[In the following essay, Reardon provides an overview of Chariton's novel, including discussions of its date, context, intended effect, structure, the significance of its historical setting, and its frequent use of recapitulation.]

I

The divinely beautiful Callirhoe is the daughter of Hermocrates, the leader of Syracuse who was victorious against the Athenian expedition of 415 b.c. Eros makes her fall in love at first sight with the handsome Chaereas after a festival Aphrodite; he returns her love. Despite the bitter rivalry of their families, and at the urgent instigation of the assembled people of Syracuse, the pair are married. Disappointed rival suitors for Callirhoe's hand mount a plot to make Chaereas think that his wife is unfaithful; he kicks her in the stomach, and she falls down apparently dead. Chaereas, suicidal with remorse, condemns himself, but is acquitted of guilt, and Callirhoe is entombed in a funeral vault. The wealth displayed at her sumptuous funeral attracts tomb-robbers; but on entering the vault they find Callirhoe alive after all and awaking from what was really a deep coma—lack of food, Chariton tells us, restored her suspended respiration. Their leader Theron decides to carry her off; their ship carries them to Miletus, and Callirhoe is sold as a slave to Leonas, the steward of a wealthy and recently widowed seigneur, Dionysius. Dionysius, who at first takes her for Aphrodite, immediately falls in love with her; but being an honourable and cultivated man he respects her person and treats her royally. At this point, Callirhoe discovers that she is two months pregnant—by Chaereas, of course, to whom, despite his treatment of her, she is still passionately devoted, but whom she thinks forever lost to her. She holds anguished debate with herself: should she kill her child or let it be born a slave? An adroit slave, Plangon, persuades her rather to marry Dionysius and pass the child off as his, in order to ensure it of a decent life.

In the meantime, Syracuse has learned of her disappearance and organised a search for her; Chaereas sets out to sea, and his ship meets that of Theron, who reveals Callirhoe's whereabouts and is crucified. Sailing to Miletus, Chaereas and his faithful friend Polycharmus land on Dionysius' estate. Dionysius' bailiff Phocas learns of their arrival and incites Persian troops to attack the Syracusan ship as hostile to the king of Persia (Ionia being represented as part of the Persian empire at this time). Most of the crew are killed, but Chaereas and Polycharmus are taken prisoner and set to work in a chain gang on the estate of Mithridates, the Persian satrap of Caria. Callirhoe now gives birth to a son, whom Dionysius, although he has now learned of her earlier marriage, unsuspectingly accepts as his own. She is led to believe that Chaereas is dead. Dionysius, though not himself certain that Chaereas was killed, holds a funeral ceremony for him to console Callirhoe. To it he invites Mithridates, who instantly falls in love with Callirhoe; back on his estate Mithridates discovers Chaereas' identity just in time to save him from crucifixion, and in the hope of manipulating the situation to his own advantage persuades him to write a letter to Callirhoe to tell her he is alive. The letter is intercepted and given to Dionysius; wilfully blind, he decides it is a trick devised by Mithridates, and complains of Mithridates' behaviour to a neighbouring satrap, Pharnaces, an enemy of Mithridates (and yet another of Callirhoe's admirers). Pharnaces relays the charge to the King of Persia, Artaxerxes, who summons Mithridates and Dionysius to Babylon for a formal trial; Callirhoe, of whom the King has already heard, is also summoned; and Mithridates takes Chaereas with him as a surprise weapon.

The trial has all Babylon agog at Callirhoe's beauty, and taking sides. In a dramatic debate, conducted according to proper rhetorical procedure, Dionysius accuses Mithridates of forging the letter and attempting to seduce another man's wife. Mithridates retorts that Dionysius' marriage is not valid, and sensationally produces Chaereas in court to prove it. But the lovers are restrained from reuniting; Mithridates is acquitted and returns home, and the question at issue now becomes the rival claims to Callirhoe of Dionysius and Chaereas. The King adjourns the trial and, pending decision, gives Callirhoe into the neutral charge of his Queen, Statira, who receives her kindly, though she is suspicious of her husband's sudden interest in visiting the women's quarters. Babylon is in a ferment. By now, however, the King has himself fallen violently in love with Callirhoe, and postpones decision by proclaiming a month-long sacrifice. He too, like Dionysius, will not force himself on her, but Callirhoe rejects persistent overtures made on his behalf by his eunuch Artaxates, who as a barbarian cannot comprehend her attitude, and threatens her with torture for herself and Chaereas.

This desperate situation is resolved by the news that the Persian province of Egypt has rebelled. The King marches out against the rebels; Dionysius goes with him, as following Persian custom do Statira and his entourage; and the King contrives to take Callirhoe as well. Chaereas, learning of Callirhoe's departure, is in despair. Polycharmus, though he has already prevented his suicide several times, at this hopeless juncture of events encourages him in his plan of killing himself, but persuades him to do so by joining the rebels and fighting against the King. Chaereas wins the Egyptian king's confidence, and with a hand-picked force of Greeks serving as mercenaries successfully (though by deceit) storms Tyre. This success leads to his being appointed commander of the Egyptian navy. In that capacity he defeats the Persian fleet and captures the small island of Aradus, where the Persian King has left his possessions and non-military entourage. On land, however, the Egyptians are defeated, and the revolt is suppressed. Dionysius distinguishes himself in the fighting, and in return the King awards Callirhoe to him (though she is on Aradus with the Queen and other Persian women).

At this point, at the beginning of the last book, Chariton himself enters the story. After summarizing events so far, he tells us that Tyche—Fortune—had intended Chaereas not to learn that Callirhoe was herself among the women on Aradus, and in his ignorance to leave her there, an outcome “as cruel as it was paradoxical”; but Aphrodite, thinking that Chaereas has paid dearly enough for his original misplaced jealousy, overrules Tyche and decides to reunite the lovers. “I think that readers will find this last episode most enjoyable,” we are told; “it will clear away the grim events of the early ones … now there will be rightful love and lawful marriage” (8.1.4). So in the nick of time, and as it were by the skin of their teeth, Chaereas and Callirhoe do at last find each other again. Chariton wraps up the story conscientiously. Chaereas, himself undefeated, disengages himself from the fighting, and generously sends Statira back to Artaxerxes; Callirhoe—surreptitiously, because she knows Chaereas' jealous nature—gives her a letter for Dionysius in which, in saying goodbye, she entrusts her son to him, bidding him send the boy to Syracuse when he grows up. Dionysius, appointed by the King governor of Ionia, goes sadly back to Miletus. The lovers return in triumph to Syracuse, with all the Persian treasure; Chaereas settles his crews generously, and gives his own sister in marriage to Polycharmus. While Chaereas recounts his and Callirhoe's adventures to the assembled citizens, Callirhoe goes to the temple of Aphrodite to thank the goddess for restoring Chaereas to her and express the wish, no doubt prophetic, that they will live happily ever after. “That,” says Chariton finally, “is my story about Callirhoe.”¹

II

Assessment of a literary work must take account of its cultural context, but the literary-historical problems raised by the story outlined here are not easy to resolve. This is because there is little evidence outside the work itself to guide us: at the same time, in examining the story we are conditioned by the assumptions we bring to it regarding its nature, and those assumptions may themselves be open to question. In particular, the date of the work cannot be established with confidence, within a period of some hundred years or more—plausible dates range from the late first century b.c. to the early second century a.d. In consequence we have only a rather loose idea of its position within the genre; we can be reasonably sure that it is the first fully extant specimen of its kind, but are on less sure ground in assessing its degree of sophistication, the extent of its author's ambitions, and the nature of the audience for which it was written. For a long time in the modern world, from the first publication of Callirhoe in 1750, the simplicity of its language, the exiguity of its textual tradition, and its reception in antiquity contributed to its neglect and unflattering reputation; indeed, from 1876, all of the novels long suffered from the contempt meted out to them in the massive and erudite standard work of Erwin Rohde, Der griechische Roman, although it was made out of date by subsequent papyrological discoveries that radically changed our knowledge of the history of the genre. For Callirhoe, the first modern study to treat it with sympathy as a literary-historical phenomenon and as a work of literature was that of Perry in 1930, but it remained relatively isolated for several decades. Even in 1976 Northrop Frye, in The Secular Scripture, a comprehensive analysis of romance as a genre, could disregard totally the first prose romance in European history, though he often refers to Longus and Heliodorus. With interest growing, however, in Greek pagan culture of the imperial period, it has risen markedly in academic esteem, and is now more generally thought to merit serious scholarly and critical attention.

All that is firmly known of Chariton himself is what he tells us in the opening sentence of his story: …

I, Chariton of Aphrodisias, secretary of the lawyer Athenagoras, shall tell you a love story that took place in Syracuse.

Even his name (“man of graces”) was once thought to be a pseudonym, suitable for the author of a love-story; but inscriptions found at Aphrodisias in Asia Minor attest the existence in the area of both Chariton and Athenagoras as proper names.² Besides this, there is mention of a writer called Chariton in a “literary letter” appearing in a collection written by Philostratus, early in the third century a.d.: …

To Chariton. You think Greece will remember your writings when you are dead. But if people are nothing when they are alive, what can they possibly be when they are not alive?³

The letter itself strongly suggests that “Chariton” is not alive at the time of writing, and certainly other letters in the collection are addressed to men already dead. While it cannot be shown that this Chariton is the novelist the identification is too good not to be true; we know of no other author of that name. On this highly likely assumption, we know at least that Chariton lived not later than the later second century, and that his novel earned the contempt of the highly sophisticated author of a Life of Apollonius of Tyana and of Lives of the Sophists (an account of many of the “concert orators” of the period).

Both of these pieces of information are consistent with what we know of the textual tradition of Callirhoe, which is the only other concrete evidence we have for its author's date and place in the literary scene of the period. That evidence consists of the only extant complete manuscript, one of four novels in a late 13th century volume containing religious and historical texts as well, known as Conventi Soppressi 627, and now in the Laurentian Library in Florence (whence it is usually designated as F—the Budé edition calls it L); together with several brief papyrus fragments and a late parchment codex of a larger fragment, these fragments covering among them some 6٪ of the text.⁴ The manuscript is unreliable; the fact that the tradition is so scanty suggests that the novel was not held in high esteem by the educated and was lucky to survive antiquity⁵—though, as will be seen, in all probability educated people did read it, much as educated people may read thrillers today without rating them highly. The papyrus fragments number four, two being from the same papyrus, and were found at remote country sites in Egypt; this suggests that the story was at least known to a fairly widely distributed readership.⁶ They can be dated on palaeographical grounds to around A.D. 200, give or take perhaps a quarter of a century; this, given that it would no doubt take quite a long time for the novel to reach rural Egypt, suggests a date of composition certainly not later than the middle of the second century, probably earlier, and perhaps much earlier. The parchment codex acquired in Egyptian Thebes by U. Wilcken and known as Thebanus (Wilckenus in the Budé), was written in the 6th or 7th century.⁷ It offers a “rogue” text, clearly less good than that of F and the papyri.⁸ The scribe has clearly made alterations and additions of his own, which suggests that the story had passed into the public domain, like the Alexander Romance, and was considered fair game for rewriting in the process of transmission; it is interesting that at one point the scribe invents an obviously sentimental passage.⁹ All of this suggests that Callirhoe was popular in antiquity as a tear-jerking story; and it all fits Philostratus' remark.

One further line of inquiry may confirm this. The novel has so far generally gone under the title Chaereas and Callirhoe, which is what it is called in F at the beginning of each book. This Jack and Jill kind of title is one of the standard forms for the genre (Daphnis and Chloe, Leucippe and Clitophon). Chariton himself, however, says in his last sentence “this is my story about Callirhoe …, not “about Chaereas and Callirhoe”. It is certainly true that Callirhoe is more prominent in it than Chaereas, and other novels were sometimes known by the name of the heroine alone.¹⁰ Further evidence turned up in a quite recently published second-century papyrus which contains the text of the end of Book 2, followed immediately by the colophon “The story of Chariton of Aphrodisias about Callirhoe, Book 2.¹¹ While neither of these items is necessarily decisive in itself, they do tend to support each other.

A final piece of information, furthermore, points in the same direction. The Roman satiric poet Persius refers to some form of literary production as Callirhoe:

his mane edictum, post prandia Callirhoen do.

To these people I offer in the morning the programme of public entertainment, and in the afternoon Callirhoe.¹²

“These people” are the object of Persius' satire, contemptible people incapable of appreciating his own elegant verse; all they are fit for is, as it were, pop TV and Barbara Cartland. Persius lived from 34 to 62, so his poem was certainly published in Nero's reign (it has been dated in 59). If he is indeed referring to Chariton's novel, the reference seems to clinch a number of matters: the relatively early date, the reputation of the novels among highbrows, and the short form of the title. It seems hard to come to any other conclusion.

Some questions remain, however. First, we do not know for sure that Persius' Callirhoe was Chariton's novel; although it seems almost self-evident, and although we do not know of anything else it could have been, it may have been some kind of literary work by someone else. There may, for instance, have been a mime or other dramatic work called Callirhoe; there were versions in mime of other novels, Ninus and Metiochus and Parthenope.¹³ If that is so, Persius is recommending to lowbrows that they read the entertainment guide in the morning and then in the afternoon go to see the show announced in it: “have a look at TV Guide and watch Dallas.” In that case, of course, we cannot know whether Chariton's novel antedates or postdates the stage spectacle; but the analogy of Ninus would suggest that the novel came first, and was successful enough to inspire a staged version, which would no doubt have appeared soon afterwards (as happens nowadays when “the film of the book” is made). Second, although all educated Romans of the period knew Greek, it is not clear that “these people” would be of that kind (elsewhere in the poem Persius seems to suggest that they were). Thirdly, it has been held that a mid-1st century date for Callirhoe does not fit certain other kinds of evidence. Chariton's language has been thought to place him a generation later, or even two generations, while other linguistic researches have put him as much as a hundred years earlier than the reign of Nero; and the contemporary historical circumstances that appear to lie behind his story, which in general reflect the Roman Empire, have seemed to some scholars more suited to the early second century a.d. than the middle of the first. But such arguments are notoriously unreliable, relying as they do on evidence that is incomplete, susceptible of various interpretation, or simply too lacking in firm concrete detail to be convincing. They are discussed further below, in connection with other aspects of the novel; for immediate purposes we may say, summarily, that in the view of the present writer the balance of probability is that Chariton's story was called simply Callirhoe, was written in or before the earliest years of Nero's reign (54-68), and was thought of by the literary establishment as sentimental and cheap. That does not preclude literary ambition on the part of its author, nor does it preclude skill.

III

The question of literary ambition is in fact of much importance in the study of Chariton. In the early Roman Empire there occurred a cultural movement that goes by the name of “Atticism”. Atticism is a fairly complex phenomenon. In its original manifestation it was in one aspect a reaction against “Asianism”, which marked a florid style of oratory that developed in the Greek world in the period after Demosthenes, and inevitably affected Roman oratory as well, since its practitioners were trained in the Greek tradition. From the time of Cicero a return to sober Attic style and imitation of classical (that is, fourth-century) models were advocated by many teachers of rhetoric. Atticism and Asianism, however, were by no means simple opposites. In the Greek world, increasingly throughout the first and second centuries a.d., the Atticist movement took the form of the imitation not so much of Attic sobriety as of Attic vocabulary. With the spread of Greek civilization after Alexander, the Greek language had evolved in the direction of syntactical and morphological simplicity and of lexical change, as was inevitable with a language learned in non-Greek countries as a second language. This resulted in the development of a “common language” … known as the Koine, the simplified international Greek notably of the New Testament.¹⁴ For the nature of the differences, one could draw a partial analogy with those between English English (classical, Attic Greek) and American English (Koine). With the definitive establishment of the Roman Empire, and especially after the troubled Julio-Claudian period, there came to the Greek world a degree of prosperity that led to a period of renewed self-confidence and cultural self-consciousness—sometimes known as the Greek Renaissance—and in particular to an attempt on the part of many educated Greeks to reestablish the Greek of the classical period in place of “debased” Koine; this was in fact the origin of the distinction in modern Greek between formal katharevousa and informal demotike. The Atticizing movement in this form, beginning in the first century a.d. and at its height in the second, affected the language and particularly the vocabulary of writers who wished to be respected. Linguistic pundits, especially in the second century, drew up lists of words and usages to be replaced by their Attic counterparts. One way of approaching the assessment of a writer's place in the literary scene is to chart his vocabulary in terms of his use of Atticizing language. Lucian, for instance, in the third quarter of the second century, who as a non-Greek (he was Syrian) had particular reason to be careful about his Greek, Atticized extensively; at the same time, he castigates those who carried the habit to extremes and resuscitated words that had always been exotic even in classical Greek (“eftsoons”, “verily”). By this criterion Chariton appears less ambitious than many in that in the main his language is a form of fairly high-level Koine. Since, however, in other respects he clearly does have literary ambitions—as will be seen—one should probably draw one or both of two conclusions: (a) he was writing at a time when the Atticizing movement had not yet attained its peak, or (b) he did not feel any strong need to write a work of this kind in fashionable literary language. Atticism of the kind here described is one of the marked features of the Second Sophistic, the renaissance of rhetoric as an art form which constitutes the context of Philostratus' Lives of the Sophists. Philostratus, who coined the term “Second Sophistic” to distinguish the phenomenon from the classical sophistic art of Gorgias and his contemporaries, although he maintains that the movement is fundamentally an extension of that first sophistic, in fact indicates a distinct renewal of it in the last two or three decades of the first century a.d.¹⁵ From this point of view, therefore, it seems unlikely that Chariton wrote later than, say, the reign of Nero—which fits the other evidence. It is relevant to add here that Petronius' Satyrica (commonly known as the Satyricon, but the nominative plural form is more likely to be correct), a work certainly of the Neronian period and in all probability written about a.d. 65, clearly parodies the Greek sentimental novel of love and adventure. There is thus nothing intrinsically unlikely in a date in the mid-first century a.d. or earlier for Chariton's novel.¹⁶

IV

Whatever its precise date, Callirhoe is nothing less than the first fully extant European novel, or romance if the less realistic term is preferred.¹⁷ Not only that, but it seems to have marked an important stage, possibly a crucial stage, in the early history of the genre, the stage at which prose fiction itself comes of age,¹⁸ although still having a long way to go even in antiquity, where it is followed by more self-consciously sophisticated specimens. Its signal success is probably what is marked by the subsequent popularity of the story as witnessed by the dismissive remark of Philostratus in the third century—for evidently Chariton was a familiar name in the early third century!—the relatively numerous and scattered fragments, and the additional fact that at some point in the second century he is manifestly (and clumsily) imitated by Xenophon of Ephesus in his novel the Ephesiaca. This distinctive place in the early history of the genre holds good, to the best of our knowledge, even if we accept a later date for the composition of Callirhoe.

To return to the linguistic evidence mentioned above, the first point to make is that the Greek language of the early Empire has not been studied systematically enough for any reliable map or chart to be constructed on which a given author can be situated accurately with confidence. There is a very considerable body of Greek literature extant from the first two or three centuries, and although there exist indices and linguistic studies of a number of individual authors, there is not enough by way of modern comprehensive analytical study. The principal tool available is still the massive study by W. Schmid, Der Atticismus.¹⁹ But it was never perfect. Such a project, to be carried out thoroughly, involves an amount of work perhaps beyond the powers of any single scholar, especially without complete indices and mechanical aids such as computers can now provide. Above all, a hundred years ago much less was known than is now known, thanks to the very extensive papyrological discoveries since Schmid's day, about the development of the Greek language in the Hellenistic and (especially) Roman periods, discoveries that have enabled us to set Koine, and hence other forms of language, in perspective. Furthermore, Schmid's study was based on some simplistic and untenable assumptions about the linguistic phenomena of the period: for him, Asianism and Atticism were opposed phenomena, and Atticism was fundamentally an unnatural attempt simply to turn back the clock. Finally, and this is extremely important, the texts he had to work with had themselves been established often on Atticizing assumptions; as an illustration of this attitude, directly pertinent to the present case, earlier in the century Cobet had gone through the text of Callirhoe not so much correcting the errors of the Byzantine manuscript as “correcting” Chariton's Greek to make it conform to classical usage—about which, be it said, Cobet assuredly knew much more than Chariton—and on every page snorting with disgust at Chariton's “ignorance”.²⁰

This reservation is important. An imperfect knowledge of the total picture can crucially affect details of that picture. That said, however, Chariton's language has been studied, and recently; but there is no agreement on the matter. In 1973 Papanikolaou examined several aspects of Chariton's language in an attempt to situate it in relation to Koine and Atticizing usage.²¹ The study is not a complete account of the matter, and is by no means free from errors, but does accumulate evidence that shows extensive Koine usage as opposed to Attic. Papanikolaou's conclusion is categorical: “Chariton's language shows no trace of Atticism, although he was a very well-read man”;²² on the strength of that, he not only declares Callirhoe the first of the extant novels but sets Chariton firmly in the pre-Atticizing period, “when Atticizing tendencies first began to have a gradual influence”; that period, he maintains, coincides with the beginning of the Atticizing reform, in the middle or second half of the first century b.c.²³ Papanikolaou establishes a terminus ante quem from a reference at 6.4.2 to a Chinese bow and arrows; China first became known to the Greco-Roman world in the early first century b.c., and is referred to several times by Augustan poets.

While the general thrust of Papanikolaou's argument is sound, some substantial reservations are necessary. First, of method: not enough attention is paid to the Atticisms that can be shown to exist and have recently received more detailed study. Hernández Lara analyses some 500 words, from Chariton's vocabulary of 3000, that are listed as Atticist either in Atticist lexica or in Der Atticismus.²⁴ Many of these are excluded on the grounds that they also occur in the New Testament, Koine authors, or non-literary papyri; but nearly 300—10٪ of Chariton's vocabulary—are apparently genuine Atticisms. In some 30 cases Chariton uses doublets of the Atticist term—that is, he uses both the Atticist and the Koine terms for the same thing in different places. To these researches it may be added that in some cases the way in which the term is used may be significant. Chariton normally uses the Koine term, but does know the Attic form and will use it, exceptionally, when he has specific reason to do so. It may, however, be just as significant, for a different reason, that often he appears to use the two interchangeably; either way, he seems not to be particularly concerned to establish himself as an Atticist.

In a related study, Ruiz Montero analyses the degree of coincidence between Chariton and a number of possible contemporaries, mostly Atticizing writers (Diodorus Siculus, Philo, Josephus, Dio Chrysostom, Plutarch), as well as Koine texts (the New Testament, papyri), in the light of Atticist lexica and Der Atticismus.²⁵ It would be disproportionate here to go into the detail of this complex examination, but some significant figures may be given. First, of Chariton's total vocabulary of 3000 words, over two-thirds occur in the New Testament and papyri—although most of these also occur in the more literary texts. The study concentrates on some 200 less common terms, of which two-thirds are drawn from the Atticizing or otherwise literary stock (Attic prose, comedy, poetic terms, Ionisms). Ruiz-Montero's conclusions are markedly different from Papanikolaou's: she attributes to Chariton “a knowledge of Atticist precepts which the author follows when he wants … Atticisms are indeed present in Chariton, although in moderate quantity.” Chariton, she maintains, employs “a mixed language in which various levels of language are combined” (p. 489), While this study is not exhaustive, and its method may need modification, it produces workable results, which are certainly much nearer the mark than Papanikolaou's exaggerated conclusions.

Ruiz-Montero's formulation corresponds well to the impression Chariton makes on the reader, of a writer of generally unpretentious but literate enough prose, by no means devoid on occasion of a degree of modest elevation. It fits also with the picture of a man distinctly living in his own times, rather than a bookworm, a pedant, or a scholar. Engaged as he was in the legal profession, he was necessarily involved in the society of his day—he shows his legal knowledge on a number of occasions, particularly in the episode of the “sale” of Callirhoe.²⁶ He was also well aware of the tradition of Greek paideia that was certainly a feature of the world he lived in, and that forms one of the most prominent motifs in his story. Chariton was fairly well-educated: he certainly had a decent secondary education, perhaps more. To call him “a very well-read man”, however—“ein sehr belesener Mann”—is an overstatement. He quotes or alludes to the classics of Greek literature: Homer very often (he clearly knew him well), historical writers quite often (especially Xenophon of Athens), orators and drama occasionally.²⁷ He similarly has a general knowledge of some of the more familiar events in Greek history, notably the Athenian defeat in Sicily (which recurs with tedious frequency in the text) and some principal features of fourth-century history (to be discussed in another context below). But very little of this goes beyond standard texts, a “reading list” of predictable “prescribed books”. Homer was the basis of all Greek education, as is demonstrated for the Hellenistic period and later by the considerable number of papyri of the Iliad and Odyssey, obviously school texts. Chariton's whole novel is set in the fourth century as a “historical novel”, and both his opening and closing sentences recall formulations from the beginning and other parts of the histories of Herodotus and Thucydides—which again were familiar works in antiquity; while Xenophon was a favourite author of the early Empire.²⁸ Menander was another favourite—Plutarch preferred him to Aristophanes; the great speeches of Demosthenes (such as De Corona) and other orators were standard models for speakers. Chariton had in fact a standard “classical education”, remarkably similar to that of today. But his quotations and literary references are not really more “well-read” than standard quotations from Shakespeare (“The quality of mercy is not strained”), or Winston Churchill (“Never in the field of human conflict …”), or Abraham Lincoln (“government of the people, for the people, and by the people”). This is by no means to denigrate him; he is culturally fairly well equipped. But he is not erudite; his knowledge of Greek literature and cultural tradition bears no comparison with that of Callimachus in the Hellenistic period, or nearer his own time Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Dio Chrysostom or Plutarch—or his successors as novelists, Longus, Achilles Tatius and Heliodorus.

Nor is his language notably that of an intellectual. Nowhere in the narrative passages does one find anything like the elaborate prose of Heliodorus, or the tortuous language of Achilles Tatius' ecphrases; throughout, he employs a straightforward, uncomplicated manner and simple Greek, although on a higher level than the New Testament, that can fairly be called literary Koine. He is rather given to clichés of vocabulary and stereotyped diction; his language often gives the impression of reflecting contemporary speech, the Umgangssprache, especially in the more rapid exchanges of dialogue; and he does not often employ metaphor, certainly not colourful metaphor.²⁹ It is in fact rather ordinary language. But this is not due to any lack of schooling; rhetorical schools flourished throughout the Hellenistic and imperial periods, and in the more emotional direct speech, such as Callirhoe's monologues, Chariton uses a whole battery of rhetorical figures—antithesis, anaphora, amplification, chiasmus, homoioteleuton, and many others.³⁰ He is careful about his prose rhythms, and he avoids hiatus;³¹ and as we have seen, he does show signs, though they are not extensive, of being aware of the linguistic and stylistic currents of his time. Given this picture of careful and moderately ambitious writing, he should be dated a good deal later than Papanikolaou's date of the middle or end of the first century b.c. How much later it is hard to say; but it seems likely that if he had been writing at the end of the first century a.d., or a fortiori in the reign of Trajan or Hadrian, where he has been placed on a variety of criteria,³² he would have Atticized more than he does. The reference in Persius—more concrete than a rather fluid linguistic or historically-based dating—would seem to place him a generation or two earlier; and his language fits there quite well.

V

To turn to the setting and atmosphere of Callirhoe: it purports, as has been seen, to be a historical novel, in the sense that some of its characters and its background are supposedly drawn from Greek history. But this is superficial; not only are there anachronisms, but more importantly, the unconscious assumptions underlying the story are consistently those of the early Roman Empire. Some of the anachronisms are major and blatant. Hermocrates is represented as being alive and pre-eminent in Syracuse when Artaxerxes (Artaxerxes II Mnemon) is on the Persian throne; in fact Hermocrates died in exile in 407—the novel does not report his death—but Artaxerxes ruled from 404 to 358. Some of the “history”, furthermore, appears to reflect the reign of Artaxerxes III; and Miletus did not come under Persian domination, in the fourth century, until 386. Other departures from historical accuracy are less flagrant, and are integrated into the story plausibly enough. Hermocrates did have a daughter, who was the first wife of Dionysius I, the first tyrant of Syracuse and originally a supporter of Hermocrates; we do not know her name, but we are told by Plutarch that she committed suicide after being brutally raped by rebels.³³ At the end of Chariton's story, Callirhoe leaves her baby (by Chaereas, but thought by Dionysius to be his own) with his putative father in Miletus, and it is predicted that he will one day come to Syracuse to come into Hermocrates' heritage. Now, Syracuse was in fact later ruled by the son of a Dionysius—Dionysius II, the son of Dionysius I. The name of Dionysius is admittedly common enough, but it is clear that this Syracusan background is the origin of Chariton's name for his character. Chariton's names for his actors are usually felicitous and generally authentic.³⁴ Besides Artaxerxes himself, Artaxerxes' wife Statira figures in the novel under her own name, though assuredly with no more verisimilitude than her husband or Hermocrates. The name Chaereas resembles Chabrias, the name of a celebrated historical Athenian general who fought as a mercenary for the Egyptian king Tachos during an Egyptian revolt against Persia. The revolt represented in the novel thus again reflects a historical event; and again it constitutes an anachronism, because it took place in 360, more than forty years after the opening events of the novel.³⁵ Other names in the story—Rhodogune, Mithridates, Pharnaces, Artaxates, Megabyzus—are equally suggestive and authentic, being actually borne by historical people at various times, although they do not fit Chariton's characters accurately. Finally, Chaereas' capture of Tyre strongly resembles the exploit of Alexander in 332 (except that Chaereas achieves it by deceit), and thus is yet another anachronism. In fact the episode resembles even more closely a later siege of Tyre, in 312;³⁶ but Chariton is less concerned with historical accuracy than with recalling a tradition about Alexander, in which procedure he is perfectly capable of conflating events. And there are anachronisms of another kind, in which the text makes reference to conditions that did not obtain until imperial times. Thus, we find civic assemblies held in a theatre (3.17.3); chaingangs (4.2.5); women participating in the assembly (8.7.1) and present at banquets (4.6.2—so that the host can see Callirhoe!).³⁷

In short, Chariton's so-called “historical” background amounts rather to a general evocation of fourth-century history than to accurate exploitation of a given historical situation. None of the anachronisms has any serious incidence on the credibility (or incredibility) of the story; it is doubtful, in fact, whether it is justifiable to call it a historical novel at all.³⁸ It is clear, however, that the author is referring, in these historical reminiscences, to Greek historical tradition, as did the Alexander Romance, and as, apparently, does the fragmentary and probably roughly contemporary, novel Metiochus and Parthenope (which could be by Chariton). Certainly, the sarcastic criticism once levelled at him for his “ignorance” of history is totally misplaced. He never aimed at historical accuracy, but only at a general colouring of Greek history, to titillate the interest of readers, who could be expected to recognize and respond to a familiar tradition, in history as in literature. The story itself is of course not in the slightest degree historical. Nor is Chariton concerned, as a modern historical novelist would be, to represent the society and mentality of his story's dramatic date. The geographical, social and moral setting is very largely conventional, but where it has some specific reference, that reference is to the conditions and mores of the early Roman Empire: broadly speaking, in the first century a.d., although some would say the early second.³⁹

For the geographical setting, Chariton clearly knows Caria, and in particular Miletus and the region around it. The town did have several harbours, as Dionysius says at 4.1.5; Chariton actually names one of them, Dokimos (3.2.11), the name being possibly a reflection of an episode in Hellenistic history.⁴⁰ It is entirely possible that in the early Empire it would have had a Temple of Concord (Homonoia); although we have no knowledge of it, other such temples are known at this period, and the general theme of homonoia—civic harmony—is common in the period, particularly from the later first century (it is the theme of speeches by Dio Chrysostom and Aelius Aristides, for instance). There did exist, at the right distance from Miletus, an anchorage similar to the one used by the pirate Theron when he brings Callirhoe to Caria (he does not use the harbour, presumably in order not to be conspicuous—he himself tells Dionysius' steward it was in order to avoid the tax-collectors—1.11.8, 1.13.4). Likewise, there was a local cult of Aphrodite, with a temple similar to that in which Dionysius first sees Callirhoe. Aphrodisias was, as its name implies, a centre of Aphrodite-worship, and had close ties with Miletus; its floruit is precisely the early centuries of the Roman Empire, so that the prominence of Aphrodite in the plot is accurate for the period. At the same time, this is after all a love-story, and Aphrodite is very much in place in it. Chariton may simply be cashing in on his local deity, rather than expressing any profound religious enthusiasm. Aphrodite's intervention in the action, whether in her own person or through her son Eros, is something less than systematic, and the religious impulse in the story is active only at a few points, for instance when finally Aphrodite decides that the lovers have been tormented enough and countermands Tyche's plans for further tribulations (8.1.1-3; this is a convenient way for the author to bring his story to an end).⁴¹Tyche—Chance—is in fact represented as a deity of major importance in human affairs, although in practice Chariton usually (not always) manages to motivate the action naturally and to eliminate unlikely coincidence from it. This concept of tyche, Hellenistic in origin, was certainly still a feature of popular belief in the pre-Christian imperial Greek world.

The structure of the society represented in Callirhoe is realistic enough, for the early imperial period. This is notably the case of the figure of the prosperous land-owner and public benefactor Dionysius, whose activities and estate correspond to those known from other sources. Other figures and elements in the story also fit perfectly well in the period: freedmen and slaves running the great man's estate, other estates worked by slaves in chain-gangs, lawyers, bankers, tax-collectors, pirates—who continued to operate despite Pompey's campaign against them in the last century of the Republic, and the best efforts of the Roman navy in the Empire. One detail may be thought seriously out of keeping: the option price paid by Dionysius's steward Leonas for the “slave” Callirhoe (1.14.5). A talent of silver would be a quite inordinate price at the dramatic date, since such a sum would have bought twenty or thirty slaves in the fourth century; even in Chariton's own time it would still be far too much.⁴² But like much else in the story, this price is intended above all to produce an effect. Leonas, having just seen the stunning beauty of Callirhoe, is willing to risk a great deal of his master's money so as to secure her for him against the competition he is sure she would inspire; and Dionysius can be represented as rich enough, and magnanimous enough, to accept the loss of such a sum with equanimity, even before he has seen Callirhoe.

To turn to less tangible aspects of Callirhoe's world, the dominant moral values are especially conventional. Dionysius, in effect a second hero in the story, is shown as humane, civilized, cultured, idealist, in fact a model ruler; and for all that these are timeless virtues, they do find an echo in the Empire, as in Pliny's Panegyric in praise of Trajan and Dio Chrysostom's speeches On Kingship. Dionysius is also the embodiment of specifically Greek paideia; throughout the story stress is laid on the comprehensive superiority of Greeks to “barbarians”, which here means Persians—the theme is traditional from classical times; along with an interest in, but only limited knowledge of, exotic Persian customs, Chariton expresses the standard Greek repugnance towards despotic rule.⁴³ The heroine Callirhoe herself is obviously an idealized portrait, but again this fits with contemporary official emphasis (as in Augustus' legislation) on chastity, fidelity, stable marriage and family values—which is not of course to say that Chariton is drawing a realistic picture of early imperial society. Callirhoe's apparently facile abandonment of her son, at the end of the story, does strike a discordant note. Readers have been worried by this apparent cold-heartedness on her part—and, it must be said, on the part of Chaereas too, since he seems singularly undisturbed at losing a son he has never seen; it is the more puzzling in that Chariton could easily have had Callirhoe bring the child back to Syracuse, and does not attribute to Callirhoe any reason for her action (he might, for instance, have adduced pangs of guilt on her part for the way she has treated Dionysius). But as we have seen, this is one element in the vaguely historical background; it also has the merit of leaving Dionysius, for whom Chariton clearly has much affection, with at least a consolation prize, to add to the honours piled on him by the King. One can only conclude that in this respect Chariton's sentiment, or rather sentimentality, did not coincide with ours. He was prepared to make the trade-off for the benefit of his plot.⁴⁴ As for Chaereas, for most of the story he is too tear-stricken and ineffectual to command our admiration—indeed, one wonders what Callirhoe saw in him—but does finally emerge as a natural leader of men, brave, successful, generous to friend and foe, and beloved by his men; these are traditional terms of Greek historiography, as found in Xenophon's Cyropaedia, and again they find contemporary echo in (notably) Plutarch's idealizing pictures of earlier Greek leaders. This is another structural trade-off: if one wants to have two heroes but only one heroine, something has to give. But whatever the needs of Chariton's plot, it remains true that the combined qualities of the trio of principals are a reflection of his own age as much as they are traditional.

VI

Some aspects of Callirhoe have been indicated in passing, in discussing its date and context; they may here be gathered up in an overall view.

The story is clearly melodramatic and sentimental, with abundant scope for pathetic representation of the three principal characters: Callirhoe, Chaereas and Dionysius indulge at every opportunity in soliloquies lamenting their sad lot, as tyche lands each of them in one desperate situation after another. It is in short an early popular romance. Early, but not primitive; if popular, not therefore cheap; and if relatively unsophisticated, in comparison with its successors, certainly not naive and not clumsy. Callirhoe is consciously conceived to produce by sensational means a strong emotional effect, and within its conventions is carefully and skilfully executed. Those conventions comprehend several spheres: moral values, literary structure, and writing. In each of these Chariton operates by clearly visible formulae.

In respect of moral values, human behaviour and the assumptions underlying it, what matters above all is love. Love makes the world go round; beauty begets love, love leads to marriage, and marriage brings happiness. This life-process is traditionally symbolized and engineered by Eros, but Chariton gives the ultimate credit to Eros' mother Aphrodite, as is only proper for a writer from Aphrodite's city; it is Eros, however, who is the principal operator. Eros is notoriously capricious, and his interventions lead to unpredictable adventures and mortal perils. He is abetted by tyche, Fortuna, herself virtually a deity in Hellenistic times, and the embodiment of another cliché: life is uncertain. But virtue will ultimately triumph; keep faith, and the gods will bring you through to happiness. In literary structure, this world-view takes the shape of other clichés. A handsome couple meet by chance and at once fall in love; they are separated and wander all over the world, meeting mounting dangers at every turn, but remaining true to each other until the gods bring them to final reunion. The mise-en-scène is just as formulaic. Characters are recognizable New Comedy types: hapless heroine, vapid hero, villain (Theron), resourceful slave (Plangon), rival (here a series of rivals, culminating in the King of Persia himself), noble seigneur (who is himself the principal rival and alternative hero, which causes problems for Chariton).⁴⁵ In the actual writing it is paradox and antithesis, apostrophe and monologue, hyperbole and rhetorical question; and linguistic figures, homoioteleuton, isoteleuton, hyperbaton; that is to say, rhetorical formulae.

Conventions and rhetorical figures are workman's tools. Like tools, they can be used well or badly. Chariton has certainly learned his lessons, and is clearly familiar with the whole range of literary equipment and devices by now accumulated in the Greek tradition. The conventions themselves, however, even if used well, can become tedious to modern readers, generally no longer used to so formal a vocabulary, such codes and devices, in literature (although often they will be perfectly happy to accept similar forms of stylized expression in opera). Chariton shares with contemporary Latin writers (notably Lucan) an appetite for whipping up the emotions, for increasing the tension at moments of crisis—they are numerous—that can be tiring; in Callirhoe's arias, paradox and antithesis can pile up to a point where the reader finds them so strident, so artificial, that they miss their effect. This of course is a matter of taste, and in the matter of rhetoric modern taste is not always the taste of Chariton's age. But beyond convention there is the author's personal contribution. Chariton, we have seen, does have literary ambitions, and they are visible in the way he approaches his story and the way he handles it. He clearly wants to fit it into the Greek literary and cultural tradition, and he handles the narrative, confidently, in such a way as to fit his specific purposes.

The historical setting of Callirhoe, it was suggested earlier, is meant to titillate the reader, who will feel pleasure at recognizing it. He can bring something to the story himself, and thus enter into complicity with the author. That is true, but there is more to it than that: there is the question of just what it is that the reader himself contributes. The setting is a classical Greek setting, so that author and reader are tacitly embracing Greek tradition; Chariton is to that extent already putting himself alongside earlier Greek writers, laying claim to paideia. That is reinforced by overt reference in his opening and closing sentences to his predecessors, the historians Thucydides and Herodotus, and further reinforced by quite frequent echoes of the historian Xenophon of Athens. The whole story is, after all, a history, or a biography, albeit of non-existent people, written for emotional effect as was some Hellenistic historiography. Polybius (2.56) describes how Phylarchus “in his eagerness to arouse the pity of his readers and enlist their sympathy through his story … introduces graphic scenes of women clinging to one another”—compare the description of the Persian queen, captive on Aradus, in Callirhoe 7.6.5, where “Statira laid her head in Callirhoe's lap and wept”; such parallels could easily be multiplied. Going beyond the historiographical parallel, the most frequent of all Chariton's literary references are to Homer. He is always ready with a familiar and apposite quotation, and is obviously conscious of the parallel between the warrior Chaereas and the warriors of the Iliad, as well as that between the wanderer Chaereas and the wandering hero of the Odyssey.⁴⁶ Chariton, in setting out his terms of reference, is staking his claim to participation in the cultural tradition; no doubt Philostratus found that especially pretentious.

So much, briefly, for Chariton's explicit ambition. The way he conducts his narrative displays another side, a somewhat more covert side, of that ambition: his self-conscious skill marks the craftsman. The principal feature of Callirhoe's structure is the way in which, by the actual manner of his narrative, Chaereas plays the events in his story against the emotion they generate. This is achieved by the interplay between narrated action and dramatic presentation of selected episodes: between “summary” and “scene”, to use the critical technical terminology employed by Hägg in his fundamental study of Chariton's narrative technique.⁴⁷ Thus, to take a particularly vivid example, the episode of the tomb-robbery is treated in this way. Chariton brings Theron into the action; his status as a pirate is established in a few lines, then we have a close-up of his thoughts as he soliloquizes about his criminal project. This is followed by the rapid description of the assembling of his gang, and then once more by dramatic representation, in direct speech, of their deliberations; all of which serves both to put us in the picture and to generate excitement as we are invited, by the mimetic presentation, to put ourselves in the gang's place. The scene switches to Callirhoe, entombed alive. The sensational revelation is made quickly: “she came back to life!” Follows a detailed account, rallentando, of Callirhoe's gradual return to consciousness and realisation that she has been buried alive. As the awful truth dawns on Callirhoe, we have no more narrative but once more a direct representation of her terror, in her actual words: “Oh, what a terrible fate! Buried alive!”; and the tension mounts with Callirhoe's emotions. As Theron's men enter the vault the process is repeated: rapid narrative passing (“gliding” is Hägg's apt term) to dramatic presentation, in the characters' very words, of the girl's excited emotions, the pirates' panic, and their leader's scornful resolution of the situation: “a fine brigand you are—scared of a mere woman!” Throughout, the reader is first put rapidly, by authorial narration, in possession of the situation, then his emotions are whipped up in sympathy with those of the characters. Hägg literally measures the proportions of these passages, and they are striking: in round figures, nine-tenths of the story is presented in emotive “scene”, and half of that dramatically, in direct speech.

