purposes, is a marginal case.) I shall proceed not with exhaustive analyses but with a few exemplary discussions of key passages.
There are two enormous questions that confront anyone considering the earliest romances. The first is “Where did they come from?” The second is “Who came first, Xenophon or Chariton?” Let us come to the first via the second, although I do not propose a conclusive answer (which would call for fresh evidence). One recent scholar, Stefan Tilg, has assembled all of the arguments and asserted strenuously that Chariton belongs in the mid-first century.19 That may well be right, but none of the evidence is conclusive: the linguistic criteria are imprecise (and who says that Atticism spread at the same rate everywhere across the empire?), the supposed references to real people implausible, the identification of the addressee Athenagoras hypothetical, and the claimed relationships between Chariton and other first-century writers unconvincing.20 All we can say is that one papyrus from the mid-second century (P.Mich. 1) offers a terminus ante quem. The evidence for dating Xenophon, meanwhile, is even more exiguous. Far too much has been made of the apparent mention of an eirenarch (“the man in charge of peace [eirēnēs],” 2.13.3; see also 3.9.5), an office first attested epigraphically under Trajan. It should not need saying that the first inscriptional mention of such an office does not necessarily mark its first institution.21
It is, however, possible to model the implications, in generic terms, of imagining precedence. Let us consider the well-known fact that (among the many similarities between them)22 the two texts open in very similar ways, with a meeting contrived by Eros between the two beautiful young people at or near a festival. The similarities of motif and even language are so close that it is unthinkable that there is no connection23—but what is the nature of that connection? There is in fact a long and inglorious history of scholarship exploring the question, but in a desperately naïve fashion: ultimately what is at issue is simply establishing chronological priority, which critics determine according to their aesthetic preconceptions about the process of literary succession, or—to use a particularly misleading word beloved of this kind of criticism—imitation.24 According to most critics of this school (and indeed to romantic literary criticism, to which it is indebted), an imitation is inherently inferior to an original. The challenge is thus to demonstrate which text is consistently “better” in those areas of similarity and posit it as the prior one.
This model is evidently outdated, both methodologically and in its estimation of the romances’ sophistication: nowadays we speak not of (passive) imitation but of (dynamic) allusion. The effect generated by the later text depends on the reader’s ability to acknowledge the similarity and to explore the tension between generic identification and local deviation from the model. Let me take just one example, perhaps the best-known point of convergence between Xenophon and Chariton. In both texts, there is a public festival: in Xenophon the phrase is epikhōrios heortē (1.2.2), in Chariton heortē dēmotelēs (1.1.4). This in itself is not surprising: infatuation at a festival is found widely in New Comedy, in Hellenistic love poetry (e.g., in Callimachus’s story of Acontius and Cydippe: Aetia 1.67.6), and indeed already at Lysias 1.20.25 But note that Chariton gives the topos a tweak. The lovers do not meet at the festival, but they bump into each other afterward: “By chance [ek tukhēs] the two met in a passageway at a corner and fell into each other” (1.1.6). This reorientation is, indeed, significant and programmatic: as has often been noted, Chariton tends to minimize direct divine intervention, preferring instead to offer psychological motivations.26 If we interpret Chariton in this way, then the little phrase by chance takes on additional resonances. First, it is heavily ironic: the festival encounter is, of course, so far from being accidentally, instead generically predetermined. Tukhē (fortune), readers of Callirhoe will discover, is a marker of self-conscious authorial intervention in the plot.27 Alternatively, the “accidental” nature of the collision can be read as a commentary on the misfiring topos: one would expect a meeting at the festival proper, but “by chance” they meet elsewhere.
None of this proves that Xenophon is prior to Chariton (though it is of course consistent with that claim). Chariton, indeed, could be playing with the topical status of the amorous meeting at a festival in preromance texts. But if we do hypothesize Xenophon’s priority, or at least the priority of another romance featuring a festival meeting, then we can see instantly how the model of genre bending that I have been proposing may work. Chariton treats the festival encounter as characteristic of the romance au degré zéro and self-consciously marks his own innovation within that frame.28
My second example comes from Achilles Tatius, who wrote in the next generation (a second-century papyrus confirms the terminus ante quem).29 In book 5 of Leucippe and Clitophon, the hero Clitophon—now remarried to Melite—discovers by letter that Leucippe is still alive (5.18.4–5). In a parallel episode in Chariton, as commentators have noted, Callirhoe—now remarried to Dionysius—learns from a letter from Chaereas that he is still alive (4.4.7–10).30 Although it serves a similar narrative function, however, Leucippe’s letter shows no signs of intertextual engagement with Chaereas’s: stylistically speaking, it is ambitious and rhetorical where Chaereas’s letter is sparse and pared down, following (as Konstantin Doulamis has shown) the rhetorical theorists’ precepts of saphēneia, or clarity.31 In terms of vocabulary and phrasing, Leucippe’s letter in fact reworks and amplifies 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:
