Beyond the Second Sophistic. Tim Whitmarsh
a slightly earlier passage in Chariton, where Chaereas addresses an imaginary reproach to Callirhoe. I give the two passages here in English translation, with the key similarities identified:32
Thanks to you [dia se], I left my mother and took up a life of wandering; thanks to you [dia se], I was shipwrecked and put up with bandits; thanks to you [dia se], I was sacrificed as an expiation and have now died a second time; thanks to you [dia se], I have been sold [pepramai] and bound in iron, I have wielded [ebastasa] a mattock, dug the earth, been whipped—was all this for me to become to another man what you have become to another woman [gegonas allēi gunaiki]? Never! No, I [egō men] had the strength to hold out in the midst of so many trials—while you [su de], unenslaved and unwhipped, you are married! (Ach. Tat. 5.18.4–5)
I [egō men] have been sold [eprathēn] thanks to you [dia se], have dug, have wielded [ebastasa] a cross and been delivered into the hands of the executioner. And you [su de] were living in luxury and celebrating your marriage while I was in chains! It was not enough for you to become the wife of another [gunē gegonas allou] while Chaereas was still alive, but you had to become a mother as well! (Chariton 4.3.10)
Now, clearly speeches and letters of reproach are to an extent generic in themselves. Powerful contrasts between one person’s claims to fidelity and the other’s perceived betrayal, particularly in erotic contexts, can be found all over Greek literature, for example in Medea’s speech to Jason in Euripides’s play (Med. 483–89).33 Moreover, certain elements in Chariton’s original (“egō men,” “dia se”) seem to allude to Stryangaeus’s reproachful letter to Zarinaea in Ctesias, a fact that I shall presently argue to be significant.34 Yet the overall density of similarities between the two passages strongly suggests that Achilles wishes his reader to bear Chariton’s passage in mind and read his own against it. This in turn suggests that Achilles is identifying the “lover’s reproach” as a signpost of romance genre, so his negotiations of this model can also be taken as indicators of his claimed position at once within and against the genre.
The first point to make is that Leucippe’s letter is markedly more elaborate than Chaereas’s monologue: it repeats “Thanks to you [dia se]” three times, in accordance with Achilles’s taste for rhetorical and thematic overkill (compare Leucippe’s three false deaths, mentioned above). Chaereas’s sufferings are limited (!) to enslavement and crucifixion, whereas Leucippe is shipwrecked, delivered to bandits, sacrificed, enslaved, bound in iron, forced into manual labor, and whipped. The excess of lurid detail, inflicted on a woman, betokens Achilles’s transformation of the genre into an exuberantly sexist fantasia.35 There is more, indeed, to be said about gender. At one level, we can read Achilles’s passage as a corrective of Chariton’s use of Ctesias: by replacing Chariton’s monologue with a letter, Achilles is being truer to his Ctesian source. The choice of a letter, then, is an implicit dig at Chariton and marker of Achilles’s sophistication. But where Achilles departs from both Chariton and Ctesias is in giving the reproach to a woman. This is all the more striking in that Achilles’s romance is narrated almost entirely by Clitophon, in flashback. The reproach is thus a rare occasion where as readers we hear Leucippe’s voice (though mediated by Clitophon); in general she speaks very little. The force of the letter—it has a profound impact on Clitophon, who (like the incautious reader) believes her to be dead at this point—lies precisely in this irruptive power. The miraculous reanimation of Leucippe is figured by her authorship of a new text, a female-centered text protesting vigorously against the androcentric worldview of Clitophon’s (and Achilles’s) monopolized narrative, wherein self-absorbed males turn a blind eye to the horrendous violence inflicted on women. Leucippe’s letter, then, turns out to be more than just a claim on Achilles’s part of generic proximity to Chariton; it also articulates Achilles’s most important revision of the genre, the limiting (more or less) of narrative authority and subjectivity to a single male.
