Summary: This essay contains an annotated plot-summary of the Ephesiaca (pp. 43–47) followed by sections on the author (47–48), his date (48), the composition of his work (48–51), his relationship to Chariton (51–53), and the later history of the Ephesiaca (53).1
The Ephesiaca or The Ephesian Tales about Anthia and Habrocomes, much the shortest of the five extant ancient Greek novels of love and adventure, is ascribed to one Xenophon (of Ephesus).2
First a sketch giving the main lines of the plot.3 While reading this, it will be profitable to pay attention already to the extent to which the story is repetitive; and note also the structural principle of rapid movement back and forth between the characters, especially between Habrocomes and Anthia.
The tale begins [as it will eventually end] in Ephesus, the sacred city of Artemis.4 Habrocomes,5 an extremely handsome youth of about 16, regarded himself as proof against the power of love. Eros made Habrocomes fall painfully in love with the equally beautiful fourteen-year-old Anthia,6 who spent her days in the temple of Artemis in the service of the goddess. Anthia too is captivated at first sight by Habrocomes,7 but their passion remains unspoken. After some time, when the children are wasting away from love-sickness, their parents consult a nearby oracle of Apollo and receive this response in common:
Why do you want to learn the end of a sickness and its cause?
A single sickness holds them both; and hence comes a release.
But I see for them dread hardships and endless toils:
Both shall flee over the brine, passion-driven,
And bonds endure among men that mingle with the sea;
And for both a grave shall be their wedding-room, and consuming fire.
But, still, after their trials they have a better fortune
And by the streams of the Nile river to Isis the august
As saviour hereafter they set up rich and happy gifts.
The parents puzzle over the meaning of the oracle8 and decide on action they hope will amount to a mild but effective fulfillment of its predictions9: they join the young couple in marriage and send them on a voyage to Egypt. The wedding, the first night of love, and the departure from Ephesus are described. On board ship Habrocomes and Anthia swear mutual fidelity in case of separation. In the temple of Helios on Rhodes they dedicate a panoply with an inscription containing their names. Continuing on their way they are attacked by pirates, the fulfillment of a dream Habrocomes has had. Corymbus, the pirates’ captain, taking Habrocomes and Anthia and a few of their servants on board his ship, burns the captured vessel and those left on it. On the journey to their base near Tyre Corymbus falls in love with Habrocomes, and Euxinus, one of his comrades, with Anthia.
The young couple resolve to die rather than give in to the pirates’ advances. From this they are saved by being taken off to Tyre by the pirate-boss, Apsyrtus, along with two of their servants, Leucon and Rhode, themselves lovers too. Manto, daughter of Apsyrtus, falls in love with Habrocomes. At first she tries to use Rhode as a go-between, but then, impatient of delay,10 writes to Habrocomes with a mixture of promises and threats, only to be defiantly rejected in his reply. Out for revenge, she accuses him of trying to rape her. Apsyrtus has him tortured and imprisoned. Anthia, Leucon and Rhode are given as a wedding present to Manto and carried off to Antioch in Syria, her husband Moeris’ homeland.11 Habrocomes has a dream that gives him hope of eventual reunion with Anthia. Leucon and Rhode are sent to be sold as slaves in Lycia. Manto makes Anthia cohabit with a goatherd, Lampon, who, however, respects her chastity. Back in Tyre, Apsyrtus finds Manto’s letter to Habrocomes and thus discovering his innocence puts him in charge of his household. Leucon and Rhode are sold to a kindly old man. Moeris falls in love with Anthia; Manto learns of this and orders Lampon to kill the girl. Instead, he sells her to Cilician traders; their ship is wrecked off the coast of Cilicia and Anthia is captured “by Hippothous the brigand and his men” (2.11.11).12 In a letter to Apsyrtus Manto says she had to sell Anthia because of Moeris’ attraction to her.13 Hearing this, Habrocomes heads for Antioch and learns from Lampon that Anthia has been taken to Cilicia.
On the day after Anthia has fallen into their hands Hippothous and his brigands set about sacrificing her to Ares, but she is rescued in the nick of time by a force of men led by Perilaus, “the man in charge of the peace in Cilicia” (2.13.3).14 Of the robbers Hippothous alone escapes. Perilaus takes Anthia to his house in Tarsus, falls in love with her and wants to marry her; Anthia has the marriage postponed for thirty days. Habrocomes, now in Cilicia, meets the fleeing Hippothous,15 with whom, without mentioning Anthia, he agrees under pressure to travel to Cappadocia.16
In Mazacus in Cappadocia, where Hippothous plans to gather a new band of men, they talk of their past lives. Hippothous relates the tragic tale of his love-affair with Hyperanthes. When Habrocomes tells of Anthia, Hippothous recognizes her as the girl he captured in Cilicia. They decide to return there to search for her; Hippothous suggests “collecting a few men, for safety on the journey” (3.3.6).
In Tarsus the thirty days have passed and preparations are being made for the wedding. To preserve her fidelity to Habrocomes, Anthia resolves to die. From Eudoxus, a shipwrecked physician from Ephesus, she gets, in return for his fare home, what she thinks is poison; in fact, he gives her a strong sleeping-potion. Perilaus laments over his apparently dead bride, exclaiming on the good fortune of Habrocomes,17 for whom his beloved has given her life. Anthia is put in a tomb, richly dressed and adorned with gold. When she wakes, she is distressed at being still alive. Robbers break into the tomb and carry off Anthia, despite her pleas to be left to die there,18 and the riches buried with her; they sail for Alexandria intending to sell her to traders there.
Habrocomes, failing to discover anything about a girl brought in with captured bandits, returns to where he is lodging with Hippothous and his men.19 There he hears from an old woman about the recent death and burial of Perilaus’ bride and the tomb-robbery. Convinced that Anthia is dead he resolves to die, but not until he finds her corpse, which the grave-robbers have evidently taken with them. He steals away on his own in the night and takes ship for Alexandria hoping to find in Egypt those who had deprived him of everything. Hippothous and his men set out to rob their way through Syria and Phoenicia. In Alexandria the grave-robbers sell Anthia to Psammis, an Indian prince, who immediately tries to rape her; she puts off the superstitious barbarian with a tale of being dedicated to Isis for a period that still had a year to run. Habrocomes suffers shipwreck near the mouth of the Nile, is captured by local “shepherds” and sold in Pelusium to Araxus, a kindly old man. Cyno, Araxus’ ugly and evil wife, falls for Habrocomes and proposes a sexual relationship to him, promising to kill her husband and marry him instead. When Habrocomes hears that she has actually killed Araxus, he leaves the house, refusing sex with a murderess. She accuses him of the murder and he is taken in bonds to “the then ruler of Egypt” in Alexandria.
Hippothous and his robbers proceed as far as Coptus in Ethiopia where they set up a base for brigandage. Habrocomes, sentenced to death, but saved by the Nile-god from both crucifixion and death by fire, is kept under guard. On the way home to India Psammis and his entourage are attacked by Hippothous’ robbers and Anthia falls into Hippothous’ hands for the second time; neither of them recognizes the other.
Habrocomes is freed by the ruler and sails for Italy to search for Anthia there. Anthia kills Anchialus, one of the robbers, when he tries to rape her, and is punished by being enclosed in a pit with savage dogs. Amphinomus, who is to guard the pit, already in love with Anthia, keeps her safe by feeding the dogs.
Habrocomes, blown off course, arrives in Syracuse in Sicily. There he makes friends with Aegialeus, an old fisherman who long ago had eloped from Sparta with his bride, Thelxinoe; she has since died, but Aegialeus keeps her mummified body in his house; this makes Habrocomes all the more eager to find Anthia’s corpse as a source of consolation. He begs Apollo to fulfill the final part of the oracle.20
When Hippothous and his robbers head back towards Syria, Amphinomus stays behind with Anthia; he swears to respect her chastity and she goes with him to Coptus. Hippothous’ robbers kill and burn on their way north; they are defeated by an army under Polyidus, sent against them by the ruler; Hippothous escapes alone and catches a ship bound for Sicily. Polyidus, with the help of captives, captures Amphinomus and falls in love with Anthia; when he tries to rape her, she takes refuge in the temple of Isis in Memphis and he swears to respect her. At the temple of Apis Anthia receives an oracle predicting a speedy reunion with Habrocomes. In Alexandria Apsyrtus’ jealous wife, Rhenaea, hands Anthia over to a servant, Clytus, to be sold to a pimp in Italy.
Habrocomes decides to leave Sicily for Italy and, if he fails to find Anthia there, to return to Ephesus, where in the meantime both sets of parents have “betaken themselves from life due to despondency and old age” (5.6.3).21
Leucon and Rhode’s kindly Syrian master has died and left them a large fortune; they decide to return to Ephesus; on Rhodes they learn that Habrocomes and Anthia have not yet come home and decide to stay there for some time.
