59. CA, 5, 1.
60. Parthenius 11, incorporating his own hexameter version, fr. 33 Lightfoot = SH 648.
61. Brown 2002. Sources discussed at Rohde 1914, 101–3; Lightfoot 1999, 433–36.
62. Brown 2002, 59–60.
63. See especially Wills 1995, 2002.
64. Braun 1934.
65. Bohak 1996 argues for the second century B.C.E. on the basis of claimed links with the temple of Onias IV at Heliopolis; Kraemer 1998, 225–85, sees the work as late antique. Further discussion of this dating (and other issues) in Whitmarsh, forthcoming a; see also Whitmarsh 2012.
66. See further Philonenko 1968, 43–48; S. West 1974.
67. Selden 1998; Stephens 2003.
68. Barns 1956.
69. I. Rutherford 2000. On the issue as a whole see I. Rutherford, forthcoming; Stephens, forthcoming.
70. Nimis 2004.
71. Hdt. 2.102–11; Maneth. fr. 34 Robbins; Diod. Sic. 1.53.
72. Stephens and Winkler 1995, 252–66.
73. Which I cite from Kroll’s 1926 edition of the A recension. Fuller discussion of the Romance is in Whitmarsh, forthcoming a, and below chapter 6.
74. There are useful summaries of scholarship on utopias in Holzberg 2003; see also ch. 3.
75. See, e.g., Dawson 1992.
76. Pl., Rep. 449c–50a.
77. Romm 1992, especially 172–214.
78. Pavel 1989.
2
The Romance of Genre
The previous chapter sought to sketch a large-scale narrative of the development of Greek prose fiction, a venture that involved setting aside the paradigm of the “imperial romance.” Cultural history cannot proceed by reverse engineering: we cannot comprehend ideas of fiction in the classical and Hellenistic periods if we view them simply as proleptic of later developments. That is teleological thinking of the most unhelpful kind. The previous chapter, then, sought to provide a narrative with no metanarrative, in which developments occur locally and adventitiously rather than according to some higher plan.
This book as a whole is about experimenting with precisely that kind of decentering motion. If we adjust the parameters, if we rewrite some of the received “certainties,” if we explore alternative literary genealogies, what kind of picture do we come up with? Yet while my interest elsewhere in the book is exclusively in the noncanonical, it seems unthinkable to present an account of prose fiction that ignores the imperial romance.1 In this chapter I consider how this particular galaxy might be located within the complex firmament of Greek fiction. There is, I believe, an answer to this question. But the crucial point (in view of the themes of this book) is a larger one, which should be borne in mind throughout: among Greek fictional texts the coherence of the romances as a body of texts is an exception rather than the norm.
Whatever phrase we use—my imperial romance corresponds to others’ ideal novel, ideal romance, or even just Greek novel—there is little ambiguity as to what we are talking of. Almost all scholars recognize a discrete grouping of texts, within the wider field of the ancient novel, consisting of the five surviving Greek prose romances: Xenophon of Ephesus’s Anthia and Habrocomes, Chariton’s Callirhoe (both probably first century C.E.), Achilles Tatius’s Leucippe and Clitophon (probably second century C.E.), Longus’s Daphnis and Chloe (second or perhaps early third century C.E.), and Heliodorus’s Charicleia and Theagenes (probably fourth century C.E.); there are also a number of now-fragmentary novels such as those known to modern scholars as Metiochus and Parthenope and Ninus. Yet to be able to itemize individual examples of the form is not the same thing, as Socrates might have said, as giving an account of it. How do we know, as readers, that these texts belong to the same category? What difference does this make to the reading experience? These are the questions that I aim to address in this chapter.
Let us begin with the much-debated issue of genre.2 For a long time it was simply taken for granted that these five surviving texts, and probably much of the fragmentary material, operate generically. All are built around an aristocratic, gorgeous, heterosexual pair, who undergo trials and separations of various kinds before being reunited at the end. Marriage plays a central role, whether at the start (in Chariton and Xenophon) or at the end (in Achilles, Longus, and Heliodorus). They are all set in a classicizing world, sometimes an explicitly classical one (in Chariton and Heliodorus). As has often been noted, moreover, the romances recycle a number of set-piece topoi: love at first sight (preferably at a festival), separation, kidnap by pirates, intense experience of conflicting emotions, the false appearance of death (Scheintod), courtroom scenes.3 Further evidence for genericity can be sought in the titling conventions, which (I have argued) take a distinctive form: “Events concerning [ta kata or ta peri] x girl,” or more usually “… x girl and y boy.”4
Because of the relative consistency of the form over some three hundred years, critics have sometimes presented the generic identity of the romance in terms of adherence to a schematic narrative template.5 This approach, however, risks downplaying the degree of variation. Each of the surviving five romances is actually very different: if Chariton, quite possibly the earliest, represents the “norm,” then Xenophon contrasts with his low-grade style, Achilles with his first-person narrative and emphasis on gore and lechery, Longus with the pastoral setting, and Heliodorus with his sanctity and African location. With repetition of narrative motifs, moreover, come improvisation and variation too: so, for example, Longus’s miniaturized pastoral romance has a failed kidnapping in which the abductors do not make it out of the bay (1.30.2), while Achilles’s exuberantly over-the-top text features three different false deaths (each of which his credulous protagonist and narrator believe in), and so forth. Genres are not schematic; more recent commentators have, instead, preferred the language of “family resemblance,” a Wittgensteinian term first applied to genre theory by Alastair Fowler in 1982.6 Members of a family are often visibly identifiable as related without sharing identical features; the same model might be used for the romances. The family analogy is also useful in that it gives a role to genetic admixture. Families, if they are not entirely incestuous, propagate themselves by mixing in new DNA; similarly, new texts within literary genres show difference as well as sameness.
This model, however, raises new problems. Families are social constructs rather than straightforward mirrors of biological truth: not all children are the natural offspring of those whom society recognizes as their fathers and mothers. Similarly, identifying the “ancestry” of literary texts can be a more complex issue than it initially appears. This is all the more so in relation to the imperial romances, which are radically intertextual, cannibalizing other forms voraciously: they absorb features from classical epic, tragedy, historiography, New Comedy, rhetoric, lyric, and so forth. What is more, they have numerous points of contact with other “nonclassical” varieties of contemporary literature: a case in point are Christian martyrologies, which often follow a similar pattern of quasi-erotic infatuation leading to obstacles and challenges and finally redemption (although in the self-denying world of early Christianity, it is death rather than sex that marks the telos).7 For some, the romance’s innumerable points of literary reference point to an absence of coherent generic identity. For Steve Nimis, for example, the romance is “anti-generic, unable to be specified as a single style of discourse.”8 Helen Morales has recently developed this claim at greater length. “The