Let me turn finally to Heliodorus—arguably the most intertextual of all the romancers, particularly in his use of other romances36—and once more to festival encounters. In Charicleia and Theagenes, the lovers again meet and fall in love at a festival, but the event is ingeniously postponed to the third book, where the narrator-priest Calasiris tells it in flashback (3.1–6). Heliodorus’s account of the festival procession clearly draws heavily on Xenophon’s Ephesian procession (1.2): the linguistic parallels are many and close.37 Once more this is not simply a case of a later writer covertly recycling another’s words; Heliodorus surely expects his readers to identify his use of Xenophon and to explore the dynamic relationship between the two texts. In particular, we are to register the disjunction between Xenophon’s bald, terse style and Heliodorus’s rich, complex description.38 Here, by way of illustration, are the two accounts of the female protagonists:
Heading the line of girls was Anthia, the daughter of two locals, Megamedes and Euippe. Anthia was wondrously beautiful, far beyond the other girls. She was fourteen, her body blooming with shapeliness, and her comeliness was increased by the rich adornment of her costume. Her hair was blond, mostly [hē pollē] free-flowing (though some was plaited), moving as the wind took it. Her eyes were gorgeous, clear like a beautiful girl’s but forbidding like a virtuous girl’s. Her clothing was a purple tunic [khitōn alourgēs], girdled [zōstos] and knee length, loose down the arms, with a fawn skin draped around, a quiver fitted with bows, arrows, javelins in her hand, dogs in train. (Anthia and Habrocomes 1.2.5–6)
[Charicleia] was conveyed on a chariot drawn by a pack of white cows, dressed in a purple tunic [khitōna alourgon] down to her feet, embroidered with golden sunbeams. Her chest was encircled with a girdle [zōnēn], which the creator had imbued with all his skill: he had never before forged such a thing, nor would he ever be able to again. [For brevity’s sake I omit the long description of the girdle.] . . . Her hair was neither completely braided nor unbound; most of it [hē . . . pollē] fell down her neck and billowed over her shoulder and back, while the remainder, on her head and her brow, was garlanded with tender twigs of laurel, which bound her rosy, sun-colored locks and would not permit them to flutter in the breeze more than was decorous. In her left hand she bore a golden bow, while a quiver hung from her right shoulder. In her right [hand], she carried a lit torch, but in that state her eyes were blazing more light than the flames were. (Charicleia and Theagenes 3.4.2–6)
This example shows how Heliodorus extends and amplifies Xenophon’s description, filling it out not only with extra details (the cow-drawn chariot and the twigs bound in the hair, for example) but also with narratorial commentary: the observations on the girdle’s creator, for example, and on the differential amounts of light coming from the torch and Charicleia’s eyes. This tactic is conscious and deliberate, as we can tell from a crucial passage at the start of book 3. Book 2 ends with the Delphians “all aflutter in their eagerness to see the magnificently arrayed procession” (2.36.2), a clear prompt to readers (and to Calasiris’s internal addressee Cnemon) that they are to expect a showcase description in the following book. Book 3, however, begins, “When the procession and the entire sacrifice was over . . .” (3.1.1)—at which point Cnemon butts in and asks for a full description and to be made a “viewer [theatēs].”39 The amplification of description and the focus on vivid, visual depiction are therefore highlighted before the procession proper. Heliodorus’s intertextual use of Xenophon, then, implicitly casts their relationship in terms of a contest of descriptive prowess, a contest that Heliodorus of course wins. One small detail corroborates this reading. When Calasiris refers to the skill (tekhnē) of the artist (ho tekhnēsamenos) who created Charicleia’s girdle, it is surely a prompt to think about the process of literary creation too. In this context, the claim that “he had never before forged such a thing, nor would he ever be able to again” takes on a new light: in the context of an intertextual dialogue with a predecessor in the genre, it points to the uniqueness of Heliodorus’s description at exactly the point where it is also most generic.
There is much more that could be said about intrageneric reference in the romances; a full study is needed, one moreover that moves beyond the naïve, nineteenth-century accounts of “imitation” and brings in new methodologies of allusion and intertextuality. Enough has been said, however, to show that ancient writers did work with a sense of romance as genre. Let me finish by reemphasizing the point that genre is not a static,