The pimp who has bought Anthia in Tarentum presents her to admiring customers; she saves herself by feigning epilepsy.
To support himself, Habrocomes has had to take work as a laborer in the quarries at Nucerium.
In Tarentum Anthia has a dream that makes her think Habrocomes may have been unfaithful to her; she resolves to die.
Hippothous, who has married an old woman in Sicily and inherited her wealth, goes to Tarentum on a shopping trip with his new boy-friend, Kleisthenes, and recognizes Anthia, whom the pimp has put up for sale in the market-place, as the girl left in the pit in Egypt; she does not know him. He buys her and wants to have sex with her. Eventually she tells him her true story and he recognizes her as the wife of his friend Habrocomes, whom he has been hoping to find.
Habrocomes leaves Nucerium for Ephesus by a circuitous route via Sicily, where Aigialeus has since died, Crete, and Cyprus, where he prays to Aphrodite. He stops off on Rhodes for a few days, determined, when he reaches Ephesus, to kill himself once he has raised a tomb to Anthia.
Leucon and Rhode have set up in the temple of Helios a pillar inscribed with their names beside the panoply put there before by Habrocomes and Anthia. Habrocomes is found by Leucon and Rhode sitting near this pillar; he and they recognize each other and they take him to their lodgings.
Hippothous decides to take Anthia home to Ephesus and they stop off on Rhodes, where she dedicates some of her hair to Helios with an inscription containing her name and that of Habrocomes. Leucon and Rhode see this and their report of it gives Habrocomes new hope. Next day Leucon and Rhode (Habrocomes has stayed behind, despondent22) find Anthia in the temple with Hippothous and after some hesitation she and they recognize each other and hurry to where Habrocomes is. He hears the good news and runs to meet them. They meet before the temple of Isis, in which they acknowledge her as their savior. That night, after celebrations and tales of adventures, Habrocomes and Anthia, at last alone together again, assure each other of fidelity preserved through all trials. Back home in Ephesus they dedicate an account of their adventures in the temple of Artemis, and spend their lives happily with their friends.
In the novel itself this plot-skeleton is fleshed out not only with narrative detail, but with a large amount of direct speech.
Any statements about the Ephesiaca and its elusive author must be based on a critical examination of (a) the novel itself, with book-titles and subscriptions, found in the single manuscript in which it is transmitted, as well as any significant relationship it may be thought to bear to the real world or to other authors, esp. Chariton, and (b) a brief notice in the Suda, a 10th-century encyclopedia, based on an entry in an earlier compilation by Hesychius of Miletus (6th century).
In the Suda our Xenophon appears between two other erotic novelists of this same name, one “of Antioch”, author of Babyloniaca, the other “of Cyprus”, who produced Cypriaca, and the entry reads:
Xenophon: Ephesian; narrative author23; Ephesiaca: that is a love-story in ten books about Habrocomes and Anthia; and About the city of the Ephesians; and other works.
Though the author is called “Xenophon” both in the Suda and in the manuscript, this is most unlikely to have been his real name, occurring, as it does, so frequently as the name of novelists.24 Authors of love-novels may have taken the name “Xenophon” in homage to the famous Athenian historian who wove the love-story of Pantheia and Abradatas into his Cyropaedia, the usual view; or, more likely, the name may somehow have come to be connected with anonymous novels in the course of their transmission because of a perceived affinity with the historian in style and/or subject matter.
The idea that Xenophon was Ephesian, found only in the Suda, is likely, as is “of Cyprus” in the case of the author of the Cypriaca, to be merely derived from the title of the novel, which appears in the manuscript in all five book-headings and in the subscription at the end as “(Xenophon’s) Ephesiaca about Anthia and Habrocomes.” The Suda tells us the Ephesiaca was in ten books, whereas the manuscript text is in 5, and that is also the number given in the subscription, where there is no mention of epitomization, just as there is none in the book-titles.25 The best and simplest solution here is to see with Salvini and others the “ten” of the Suda (represented in Greek by the letter ι) as an error for “five” (represented by ε).26 The Suda’s “ten” was the prime basis of the theory that the transmitted text of the Ephesiaca is only an abridgement of a much longer work.27 I shall not include a refutation of that notion in this essay, since I regard it, after the work of Hägg and myself,28 as a red-herring; and the view that our Ephesiaca is indeed the original and not an epitome seems in any case to be gaining considerable ground recently.