Thus, it is not—or not only—the story itself, the plot, that is at the centre of Chariton's mind; it is the reactions it generates in the reader. This is particularly noticeable in the trial scene, in Babylon. Chariton, drawing on his legal experience, pulls out all the stops in the episode: the build-up to it, the impassioned and carefully written debate between Dionysius and Mithridates, and above all the startling climax as the “dead” Chaereas steps forward in court, to see Callirhoe for the first time since her “funeral” (the theme of Scheintod is standard in such novels. “Who could fitly describe that scene in court?” asks Chariton, who then proceeds to do so himself; “what dramatist ever staged such an astonishing story?” And there is proof, were proof needed, that Chariton, who explicitly acknowledges his debt to historiography and epic, is just as fully conscious how much he has borrowed from his third major model, drama. What is equally striking, however, is that although this is perhaps the most exciting moment, the emotional climax, of the whole story, it is not structurally of great importance, since for all its glamour it does not advance the plot at all; Callirhoe remains where she was before the trial, in the hands of Dionysius—or more accurately, of the King of Persia, and that is worse. The central issue—possession of Callirhoe—is resolved not by a passionate scene in court, but by a war related in the medium of narrative.

For all his drama, however—his melodrama, in fact, with its coloratura arias from Callirhoe, its blood-and-thunder Verdi-esque passions—Chariton does pay as much attention to his plot, his mythos in Aristotelian terms, as to his emotional effects. One of the marked features of his storytelling is the number of recapitulations he distributes throughout his narrative. Some of these are major. At two points he recalls to us in detail “the story so far”, before inviting us to read on, and they are significant points: the middle of his tale, just before the sensational trial in Babylon (which might well throw a reader off track), and the beginning of his last book, a point at which he takes care to inform a reader now perhaps nearing emotional exhaustion that he is nearly home and everything is now going to be good news and plain sailing—quite literally, as Chaereas' ship, with Callirhoe now on board, heads for Syracuse. Other summaries are brief, but still carefully put together. There are some twenty of these recapitulations, as well as numerous brief phrases to keep the reader aligned as the narrative proceeds. This is the demonstration that Chariton is conscious of the need to keep his story straight, through all the emotion. He is willing, and eager, to play story and emotion off against each other; but he has a craftman's conscience. Conscience shows also in the care he takes to motivate action credibly as far as possible. He will go to a good deal of trouble in the matter, as in the episode wherein Mithridates learns the identity of his slaves Chaereas and Polycharmus; this could have been achieved quite summarily, but Chariton mounts a slave revolt purely to cover it plausibly. Likewise, the interception by Dionysius of Chaereas' letter to Callirhoe is justified by the rowdy behaviour of slaves left without supervision, which results in intervention by the forces of authority. Tyche is frequently represented by Chariton as being an ever-present driving force in human affairs, but in fact pure chance and coincidence do not figure excessively in the unfolding of the story. They are invoked sometimes, as when rebellion breaks out in Egypt just in time to solve Artaxerxes' (and Chariton's) insoluble problem of what to do with Callirhoe; but in general, here also Chariton's trompe l'oeil tends to hide a writer's conscience that is commensurate with his ambition.

Add, to all of this, the care for language and style already noted, and there emerges a picture of an early writer, working in clearly marked romantic conventions, who is by no means the poor thing he was once thought, by critics and scholars of more austere taste. Chariton, as a writer of love stories, is no Stendhal; no-one in antiquity was. One can reasonably reject the conventions of Greek romances. But they tell us something about their age, and at their best can be relished. Chariton is worth serious attention.

Notes

1. There is a much fuller account of the plot in Perry (1967) 124-37. On Chariton's novel see above all Ruiz-Montero (1994a) for comprehensive, systematic and thoroughly documented coverage of the topics here discussed. There is a general study in Schmeling (1974). Schmid (1899) is now out of date but gives much basic information. For editions see n. 5 below. Modern translations: English, Blake (1939), Reardon (1989b), Goold (1995); French, Grimal (1958a), Molinié (1989); German, Plepelits (1976), Wehrhahn (1983), Lucke-Schäfer (1985); Italian, Nuti (1958), Annibaldis (1987); Spanish, Mendoza (1979).

2. Rohde (1914) 520 = (1876) 489. For Aphrodisias see Erim (1986).

3. Letter 66. It is worth observing at this point that the word here translated as “writings” … may be a real plural (rather than designating only one book); it is quite possible that Chariton wrote other novels, of which we have fragments; see n. 19 below.

4. Conventi Soppressi 627 contains also texts of Xenophon Ephesius and the more sophisticated Achilles Tatius and Longus. Xenophon—commonly paired with Chariton as a “pre-sophistic” writer—shares with him the feature of having survived only in this manuscript. For the Budé edition see next note.

5. It has not fared well in modern times either until recently. It did not surface until the 18th century, and until 1938 none of the scholars who edited it had themselves seen the only evidence for its text; see Blake (1931 and 1938, introduction). Modern editions are D'Orville (1750); Beck (1783); Hirschig (1856); Hercher (1859); Blake (1938) (indispensable); Molinié (1979) (Budé; cosmetic improvements in 2nd ed., 1989) see Reardon (1982a).

6. See Grenfell (1900) (P.Fay.1); Grenfell (1910) (P.Oxy.1019); Crawford (1955) (P.Mich.1); Weinstein (1972) (P.Oxy.2948). For the superiority of the fragments to F see Lucke (1985a).

7. On acquiring the codex (a palimpsest) in 1898 Wilcken transcribed about half of it in Egypt, but did not have the facilities to examine the more difficult passages. On his return to Hamburg in 1899 the codex was destroyed in a fire. See Wilcken (1901).

8. See Zimmermann (1922).

9. At 8.5.15 Dionysius has learned that he has definitively lost Callirhoe, who has returned to Syracuse with Chaereas. The Thebanus represents “his” baby son (in reality Chaereas' son) as saying to him “Daddy, where's Mummy? Let's go to her.” Blake (1938, apparatus ad loc.) observes that the scribe is developing, rather untelligently, a sentimental motif sketched at 5.10.4-5.

10. It is not impossible, however, that the text of F is defective in Chariton's last sentence—it not infrequently omits words or groups of letters—and should read “This is my story about Callirhoe.” For the shorter form of title cf. Achilles Tatius' Leucippe (Leucippe and Clitophon) and Heliodorus' Charicleia (Theagenes and Charicleia). Yet another form of title is geographical: Ethiopica, Ephesiaca.

11. P.Mich.1; see Crawford (1955) 1.

12. Persius, Satires 1.134. The edictum, in this context, was the official public announcement of forthcoming games or other spectacles.

13. See, most recently, the full discussion, with extensive bibliography, of Quet (1992). Ninus is certainly early (see n. 17 below); Metiochus and Parthenope is stylistically similar to Callirhoe, so probably of similar date (and conceivably by Chariton himself—see n. 19 below). It is of course possible that the mosaics discussed by Quet were inspired directly by the stories. Persius may be referring to a written work other than Chariton's novel, rather than to a staged entertainment. This speculation, however, seems to create more problems than it solves: what would be the relation between such a work and Chariton's novel?

14. Browning (1983) chs. 2, 19-52, “Greek in the Hellenistic World and the Roman Empire”, gives a concise comprehensive treatment of the phenomenon. The principal features are: optative and dual largely disappear; verb voices (active and, middle) are confused, as are verb tenses (aorist and perfect); differences in case (dative replaced by accusative or genitive) and use of prepositions … ; periphrastic verbal expressions … ; changes in participial usage; syntactical change … ; morphological simplification; and lexical change. …

15. Philostratus, Lives of the Sophists 19; the main influence was Nicetes of Smyrna.

16. The genre existed before Nero's time; the Ninus Romance, the surviving fragments of which are securely dated by documentary evidence to a.d. 100-101, was probably written in the 1st century b.c.; see Wilcken (1893).

17. Early scholarship saw in Callirhoe the last of the line of novels, not the first. Rohde (1914) dated it in the 5th or 6th century precisely on account of the simplicity of its language, which he took to indicate decadence. It is now clear that it indicates, on the contrary, an early stage of the form.

18. Chariton may well have written other novels, to judge by the style and manner of some extant fragments: see Dihle (1978), Gronewald (1979b), Lucke (1984); the Chione fragment was in the same codex as the Thebanus fragment of Chariton. He could thus be a key figure in the development of the genre; or he may have been the “leader” of a group of early novelists (“school of Chariton”).

19. The full title, cumbrous as it is, is of relevance here: Der Atticismus in seinen Hauptvertretern von Dionysius von Halikarnass bis auf den zweiten Philostratus; that is, it is a study of major authors from the time of Augustus to the early third century.

20. See especially Cobet (1859) (his review of Hercher's edition).

21. For reviews of Papanikolaou (1973) see Giangrande (1974) and Reardon (1976c). There is a study of Chariton's language by Gasda (1860), but it is based on the view that Chariton is to be dated late—not before the later 4th century, and perhaps as late as the 6th century.

22. Papanikolaou's first chapter is an examination of Chariton's quite numerous borrowings from classical literature, especially Homer and historical writers; see text and n. 29 below.

23. For this dating see Papanikolaou (1973) 160-63, Zusammenhang. The other candidate in recent times for the distinction of being the earliest extant novel has been that of Xenophon Ephesius. There are some episodes and expressions in which one of the two has clearly imitated the other, notably at Char.3.5.4 and Xen.1.14.4, scenes of impassioned pleading on the part of distraught elders. Papanikolaou (ch. 10) argues convincingly for the priority of Chariton, in whom the impassioned pleading is clearly more in place than it is in Xenophon. At Char.6.6.4 and Xen.5.5.5, Callirhoe and Anthia respectively lament their treacherous beauty in similar language. …

24. Hernández Lara (1990, 1994). …

25. Ruiz-Montero (1991).

26. Zimmermann (1957).

27. Papanikolaou (1973) ch. 1 collects the following: Homer, over 30 quotations and allusions; historians (Hdt., Thuc., Xen.), especially similarities and reminiscences of expression and vocabulary (quite frequent); orators, a handful of passages, from Dem. in particular; Menander, a few cases; Sophocles, one reference. Some of Papanikolaou's instances are questionable. On the use Chariton makes of his principal borrowings see Bartsch (1934), Zimmermann (1961) (historiography), and Scarcella (1971) 54-59 (Homer).

28. Several writers used his name as a nom de plume, notably Arrian (who calls himself a “second Xenophon”) and the novelist Xenophon Ephesius. Others are mentioned in the Suda; see Perry (1967) 167.

29. See Zanetto (1990) 236-37.

30. Ruiz-Montero (1991a) shows that there is a marked correspondence between Chariton's practice and the precepts set out in Aelius Theon, Progymnasmata or “Preliminary Exercises”, (2nd century a.d.), one of a number of manuals of rhetoric in common use in the imperial period. See also Hernández Lara (1990).

31. Prose rhythms: Heibges (1911); hiatus: Reeve (1971b).

32. Late 1st century/Trajan/Hadrian: Ruiz-Montero (1994a) 489; C.P. Jones (1992a) 165; Baslez (1992) 204. Other estimates are conveniently summarized in Plepelits (1976) 4-9, Ruiz-Montero (1980) 64-67, and Hernández Lara (1994) 7-10. Briefly: early or mid-1st century a.d. is favoured by Perry (1967) 108-109, Garcia Gual (1972) 374, Plepelits (1976) 8, Reardon (1982) 1 and (1991) 17, Holzberg (1986) 52. The extreme date of late 2nd century a.d. (Petri 1963) is based on the thesis of Merkelbach (1962) that the novels are almost all mystery-texts, that is to say literary elaborations of the proceedings of the mysteries of various divinities. Chariton's story, in this theory, does not fit the mystery-pattern; this is taken to mean that his novel was written not according to any such programme, but in uncomprehending imitation of earlier (mystery-) novels such as the Ephesiaca of Xenophon Ephesius. This entails the assumption of a date later than the 2nd century models and near the date of the papyri (see n. 6 above). The theory has been universally rejected; see e.g. Reardon (1971) 394-98.

33. So says Plutarch, Dion 3; the charge of rape is a fair inference from his phrase “grave and outrageous abuse of her person”. Diodorus 13.112 reports that she died of blows inflicted by soldiers.

34. “Callirhoe” means “lovely stream”; the name is not uncommon (and we do not know that it was not the name of Hermocrates' daughter). “Chaereas” suggests “rejoicing”, although he does little enough of that until the end of the story; the name occurs in an inscription from Aphrodisias, as belonging to a lawyer (the profession of Chariton's employer Athenagoras); see C. P. Jones (1992a) 162.

35. Salmon (1961) examines in detail this situation and associated circumstances.

36. See C. P. Jones (1992b).

37. See Plepelits (1976) 14-17 and his notes, esp. 118, 127, 144, 182, 185.

38. See especially the important articles of Hägg (1987a) and Hunter (1994).

39. Notably C. P. Jones (1992a), Baslez (1992), and Ruiz-Montero (1980, 1989, 1994a).

40. See C. P. Jones (1992b); this article and Jones (1992a) should be consulted for Chariton's own context and knowledge.

41. For a different view of the importance of Aphrodite in Callirhoe, see Edwards (1985) and Ruiz-Montero (1994a) 1032-35.

42. A talent was 6000 drachmas, and at the time Hermocrates was alive a drachma per day was what a skilled workman earned (Thuc.3.17).

43. See Bowie (1991) for Greek attitudes towards “barbarians”.

44. Perry (1930) 102n contends that Chariton “must have been following some tradition that obliged him to make this concession”—a singularly weak explanation given the liberties that Chariton takes with the genuinely existent tradition about Callirhoe herself when he actually resuscitates her from the dead!

45. On Chariton's character portrayal see Helms (1966).

46. At 8.1.3, recounting Aphrodite's reconciliation with Chaereas, Chariton explicitly refers to the very language of the Odyssey's exordium. … For Chariton's references to the world of legend see especially Hunter (1994); for his use of Homer, Müller (1976) (exaggerated).

47. Hägg (1971a) discusses the topic in great detail, in a comparative study of Chariton, Xenophon Ephesius and Achilles Tatius. See also Gerschmann (1975) for a study of the unfolding plot; and Reardon (1982) for Chariton's handling of his story.