supra, pp. 122 f.), in the sympathetic portrayal of conventional respectability (cf. Dionysius and Artaxerxes), in the large number of recurring stereotyped expressions, and in the tendency to regard wisdom as consisting in knowledge of maxims. Kallirhoe's beauty, greater than that of Ariadne or Leda, can scarcely be looked upon by the naked eye; even children suffered somewhat, and Mithridates fell in a faint (70, 30 ff.). The entire populace and public assemblies are deeply concerned about the lovers' affairs (I, 1; III, 3; IV, 1; VI, 1; VIII, 7). When Kallirhoe was found dead, the scene in Syracuse was like that at the sacking of a city; what Ovid remarks with a playful apology (Trist. I, 3, 25) Chariton says in full earnest. The first injunction laid upon Dionysius by Kallirhoe in her letter concerning the child is to have him married as soon as he grows up (Hercher, 145, 21). Book VIII is full of enthusiasm for the happy and edifying conclusion. In the first paragraph the author tells us just how he feels about it: “I think this last chapter will be the most pleasing to my readers, for it is a purging of the gloomy events that have gone before. No longer piracy, slavery, litigation, war, hardship, and captivity, but legitimate love and lawful nuptials.” At the end the happy dénouement is elaborately presented in the form of a stage-setting on board the returning ship, followed by a public assembly summoned for no other purpose than to hear the joyous news and to behold the lovers' felicity; everything is to be completely satisfactory to the reader's fancy, as at the end of the average mid-Victorian novel. Chariton has real enthusiasm even when it is expressed in conventional terms, as may be seen in 99, 10 ff.: “Who could describe adequately the aspect of that court room? What poet ever brought so wonderful a story upon the stage? You would think you were in a theatre filled with a thousand passions” (similarly, 91, 26). Again, the author confides to us by saying, “It would seem to me that then even the king would have liked to be Chaereas” (99, 20), or, “But I want to tell you first what happened in Syracuse” (50, 21), Dionysius, “being an educated man, knew that love is [philókainos]” etc. (84, 2). … These are not the symptoms of classicism decayed and become senile, but of a new and thriving bourgeois culture, one which is highly conventional as well as romantic, which is not unlike in kind to that of our mid-Victorian period, and which is distinctly democratic in spite of (and because of) the premium it puts upon persons of high degree. The theory suggested by the discovery of the Theban codex (7th-8th cent. papyrus) that Chaereas and Kallirhoe was a folk-book with a ‘fluid’ text, like that of Pseudo-Kallisthenes, has been abandoned since the discovery of other earlier papyri; see F. Zimmermann in Philologus, LXXVIII (1923), 330 ff. It is an open question to what extent the romances were addressed specifically to youth; Chariton himself may have been a youngster.

38. Rohde (Gr. Rom.², p. 388) very reasonably infers that Suidas got this notice from a book of Hermippus of Berytus. …

39. Xenophon's remarkable fondness for schematic arrangement is noticeable in the soliloquies as well as in the episodes: first Habrocomes soliloquizes, then Antheia, and then the author tells us what both of them thought (I, 4-5), and this scheme in its essentials is often repeated; see further, O. Schissel, Die Rahmenerzählung in den ephesischen Geschichten des Xenophon v. Ephesos, Innsbruck, 1909. The Rahmenerzählung is not an aboriginal feature in the romance (as Schissel supposes, who attributes the birth of the species to rhetorical experiment and combination) but is incidental to the shifting of emphasis from the internal features of the story to the external.

40. The recently discovered papyrus fragment of the romance of Kalligone (2nd cent.; cf. supra, note 14) is said to be from an édition de luxe.

41. For the reasons stated above I do not reckon Jamblichus, Heliodorus, or Achilles Tatius as “genuine”, and Xenophon is probably, though not certainly, a contemporary of Chariton.