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, synchronic template that can be mapped out typologically but a dynamic relationship between texts, a relationship that shifts and 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
