Beyond the Second Sophistic. Tim Whitmarsh
develops over time. Heliodorus’s use of Xenophon’s procession scene exemplifies this excellently. He casts as naïve, bare, and primitive the generic reference point that he invokes intertextually, but he reinvents the motif sensationally, and with that the genre itself. The genre transforms before our very eyes.
By the time when Heliodorus wrote, there was, I submit, a well-established sense of the romance genre: he could expect his readers to notice his modifications, innovations, and amplifications and interpret them as generic transformations. It is hard to find such traces of generic self-consciousness in Xenophon (although that may of course be simply because he is a less self-conscious writer). Chariton, I have argued, can already be seen to be manipulating topoi self-reflexively, but whether he sees such topoi as constitutive of romance as an independent genre is a more difficult question. The difficulty lies partly in the uncertainty of dates: if Xenophon is older, then Chariton will have had at least one romance to play with.40 But in any case, lying behind Callirhoe is a rich hinterland of Hellenistic narrative erotica embedded in nonromance genres, of which only a few traces survive. Ctesias’s famous story of Zarinaea and Stryangaeus, for example, was evidently an important reference point for Chariton (and hence for later romancers). When Nicolaus of Damascus, writing in the Augustan era, produced a version of it, he already larded it richly with motifs that would later be thought of as distinctive to the romance: a weepy, dispirited male threatens suicide and writes a reproachful letter to his beloved, while a counselor attempts to dissuade him from his course.41 Whether or not he had read anything approximating to what we call prose romances, Chariton was evidently responding to this broader range of narrative material as well. In other words, he is likely to have worked with a much looser and more fissiparous sense of generic identity than the later romancers did, or, to put it another way, Callirhoe probably became a “romance” only thanks to the co-optation of later romancers. This much is speculation, inevitably so given the uncertainties of dating and the limited amount of surviving Hellenistic prose fiction. Yet what is clear, it seems to me, is that the romance really did develop a strong sense of generic identity, and that fact sets them apart from the more amorphous body of prose fiction to which I turn in the subsequent chapters.
1. I return to the romance, from a different perspective, in ch. 8.
2. For recent sharp discussion of the genre question (discussed in more detail later) see Goldhill 2008 and Morales 2009.
3. Létoublon 1993 offers a full catalogue.
4. Whitmarsh 2005b. The recent Loeb editor of Xenophon and Longus accepts my arguments (Jeffrey Henderson 2009, 200). Tilg 2010, 2 n. 1, by contrast, declares himself “not convinced” but offers no explanation or counterargument. Henrichs 2011 also registers some skepticism, but his grounds do not seem secure. His claim at 308 n. 23 that I do not “distinguish adequately between pre-Byzantine and Byzantine conventions of quoting or fabricating such titles” is, I think, misleading, since the principal evidence is securely ancient—the texts themselves (e.g., the endings of Chariton and Heliodorus), as well as P.Mich. 1, a second-century papyrus of Callirhoe, which carries a colophon: “tōn peri Ka[llirhoēn / diēgēm[a]tō[n logos b’.” I do not deny that Ephesiaka and Aithiopika were fully integral to the titles of Xenophon and Heliodorus, but here they were used in conjunction with the name formula; nor, incidentally, do I deny that certain kinds of nonromantic fiction such as Petronius’s Satyrica and Lollianius’s Phoenicica had titles only of this form (see Henrichs 2011, 314–15, with n. 37, where a casual reader might deduce that I have not accepted this point). My claim is rather that the romances really are in a category of their own vis-à-vis other works of ancient fiction when it comes to titling conventions and (I hope to make clear in this chapter) to other features. Henrichs’s claim that Lollianus’s Phoinikika is “the one attested title” (314) is contradicted by P.Mich. 1 (quoted above), which he himself elsewhere accepts as transmitting Chariton’s correct title (311).
