[In the following excerpt, Perry describes the development of the Greek novel and credits Chariton for his part in creating the new literary form of the romance.]

1

Thanks to the recovery of fragments written on papyrus in the second century after Christ, it is now generally believed that Chariton's story of Chaereas and Callirhoe is the earliest of all our extant Greek romances. The nature of the book itself, considered from a literary-historical viewpoint in comparison with the other extant romances, is such as to confirm this belief in a positive way; so much so that the relatively early dating of Chariton which we now accept on the basis of documentary evidence was maintained on grounds of style and content alone by one scholar, Professor Wilhelm Schmid, before the papyri were discovered, and at a time when historians of literature had long been unanimous in supposing that Chariton was the latest of the ancient romancers and that he lived in the fifth or sixth century.¹ This misconception about the date of Chariton, which prevailed throughout the nineteenth century, was largely responsible for what we now know to have been an upside-down orientation of the whole problem of Greek romance. For Rohde, influenced by the prevailing conceptions of his day, placed Iamblichus, Heliodorus, and the other “sophistic” romances at the base of his system, assuming that they were typical of the romance in its pristine character, and that the distinctive features of Chariton's work were merely so many aberrations from an originally sophistic norm, due mainly to decadence. On this assumption we were told, for instance, that the simplicity of Chariton's plot was a deficiency due to want of imagination or ingenuity in the invention and multiplication of episodes, that he imitated the substance of all the other romancers, and that the historical background of his narrative, instead of being due to an early literary convention, was only a bit of arbitrary decoration—or flavoring, as a recent writer calls it in effect—superimposed on a story that was pure invention from the bottom up. In Rohde's theory of development the romance passes from Antonius Diogenes at one pole to Chariton at the opposite, from the complex, unreal, sophistic, and externalized at the beginning of its career to the simple, naïvely sentimental, and quasi-historical at the end. This theory does not need to be refuted today, since no one accepts it in principle; but its baleful influence still lives, particularly in the tendency to regard ancient romance as a by-product of professional rhetoric, and in certain other misconceptions which have not yet disappeared from what is casually or perfunctorily written about the Greek romances.

What was the rational basis, in the nineteenth century, for this completely erroneous dating of Chariton? Was it inferred from any internal evidence of a positive nature, or from any external testimony? The answer is no. It was only a hazy guess, fostered by historical accidents in the textual transmission of the several romances, and by the vogue which the sophistic romancers, Heliodorus, Longus, and Achilles Tatius, had enjoyed among the precieux of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and, before that, among the Byzantines. What might be called the canon of Greek romance, comprising the authors just mentioned, had been established some two hundred years before the text of either Chariton or Xenophon of Ephesus was discovered and published (Chariton in 1750 and Xenophon in 1726). The fact that Chariton was the latest of the romancers to be made known to the modern public, and that Heliodorus, Longus, and Achilles had for many years been accepted as standard, created the false impression, strong though not consciously reasoned, that his romance was also the latest of its kind to be written; and the complete absence of any sure reference to this author in either ancient or Byzantine writers encouraged the belief that he was unimportant and so, presumably, late. We owe the preservation of his book, along with that of Xenophon of Ephesus, to a single manuscript of the thirteenth century, which remained the property of a small Florentine monastery until late in the eighteenth century, when it was transferred to the great Medicean library.²

2

It is probable that Chariton's romance was well known in the second century after Christ and that it was read by many people, particularly, we may suspect, by young people of both sexes. There is such a thing as juvenile literature even in our own highly sophisticated age; and in ancient times the ideal novel must have catered to that obscure but far-flung literary market long before it became adapted in some measure to the taste and outlook of mature or educated minds. This is evident from the nature of the idealism in the romances themselves. Age levels, as well as cultural levels, mark off different strata in literature as determined by its psychological outlook. Our belief that Chariton's romance was a popular one is confirmed by the fact that since 1900 four fragments of it have been found on papyri in different towns of Egypt.³ It seems probable, moreover, that the author of Chaereas and Callirhoe, rather than some unknown person, is the Chariton addressed by the sophist Philostratus in a short epigrammatic letter (no. 66 in the collection) which reads as follows: “To Chariton. You think that the Greeks are going to remember your stories … when you are dead; those who are nobodies when they are living, what will they be when they are not living?” This letter stands in the neighborhood of at least two others, namely no. 67 to Philemon and no. 72 to Caracalla, which were addressed by Philostratus to well-known persons who were not living when he wrote. It is apparently an open letter to a dead author. It implies that Chariton's writing was well-known and widely acclaimed, and that the sophist looked upon this popular writer in the same spirit of jealous contempt that he shows for a certain Epictetus in the preceding letter and in letters 42 and 69. To this Epictetus, conceivably the slave-born philosopher but more probably a rival sophist, Philostratus says: “Fear a people with whom you have so much power” (Ep. 65); and “the Athenians by their applause drive you so frantic that you forget who you are and of whom you were born” (Ep. 69).

The principal virtue of Chariton's novel, apart from the element of manifold adventure which it has in common with the others, though in a smaller degree, lay in its sentimental idealism, its inner force, which was meant for the edification of naïve readers in a middle-class, pagan society. Since this society had passed away or disintegrated with the coming of Christianity, what the Byzantine ages would see or relish in any pagan romance would be only its externals; and these, the novelties of plot and episode, the affectations of learning and of rhetorical style, and the ascetic or mechanically exaggerated virtue of the heroine, were much less evident in Chariton, who was the spokesman of an earlier culture on a non-academic plane, than in the later romances of Heliodorus and Achilles Tatius. The two last mentioned, which represented Greek romance in its latest and most artificial phase, came to be looked upon in Byzantine times as the standard and almost the only known specimens of the ancient genre, to the exclusion of its more genuine but more humble representatives, which for their part had never been recognized as literature by the intelligentsia, and on that account were more easily and more quickly forgotten. The greater the degree in which a romance was popular and reflected the psychological outlook and taste of the unacademic readers for whom it was written, the less chance it would have of surviving in a literary world whose fashions were dominated by the academic standards of scholars, pedants, and professional rhetoricians. It was not until late in the second century after Christ that romances of love and adventure began to emerge upon the surface of sophistic literature; and it was only then, when the genre had been elevated in a few cases to that higher and more arid plane of literature, whereon it was transformed and sophisticated by such authors as Iamblichus, Longus, Achilles Tatius, and Heliodorus, that it became conspicuous enough to attract attention in the world of formal learning. What appeared in that environment, or even on the edge of it, had a much better chance of being preserved than what lay beyond its pale, no matter how popular the latter may once have been. This explains why such authors as Heliodorus and Achilles Tatius, instead of such as Chariton and Xenophon of Ephesus, came to be the principal representatives of ancient romance in the Greek middle ages: they owed their survival to the attention given them by scholastics. But why Heliodorus and Achilles were elected, instead of Longus and Iamblichus or others of their kind no longer known to us, is not so clear. It must have been due, however, more to random historical accidents than to the nature of the romances themselves. There seems to be no good reason, for instance, why the book of Achilles Tatius, whose realistic eroticism was scandalous in the eyes of the patriarch Photius, should have been more favored by early Christians on account of its actual content and style than Daphnis and Chloe or the Babyloniaca of Iamblichus. It appears that the nature of a romance could not assure its survival, and that other factors, depending on whim or circumstance, could be more decisive. It so happened, although we know not just why, that as early as the fifth century, if not sooner, both Heliodorus and Achilles Tatius were believed in some quarters to have been Christians; and this conception of them as Christian writers may account in large measure for their celebrity in Byzantine times, and for the fact that their romances were transmitted through more manuscript copies, from antiquity on, than any of the others. Concerning Heliodorus in this connection more will be said later on. The evidence that Achilles Tatius was believed to have been a Christian is derived partly from Suidas, who states explicitly that he “finally became a Christian and a bishop,” and partly from the fact that persons bearing the same names as those of the principal characters in his novel, the lovers Cleitophon and Leucippe, were represented as the parents of St. Galaktion in an early legend dealing with the two saints Galaktion and Episteme.⁴ Pointing in the same direction, moreover, is the fact that Ps.-Eustathius in the late fourth or early fifth century, in his hexaemeral commentary on Genesis, uses Achilles as one of his sources for the description of peculiar animals, along with such other authorities as Origen, Eusebius, Clement of Alexandria, Josephus, Philo, and the Physiologus—as if he saw Achilles Tatius, though dimly, in the same religious light as the others, presumably as a Christian writer.

3

The bridge over which the Greek romance passed on its way from the ancient world to the Byzantine was purely scholastic and had almost no support in popular favor. The ideal love story, or the story of worldly adventure, was no longer cultivated as a literary form. It had passed out with the pagan culture that had fostered it. What replaced it on the dynamic level of literature was the biography of a saint. Hundreds of these are known to us, and the highest development of the type is seen in the immensely popular “romance” of Barlaam and Joasaph,⁵ which was made for the eighth century, the age of the iconoclastic struggle, when metaphysical contemplation and renunciation of worldly affairs could inspire men to write books, but not the assertion of such things. Primary concern with the hopes, fears, passions and manifold experiences of life in its purely mundane aspects, and with the exploitation of these on their own account in an intellectually wide-open society, was the force that sustained and made possible the proliferation of the ancient novel, as of the modern. When that outlook on life and its values passed away before the onset of otherworldliness, the ancient romance passed away with it. The things that the latter held in honor and exploited were the things that the early Christians renounced on principle. This is not to deny that many people in the early Middle Ages might enjoy reading a Greek romance, just as many of us today may enjoy reading a tragedy of Sophocles or the Barlaam and Joasaph ascribed to St. John of Damascus. But reading an ancient book, even with pleasure and profit, is a very different thing from having the inspiration and incentive necessary to create others like it and propagate them in one's own environment, and unless that is done to a notable extent, the literary genre is dead in our sense of the word.

The age of asceticism in the East, which is sometimes called the Dark Age, from a humanistic standpoint, extended from the fourth century, approximately, to the middle of the ninth. In terms of the basic literary pattern which we have called epic, meaning thereby any extended narrative of personal adventure exploited on its own account, the truest expression of this age was the saint's life. Latter-day epic, as we called the Greek romance, had been succeeded by martyr-epic, or saintly epic, which was generated by a new culture with a new Weltanschauung. This age of asceticism, in which theological thinking was dominant and tended to exclude concern with anything of a purely secular nature, was followed by an era extending from the ninth century down to the fall of Constantinople in which the interest of men in worldly things became ever more pronounced and more varied. In literature, as well as in scholarly activity, this oncoming humanism, which ran deep in the tides of instinct and action, manifested itself in many ways and on both cultural levels, the level of genuinely popular and spontaneous expression on the one hand, and that of learning, and learned affectation or pedantry on the other. What concerns us here is primarily the popular expression in epic medium—narratives in a new, unclassical verse, which were in the unscholarly vernacular, sung and recited in part by minstrels, as well as written down. In this kind of narrative we can see, more clearly than elsewhere, the cultural ideas and forces which created new forms and modified the old ones. Even the learned world of Byzantium, hitherto always formal and backward-looking in secular matters, was affected by it. Tzetzes in the twelfth century poured out the copious erudition of his Chiliads in 15-syllable “political” verse, to the tune of “A captain bold of Halifax who lived in country quarters”; which was the meter of popular epic and romance. The humanistic outlook of the later Byzantine ages, insofar as it was romantic, found its fullest and truest expression on the popular plane of song and story, much of which still lives in the Greece of today; but it is only a pale reflex of this romantic stir that we observe in the slavish imitations of Achilles Tatius and Heliodorus which were written in the twelfth century by such miserable pedants as Eustathius Macrembolites, Theodorus Prodromus, and Nicetas Eugenianus, trying to write romance in what they thought was the ancient manner.⁶ Of these no account need be taken.

The real Byzantine epic and romance begins with the chanson de geste dealing with Digenes Akritas, the hero of border warfare in the tenth century against Moslems and robber knights on the eastern outskirts of the Empire.⁷ This warrior-epic is closely analogous in many fundamental respects, including its ballad-like meter, to the old Spanish Cid, the story of “el mas famoso Castellano”; and it stands at the head of a line of epic-romantic development in the East, which is profoundly similar to that represented in the West by the chansons de geste from beginning to end, and the romance of chivalry as a whole. In the East, as in the West, warrior-epic, as we called it, was succeeded, under the influence of feudalism and the presence of Frankish knights and kingdoms throughout Greece in the thirteenth century, by romantic epic. Like their ancient counterparts, the Iliad and the Odyssey respectively, but unlike the latter-day epic known as novel which arises only in a literate environment and is a written composition from the start, both types of medieval epic, in the forms preserved to us, rest upon a broad and fertile substratum of oral minstrelsy. They were sung or recited in substance and variously adapted to listening audiences by wandering rhapsodists before they were written down, whether in the form of relatively short poems, or combined into larger unities by a conscious literary effort. In the process of being cast into literary form, and later reworked, these epics and romances acquired some formal features of language, style, and structure, and perhaps also of substance, which were not native to them but superimposed by learned convention and the literary education of their editors. Thus even Digenes Akritas shows verbal imitation of two descriptive passages in Achilles Tatius, although the inspiration that underlies the poem is everywhere fresh and original, and its thought and substance independent of book learning.⁸ The influence of formal education upon these popular stories was only superficial; and between the two cultural spheres, popular and academic, osmosis, so to speak, took place in both directions. Greek romance in the medieval period, generated by the ideal impulse which first appears in the epic of Digenes Akritas and was later modified by the mingling of peoples and cultures after the fourth Crusade, comes out in a variety of forms. Some of these are lengthy, some relatively short. In date of composition they range from the thirteenth century to the mid-sixteenth. The themes may be either ancient in origin or medieval; in nationality, Greek, French, Italian, Oriental or mixed. Some are only adaptations of romances of chivalry current in the West. The hero may be historical, quasi-historical, fictitious, or folkloristic; and his wanderings may be in a known region of the world or mainly in fairyland, where things happen by magic. To illustrate these points would take us too far from our course.⁹

In the West during the period of the Renaissance, and onward to the eighteenth century, there was no genuine ideal romance. As a dynamic literary form it had been replaced chiefly by the drama, which belongs to the microcosm of the city (where the currents of thought and fashion are centripetal) rather than to the castle in the distance, the wars of the barons, the knight on his journey of adventure, and the wandering minstrel who sang of his exploits. Concentration in the forms of artistic expression, rather than extension, were in honor, and literature in fashion was under the control either of intellectuals and classicists, or of a smart set, all of whom in the aggregate exercised the function of an academy. In this environment ideal romance, being at the base mainly an inheritance from the past, could be cultivated only as a tender plant in a literary hothouse. More favored by the intellectual temper of the times was a short story, usually witty or picaresque, told in a light vein for the amusement of smart society; if such a story was long, it would be a satire weighted with philosophical meaning or criticism of some kind. As we have noted before, the real novel, comparable to the Greek romance in its time, did not appear until the middle of the eighteenth century. Latter-day epic, martyr-epic, warrior-epic, romantic epic and, once more, latter-day epic—such, in broad outline, are the forms successively assumed under the impact of different cultures by the primeval pattern of epic narrative from the time of Heliodorus to the present day.

4

A fitting epitaph for the Greek erotic romance was penned by Nietzsche: “Christianity,” he says, “gave Eros poison to drink; he did not die of it, certainly, but degenerated to Vice.”¹⁰ How true this is will be realized by anyone who reads the apocryphal Acts of Christian martyrs or the lives of the saints. Eros, healthy, pagan, and not yet poisoned, had been the principal prop of Greek romance in its beginnings and in its prime; and when that prop weakened and decayed, by degenerating into vice or into trifling, the form supported by it collapsed therewith, inevitably, and died. The sickening of Eros is already evident in Heliodorus and Achilles Tatius.

Achilles treats love objectively in a spirit of critical realism, and more as a sporting proposition, or ludus, as the Romans would say, than as a sentimental ideal which he honestly shared with his lovers as a motive for their actions, as does Chariton. For him love is one of many sophistical topics upon which he likes to dwell learnedly and rhetorically, and, it must be confessed, with a good deal of understanding. His Melitte, for example, a minor character, is pictured with more insight into human nature and is thereby more real and interesting than his own Leucippe or almost any other heroine of Greek romance. Achilles has his virtues, but they are those of a highly sophisticated writer which appear as something incidental or tangential to the conventional type of plot with which he deals invita Minerva, and with which he seems to have little sympathy. He was better qualified by nature for the writing of a picaresque novel than an ideal one. From the ideal standpoint of other Greek romances many of his episodes are close to burlesque, and some critics have maintained that he was deliberately mocking at the extravagances of the conventional romance.¹¹ His realistic eroticism was bound to appear as sinful in the eyes of Christians, as it did to Photius (cod. 87), and as trifling, or disillusioning or cynical in the eyes of those simple-minded pagans whose idealistic sentimentality had been the chief support of romance as a literary institution at the beginning, insofar as it was a love story. The novel of today may deal with love in any manner whatever, without weakening the impulse to write novels; because in our own degenerate society the very negation of moral and spiritual values has become a fashion and a cultural power. But this was far from being the case in the time of Achilles Tatius. He lived in the late second century, a climactic age, when negation of any kind was sheer weakness and the only thing that could survive was something very serious, positive, and idealistic.¹²

In Heliodorus love as an ideal or as something to be attained and enjoyed is decidedly secondary in interest to religious mysticism, sacerdotal solemnities and strategies, and the implication that a grandiose epic scheme of things, too complicated to be more than dimly understood, is being worked out by the design of an inscrutable Providence. The idealized persons in Heliodorus are likely to be either priests or ascetics: Calasiris, who comes close to being the real hero of the story, Sisimithres, Charicles, and the latter's daughter the heroine Chariclea, who was a priestess of the virgin Artemis in the beginning and never quite got over it. She remains a celibate at heart, and is more interested throughout in managing things by means of deceptions and roundabout methods, in which she is expert, than in love or loving, although she is willing to marry under priestly guidance after all the proprieties of courtship have been rigidly and ostentatiously observed. From the way in which she and Theagenes behave, especially near the end of the story, one gets the impression that neither of the two is really in love or anxious to possess the other. Here Eros is failing. Heliodorus is what Nietzsche might have called “preëxistently Christian,” with reference to his religiosity and his priestly character as seen in the Aethiopica, as well as to the cultural outlook of the transitional age, mid-third century, in which he lived.¹³ He was devout by nature, howbeit in the cause of a pagan cult, and there is something sanctimonious and pontifical about his manner of writing. Those qualities of mind caused him to be looked upon as a kindred spirit by pious Christians; and that view of him, together with the fact that his name happened to be the same as that of a reputed bishop of Trikka in Thessaly, gave rise to a popular rumor that he was the same man and that he had written the Aethiopica in his youth before he became a convert to Christianity and thereafter a bishop. This popular rumor is reported by the ecclesiastical historian Socrates in the early fifth century, writing as follows in his Hist. Eccl. V 22 (Migne, Patr. Gr. 67, col. 63): “The first to institute this custom in Thessaly [the custom of requiring celibacy of the clergy] was Heliodorus who became bishop there, and who is said to have been the author of a love story in several books which he composed when he was young and to which he gave the title Aethiopica.” The unqualified statement here made by Socrates about what a bishop named Heliodorus had done in Thessaly is such that we have little reason to doubt the truth of it; but, whether or not it was true as church history, it was at all events something that the historian believed to be true, and it was obviously on the basis of that belief, taken as fact by himself and by his informants, that the identity of the bishop with the romancer had been inferred. That inference, however, unlike the matter-of-fact reference to Bishop Heliodorus of Trikka, is subject to grave suspicion, because its pattern is that of a familiar type of myth of which we have many examples.¹⁴ In the case of Achilles Tatius it is difficult to see how popular tradition could have fancied him to have been or to have become a Christian bishop; but in the case of Heliodorus it was almost inevitable that he should be mistaken for such. He was a kindred spirit. In him, more easily than in any other ancient romancer, they could find spiritual values of the kind that they wanted to find, while enjoying at the same time that element of sensational adventure which is always popular with readers who have time for it, and which was abundantly featured—though not on its account—in their own biographies of the saints and martyrs.

5

In the evolution of the Greek novel there are two large phases which must be clearly distinguished one from the other in our contemplation of the genre as a whole. Failure to make this distinction in the past has resulted in many misconceptions concerning both the nature and the origins of the Greek romance. The two phases to which I refer have already been mentioned (sec. 2). They may be called the presophistic and the sophistic, respectively, in order to indicate their historical sequence;¹⁵ but since the difference between the two kinds is due less to the age in which they appear than to the mentality and educational background of the authors themselves, and the class of readers for whom they wrote, it follows that romances of the presophistic type (or the non-sophistic), may be produced in the same age as that in which the sophistic type is coming to the fore, as they were in the second century after Christ. Both types, broadly conceived as such, are historically significant and deserve our attention: the sophistic because it signalizes an upward and outward movement in the range of the novel, comparable to that which has taken place in modern times, and the presophistic or relatively simple type because it alone can reveal to us what the fundamental nature of the genre was in its beginnings. Since our study relates primarily to origins, the later part of this chapter will deal with the earlier phase of Greek romance as exemplified by Chariton. Meanwhile some attention must be given to the nature, implications, and potentialities of the sophistic romance.

What may be called the formal trade-mark of the sophist, the writer whose concepts of literary propriety are shaped by classical and academic standards, in contrast with the defiance of those standards by the earlier romancers, is clearly seen in the methods by which, respectively, Longus and Achilles Tatius introduce their stories. Both stories, unlike those of Chariton and Xenophon, are told on the authority of someone other than the author himself, in what the rhetorician Theon calls the accusative case. “Most of the ancients,” says Theon, “introduced their fables in this way, and very rightly so, as Aristotle remarks: for they do not tell them in their own person, but refer them to ancient authority, in order to mitigate the appearance of relating impossible things.”¹⁶ This reveals the conscience of the historian who feels responsible for the truth of what he states in his own person, in contrast with that of the earliest romancers who thought of themselves as creative artists, like the dramatists, and had emancipated themselves accordingly, as prose writers, from the bonds of historiographical convention.

Technically considered, the Daphnis and Chloe of Longus is an ecphrasis, a form of writing which was much in favor with professional rhetoricians and about which they have much to say. An ecphrasis, properly so called, might be a description of almost anything visible—a landscape, a battle, or a person, but it often took the form of an exegetical interpretation of a picture or a statue, as in Philostratus and other sophists, and that is what we have in Longus. The author tells us that he saw a beautiful painting in a grove of the Nymphs on the island of Lesbos, that he was delighted with the varied scenes of rustic life and love therein depicted, that he inquired for an interpreter of the picture. After finding one, he wrote up the story which it represented in four books, “as an offering to Eros, the Nymphs, and Pan, and as a delightful possession for all mankind. It will remedy disease, bring fond recollections to him that has loved, and instruct him that has not loved. [Cf. cras amet qui nunquam amavit, quique amavit cras amet.] None, indeed, has escaped love or ever shall, as long as beauty survives and eyes to see it. May the god vouchsafe me to retain prudence as I write of the vicissitudes of others.” Longus presents his love story for its own sake and makes no pretense of its being anything else than an artistic creation of his own. For that reason he is as truly a novelist as any of those who preceded him; but unlike the latter he has the sensibility of an educated man trained in the academic tradition, for whom a narrative in prose, unlike a drama, is necessarily a history in theory. It must be formally vouched for as true in substance, either by the author himself in his own person, like Dio in his idyllic account of the country folk of Euboea, or by some other authority, man or document, in this case a picture, to which the author refers. There is as large a proportion of pure fiction in Longus as in Chariton, and probably larger. Both writers feel free to invent as much as they please, but they differ profoundly in respect to the sanctions on which their narratives rest. Chariton tells the story of Callirhoe in his own person, with the self-assurance of a creative artist, poet or dramatist, elaborating a kernel of historical legend. Longus will not take that liberty, through fear of violating the conventions of formal prose literature. Instead he professes to describe events which an unknown artist outlined in a picture. By this technicality he aligns himself with the contemporary sophists, but his exploitation of poetic values on their own account in prose narrative marks him as a romancer.¹⁷

Achilles Tatius, like Longus, and for the same reasons, is careful not to tell his story of Clitophon and Leucippe on his own authority, as a poet or dramatist would do, and as the earlier romancers had done. Instead, he introduces Clitophon himself, whom he says he met at Tyre, relating his adventures in the first person. The author, Achilles, poses as only a listener to the story, although he often forgets that Clitophon is speaking and makes him say things that presuppose an overall knowledge such as only the author himself could assume.

Since the protagonist Clitophon is a young man whom the author meets and talks with personally, we see that the action described in the romance takes place supposedly within the lifetime of the author himself. That is something new. In all the other ideal romances of antiquity of which we have any knowledge, the actors live in a distant past; they belong, in theory at least, to saga, and not to the contemporary world of the writer, however thoroughly they may be conceived and represented in the likeness of contemporary men and women.¹⁸ Achilles has broken away from a tradition of long standing, which was dominant not only in the earlier romances but also in tragedy and other forms of objective poetry, namely, that ideal narrative must relate to saga, myth, or history. His writing about a serious love affair, freely invented, as about something that happened in his own time (but not to himself personally) is without parallel, insofar as I can recall, in ancient literature. It is important for us to realize the significance of this innovation. By it all the essential difference in form and potentiality between the ancient and the modern novel is bridged. In the modern novel the practice of writing ideally about the emotions and experiences of an imaginary third person who lives in the same age as the author has been cultivated ever since Fielding. This approximate contemporaneity of the fictional characters is so common in our own literature that the historical novel (which is the only kind known to us in ancient books apart from Achilles Tatius and the comic romances) is looked upon as something exceptional and in a class by itself. The ratio between the two kinds of novel in ancient practice might easily have become what it has been in modern times, had the need for contemporaneity been similar. But it was not. The needs of the novel in the matter of form are determined to some extent by the nature of the ideas of which it is made to be the expression. The ideas and aesthetic values which the ideal ancient novel had to convey, among them love and adventure, for example, were always of such a general, broadly human, and timeless nature (even when scientific or critical as often in digressions) that a theoretically ancient setting for the characters, in line with the long-established tradition of objective poetry, would serve as well as a modern one.¹⁹ This is true also of many modern novels, which could easily have been shaped as historical novels, and of the Clitophon and Leucippe of Achilles Tatius. Contemporaneity in the latter is not called for by the nature of its subject-matter, but is an accident due to the method employed by the author in launching a nominally true story. If Achilles, or Richardson, had combined this contemporaneity with the method followed by other ancient romancers—all of whom tell the story on their own authority about other characters in the manner of historians—there would have been no formal difference at all between their methods of story telling and that of the average modern novelist. As it was, contemporaneity in both the ancient and the modern novel was introduced, not to meet any requirement of the novel itself, but by the author's desire to observe the proprieties of classical literature, still dominant in his time. To tell a story, however fictitious, about one's own personal experience or emotions, as do Clitophon and Pamela, had been proper in formal literature from Homer onwards, and it did not matter whether or not the narrator was identical or contemporary with the author himself. The incredible adventures of Odysseus are told by himself to Alcinous and are not vouched for by Homer; Sappho and many of the lyric poets, including Petrarch and Shakespeare in early modern times, write freely about their own emotions or experiences, at least ostensibly; and when an elegiac poet at Rome writes about his own love affair, as Propertius says,

Maxima de nihilo nascitur historia.

The license that went with subjective writing of any kind was far greater than that which was allowed to the historian, or even to the poet in writing objectively about a third person. Narrative in the first person always bordered very closely on undisguised fiction, and was generally seen either as such or as comedy or trifling (ludus).²⁰ A writer in the classical tradition might say whatever he pleased about himself, or represent another person so doing; but what he could not do, without violating all literary propriety or lapsing into farce, was to write out on his own authority an extended account in prose of the fictitious experiences of another person, especially if that person did not belong to myth or saga, but was presumably a contemporary. That is what the modern novelist has usually done, beginning with Fielding; but neither Achilles Tatius nor Richardson ventured to break with literary convention to that extent. Achilles, instead of writing the history of Clitophon on his own authority, only reports the autobiography of that character, and Richardson puts his romance into the well-recognized form of personal letters wherein Pamela tells of her own experiences.

The modern fashion of bringing ideal fiction into a framework of contemporary life, regardless of whether or not such a setting is actually needed, is probably due in large measure to the precedents set by Richardson and his followers in eighteenth-century England. The temper of those authors was as peculiarly realistic, and English, as it was moral. They were prone to preach, not in the relatively abstract manner of philosophers, poets, and essayists who address themselves to an intellectual few, but in terms of the concrete aspects and particularities of social life in their own time. Their message, which was more moral and positive than that of the earliest Greek romancers, and less concerned with the novelties of external adventure, needed to be dramatized in a familiar, realistic setting in order to be brought home to the masses of middle-class people for whom they wrote. In the communication of ideas or the description of events Greek writers, on the other hand, are likely to be more abstract than Romans or Englishmen, except in comedy, and are less inclined to illustrate their thought or meaning with an abundance of concrete details. The precedent of contemporaneity in the early modern novel opened up the form for the exploitation through its medium, in more recent times, of a wide field of ideas involving the studious criticism or description of contemporary social phenomena on their own account. The ancient novel as it appears in Achilles Tatius had the same potentiality, so far as form is concerned; but the writers of that time had no need for the extension of the novel in that direction.

In ancient literature the convention that restricted ideal fiction, whether in prose or in verse, to a setting distant in time or place was stronger than it has been in modern times; and, conversely, what was close-up and contemporary was associated more inevitably with what was broadly comic by nature and literary tradition, or else trivial and playful. Normally the ideal romance, like Sophoclean tragedy, was a bit of ancient history in theory, solemnly related in the third person; the comic was a story of contemporary experience told subjectively by the protagonist speaking about himself in the first person. Moreover, the protagonist in the ideal romance, as in tragedy, was usually a person of high estate, or one known to myth or legend; whereas the protagonist in a comic story would often be a nonentity. Neither of the two categories of epic narrative, thus described with reference to their traditional conventions, is broad enough to contain either the Clitophon and Leucippe of Achilles Tatius, or the novels of Henry Fielding. For that purpose, the two categories will have to be fused into one which admits the proprieties of both. It is obvious that Achilles is writing in the ideal tradition of Greek romance, but the contemporaneity of his story, the use of a Tom-Dick-or-Harry (specifically an unknown Clitophon) speaking in the first person as the protagonist, and the nature of the episodes, many of which border on burlesque and are thought by some to have been intended as parody—all this signifies that in his book the comic or picaresque tradition of epic narrative has been grafted onto the ideal, thereby greatly widening the scope of the genre romance and its capacity as an artistic medium for the criticism or interpretation of life in all its aspects. It was natural that this should happen when a relatively sophisticated author and one of realistic and skeptical temperament, such as Achilles, undertook to write in the ideal tradition of Greek romance. Such a man would react to the naïve conventionalities and sentiments of his predecessors in much the same way that Fielding reacted to Richardson's Pamela. Achilles stands in about the same relation to Chariton, Xenophon of Ephesus, and the author of the Ninus romance as Fielding does to Richardson, except that the Greek writer's reaction was not so strong, positive, and explicit as the Englishman's. Thus the ancient novel on the eve of its eclipse attained to just that point in its formal development which the English novel reached, only two years after its birth, in Fielding's Joseph Andrews.

The full title of the book just mentioned is significant: The History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews, and of his Friend Mr. Abraham Adams. Written in Imitation of the Manner of Cervantes, Author of Don Quixote (1742). The central purpose with which Fielding began in the writing of this book was to ridicule Richardson's Pamela by transferring that heroine's embarrassments, caused by the love-making of her master, to a hero who purported to be her brother, Joseph Andrews, bravely resisting attempts made upon his virtue by the amorous Lady Booby. But this initial purpose, stated explicitly in the first chapter, quickly fell into the background and became unimportant when the author, with his genius for the sketching of character-types, his moral seriousness, and his interest in the contemplation of human nature per se as a great subject, warmed to his theme. The secondary characters, such as Parson Adams and Mrs. Slipslop, became more interesting than the principals. Although the story begins and ends outwardly as parody, the greater part of it, in spite of many ludicrous scenes, is concerned with a serious and sympathetic study of human nature as it appears against the background of contemporary society. It differs from a purely picaresque, satirical, or burlesque novel—what we have called in ancient literature a comic romance—in much the same way that the comedy of Menander and Terence differed from that of Aristophanes. It is more serious and sympathetic in its underlying tone and tendency; it is written for the sake of ethical instruction, instead of for satire or amusement only; the characters are made fallible in order to be real and human; and the burlesque element is a means rather than an end. It was not until he had come to the close of his first volume that Fielding realized that he (like Apuleius) had created a new kind of fiction; and in the preface to the second volume he explained very truly what the new form was in terms of the older classical conventions. He defines his work as “a comic epic poem in prose.” It is epic, because it is an extended narrative of personal adventure or experience; it is comic in the sense that it is realistic and admits ludicrous actions and commonplace characters, unlike the serious romance; and it is a poem (so he implies) in the loose sense that, unlike a burlesque or picaresque novel, it contains ideal values comparable to those of the Odyssey and other epic poems. The more precise implications of this definition need not detain us. The important thing to note is that Fielding combined the two main traditions of prose fiction which went into the making of the modern novel: the sophistical literary tradition, which allowed only novels of a burlesque, satirical, picaresque, or trifling kind, with which he began in Joseph Andrews, and the serious, ideal tradition which he shared with Richardson in spite of his disagreement with that author in matters of taste and ethical perception.²¹ The same combination, as we have observed, is found also in Achilles Tatius; but there the ancient sophistical or intellectual tradition in prose fiction, which, like the modern, was fundamentally comic, is the superimposed element, instead of being, as in Fielding, the formal conception with which the author begins.

The serious Greek romance had originated with naïve authors who were of small understanding, and whose moral sentiments, like those of Richardson, were narrowly conventional and jejune. They were not addressing themselves to educated readers whose sense for ethical values would be cultivated and discriminating; and, apart from that, they had no such positive and absorbing interest in morality and problems relating to the conduct of life as did most English writers in the eighteenth century. Virtue, or heroism, for those obscure Greek romancers was usually a negative quality, meaning little more than sexual respectability, conformity to middle-class mores generally, and the heroic(?) readiness on the part of lovers to give up and commit suicide whenever external circumstances seemed to triumph over their struggles. This passive and negative outlook on the world was characteristic of the Hellenistic age, but not of the age of Richardson. In that respect the culture that projected the ancient novel was different in kind from that in which the modern novel grew up. What interested the early Greek romancer positively, the inspiration that moved him to write, was not a moral problem, as it was primarily with Richardson, nor the artistic exhibition of ethical qualities, as in much of the higher literature of antiquity, but a sentimental ideal centering about young love and the sensational buffetings of Fortune that interfered with its realization and prolonged the dramatic suspense. Preoccupation with such childishly fanciful and spectacular themes tended to preclude any concern with the portrayal of character or the study of human nature on its own account. These restrictions in the range and quality of Greek romance originated with the earliest exponents of the genre and became stereotyped features of it before the time when authors trained in the higher fashions of literature and thought, expressed in other forms, entered upon the writing of romance.

In our so-called sophistic romances the banalities of the earlier and more naïve type of romance are retained in varying degrees as a matter of traditional form; but much is added thereunto which stems from the educational background of the sophistic writer and his sense of literary or philosophical value. What is added in substance, or changed in respect to orientation and emphasis, whether inwardly or outwardly, depends upon the teste and talent of the individual writer and may be shaped in accordance with any concept of artistic value known to the higher literature of antiquity. Here the potentialities of the situation are more significant than the actualities as known to us, for the latter depend upon the identity of only a few romances that have survived by chance out of the many that were once written, while the former are implied by the nature of the innovations which we know to have been made.

These innovations in the techniques employed by Longus and Achilles in launching their stories, and in the admission of comic proprieties into ideal romance by Achilles, have already been noted and their literary-historical significance considered. Certain others, consisting mainly of digressions superimposed on the story, seem not to have any value for the development of the novel as such but to be carried over into it from the curricula of academic prose writing, the orientation of which in that age was scientific by pretension, or rhetorically epideictic. Iamblichus, Achilles Tatius, and Heliodorus seek to entertain their readers with disquisitions on a variety of topics which they regard as edifying or instructive, but which contribute nothing to the artistry of the main story, either outwardly as drama or inwardly as psychological experience. For them the story of love ending in success is a perfunctory theme of which they are almost ashamed. They tolerate it because they know that it is popular and will bring them readers, but they try to improve upon it as much as they can by the injection of a more respectable kind of subject-matter and artistic display. They do not tell the love story for its own sake, as a poet would do, and as the earlier romancers had done, but rather use it as a framework within which to display their sophistical wares. These may consist either of digressions upon topics of an informative kind, the tendency of which is scientific, pseudoscientific, philosophic, or paradoxographical, or of rhetorical displays of one kind or another where the subject matter, as in nearly all the great sophists of the day, is of less consequence than the word-working and is looked upon almost with indifference by the authors, provided only that it is academic in kind or pretension. After reading the Babyloniaca of Iamblichus, Photius praises the author's prose style and thinks it a pity that one who was so capable a rhetorician should have stopped to childish fiction as a medium for the display of his rhetorical talents, instead of writing about matters of serious concern.²² The digressions in these sophistic romances, which often take the form of philosophical or scientific discussions, are fundamentally analogous, in their literary-historical meaning, to the critical and philosophical essays which appear at the beginning of almost every book or chapter in Fielding's Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones. What these non-organic features signify in both cases is that the novel, when it first comes into the hands of authors trained in the intellectual or classical traditions, does not yet stand entirely on its own feet as a work of art, and has not yet cut its connections with those other forms which dominated the literary scene before its birth. In antiquity the novel stood on its own feet as an artistic creation mainly, though not entirely, in the presophistic or non-sophistic stage of its cultivation, when it was ignored or despised by the intelligentsia.

What were the possibilities of the ancient novel as a medium of artistic expression in the age of the Antonines? Judging only by what we have in the extant romances, including those which are reckoned among the non-sophistic, the variety of plots, aesthetic viewpoints, and orientation in this ancient species of novel was considerably greater than what is commonly supposed to be typical of the Greek romance, heretofore too narrowly defined. The plot is not necessarily concerned with a pair of lovers, as it is not in Apollonius of Tyre or in the Recognitiones of Pseudo-Clement, both of which are genuine romances in a sense which is not true of the apocryphal acts of the martyrs; travel and hazardous adventures by land and sea are not a necessary ingredient, as they are not in Longus; the main interest may be centered in the characters and their psychological experience, rather than in external events, as is the case in the Daphnis and Chloe of Longus, and in many parts of Chariton. Beyond this, we have to consider what must have been the aesthetic viewpoint and orientation in those erotic romances which are mentioned by ancient authors but which have not come down to us. Did the love story always end happily in those books, or might the ending have been tragic, as is the case in almost every story that is told by the elegaic or dramatic poets about mythical lovers (and even in Richardson's Clarissa)? Might it not be that in some of those lost romances the comic or realistic proprieties were as much blended with the fundamentally ideal and serious tendency as they are in Achilles Tatius or in Fielding?

Suidas mentions a Xenophon of Cyprus who wrote a book entitled Cypriaca, concerning which he ways: “It too [like the Ephesiaca of Xenophon of Ephesus just mentioned] is a story … dealing with an erotic theme, concerning Cinyras, Myrrha, and Adonis.” It is hard to imagine how this myth, which told about the incestuous relations of Myrrha with her father Cinyras, could have been shaped into a romance in which the ending was a happy one, rather than tragic, as elsewhere. This story of incest was too well-known to be completely ignored or avoided by any author writing about Cinyras and Myrrha. One may suppose that the main part of the romance dealt, as in Ovid, but more extensively, with the inner conflicts, passions, contrivances, and adventures of Myrrha herself, being, so to speak, a psychological novel. However, even if both parties were represented as innocently unaware of each other's identity, in any case the ending must have involved the recognition of incest and would thereby the tragic. The love of Myrrha for her father Cinyras had been elaborated in Alexandrian fashion by the Roman poet C. Helvius Cinna in his famous Smyrna (= Myrrha), to the writing of which he had devoted nine years; and the incestuous love of Byblis for her brother Caunus was told by Parthenius in hexameter verse.²³ The treatment of love in the Alexandrian and Roman poets, when it related to mythical or historical persons, was psychoanalytical in character and the story ended almost always in calamity or tragedy. No sophisticated writer in antiquity was likely to deal seriously and objectively with love as his principal theme in any other fashion; and this was the fashion in which a formal prose writer of the second century, one trained in the learned or academic tradition, would naturally handle a love story if it were the principal topic to which his artistic effort was directed. Such, as we noted above, was not the case with Iamblichus, Achilles Tatius and Heliodorus. For them the conventional story of love and adventure with its happy ending, taken over from the presophistic romance, was a perfunctory theme of secondary interest used as an attractive framework for the exhibition of other more sophistical wares; but the nature of the myth chosen by Xenophon of Cyprus is a clear indication that love in his prose romance must have been treated in essentially the same fashion as it was in the Alexandrian poets and in Ovid. These poets were not “forerunners” of the Greek romance in the sense intended by Rohde. They had no influence on its origins, and their conventions in writing about love were not brought into it from above until long after the species romance, as a new literary form with a happy ending, had been born and propagated in a lower intellectual environment. In order to invent the kind of drama that they wanted, namely an externalized story of love and adventure with a happy ending, the earlier presophistic romancers, who were men of naïve sentiments uncontrolled by intellectual standards, would choose for their theme either an obscure myth about whose principals next to nothing was known, or, like the author of the Ninus romance, they would deal with that part of a mythical hero's or heroine's life concerning which tradition had been silent. That was not the method of poets and sophistic writers generally. What the latter chose to deal with, if it was to be their principal subject, was nearly always either a famous myth or the essential part of an aetiological myth, however obscure it might be; and it is clear that Xenophon of Cyprus must have followed their example in writing a romance in prose about the love of Cinyras and Myrrha. Once the methods, values, and viewpoints of the ancient poets in dealing with a story of personal experiences had been carried over into prose narrative, as was probably the case in Xenophon of Cyprus, the potentialities of the form romance, as literature with a tragic, or ethical, or psychoanalytical orientation, were greatly extended. The rigid convention of the happy ending, along with other restrictions due to the environment in which this literary species had originated, was broken down and the form was open henceforth, by precedent, for the exploitation of all such narrative values as are represented by the ancient poets early and late on the one hand, and by such modern novelists as Thomas Hardy and James Joyce on the other.

Strict loyalty of the lovers to each other outwardly unto death was not so inevitable a feature of Greek romance as modern students, with Heliodorus in mind, have been inclined to assume. That convention is observed, as a matter of fact, in only two of the six erotic romances whose contents are known to us entire or in outline, namely, in Heliodorus and in Xenophon of Ephesus. Chariton's Callirhoe is induced by hard circumstances, though not compelled, to marry a second husband, whom she cherishes with affection and respect until her first husband, Chaereas, whom she prefers and has never ceased to love, is finally restored to her. Sinonis, the heroine in Iamblichus, marries another man for no other purpose, apparently, than to spite her first husband, Rhodanes, and to take revenge upon an imaginary rival; but in the end Rhodanes gets her back by defeating her husband, the king of Syria, in war. The innocent Daphnis, in the pastoral romance of Longus, is given a practical lesson in love-making by a neighbor's wife, a young woman married to an old man, who takes him into the woods apart from Chloe; and Clitophon in Achilles Tatius, though in love with Leucippe, satisfies the passion of the widow Melitte on the floor of his prison.

The behavior of lovers in Achilles Tatius (including their attempted premarital union) is described realistically and sympathetically, and there is nothing in his representation of their passions which would seem immoral or cynical to a cultivated man of antiquity or to the average modern novelist, however shameless it might seem to Photius the patriarch in an age of Christian asceticism, or to a small-minded person like the author of the Ninus romance for whom morality in all its aspects consisted, apparently, in nothing more than the mechanical observance of social respectabilities and taboos.

The manner of dealing with love in a Greek romance in the last half of the second century must have depended, as it does in the modern novel and in most of ancient literature, much less on conventions observed by the pioneers of the genre than on the taste and fancy of the individual author and the kind of readers for whom he wrote. The orientation of an erotic romance might be either inward or outward, tragic or sentimentally ideal, contemplative or sensational, realistic or extravagant, puritanical, prurient, or pornographic. Suidas mentions the Rhodiaka in nineteen books of one Philip of Amphipolis, which, he says, was “very indecent.” … The same author also wrote Koaka and Thasiaka, each in two books, according to Suidas; and the physician Theodorus Priscianus at the beginning of the fifth century recommends the erotic writings of this Philip of Amphipolis, along with those of Iamblichus and a certain Herodian, as prurient reading good for stimulating the sexual energy of partially impotent males.

The potentialities of the ancient prose romance as a literary form, once the writing of it had been taken over by sophisticated authors, were as great, therefore, as those of the modern novel; seeing that the varieties which it naturally admitted in the exploitation of a story of personal experience were as manifold as those of ancient literature itself. The only limitations in this direction were those imposed by the nature of thought and feeling in late antiquity. As it happened, this completely open stage in the development of the ancient romance was not attained until that worldly pagan culture upon which the species itself depended for its life was very close to its end. The ancient romance died almost as soon as it reached its maturity.

The nature of Greek romance in its earlier persophistic stage may be seen in Chariton's Chaereas and Callirhoe, an outline of which here follows.

6

I, Chariton of Aphrodisias, secretary to Athenagoras the advocate, will describe a love affair that came about in Syracuse.

Hermocrates the Syracusan general, he who conquered the Athenians, had a daughter named Callirhoe, who was a wonderful prodigy of a maid, and the idol of all Sicily. Indeed her beauty was more than human; it was divine; and not the beauty of a mere Nereid or mountain nymph, but of Aphrodite herself, the maiden's goddess. Reports about her astonishing beauty spread abroad everywhere and suitors came pouring into Syracuse, men of power and the sons of kings, and not from Sicily alone but from Italy and Epirus and the mainland of Greece. But Eros wanted to make a match to his own liking. There was a certain young man named Chaereas who surpassed all the youth of his generation in beauty, being such a one as sculptors and painters represent Achilles to have been, and Nireus and Hippolytus and Alcibiades. He was the son of Ariston, the second greatest man in Syracuse after Hermocrates. And there was a certain political jealousy existing between these two men, so much so that they would have promised their children in marriage to anyone rather than to each other's offspring. But Eros is fond of strife and rejoices in victories of a paradoxical nature.

At a festival of Aphrodite almost all the women in Syracuse went out to the temple, and among them Callirhoe accompanied by her mother. On that occasion Chaereas, returning home from the gymnasium, shining like a star with the ruddy glow of youth, met Callirhoe on a narrow path, the god Eros having strategically arranged this meeting. Chaereas went home deeply wounded, “like a champion in battle who has been dealt a fatal blow, ashamed to fall down but unable to stand up.” Callirhoe, likewise affected, fell at the feet of Aphrodite praying for possession of the lover thus revealed to her. Both thereafter spent a terrible night of anxiety. The girl suffered more because of her enforced silence; but Chaereas, already wasting away bodily from love-sickness, ventured to tell his parents that he loved Callirhoe, and that he could not live without her. His father urged him not to woo Callirhoe because Hermocrates would never consent to the marriage, and his refusal would be humiliating to the whole family. Chaereas was too ill to go to the gymnasium any more, and when his friends there found out the cause they all pitied him. He was in danger of death. Something had to be done about this alarming situation. A public assembly was held of the citizens of Syracuse, and as soon as the crowd was seated they all called out to Hermocrates, urging him to save Chaereas by allowing his daughter to marry him. Hermocrates felt obliged to consent, and the wedding was arranged amid great public rejoicing. When the bride and groom appeared in public, many people bowed down before them, as though they were deities. Even such was the wedding of Thetis on Mt. Pelion as the poets tell it. But an evil demon, jealous of felicity, attended upon this occasion, as they say that the goddess Discord was present at the other.

For the numerous unsuccessful suitors, being angry and considering themselves insulted because a private citizen had been preferred to them, made common cause and held an indignation meeting. The first man who rose to speak was a young Italian, son of the tyrant of Rhegium, who, after denouncing Chaereas, proposed that plans be made to kill him. This was approved by everyone present except the tyrant of Agrigentum, who said in effect that he too would be

“much for open war, as not behind in hate,”

were it not for the fact that Hermocrates was a dangerous man to oppose. Guile must be used. “For it is by guile and intrigue, rather than by outright force, that we rulers manage our kingdoms. Elect me as your general in the war against Chaereas and I promise to break up this marriage. I will arm Jealousy against him, and she, with Passion as her ally, will do great havoc.” The first scheme tried by the suitors fails, but on the second attempt they succeed by bribing Callirhoe's maid. Chaereas is told confidentially by one who pretends to be his friend that his wife is unfaithful to him and that she entertains a lover in secret. In order that he may see this for himself, he is brought upon a scene carefully arranged by the suitors to frame Callirhoe as an adulteress. Chaereas is completely deceived and, in his fury at what he supposes to be Callirhoe's treachery, he kicks her so violently that she swoons and appears to be dead. Thereafter he spends the whole night cross-examining the servants and, after discovering the truth, is so filled with remorse that he wishes to commit suicide. He is restrained from so doing by his friend Polycharmus, who performs the same office on several later occasions, his only function in the story being to console Chaereas whenever the latter despairs, and to marry his sister at the end. On being tried for murder the next day, Chaereas makes no effort to defend or excuse himself, but instead pleads vigorously for his own condemnation. Hermocrates, however, has learned the truth and through his influence our hero, Chaereas, is acquitted in spite of himself. Thereupon follows the funeral of Callirhoe, carried out with great pomp and splendor. Still alive, although presumed to be dead, she is entombed in a large vault near the seashore, and with her is deposited a great deal of wealth in the form of gold, jewelry and fine raiment. At this point the villain of the story is introduced. His name is Theron, 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. Theron is very anxious about the treasure that he had seen buried with Callirhoe. Lying in bed that night, 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 job? Stop and think now, Theron, who is the most suitable of those you know?” This soliloquy continues in lively fashion, and in the end Theron plans to break into the tomb with his men on the following night and carry away the booty upon the sea. “Waiting until the very hour of midnight,” says Chariton, “Theron silently and with muffled oars drew near the tomb.” Meanwhile Callirhoe has recovered consciousness, and her emotions on realizing the situation are effectively put forth in a soliloquy. When Theron finds Callirhoe alive in the sepulchre, he decides, after some hesitation and a lively debate among his men, to carry her off with the rest of the booty and sell her for a high price.²⁴ On arriving overseas in the neighborhood of Miletus, he brings his ship to shore some ten miles outside the city, for it was dangerous to be selling a freeborn woman, and he has to go about the business secretly. With two companions he enters the city and begins looking about for a wealthy buyer. At first he has no luck and is much worried, lying awake nights and talking to himself. But one day he happens to be sitting in a shop in Miletus when a wealthy man dressed in mourning passes along attended by a crowd of servants. Theron inquires of one of the servants “Who is that man?” “You must be a stranger around here,” replies the servant, “if you fail to recognize Dionysius, who is the foremost of all the Ionians in wealth, family, and education, and a friend of the great king himself.” “But why is he dressed in mourning?” “Because his wife died recently, and he was very fond of her.” Theron, having come across a man who was both wealthy and uxorious, follows up this conversation and becomes well acquainted with the servant, whose name is Leonas. He is the chief steward of Dionysius and the business manager of his estate. He becomes much interested in the possibility of purchasing Callirhoe for his master Dionysius, and with that in mind he takes Theron to his own house where the two men talk things over. It appears that Theron's ship has been moored off Dionysius' own land, so that the whole transaction can be carried on privately. Theron explains to the steward Leonas that Callirhoe is a servant girl whom he bought from a Sybarite woman who was jealous of her beauty and wanted to be rid of her. This was necessary in order to satisfy the conscience of Dionysius, who, as a man of honor and moral principle, would not buy Callirhoe if he knew the truth about her. Theron goes to the ship to fetch Callirhoe, but does not let her know what is going on. When he returns with her to the house of Leonas, all present are astounded by her beauty. Some thought that they were really looking at a goddess, because a rumor was abroad in the country that Aphrodite at that time was making her epiphany. More anxious than ever to clinch the deal, Leonas insists on making a down payment of a silver talent to Theron until such time as a formal contract of sale can be drawn up in the city. But Theron, after receiving the talent, makes off in his ship immediately, resolved to take no chances of becoming involved with the magistrates of Miletus. Callirhoe, left alone to rest in a comfortable apartment in Leonas' house, bewails her misfortune. Gazing at the image of Chaereas on her ring, she kisses it and exclaims, “Now indeed am I dead to you, Chaereas, separated by such an expanse of sea. You mourn for me and repent, sitting by an empty grave and bearing witness to my loyalty after death. And I, the daughter of Hermocrates, your wife, have been sold this day to a master.” So lamenting, sleep came upon her at last.

Book II tells how Dionysius, at first uninterested, meets Callirhoe and falls deeply in love with her, although it occasions some struggles with his conscience; and how Callirhoe, finding herself two months pregnant by Chaereas, feels obliged to consent to marriage with Dionysius in spite of her very great love for her husband. For her child's sake, lest he be born in slavery, as well as for her own interest, it was about the only thing that she could do. Here no deus ex machina intervenes, as is so often the case in other romances. The hard circumstances which induce, though they do not compel Callirhoe to marry Dionysius, remain unalterable, and our heroine has to solve her own problem on the basis of things as they are. These developments are described by the author in a very effective way and with much dramatic irony. Here the interest of the story is focused throughout upon the characters themselves and the emotional struggles which they undergo. Dionysius is a kind man with good instincts who wants to do the right thing both legally and ethically. His dealings with Callirhoe are marked by much delicacy and consideration for her feelings. Although he is madly in love with her, he will not take advantage of the fact that she is actually in his power, but rests his whole hope on the chance of winning her love, or at least her willing consent to marry him. Failing that, he is ready to commit suicide. During this time Callirhoe has been under the care of a middle-aged servant woman named Plango who takes a friendly interest in her and advises her confidentially. She arranges a meeting between Dionysius and Callirhoe, in which the latter tells Dionysius the principal facts about herself and her recent experiences, without, strange to say, making any mention of her marriage to Chaereas. It is only later, when Dionysius is married to Callirhoe, that he learns about Chaereas accidentally, when Callirhoe talks about him in her sleep as though he were no longer living. It seems hardly plausible under the circumstances that Dionysius should continue throughout to believe, as he does, that Callirhoe's child is of his own begetting, especially after he learns that Callirhoe was married to Chaereas shortly before she came to him. This is one of several loose ends in Chariton's story which seem to indicate that he is following, in part at least, a popular legend in which some of his data were already fixed for him. Callirhoe's child, the successor to Hermocrates, as he is repeatedly called in this romance, had to be fathered ostensibly by Dionysius of Miletus, apparently, as Naber suggests, in order to become the famous Dionysius I, tyrant of Syracuse. But of this more later.

“Now,” says Chariton (III 2 end), “I want to tell you what happened meanwhile in Syracuse.” 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 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 Callirhoe 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 Callirhoe. 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 scoundrel, for he kept filching the drink apportioned to his companions, robbing 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 crucifixion.” (III 3) Meanwhile the Syracusan trireme with Chaereas on board was approaching. Their main purpose was to recover the body or person of Callirhoe. On boarding the pirate ship, Chaereas found Theron half dead and began to question him. Theron said that it was only by accident that he had boarded the ship; he had not known that it was a pirate ship; and he alone of all those on board had been spared, owing to his piety. Afterwards Theron is taken before the assembly of the Syracusans where he is again questioned and where he repeats the same story; but in spite of his protestations, that he had “never done anything wrong in his life,” 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.”

From Theron the inquisitors learned that Callirhoe was sold to someone in Miletus, but to whom is not known. Hermocrates in a public assembly proposes that an embassy be sent to Miletus, at that time under Persian rule, for the purpose of recovering Callirhoe. Hereupon the crowd shouts, “We'll all sail to Miletus.” Hermocrates decides that five envoys will be enough, these to include Chaereas. When the Syracusan trireme comes to shore, by chance just where Theron had landed, on the estate of Dionysius, his steward Phocas, the husband of Plango, after learning from a sailor what the Syracusans have come for, takes it upon himself to have the ship destroyed by a Persian garrison in the neighborhood, on the ground that it has come with hostile intent. Some of the crew are killed, but among the rest, who are taken captive, Chaereas and his friend Polycharmus are sold as slaves to Mithridates, the satrap of Caria. From the account of this affair given by Phocas, who implies that all the Syracusans were killed, Callirhoe concludes that Chaereas is dead and Dionysius holds a public funeral in his honor, erecting a cenotaph. Mithridates, Chaereas' master, attends this funeral ostensibly to honor Dionysius but really for the purpose of seeing Callirhoe, the fame of whose beauty has spread over all Western Asia. On this occasion the effect of her beauty upon those who beheld it was literally stunning. Those who tried to look upon it with the naked eye were compelled to turn aside their gaze, as though they were looking at the sun; even children suffered somewhat, and Mithridates the governor of Caria fell down in a faint. Mithridates makes a friend of Chaereas, after discovering who he is, and presently joins with him in sending letters and presents to Callirhoe. By helping Chaereas and pitting him against Dionysius, he hopes somehow to step in between the two and carry off the prize. As soon as Chaereas learns from Mithridates that Callirhoe is married to Dionysius, he is eager to go to Miletus right away and demand back his wife; but Mithridates restrains him, saying, “How can you, a lone stranger, go into a great city like Miletus and deprive the foremost citizen there of his legal wife? In what power are you trusting? Your only possible allies, Hermocrates and Mithridates, will be a long way off and better able to mourn for you than to bring you aid.” On the advice of Mithridates Chaereas writes a letter to Callirhoe telling her that he is living, thanks to the kindness of Mithridates, his benefactor. He tells her what has happened to him and begs her to return his love. This letter, along with one from Mithridates, in which the latter offers to help Callirhoe regain Chaereas, even at the cost of making war on the Milesians, is intercepted and given to Dionysius, who infers that Mithridates is the author of both letters, and that he has forged the name of Chaereas. Soon the quarrel between him and Mithridates is reported to King Artaxerxes, who summons both men to Babylon for trial and orders Dionysius to bring Callirhoe with him. Her triumphal procession through Asia to the king's court and her sojourn there are full of incidents that bring anxiety and torment to both her husband and herself. Dionysius was pained by being congratulated so much, and the greatness of his good fortune (in having Callirhoe) only made him the more miserable. For, “being an educated man, he reflected that love is fond of change.” He feared every man as a possible rival, and even the king proved to be such.

Mithridates, whom Dionysius has accused of plotting adultery, takes Chaereas and Polycharmus with him to Babylon as star witnesses; but this is unknown to Dionysius, who thinks that Chaereas is dead. The trial scene, which is the culminating point of a suspense which has been long and steadily gathering momentum, is much superior in dramatic effect to anything that one meets with elsewhere in the Greek romance. All the factors in the situation are clearly before the reader, as in a Greek tragedy, and the surprises are all for the characters. Dionysius in his opening speech, accusing Mithridates, is very eloquent and very confident that he can prove his case, because he thinks that Chaereas is dead; but the reader knows that Chaereas is present in that very courtroom, though concealed. Dionysius ends his speech with these words: “I have stated the case under trial. The demonstration is sure. One of two things must be; either Chaereas is living, or Mithridates is proved guilty. 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. 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 that, and he may be let off. But consider, O king, how shameless this adulterer is who gives the lie even to a dead man.” On hearing this, everyone in the crowded courtroom inclines strongly to the side of Dionysius, and the king looks hard at Mithridates. But what the latter has to say in his own defense is no less eloquent and persuasive. “Even if I were guilty,” he says, “I could avoid conviction; for Dionysius is not complaining on behalf of a legal wife, but one that he bought for a silver talent. The law of adultery does not pertain to slaves. If Dionysius maintains that Callirhoe was free when he married her, that only means that he enslaved her, since he acted against the will of her husband and without the consent of her father. I have not injured Dionysius either as husband or as master. He accuses me of intended adultery, and not being able to prove the act, reads you meaningless letters; but the law is aimed at the deed, not at the intention.” Then turning to Dionysius, he continues: “I might say that I did not write that letter, that it is not in my hand, that it is Chaereas who is making the advances to Callirhoe, and that he is the one that you should be charging with adultery. But you claim that Chaereas is dead and that I am only using his name. You are challenging me, Dionysius, in a way that is not to your interest. You'd better withdraw your charge. If you don't, you'll be sorry for it. I'm warning you, you'll lose Callirhoe; and it won't be me whom the king finds to be an adulterer, but you.” When Dionysius persists as before, Mithridates lifts his voice in prayer to the gods, asking them to reveal Chaereas, if only for this one occasion; and while he is still speaking Chaereas walks in. “Who could begin to describe the scene in that courtroom?” exclaims our author. “What poet ever brought so wonderful a story upon the stage? You would think you were in a theater filled with a thousand passions. Callirhoe herself was astounded and stood speechless, gazing with wide-open eyes at Chaereas. It would seem to me that even the king at that moment wished he were Chaereas.” As the result of this trial Mithridates is dismissed with honor and the date is set for a new trial between the rival husbands Chaereas and Dionysius. But King Artaxerxes, having fallen in love with Callirhoe and wishing to protract her stay in Babylon, keeps postponing the trial until, as it happens, he is suddenly obliged to march out with his army against the Egyptians, who have revolted and already overrun most of Syria. With him on the march he takes Dionysius and all the women of the court, including Callirhoe and Statira, the queen. Chaereas, having heard a false rumor that the king has awarded Callirhoe to Dionysius, joins the Egyptian army, takes Tyre by strategem from the Persians, captures the island of Arados, where Artaxerxes had left the women for safe keeping, and so gains possession of Callirhoe. Chaereas, the commanding general, at first does not know that his wife is among the captives, nor does she know who the conqueror is; and this situation gives rise to some scenes remarkable for their dramatic irony. Here, at the beginning of Book VIII, the author once more takes us into his confidence: “I think,” he says, “that this last chapter will be most pleasing to our 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. And now I shall tell you how the goddess revealed the truth, and made the lovers known one to the other. It was evening,” etc. The reunion of the lovers is described by the author with immense enthusiasm and no little felicity of style. Afterwards, Callirhoe, unknown to Chaereas—for she realized how prone to jealousy he was—wrote an affectionate letter to Dionysius, as follows: “Callirhoe to Dionysius, her benefactor, greetings. You are the one who saved me from pirates and slavery. Please don't be angry with me. I am with you in spirit on account of our child, whom now I leave with you to bring up and to educate worthily of us. Have him married, when he gets to be a man, and send him to Syracuse to see his grandfather. Give my best to Plango. Farewell, good Dionysius, and remember you Callirhoe.” Chaereas had thought of taking Queen Statira, wife of King Artaxerxes Mnemon, back to Syracuse with him as a handmaid for Callirhoe, but the latter would hear of no such thing. No, indeed. She and Statira had become quite chummy during their association in Babylon, and Callirhoe had arranged for a ship to take her good friend immediately back to the king. And now was the moment of parting. Callirhoe, taking her friend by the hand, escorted her on board the ship and said, “Good-bye, my dear Statira. Remember me, and write to me often at Syracuse … I shall tell my parents how grateful I am to you, and shall make the fact known to the gods of Hellas. I send my little child in your care. … Consider him a pledge in place of myself.” As she said this the tears began to flow, and the women about her were moved to lamentation. Then, as she was leaving the ship, Callirhoe bent over toward Statira and blushing put a letter in her hand, saying, “Give this to Dionysius, poor man. Try to console him.” Chaereas and Callirhoe arrive safely in the harbor of Syracuse, accompanied by three hundred Greek mercenaries, who had helped Chaereas in his campaigns, and twenty triremes laden with the rich spoils of war. The Syracusans are suspicious of these ships, although they are said to be Egyptian merchantmen; and Hermocrates allows only one of them, that on which Chaereas is aboard, to land. On this ship an elaborate stage scene has been arranged under a covering of Babylonian tapestry. It is claimed that under the covering are the wares of the Egyptian merchants. A great crowd of curious people are gathered on the shore wondering about what is going on. When Hermocrates comes on board, the tapestry is suddenly removed and there, behold, the incomparable Callirhoe reclining upon a gold-studded couch, clad in scarlet robes of Tyrian dye, and beside her Chaereas, our hero, in the uniform of a general. “No peal of thunder ever broke upon the ears of men so loud, no lightning such did ever blind the eyes of those who see, nor, treasure found of gold, did ever man cry out so lustily as that great crowd, when they beheld a sight so strange, so far beyond belief.” Hermocrates leaped onto the stage and throwing his arms about his daughter exclaimed, “Child, are you living, do my wits deceive me?” “I am alive, father; now in very truth, since I behold you living.” All wept tears of joy. After this, the Syracusans, one and all, hurry into the theater for a public meeting, in order to hear all about Chaereas and Callirhoe, to see them in person, to praise them, and to pass such official decrees as are recommended by Chaereas in the interest of his soldiers.

In order to add to the felicity of the occasion, Chaereas proposes to the assembly that his sister be married to Polycharmus, and that a part of the spoils of war be given to her as a dowry. This is joyfully approved; although this sister of Chaereas has not hitherto been mentioned, and Polycharmus has not been consulted about the marriage. Meanwhile Callirhoe goes to the temple of Aphrodite to offer thanks to the goddess for the happy outcome of her trials, praying that she may never again be separated from Chaereas, or outlive him.

“So much,” says Chariton in the last sentence, “have I composed … on the subject of Callirhoe.” What Thucydides did for the Peloponnesian War, that Chariton has done for the daughter of Hermocrates!

The ideal sentimental values which Chariton puts forth in this story, and the psychological attitudes which it reveals, obviously belong to those spiritual and cultural forces which brought about the birth of romance as a new literary form.

7

The substance of Chariton's book, our earliest extant specimen of Greek romance, is much more closely connected with historical persons and events than is the case in any of the later romances. This is true with reference to the pattern of many episodes and to the actors and names of actors who play a part in the story;²⁵ and—what is more significant—with reference to the identity of the principal character Callirhoe, who is the daughter of the famous Syracusan general Hermocrates. The name Callirhoe, which had various mythical and poetical associations, may have been invented by Chariton; but some of the principal experiences which this heroine undergoes in the romance are closely parallel to things which are told by Diodorus and Plutarch concerning an unnamed daughter of Hermocrates: namely, that she married the famous Dionysius I of Syracuse (instead of an unknown Dionysius of Miletus); that she was assaulted by rebel soldiers (instead of by a jealous husband Chaereas, doing what Nero did to Poppaea), and that she died, or was believed to have died, as a result of those injuries (compare the apparent death of Callirhoe). It is aptly surmised by Professor Wilhelm Schmid that the nucleus of a legend about Hermocrates and his daughter, which may have concerned his connection with Dionysius I and the latter's lineage, was to be found in the historians of Sicily, in Timaeus perhaps, or in Philistus, a contemporary of Dionysius, who wrote about him at great length in his history and flattered him. However this may be, there are some loose ends in Chariton's story which are hard to account for otherwise than on the assumption of a pre-existing popular or historiographical tradition which is not elsewhere attested. We are assured, for example, that the infant son of Callirhoe, really by Chaereas, but ostensibly by Dionysius of Miletus in the romance, shall one day sail to Syracuse, when he grows up, and see Hermocrates (II, 9 and 11; III 8; VIII 4, 5, 8); he is to be the successor of Hermocrates, as was the famous Dionysius I, and great hopes are held out for his future. But it is strange that this child should have been sent to Miletus to be brought up by Dionysius (VIII 4), when his parents, after the capture of Arados, could just as well have taken him with them to Syracuse. This episode is so purposeless insofar as the story is concerned, and so peculiar or unnatural in the conduct of the lovers—especially of Chaereas, who is not even consulted about the sending away of his child—that it seems unlikely to have been invented by Chariton. The same is true of such other episodes as the marriage of Callirhoe to Dionysius, and the brutal and almost fatal assault made by the otherwise ideal lover Chaereas upon his bride. Such episodes seem to owe their presence in the romance, not to the purely arbitrary invention of the author bent on telling an ideal story, but to the historical or legendary materials with which he worked, and whose patterns he followed, however much he may have altered those traditional data in terms of time, place, and the identity of the actors. It has been very plausibly suggested, by S. A. Naber,²⁶ that Chariton was thinking of Callirhoe's child as the future Dionysius I of Syracuse, who is said to have been the son of an earlier Hermocrates (otherwise unknown) and who won his way into power, as we know from the historians, by championing the faction of the famous Hermocrates. The tyrant's well-known literary aspirations may have suggested the intellectual qualities of his presumable Milesian foster-father in the romance, and the tradition that he was of low birth and obscure origin may have led to the creation by his followers of some such myth as Chariton seems to have in mind.

In choosing an historical character, the daughter of Hermocrates, as his heroine, Chariton was proceeding on artistic principles which were inevitable for the earliest romancers. They were bound, by the long-established conventions of serious or ideal narrative, whether in poetry or in prose, to write about presumably historical persons; and this artistic requirement was equally well satisfied whether the subject of a poem or a romance was a person well known to history, or purely and patently mythical; whether he was Xerxes or Inachus, Gyges or Oedipus, the daughter of Hermocrates or Daphnis the herdsman, Alcibiades or Nireus, Semiramis the queen of Assyria (ca. 809-782 b.c.) or Parthenope the siren who died and was enshrined at Naples. All these are equally historical from the artistic standpoint of ancient writers. The two characters last mentioned are the heroines of erotic romances of which we have fragments on papyrus dating from the second century. It is probable, as Lavagnini has demonstrated, that many of these heroines of romance, like those in Ovid and the Alexandrian poets, were taken from local myths, the bare outlines of which had already been rationalized and the characters humanized to some extent by historians and antiquarians who had recorded them briefly in connection with the founding of cities and the origins of cults and local institutions. Some of the myths used by romancers were better known, or closer to real history than others; but even a well-known legend, like that of Ninus and Semiramis, could be made to contain a completely new and lengthy story of love and adventure without contradicting what was known to tradition about its principal characters. The more obscure and recondite a myth was, the more easily it would serve as a base on which to construct a series of invented episodes and characters of whatever kind. Once the formal pattern of romance writing had become established and conventional, it was no longer necessary to select a real myth as the starting point for one's fictional narrative, and only the semblance of such would serve the purpose. All the extant romances, except that of Achilles Tatius, which relates—in the comic tradition—the experiences of a contemporary individual, are based either on real myths or local legends, or else they have the appearance of being so founded, as in Xenophon and Heliodorus.

8

Greek romance, as a new literary species with a purpose and direction all its own, was, as we noted above (p. 178), fundamentally drama in substance and historiography in its outward form. This is true also of the early modern novel, and the fact is historically significant. The novel is the necessary successor to stage-drama on the popular level for a reading public; and since its subject matter is theoretically historical, and its form that of prose narrative, it naturally follows the conventions of historiography, some of which in turn were fundamentally dramatic. Except for its form as narration, the novel is drama in a new quantitative dimension, not different in the nature of its substance and purpose from stage-drama, whose limits it transcends, but multiplied in respect to the number or length of its acts and capable of indefinite extension. Its tendency, like that of many folktales and of the early romantic epic, is away from organic structure in the direction of agglutinative parataxis. It is possible of course for even a lengthy novel to be constructed on organic principles with a strong inner synthesis; but such novels are exceptional, since multiplicity of action, which is the primary demand of the reading public, does not lend itself easily to that kind or degree of organic unity which, for example, Aristotle admired in the Oedipus. Only a loose framework with arbitrary limits of extension, allowing for the insertion of an indefinite number of successive episodes, as in the Iliad or Odyssey, will serve the main purpose well enough. All the plots of Greek romance known to us have an elastic framework of this kind, consisting usually in an initial separation of the principals followed by their reunion at the end. The episodes which are brought into an open plot of this nature may vary greatly both in number and in the motivation by which they are introduced and connected one with another. Some authors show more regard for organic structure than others, and are thereby more truly dramatic. In comparison with the later romances of Xenophon, Iamblichus, Achilles Tatius, and Heliodorus, that of Chariton, the earliest, is relatively very simple and compact. Its episodes are few in number, comparatively, and well motivated. Things seldom happen by accident, but are brought about usually by the willful and plausible actions of the main characters. The device known as deus ex machina, by which a lucky and purely fortuitous event resolves one situation and leads to another, is rare in Chaereas and Callirhoe, but very common in all of the later romances. Chariton's plot, unlike that of any of the authors above mentioned, has the structural economy, the inner motivation, and the overall unity of a drama in five acts, as follows:

• I. Marriage of Chaereas and Callirhoe at Syracuse. The fortunes of Callirhoe: her apparent death; her abduction by the pirate Theron, who sells her to Dionysius in Syracuse; the courting of Callirhoe by Dionysius and their marriage.
• II. Adventures of Chaereas: He pursues the pirates in the effort to recover Callirhoe. Learns from the pirate Theron that Callirhoe was sold in Miletus. Lands at Miletus, but his company is destroyed by a Persian garrison, and he himself is sold as a slave to Mithridates, governor of Caria. Mithridates becomes a friend to Chaereas, when he learns who he is, and the two write letters to Callirhoe. Dionysius, having intercepted these letters, concludes that Mithridates is plotting to get possession of Callirhoe, and that the letter from Chaereas, whom he supposes to be dead, was forged by Mithridates. The complaint of Dionysius against Mithridates becomes known and both are summoned to Babylon for trial before the king. Mithridates takes Chaereas with him as a witness.
• III. The action that has gone before is recapitulated for the first time (V 1), by way of introducing the climax of the drama. The trial of the case of Dionysius vs. Mithridates, on a large stage-setting at the king's court, results in the elimination of Mithridates and the introduction of Chaereas as the real opponent of Dionysius. The case of these two rivals is then scheduled for trial at a future date; but the king, having himself fallen in love with Callirhoe, postpones this trial indefinitely in his own interest, until, owing to a revolt of the Eygptians, he is compelled to take the field along with all the people of his court (Bks. V and VI).
• IV. The military triumphs of Chaereas fighting as a general on the Egyptian side against the king. In the end he gains possession of Arados, along with all the king's women, including Callirhoe; but he does not know that Callirhoe is among his captives, nor does she know that the victorious general is her dear husband Chaereas (Bk. VII).
• V. Before the curtain rises, at the beginning of Bk. VIII, the author bows before his readers and says: “I think that this last chapter (act) will be most pleasing to our readers (audience); for it is a purging of the gloomy events that have gone before,” etc. Then follows the joyful and highly dramatic recognition scene between Chaereas and Callirhoe, and their 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 evident to anyone who has read the outlines given above. 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 by a deus ex machina in the preceding narrative; but in Chariton the trial scene, which is the culminating point of a suspense that has been gathering momentum for the space of an entire book (IV 3 to V 6), and in which the fortunes of all the principal characters are directly involved, overshadows in interest and importance everything that has preceded, and what follows consists in the unravelling of the situation thereby developed. Moreover, for recognizing 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 serves to keep up 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 exalted 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 seek to entertain us with sensational surprises, as in a mystery story, Chariton, in the manner of the Greek tragedians, appeals primarily to our contemplative sense.

The analysis of Chaereas and Callirhoe as structurally equivalent to a drama in five acts, which we outlined above, was first made by R. Reitzenstein in his Hellenistische Wundererzählung (Leipzig, 1906), pp. 95 f. In this part of his book Reitzenstein describes first the rhetorical theory of artistic narration, as set forth explicitly by Cicero and other ancient writers, and, secondly, the concrete manifestations of this theory as seen in the practice of Sallust in his historical monographs, the Jugurtha and the Catiline (both of which are also divided by Reitzenstein into five acts, pp. 87 f.), as well as of Chariton in his romance. The theory as outlined by Cicero in the De Inventione (I 27 = Auct. ad Herennium I 12-13) relates to narratio apart from that used in pleading cases in court (tertium genus, a causa civili remotum), irrespective of the literary forms in which it might be employed, and of prose or verse. The specifications for all this non-forensic narratio are here formulated on the patterns of stage-drama in respect both to the action, or plot, and to the characters and their emotions. They were also applicable in Cicero's view to narration in history writing, as we see from his letter to Lucceius quoted below; but the illustrations here mentioned and quoted are drawn only from Terence. The substance of the action, we are told, may be one of three kinds: fabula, as used in tragedy, which has neither truth nor the likeness of truth (contrary to Aristotle, who reckons the myths of tragedy with historical things); historia, something which actually occurred (res gesta), but distant in time from the present; and argumentum, which is fictitious, but of such a nature that it might have occurred, as the plots of comedy. Here Cicero and the Auctor ad Herennium are recommending, by implication, rhetorical exercises in imitation of well-known literary forms, which Cicero illustrates by reference to tragedy and comedy. The same applies to the second aspect of non-forensic narratio, which relates to the characters in action in any kind of plot. On this side there should be, in the words of Cicero: multa festivitas confecta ex rerum varietate, animorum dissimilitudine, gravitate, levitate, spe, metu, suspicione, desiderio, dissimulatione, errore, misericordia, fortunae commutatione, insperato incommodo, subita laetitia, iucundo exitu rerum. In other words narratio, wherever employed, should have all the emotional appeal along with the characteristic devices of stage-drama as an artistic entertainment.²⁷ In the field of historiography this prescription was followed out most commonly in the historical monography, where unity could be attained by concentrating upon a single group of closely related events. Before Cicero's time Polybius had had much to say in protest about the disposition of those who wrote particular histories (i.e., monographs) to cast their matter into the form of sensational tragedies, thereby obscuring or misrepresenting the truth of historical events and their real meaning. The purpose of history, he reminds us, is to tell the truth, unlike that of tragedy, which is to entertain. Cicero honestly agreed with this in principle; but, like many other prose writers of his time and earlier, he was so fascinated with the artistic effects of dramatic narrative that he would recommend it to the writers of history in spite of its tendency to distort the truth of events. He wanted a history to be true, but also full of dramatic entertainment. In a well-known letter he urges his friend Lucceius to write a special monograph on the subject of his (Cicero's) consulship, instead of waiting to deal with it later on in a general history of the Civil Wars which he was then writing. In this way, he says, Lucceius would be concentrating on a single well-defined theme centering around one man (uno in argumento unaque in persona), and that would enable him to embellish the subject. Cicero's fortunes would furnish Lucceius with a great variety of matter fraught with a kind of pleasure that would take a strong hold on the minds of readers (plenam cuiusdam voluptatis, quae vehementer animos hominum … tenere possit). “Nothing,” he continues “is more apt to delight the reader than the variety of events and the vicissitudes of fortune … When we look upon the misfortunes of others, without suffering ourselves, our very feeling of pity is something pleasurable. The continuous series of events in an annalistic history holds our interest only in a mild degree, like the listing of acts in an official register; but often the hazardous and varied fortunes of a distinguished man arouse feelings of wonder, suspense, joy, uneasiness, hope and fear. Then, if the conclusion is a memorable one, the reader's mind is filled with a most agreeable pleasure.” I hope therefore—says Cicero in effect—that you will devote a special monograph to what I may call the drama of my career (quasi fabulam rerum eventorumque nostrorum); for it falls naturally into different acts, and contains many actions arising from the counsels of men and the nature of the times (habet enim varios actus multasque actiones et consiliorum et temporum).²⁸

Cicero's fondness for dramatic narrative reflects the universal taste of his age, when writers were prone to exploit the dramatic possibilities of any narrative that they might have occasion to use, regardless of the literary form in which they were writing. The great tide of drama, that is to say fondness for the spectacle of men and women in action with all its excitements, peripeties, personal emotions, and character displays, had long since overflowed the dike of the stage, which had once contained it, and was now pouring into all the literary forms where narrative could be anywise employed. The new form romance was made—and just about this time—for the sole purpose of exploiting this drama on its own account; and it was, for that reason, the only form fully capable of containing it. In all the other prose forms, the central purpose and direction of which was informative or hortatory in theory, rather than artistic, drama or romance had to be something subordinate or incidental, and might be, as often in the historical monograph, positively injurious to the confessed aim of the book. As for the poetic forms, the long epic was much too artificial and learned in kind to satisfy the popular demand, and elegy and epigram were too small, as well as too smart and specialized in their conventions. It is noteworthy, however, that in the poetry dealing with Greek myths, the dramatic treatment of the narrative, which had been almost absent in Callimachus, where the story was only a curious and erudite antiquity told objectively in bare outlines, became the principal thing in Ovid, where it is exploited on its own account. This importation of drama into what had once been antiquarian mythology, or some form of poésie verbale, is parallel to the influence of drama on historiography in the same period. It was a powerful force entering from without into forms whose orientation had been different.

Chariton's romance has the outward form of an historical monograph, a biography, in part, of Callirhoe, the daughter of Hermocrates. Still more significant for the purely formal relation of romance to historiography is the fact that Chariton makes much more use of historical persons and events in the invention of episodes than does any of the later romancers whom we know. His romance is also closer to stage-drama than any of the others, with the partial exception of Daphnis and Chloe, in its organic structure, its economy of episodes, its dramatic ironies, and its lively mimetic representation of character. All this is what we should expect in the early stages of the writing of romance. The earliest authors, like Fielding in modern times, were necessarily influenced to a greater degree by the fashions and precedents of formal historiography and drama (in honor before the invention of the romance genre) than were their successors, who wrote at a time when the romance as an independent form catering to the popular taste for a multitude of adventures had been further extended along its own lines by many practitioners. It is probable that the early romances as a whole were shorter and more organic in their structure than those of later times; and the transition from historical, or supposedly historical, characters at the beginning to unheard-of characters near the end is evident in our extant specimens.

The historical monograph, dealing with the career of a famous man, as in Xenophon's Cyropedia, the historians of Alexander, Sallust's Catiline and Jugurtha, and Plutarch's Lives, was the conventional pattern of composition into which the Greek romancers chose to put their new product with its entirely new orientation. This was a natural choice, because historiography, whatever its stylistic modifications may be here and there, is basically narrative relating to men in action and capable of indefinite extension. It was not quite a necessary choice, because this dramatic narrative, of which the novel as we know it is only one specialized form, could have been put into other forms of composition, mechanically so defined, which were no less conventional and respectable in antecedent literary practice. The first ideal English novel, Richardson's Pamela, was presented in the form of personal letters written by the heroine; and, in antiquity, the same form was used in what purports to be the autobiography of Chion of Heraclea, which is called a “novel” by its latest editor.²⁹ Longus, being a sophistic writer who was very conscious of the formal literary proprieties, put his love story of Daphnis and Chloe in the well-sanctioned technical form of an ecphrasis—the exegetical description of a picture or a series of pictures. He would not use the outright historiographical form employed by Chariton, lest he seem to the fashionable world of letters, whose standards he acknowledged, to be writing bad history.

In speaking about the nature of Greek romance in its beginning, we have confined our attention to only two aspects of it, its substance as drama and its outward form as historiography, because these features are most significant for our understanding of where the romance belongs in literary history and why it came into being. Other aspects of the early Greek romance, such as the happy ending, and the affinity of the romance in various of its qualities with the folktale, as opposed to formal literature, are omitted, lest the necessarily lengthy explanation of them should distract the reader's attention from the main subject of this book, which is the origin of the Greek romance.

Notes

1. Article “Chariton” in RE III 2 (1899), 2168 ff. In his Anhang to the third edition of Rohde's Griechischer Roman (Leipzig, 1914), p. 610, Schmid states that Chariton's romance is to be dated, at the latest, near the end of the first century a.d., and, in his Gr. Litt.⁶ II (1924), p. 808, he states, with reference to his previous writings on the subject (1899, 1901, and 1904) that the lifetime of Chariton must be put “spätestens in das 2. Jr. n. Chr.”

   Three fragments of Chariton's Chaereas and Callirhoe, written on three different papyri, have been dated palaeographically by their respective editors to the second or early third century after Christ. From this fact we may infer with certainty that the text of the romance was in existence and being widely read before the close of the second century; but the date of the writing on these papyri, whatever it may be exactly in each case, gives us only a terminus ante quem in the second century, while the dating of the composition of the romance itself can be reckoned more closely only on the basis of other and less objective criteria, such as those by which Schmid was guided.

   Papyrus Fayûm 1, edited by Grenfell and Hunt (Fayûm Towns and their Papyri [London, 1900]) was dated by the editors to the second century. In the expert opinion of E. G. Turner, whose letter on the subject is quoted by R. Petri (Über den Roman des Chariton [Meisenheim am Glan, 1963], p. 47) the writing on this papyrus might be as early as a.d. 150 or as late as 250, but is more probably to be dated some time between 175 and 225. It contains fragments of the text from IV 2,5-IV 3,2.

   Papyrus Oxyrhynchus no. 1019 (Oxyrhynchus Papyri, ed. B. P. Grenfell and A. S. Hunt, London, Egypt Exploration Fund, vol. VIII, 1910) was dated by the editors in the second or early third century. Turner allows that the writing could be as late as 250, but is inclined to date it rather toward the end of the second century. It contains fragments of Chariton's text between II 3,5 and II 4,2.

   Papyrus Michaelides no. 1 (published by D. S. Crawford in Papyri Michaelidae, Aberdeen: Univ. Press, 1955) is assigned to the mid-second century by the editor and likewise by Turner. It contains fragments of the text extending from II 11,5 to the end of Bk. II.

   My own conviction, that Chariton lived and wrote before the end of the first century after Christ, is based partly on the fact that historical persons and events are much more prominent in his book than in any extant romance known to have been written in the second century or later, partly on the considerations of language and style mentioned by Schmid as preatticistic, and partly on the consideration of certain other features of style and thought which are conspicuous in Chariton's composition but absent in literature of the second century. Here I think primarily of what may be called Chariton's classical style of composition, as manifested in the economy and organic structure of his prose drama as explained below (pp. 142 f.), in his effective use of dramatic irony in the manner of the old Attic tragedians (a feature listed as “primitive” by Schmid, Gr. Litt.⁶ II 809), and in his appreciation of and ability to imitate Thucydidean irony; all of which, together with other significant aspects of Chariton's classic style, are described in my article on Chariton in AJPh 51 (1930) 99-134. Broadly speaking, these classical features of mind and style, which one looks for in vain in second-century literature, are too numerous and too indicative of a vigorous and healthy moral outlook on the world to be explained as the idiosyncrasies of an individual living in the tired age of the Antonines, in which the world of classical values is seen far off in a mystic twilight without being understood. For reasons of this kind I suspect that Chariton wrote in the early part of the first century rather than later; I do not think that his romance could have been written as late as the age of Hadrian.

2. Today this manuscript is known as cod. Laurentianus Conv. Soppressi no. 627. Before its transfer to the Laurentian Library in the early nineteenth century it was no. 2728 (olim 94) in the Florentine monastery known as the Abbazia (Badia) Fiorentina. It is often called the Casinensis, not that it is known ever to have been at Monte Cassino, but because the Florentine monastery was founded by the Benedictine monks (fratres Casinenses) of Monte Cassino. Our manuscript came into the Badia Fiorentina as one of a number of MSS bequesthed to that monastery by Antonio Corbinelli in 1425, according to Rudolf Blum in his La Biblioteca della Badia Fiorentina (Città del Vaticano, 1951), pp. 43, 77, 116, and 160. The fact that this manuscript was written near Melitene on the border of Syria and Armenia is indicated by the mention of a certain “Demetrius of Melitene” as one of the scribes in a subscript at the end; and by the fact, which I shall explain in a forthcoming article (to be published in a Festschrift for Franz Dölger), that parts of this particular Greek manuscript were translated into Armenian in a collection of medieval Armenian fables ascribed to Vardan.

   For detailed information about the contents of the unique Laurentian codex (Conv. Soppr. 627; for which I use the symbol Ca in the Fables of Aesop but W in the Life), and about the numerous copies, collations, and studies made of it by scholars previous to 1726 when its text of Xenophon's Ephesiaca was first printed by Antonio Cocchia at London, see the following publications: H. Rostagno's catalogue in Studi Ital. di Fil. Class. I (1893) 172 f.; the prefaces, respectively, of D'Orville's edition of Chariton (1750); of W. E. Blake's edition of the same author (Oxford, 1938); Aristide Calderini's Le Avventure di Cherea e Calliroe (Torino, 1913), pp. 215-219, where a full account is given also of early modern translations and editions; G. Dalmeyda's edition of Xenophon of Ephesus (Paris, 1926) pp. xxxiii ff.; and Fr. Furia's introduction to his Fabulae Aesopicae (Leipzig, 1810), pp. xxx-xxxvii. In addition, some other noteworthy facts have recently been called to my attention by Professor Aubrey Diller, concerning the familiarity shown by scholars of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries with the romances of Xenophon of Ephesus and of Chariton. I am also indebted to Professor Diller for the reference made above to Blum's book on the library of the Badia Fiorentina. In what follows brief mention is made of only the more important facts concerning the use made of our MS subsequent to its arrival in Florence in 1425: Angelo Poliziano in ch. 11 of his Miscellanea (1489) quotes at length from Xenophon's Ephesiaca (Diller). Codex Holkhamicus 278, written in the fifteenth or early sixteenth century, contains the text of the Life and Fables of Aesop transcribed from the Laurentian codex; cf. B. E. Perry, Studies in the Text-History of the Life and Fables of Aesop (Haverford, Pa., 1936), p. 71, note 1. Cod. Add. 10378 in the British Museum, dated as of the sixteenth century, contains the text of Xenophon's Ephesiaca (Diller). H. Stephanus discusses the romances of Chariton and of Xenophon of Ephesus in the Prolegomena of his Xenophontis Opera Omnia published in 1561; and a collation by Stephanus of the text of Achilles Tatius in the Laurentian codex is extant in one of the Old Royal MSS in the British Museum catalogue as 16.D.XVIII (Diller). In 1700 Antonio Maria Salvini made a transcript of the text of Xenophon, which is now on fols. 51-82 of cod. Riccardianus 1172.1 (see Vitelli in Stud. ital. di Fil. Class. II [1894], 540), and which was later used by Antonio Cocchia as the basis of his printed edition. Salvini also made a transcript of Chariton's text, which is now in Venice (cod. Marc. Classe VIII no. 16, see p. 142 in Mioni's recent catalogue [Venice, 1960]); and this, together with another apograph made by Cocchia, served as the bases on which D'Orville's editio princeps of Chariton was made in 1750.

   Xenophon of Ephesus is commonly dated some time in the second century (so Rohde, W. Schmid, Sinko, Weinreich, and others), and that much, although vague, is the most that can be inferred with safety from such internal evidence as we have. The mention of an Eirenarch of Cilicia in II 13 and III 11 … indicates that the romance must have been written after the reign of Trajan, since the office of Eirenarch is not known to have been in existence before the time of Hadrian (a.d. 117-138). The famous temple of Artemis at Ephesus, around which the action in the romance is centered in the beginning, was destroyed by the Goths in a.d. 263; and, because the author shows no awareness of that historical event, it has been commonly inferred that he wrote before that time. This, however, is not a necessary inference nor a reliable terminus-ante-quem for the composition of the romance. The author, a novelist writing about the Artemisium at Ephesus as it had been in ancient times, would have no occasion to mention its destruction in his own time even if he had seen it or known of it. Only the fame of the temple would have concerned him, and that did not die in a.d. 263. As we have pointed out below (p. 358, n. 17), on the basis of Lavagnini's study, the author of this romance was indebted to Herodotus for what he says about the topography of Ephesus and its Artemisium, as well as for the names of many of his characters, including Habrocomes. If it is true, as we have good reason to believe (below pp. 170 ff.), that “Xenophon of Ephesus” is only a pseudonym, then it follows that the author, in adopting that practice of anonymity, still feels bound by the example of the earliest romancers, who likewise called themselves Xenophons. That practice had already been boldly abandoned by Chariton and none of his successors in the writing of romances except this “Xenophon of Ephesus” is known to have revived it. Iamblichus, Longus, and Achilles Tatius in the second century and Heliodorus in the third all use their own names, feeling no need for anonymity. The resort to anonymity on the part of the author of the Ephesiaca would therefore tend to indicate that he wrote in the early part of the second century rather than later. The absence of certain sophistic qualities in this romance has led the majority of critics to classify it as a relatively early specimen of the genre, more closely analogous to Chariton's romance than to the so-called sophistic romances of a later time.

   It is stated in the Suda lexicon that the romance ascribed to Xenophon of Ephesus was contained in ten books; but the text that has come down to us is only five books in length and in it the narrative seems abnormally syncopated, bare, and hurried in relation to the large number of episodes that are told in rapid succession without being naturally developed. With these facts in view Rohde concluded that what we have is very probably only an epitome of the original romance; and later, in 1892, Karl Bürger (Hermes 27, 36-67) demonstrated convincingly, in a close-up study of the internal evidence, that such indeed is the case. In consequence of the epitomator's operation, much of the original motivation and literary virtuosity of this romance is obscured by lacunas in the narration which puzzle the modern reader and make it impossible to estimate accurately or with confidence the real nature of the original.

3. Three of these are listed above in note 1 as having been dated by their editors in the second or early third century a.d. The other fragment, called the codex Thebanus, was a palimpsest on parchment datable to the sixth or seventh century, which was identified and published by Ulrich Wilcken in the Archiv für Papyrusforschung I (1901), 227-272, but was subsequently destroyed in a fire on the docks at Hamburg; cf. Blake's edition of Chariton, pp. x-xi.

4. Migne, Patr. Gr. 116, pp. 93 ff., from the Acta Sanctorum for Nov. 5. According to this martyrology Leucippe and Clitophon were pagans living at Emesa in Syria. Leucippe as it happened was sterile and on that account she and her husband were very unhappy. A monk named Onufrius, fleeing from persecution, is given shelter by Leucippe, converts her to Christianity, and baptizes her; after which her prayers for offspring are answered and she becomes pregnant. Then Leucippe, with the aid of Onufrius, converts and baptizes her husband Clitophon. Their son, who is named Galaktion, is as beautiful to look upon as his father had been. He marries an equally beautiful young woman named Episteme who is a pagan. He converts her to Christian asceticism, and thereafter the two, while living apart, suffer a glorious martyrdom in the persecution.

   In an article entitled “Die griechischen Romane und das Christentum,” in Philologus 93 (1938), 274, H. Dörrie cites the foregoing martyr-story in support of his belief that the only thing that can account for the survival and wide propagation of the romances of Achilles Tatius and Heliodorus in the Christian ages, to the exclusion of other pagan romances, was the belief that the authors or their dramatis personae were Christians. Chap. 5 in H. Delehaye's Sanctus (Brussels, 1927) gives us an interesting and authoritative account of “saints who never existed.” A certain St. Epicharis, whose martyrdom at Rome under Diocletian is briefly related in the Menologium of Basil (Migne, Patr. Gr. 117, p. 73 c, and in the Acta Sanctorum for Sept. 27), may very well be, as A. D. Nock has suggested (Jour. of Theol. Studies 27 [1926], 409 f.), a Christianized projection of the heroic Epicharis who had taken part in the Pisonian conspiracy against Nero and whose martyr-like endurance of torture in defiance of the inquisitors is described by Tacitus in the Annals (XV 57).

5. See the text of St. John Damascene's Barlaam and Joasaph edited with a critical introduction and translation by G. R. Woodward and H. Mattingly in the Loeb Library (London, 1937); and Fr. Dölger, Der Barlaam Roman, ein Werk des H. Johannes des Damaskos (= Studia Patristica et Byzantina 1) (Ettal, 1953).

6. These twelfth-century romances are described by Krumbacher in Byz. Litt.² pp. 751 (Prodromus), 763 (Nicetas), 764 f. (Eustathius); and, at greater length, by Rohde in Gr. Rom.³ pp. 556-61 (Eustathius), 562-65 (Prodromus), and 565-67 (Nicetas). The texts of all three romances are published in the second volume of Hercher's Scriptores Erotici Graeci (Leipzig, 1859).

   A very good summary and critique of the romance by Eustathius entitled Hysmene and Hymenias (11 books in prose) will be found in Dunlop-Wilson, History of Prose Fiction I 77-80. Rohde (p. 539) says of this romance that it is “nothing more than a caricature of the narrative of Achilles Tatius.” The title given by Theodorus Prodromus to his romance, which is imitative of Heliodorus, is The Adventures of Rodanthe and Dosicles … This consists of 4614 iambic trimeters divided into 9 books. Nicetas Eugenianus, studiously imitating Prodromus, whose romance for him is a classic, writes about The Adventures of Drosilla and Charicles in 9 books containing 3641 trimeter verses. Concerning the romance written in 15-syllable political verse by Constantine Manasses in 9 books about Aristander and Callithea, which is not entirely preserved, see Krumbacher, p. 377, and Rohde, p. 567. Text in Hercher's Script. Erot. Gr. vol. II.

7. See Krumbacher, Byz. Litt.², 827-832; and John Maurogordato's Digenes Akrites, edited with an introduction, translation and commentary (Oxford, 1956).

8. For a list of passages in which the written form of Digenes Akritas is only a versification of the text of Achilles Tatius, see O. Schissel von Fleschenberg in Neophilologus XXVII (1941-2), 143-145.

9. An interesting and comprehensive description of these Byzantine romances of chivalry, of their cultural background, substance, and sources so far as these can be known, is given by Krumbacher in Byz. Litt.² (1897), pp. 854-872.

   In connection with both the western European romances of chivalry and with the Byzantine, I would suggest that the Greek sources which influenced them here and there, insofar as they were written sources rather than oral, did not come from formal Byzantine prose literature which remained limited and static in relation to ancient or Oriental texts, but, more likely, from ancient romances which—like Chariton's in Asia and the oldest Life of Aesop (Vita G) in southern Italy—had not survived in Byzantium and on the mainland of Greece. Other sources may have been Greek books of fiction or fable-collections written in western Asia under the domination of the Muslim world of ideas and fashions, including inter alia certain Greek imitations of Kalilah and Dimnah mentioned by the Arabs, which were enriched with new narrative substance of popular Asiatic origin. On this see my article entitled “Some Traces of Lost Medieval Story-Books,” in Humaniora (Essays in Literature, Folklore and Bibliography honoring Archer Taylor, 1960), pp. 150-160; and, supplementary thereto, “Two Fables Recovered” in Byz. Ztschr. 54 (1961), 4-14. Rohde in Gr. Rom.³ pp. 572 ff. conjectured brilliantly, and with much well-reasoned probability, that Boccaccio's story of Galeso (Cimon) and Efigenia (Decam. V 1) came to him, directly or indirectly, from an ancient Greek romance which is now no longer extant, and which was probably entitled Cypriaca. Boccaccio tells us at the beginning that he read this story “aforetime in the ancient histories of the Cypriots.” Concerning the historiographical pretense implicit in such ethnological titles, which were very common in ancient romances, see further what we have noted below in chap. iv, pp. 167 f. Boccaccio's story is one of love and manifold adventure on land and sea amid piratical actions, hostile intrigues and imprisonment; all the names, some of them specifically Dorian, and all the places mentioned, islands in the eastern Mediterranean, are Greek; and repeated mention is made, as in Greek romances, of the action of adverse Fortune (Tyche).

10. Beyond Good and Evil, no. 168 on p. 90 in Helen Zimmern's translation (New York, Modern Library, n.d.).

11. On comedy in Achilles Tatius see S. L. Wolff's Greek Romances in Elizabethan Fiction, New York, 1912, pp. 157 and 160 f.; and D. B. Durham's “Parody in Achilles Tatius,” CPh 33 (1938), 1-18.

12. Before the discovery of any papyrus fragments of his romance, Achilles Tatius was dated conjecturally by Rohde in the mid-fifth century after Christ (Gr. Rom.³ pp. 501 ff.). The first papyrus fragment to be published was the Oxyrrynchus papyrus no. 1250 in 1914, which was dated palaeographically by the editors in the early fourth century. Thereafter on the basis of various internal evidence adduced by Lehmann, Boll, and Kerényi, which is briefly summarized by Th. Sinko in Eos 41 (1940-1946), 40 f., the dating of Achilles was pushed back to the third, then to the late second century. In 1950 another papyrus fragment was published by W. Schubart, who ascribed the writing on it to the third century at the latest. The main facts about this papyrus, now lost, are stated by E. Vilborg on p. xvi of his recent critical edition (Göteborg, 1955), along with an up-to-date account of two other fragments on papyrus. One of these two, Oxy. Pap. 1250 of the early fourth century, was mentioned above; the other is a papyrus at Milan published by A. Vogliano in Stud. Ital. di Fil. Class. 15 (1938), and the writing on this papyrus is assigned with confidence by both Vogliano and Schubart, who examined it independently, to the second century after Christ. See Vilborg pp. xvi f. From this it appears that Achilles wrote his romance hardly later than the middle of the second century.

13. The dating of Heliodorus in the mid-third century, on the basis of internal evidence described by Rohde (Gr. Rom.³, 462 ff. [and also in the 1^st edition, 1876]) and later supplemented by K. Münscher (RE VIII 1913, 20 ff.) and others, has been approved by the great majority of scholars who have studied the matter and written about it in recent times. These include R. M. Rattenbury in the Budé edition of Heliodorus (Paris, 1935), pp. xi-xv; Fr. Altheim, article “Helios und Heliodoros von Emesa” in Albae Vigiliae 12 (Amsterdam, 1942: repeated in the author's Literatur und Gesellschaft I, [Halle-Saale, 1948], 93-124); Th. Sinko in Eos 41 (1940-1946), 43; V. Hefti in Zur Erzählungstechnik in Heliodors Aethiopica (Vienna, 1950), p. 53 with note 450; and O. Weinreich in Der Griechische Liebesroman (Zürich, 1962) pp. 32-40. Rohde (p. 496) suggested the reign of Aurelian (270-275) as the most probable date for our author; but an earlier date, some time between 220 and 240, in or shortly before or after the reign of Severus Alexander (222-235) is favored by Münscher, Rattenbury, Altheim, and Weinreich. It was during those years, in the successive reigns of Elagabalus and Severus, both of whom like Heliodorus were natives of Emesa, that the cult of Helios the sun-god in Syria was at the peak of its influence, and the predominance of that religious cult in the structure of the Aethiopica is the principal, but by no means the only reason for dating it in the third century. At the end of his romance Heliodorus himself tells us that he was a and a descendant of the sun-god Helios. … Rattenbury called attention to the significant fact that no Greek romance is known to have been written as late as the fourth century, which would indicate that the genre itself was épuisé by that time, and Altheim adduces historical evidence to show that the romance must be dated in the third century. The description of the siege of Syene by Hydaspes in Aeth. IX 3 ff. bears such a close resemblance to what Julian in his rhetorical panegyric of the emperor Constantius (Or. 1 and 3) says about the siege of Nisibis by Sapor in a.d. 350, that it must be admitted that one of the two authors has been influenced in part by the other. Van der Valk in Mnemosyne IX (1940), 97-100, and A. Colonna in Athenaeum 28 (1950), 82 ff. and elsewhere, have maintained that Heliodorus depended on Julian and must therefore be dated in the second half of the fourth century; but Weinreich has demonstrated convincingly on the basis of data which were overlooked by Van der Valk, that Julian, who had read Greek romances (Ep. 89, p. 141, Bidez), is more likely to have been debtor to Heliodorus and other writers than Heliodorus to Julian. The passages cited by Van der Valk in the two authors tend to show only that Julian had read Heliodorus.

14. Some noteworthy specimens of these Christian myths are mentioned above, n. 4, in connection with Achilles Tatius, who was also said to have been a bishop—God only knew where—in spite of the fact that there was nothing at all Christian in his way of writing and thinking, and no bishop by the name of Achilles Tatius was otherwise known.

15. The chronological sequence of the extant romances is somewhat as follows, allowing for exceptions in the cases of closely contemporary productions, where the priority of one to another cannot be known. References in parentheses refer to places in this book where the dating of a romance is discussed:

    1. Ninus, ca. 100 b.c. (chap. iv, sec. 2).
    2. Greek prototype of the Recognitiones of Ps.-Clement (Appendix I).
    3. Chariton, first century after Christ (n. 1 above).
    4. Xenophon of Ephesus, early second century (n. 2 above).