5. E.g., Holzberg 1995, 9: “Such fixed notions meant that, within the framework of the story, their choice both of individual motifs and of the various devices by which these were to be represented followed an almost stereotype pattern. . . . The mere presence of elements which are recurrent in all examples of this literary form itself also provides a basis for our attempt to define the genre.” See also Lalanne 2006, 47: “All the Greek romances tell the same story of love and adventures, with variations that (for all their number) do not affect the structure as a whole.”
6. A. Fowler 1982, followed by, e.g., S. Heath 2004. For the general point see, e.g., Reardon 1991, 3: “Romance will not necessarily follow a recipe, rather it will exhibit typical features.”
7. See now Konstan 2009.
8. Nimis 1994, 398. Fusillo 1989 tracks the romances’ many intertextualities; see also Zimmermann 1997.
9. Morales 2009, 9–10.
10. Ibid., 10–11.
11. For the influence of Achilles on Musaeus, see Kost 1971, 29–30, and more fully Lehmann 1910, 12–25; also Morales 1999, 42–43, and Bowie 2003, 95, both with further references. Orsini 1968, xv–xvii, also discerns the influence of Chariton. The generic affiliation to the novel suggested by the title is noted by Kost 1971, 117–18; Schmid at Rohde 1914, 618; Hopkinson 1994, 138; Whitmarsh 2005b, 603.
12. A. Fowler 1982.
13. Bakhtin 1986.
14. Culler 1975, 145.
15. See, e.g., Morales 2009, 9–10; Henrichs 2011, 303–5.
16. See, e.g., Bibl. cod. 73 = Hld. test. IV Colonna; 87 = Ach. Tat. test. 2 Vilborg. See further Rohde 1914, 376–79; Agapitos 1998, 128–30.
17. Bowie 1994, 442.
18. A. Fowler 1982, 23.
19. Tilg 2010.
20. I am in particular unconvinced that the Neronian poet Persius refers to our text at 1.134: “His mane edictum, post prandia Calliroen do”; see Tilg 2010, 69–78, which cautiously accepts the reference. I argue at Whitmarsh 2005b, 590 n. 14, that some kind of poetic text is needed to make sense of the passage, specifically a competitor to Persius’s aggressive satire. It is not impossible, however, that Calliroe was a pantomime, a genre introduced to Rome with great fanfare under Augustus: note the story at Paus. 7.21.1 about the Calydonian Coresus, who kills himself for love of Callirhoe. There is another Callirhoe story at 8.24.9–10.
21. So, rightly, J. N. O’Sullivan 1995, 4–9, and Bowie 2002a, 57. Ruiz Montero 2003 argues persuasively that Xenophon shows stylistic similarities with archaizing local legends of the kind found in the second-century pseudo-Plutarch’s Love Stories and Pausanias, but this affinity cannot date him absolutely since we lack comparable material from earlier periods.
22. See especially Garin 1909, 423–29; Gärtner 1967, 2081–87; J. N. O’Sullivan 1995, 145–70.
23. I tabulate the similarities at Whitmarsh 2011a, 35. There is, of course, the possibility of a common shared source (so, e.g., Hägg 1983, 20–21), but this seems to me unlikely given the extent of the echoing (see above, n. 21).
24. For criticism of the romance along these lines see, e.g., Schnepf 1887; Garin 1909. For this older material, www.archive.org is invaluable, but I have not been able to access either a print or an electronic copy of Kekkos 1890. More recent criticism tends to take Chariton as the prior text (e.g., Bowie 2002a, 56–57; Tilg 2010, 85–92; but contrast J. N. O’Sullivan 1995, 145–70), but there is no real basis for this assumption.
25. Harder 2012, 2.555, gives primary and secondary sources; discussion at Whitmarsh 2011a, 37, with n. 62.
26. Weissenberger 1997; Whitmarsh 2011a, 27.
27. See Whitmarsh 2011a, 246–51, on aleatory tukhē versus teleological plotting.
28. Additional, albeit indirect, evidence for the connection between the festival topos and the romance genre comes from Josephus’s account of the Potiphar story, where he levers in this extrabiblical detail (Ant. 2.45) as part of his program of eroticizing biblical narrative. See Braun 1934 on this process of Erotisierung; Whitmarsh 2007a, 88–89, on the passage