    1. SOPHISTIC ROMANCES

    2. (6)? Iamblichus, ca. a.d. 165 (n. 21 below).
    3. (5?) Longus, late second century (n. 17 below).
    4. Achilles Tatius, mid-second century (n. 12 above).
    5. Heliodorus, first half of third century (n. 13 above).

    1. IDEAL LATIN ROMANCE

    2. Apollonius of Tyre, third century after Christ (Appendix II).

    We see from this that the Greek romance was at the peak of its propagation in the second century. Besides the four romances mentioned above as having been written in that century or earlier, we have fragments of three others copied on papyrus which can be dated palaeographically in the second century: fragments of the so-called Calligone romance, of the romance of Metiochus and Parthenope (cf. below, p. 359), and the Herpyllis fragment. See Zimmermann, Griechische Roman-Papyri, Heidelberg, 1936.

16. Theon, Progym. 3. See above, p. 68, where this matter of technique has been discussed more fully.

17. With one unimportant exception (Psellus, De operat. Daemonum, cited by Christ-Schmid, Gr. Litt.⁶ II 824), no ancient or medieval writer, insofar as we know, not even Suidas, makes mention of this Longus or of his romance Daphnis and Chloe; no papyrus fragments of it have yet been found; and we would not have known the book at all, or the name of its author, had it not survived by a lucky chance in a few medieval manuscripts. The approximate time in which it was written can be reckoned therefore only on the basis of internal criteria—linguistic usage, content, rhetorical mannerism, and the age to which the kind of painting described in the author's ecphrasis belongs. All these criteria lead, in my opinion, to the conclusion that Longus must have lived on the island of Lesbos in the second half of the second century; and that is the conclusion reached by the majority of critics in recent years, although not all of them have made use of all the available criteria. These data are much too long and complex to admit of being reviewed here in their entirety; but two new points, recently discussed by O. Schönberger in the introduction to his edition of Longus (Berlin, 1960), pp. 1-3 and by Weinreich in Der Griechische Liebesroman (Zürich, Artemus Verlag, 1962), pp. 18-19, are deserving of special emphasis in this connection.

    The first point is that the cognomen Longus belonged to a distinguished family at Mytilene on the island of Lesbos, which had taken its gentile name, Pompeius, from its patron Pompey the Great, as attested in several inscriptions, most notably IG XII 2, 88, and that a consul of the year a.d. 49 whose name was Pompeius Longus (Prosop. Imper. R. III p. 67) may have come from the same family. All this was noted by C. Cichorius on pp. 321 and 323 of his Römische Studien (Leipzig, 1922), in connection with which he suggested that the romancer and sophist Longus may also have been a descendant of that Mytilenean family. The close familiarity with the island of Lesbos shown by Longus in his romance, and his obvious fondness for its rural scenery, tend strongly to confirm our belief that he was indeed a native of that island, as he himself implies when he tells us that it was there, in a grove of the Nymphs, that he saw the picture which he professes to describe with the aid of a local interpreter. Since Lesbos, unlike Sicily, was never famed as a land of shepherds, there seems to be no special reason why the author of Daphnis and Chloe should have chosen it as the homeland of his shepherds, unless it was on account of the idyllic rural landscapes which he had seen on Lesbos and the types of which were favorite objects of contemplation in second-century literature and art.

    The second point is that the type of picture described by Longus in his romance can be dated fairly well by reference to the history of wall-painting in Roman imperial times. This point, which was first made by Weinreich in the appendix to a German translation of Heliodorus by R. Reymer (Zürich, 1950, pp. 323-379), is briefly restated on p. 19 of his Griechischer Liebesroman. The evidence is to be found in Fritz Wirth's Römische Wandmalerei (Berlin, 1934), in which the successive styles of wall-painting in vogue from the destruction of Pompeii in a.d. 79 to the end of the third century are described and illustrated. From this it appears that rural landscapes of the kind described by Longus were in fashion only in the middle of the second century (ca. 130-160) in a style of painting which Wirth calls the “Philhellenic” and which extends by his reckoning from a.d. 100-160. See especially Tafeln 17 and 18. In literature verbal pictures of rural landscapes, of the life of rustics and shepherds and their love affairs, are numerous throughout the second century and the first quarter of the third, as seen in Dio Chrysostom's idyllic description of the Euboean hunters (ca. a.d. 100), in Lucian, Alciphron, Aelian, and Philostratus in his Imagines; but after that such pictures are not seen in extant wall-paintings and in literature are rare or different in perspective, as with Himerius in the fourth century, whose writing although poetic, is on mythological themes.

18. There is no antiquarianism in creative Greek literature, as there is none in medieval literature or in Shakespeare. Convention required that the subject of a drama or an epic should be taken from sagas or myths relating to men and events in a distant past; but the conditions of life and thought in which the actors move about, and by which they are motivated and emoted, whether physical, moral, legal, political, social, or domestic, are those of the writer's own time, and properly so. Classical literature is never antiquarian in matters of detail; it sees man as fundamentally the same today as he always has been. This has often been noted by students of literature and much might be quoted on the subject. Spengler summed it up briefly in these words: “In the Classical world-consciousness all Past was absorbed in the instant Present” (Decline of the West in the translation by C. F. Atkinson, [New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1937] I p. 103).

19. See note 18 above.

20. See Appendix III on the rationale of the ego-narrative.

21. Essentially the same kind of innovation as that made by Fielding, in bringing the warm ideal values of sympathetic character-portrayal into what was otherwise a comic and satirical narrative in the classical tradition, had been made by the Abbé Prévost in his Manon Lescaut, which was published in 1731 and is a genuine novel in our sense of the term. In this novel, as in Achilles Tatius, the author introduces us to a young man, one Chevalier des Grieux, who tells him, speaking in the first person, the tragic story of his foolish and frequently frustrated, but unquenchable and undying love for a fille de joie named Manon Lescaut. Manon throughout the story seems to love the young man, in her way, and favors him so long as it is convenient for her to do so; but in order to get out of trouble or to avoid the discomforts of poverty, she frequently sells her favors to high bidders, thereby cruelly betraying the lover who adores her. In the end, however, she clings to him with a true and selfless love, bravely resisting the efforts of powerful men to take her away from the lover who has pursued her overseas from Paris to the wilds of Louisiana. Likewise the lover, M. des Grieux, after the death of Manon and while he is still young, becomes a deeply religious man, having arrived at the haven of peace at last by the grace of God, after all his mental agonies. By birth and early training he had been, and remained fundamentally throughout, a gentleman of honorable principles and good instincts; but his passion for Manon was so overpowering that, regardless of ethical principles and common sense, he would do anything he found it necessary to do, however foolish, dishonest or criminal, in order to attain his love in a world in which almost every man in power was venal and corrupt. Viewed outwardly from the standpoint of common sense and moral principles, the conduct of the young lover is that of a fool and a rogue in the cynical picaresque tradition; but inwardly, as regards the spirit in which the story is told, there is nothing coldly comic or scornful about it, no mockery or satire, and nothing to laugh at, but rather a deep feeling of pity for the frailties of human kind.

    As in Fielding and in Prévost, so likewise in Apuleius, the potentialities of prose fiction were greatly increased in the direction of the modern novel by the introduction of ideal values into what had previously been purely comic stories written in a spirit of burlesque. This will be explained below in chap. vii, sec. 4.

22. The dating of Iamblichus in the third quarter of the second century has never been in question. He himself in his romance, as reported by Photius, had stated explicitly that he lived in the time of Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus, when the Arsacid Soämus was king of Armenia under the Romans, and that he had accurately foretold the outcome of the Parthian War (a.d. 161-165). See Rohde, pp. 388 ff., for a clear account of all that we know about the person of Iamblichus and his work.

23. In his Erotica Pathemata no. 11, Parthenius in the course of outlining the story of Byblis and Caunus quotes six lines from his own poem on the subject and ten lines from a poem by the Alexandrian Nicaenetus, both in hexameter verse. For the text of Parthenius with notes and translation, see Gaselee in the Loeb edition of Daphnis and Chloe (London, Heinemann, 1935), pp. 293 ff. The story was also told, somewhat on the pattern of Mattidia's experience in the Ps.-Clementine Recognitiones, by Conon in his Narrationes as summarized by Photius in cod. 186 (Migne, Patrol. Gr. 103, p. 548). On Cinna's Smyrna, see Schanz in Röm. Lit.³ II 1 pp. 85 ff.

24. The first of Theron's men to look into the sepulchre sees the living Callirhoe, takes her to be a ghost, is frightened, and retreats in panic haste. Theron laughs at him; but, finding that his other men are equally afraid, he himself enters and discovers the true situation.

    A remarkable parallel to this story appeared in a United Press dispatch from Bucharest which I clipped from a local newspaper some time around the year 1935, as follows: “Josefine Nagy, wife of a wealthy farmer was buried Tuesday in the village cemetery of Trenteamare, central Transylvania, according to the story as it was told here. Wednesday night, three grave-robbers went to the cemetery, dug up the coffin and prepared to loot the grave. They opened the casket and were horrified when the “corpse” moved. Josefine Nagy was alive. She arose, murmured ‘Where am I’ and stepped out of the coffin. One of the robbers fainted. The others fled. Josefine walked to her home, where her husband and family kept her out in the cold until they were convinced she was not a ghost. Farmer Nagy helped police look for the robbers today. He did not want to punish them, but to ‘pay them for bringing Josefine back to me.’” The police ought to have gone after the undertakers.

25. Many specific instances of this are cited and explained in my long note on the subject in AJPh 51 (1930), 100-103. As I remarked there (p. 101), the violence done to Callirhoe by her jealous husband (Chariton I 4, 12) may have been due in the first place to a recollection of the assault made by soldiers upon that daughter of Hermocrates who had married Dionysius the Elder, and who was reported to have died of her injuries (Plut. Dion 3; Diod. III, 112). In this connection I should have noted also, as Martin Braun points out (Hist. and Romances in Graeco-Oriental Lit., p. 11, n. 1), that the kind of assault made by Chaereas, kicking his wife apparently to death when she was pregnant, had been told also of Cambyses by Herodotus (III 32), to whom Chariton was indebted for other matters. Further, Braun cites the suggestion made to him by M. P. Charlesworth that this Herodotean motif had taken on fresh topicality in Chariton's time from the fact that the same story had been told about Nero's treatment of Poppaea (Suet. Nero 35; Tacitus Ann. XVI 5).

26. Mnemosyne 1901, p. 98.

27. Since this description of narratio quae versatur in personis would apply very well to the Greek romance as we know it, the thesis was put forth by G. Thiele in 1890, and later accepted by others, that Cicero in this passage was thinking of the Greek romance. But there is no indication that he was aware of the Greek romance, which he does not mention, and everything in the context of what he says, and his illustrations, seem to point in the opposite direction. See the article on this subject by K. Barwick in Hermes 63 (1928), entitled “Die Gliederung der Narratio in der rhetorischen Theorie und ihre Bedeutung für die Geschichte des antiken Romans.” Barwick shows that the rhetorical theories of Cicero and others about narratio were made with no reference to Greek romance.

28. Cicero, Ad Fam. II 12. Cf. Brutus 11, where Cicero agrees with the statement made by Atticus that “concessum est rhetoribus ementire in historiis, ut aliquid dicere possint argutius.” In De Oratore II 36 he says in effect that the nature of history is such that only an orator can do justice to it, by way of bringing out its dramatic values and the importance of its lessons. Concerning the tendency on the part of writers before Cicero to dramatize history, and the opposition to it by Polybius more in theory than in practice, see the second part of P. Scheller's dissertation De Hellenistica Historiae Conscribendae Arte (Leipzig, 1911), and B. L. Ullman's “History and Tragedy” in TAPhA 73 (1942), 25-53.

29. Ingomar Düring, Chion of Heraclea, A Novel in Letters, edited with introduction and commentary (Göteborg, 1951). Historically, this Chion of Heraclea was a devoted follower of Plato and a martyr to the cause of freedom in his native city. His kinsman Clearchus, who had also been a member of the Platonic school, became tyrant of Heraclea and ruled viciously over that city for twelve years. In 352 b.c. Chion with the aid of a band of conspirators assassinated Clearchus and was himself thereafter put to death by the tyrant's followers (Memnon's Hist. of Heraclea in Müller's Frag. Hist. Gr. III Paris, 1849, p. 527). Mr. Düring's novel, if such it can be called, consists of seventeen letters composed by an unknown writer in the first or second century after Christ (Hercher, Epist. Graec., Paris, 1873, pp. 194-206) and ascribed to Chion. Fourteen of these letters purport to be written by Chion to his father, and of the others one is to his friend Bion, one to Clearchus (to put him off his guard), and the last to Plato. In these letters Chion gives an autobiographical account of himself, his thoughts and activities, and his association with prominent men, including Xenophon and Plato, for a few years preceding his return to Heraclea. He announces his. intention to kill the tyrant Clearchus in letters to his father, and in the last letter, addressed to Plato, he says that he expects to die for his deed but that he takes pride in becoming a martyr in the cause of freedom.

Abbreviations

AJPh: American Journal of Philology

BZ or Byz. Ztschr.: Byzantinische Zeitschrift

Christ-Schmid or Christ-Schmid-Stählin Gr. Litt.⁶: … Wilhelm von Christ, Geschichte der Griechischen Litteratur, sixth edition, Part II revised and extended by Wilhelm Schmid and Otto Stählin, München (C. H. Beck Verlag), 1920 (II 1) and 1924 (II 2). Part I, by W. Schmid, 1912.

CPh: Classical Philology

Diss.: B. E. Perry, The Metamorphoses Ascribed to Lucius of Patrae; Its Content, Nature, and Authorship, Lancaster, Pa., 1920. Copies obtainable from W. H. Allen, Bookseller, Philadelphia, Pa. 19103.

Krumbacher, Byz. Litt.²: Karl Krumbacher, Geschichte der Byzantinischen Litteratur, second edition, München (C. H. Beck Verlag), 1897.

Oxy. Pap. or Oxy. P.: Oxyrhynchus Papyri, ed. B. P. Grenfell and A. S. Hunt, London, 1898-.

Migne, Patrol. Gr.: J. P. Migne, editor, Patrologiae Cursus Completus. Series Graeca, Paris, 1857-1866.

Migne, Patrol. Lat. J. P. Migne, editor, Patrologiae Cursus Completus. Series Latina, second edition, Paris, 1878 ff.

PSI: Papiri greci e latini (Pubblicazioni della Società italiana per la Ricerca dei Papiri greci e latini in Egitto), Firenze, 1912-.

RE: Pauly-Wissowa-Kroll, Real-Encyclopädie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft.

RhM.: Rheinisches Museum für Philologie

Rohde, Gr. Rom.³: Erwin Rohde, Der gerichische Roman und seine Vorläufer, third edition with an Anhang by W. Schmid, Leipzig, 1914.

Schanz, Röm. Litt.³: Martin Schanz, Geschichte der römischen Litteratur, third edition in collaboration with Carl Hosius and G. Krüger, München (C. H. Beck Verlag).

TAPhA: Transactions of the American Philological Association.