“About the city of the Ephesians” can hardly refer to the content of the Ephesiaca, and why one should be more than skeptical about Xenophon’s authorship of a separate work of that kind will, I hope, emerge in the course of this essay. If such a book did exist, then it was the work of another. Maybe of one “Xenophon” of Ephesus here conflated with the anonymous and cityless novelist?
Dating the Ephesiaca is crucial to the early history and development of the novel. We have no immediate indication of its date of composition29 and the two supposed bases for a terminus ante quem usually adduced are inadequate: the claim that “the ruler of Egypt” who condemns Habrocomes for the murder of Araxus is a Roman Prefect, holder of an office instituted under Augustus in 30 B.C., and the view that Perilaus, who rescues Anthia from Hippothous’ robbers, is an irenarch, a type of peace-keeping official otherwise first attested in an inscription of 116/117 C.E. from Caria. The expression “ruler (archōn) of Egypt” can by no means be restricted to the Roman Prefect,30 and even if it could, that would not matter here: I have no interest in arguing that the Ephesiaca was composed before 30 B.C. Perilaus, who is not actually given the title “irenarch,” was “elected to be in charge (archein) of the peace in Cilicia” (3,9,5).31 The fact that he is represented as operating in the whole of Cilicia is enough on its own to rule him out as an irenarch32: irenarchs were strictly municipal officers whose functions were confined to particular cities33; and the kind of vocabulary used of Perilaus is found used of real-life territorial peace-officers, e.g. in Lycia, next door to Cilicia, long before 116/117 C.E.34
But, though Perilaus and “the ruler of Egypt” are not much use to us for dating Xenophon, all is not lost and I shall return to the question of date in connection with the relationship between him and Chariton.
Turning to the character of the novel itself we are on firmer ground. The most significant – I do not say the most striking, since it has not struck anyone properly until very recently35 – thing about the Ephesiaca is its very remarkably repetitive manner: as far as subject-matter allows, the Ephesiaca is a tissue of kaleidoscopic repetition at the three intimately related levels of scene (or theme), theme-element (i.e. a single action vel sim. as a basic element or building-block of a scene), and verbal formulae or standard key-words that regularly express theme-elements.36
As a small taste of Xenophon’s compositional technique37 consider the following passages38:
5.5.8
“and he, seeing beauty such as he had never before looked upon, considered that he would have a great source of profit in the girl and for some days he let her recover, weary from the voyage and from Rhenaea’s tortures,”
3.8.3–9.1
“… and [the pirates] see Anthia alive. And regarding this too as a great source of profit, they raised her up and wanted to take her off. …
And they, completing the voyage in no few days, put in at Alexandria and there took Anthia ashore and decided to < let her recover, weary > 39 from the voyage and sell her to some merchants.”
1.12.1
“And all the Rhodians thronged together astonished at the beauty of the children, and none of those who saw them passed by in silence, but some said it was a visit from the gods, and others bowed down and prayed to40 them. And soon the names of Habrocomes and Anthia had spread through the whole city.”
2.2.1–4
“[Apsyrtus] came to the estate and saw Habrocomes and Anthia and was astonished at their comeliness and straight away considering them a great source of profit, claimed them for himself. …
Their procession was gazed at from all sides and everyone was amazed at their beauty, and barbarians who had never before seen such comeliness considered those they gazed on to be gods and called Apsyrtus happy in having got such servants.”
1.2.7
“… and so on this occasion too, when she was seen, the crowd shouted out and various utterances came from the spectators, some in their astonishment saying it was the goddess, others some other lady made by the goddess in her own likeness. And they all prayed to her and bowed down and called her parents happy.”
In 5.5.8 the brothelkeeper sees Anthia’s beauty, beauty such as he has never seen before, considers that she will be a source of great profit to him, and lets her recover for a while from the voyage and what preceded it (i.e. so that she will look her best for his customers); in 3.8.3–9.1 the pirates see Anthia, consider her a source of great profit, carry her off to Alexandria (in the omitted sections, 3.8.4–7, we have two speeches from Anthia, one addressed to the pirates, the other a soliloquy on board ship, and a couple of sentences of narrative), and decide to let her recover from the voyage before selling her; in 2.2.1–4 Apsyrtus sees the young couple, is astonished at their beauty, considers them a source of great profit, and takes them into Tyre (2.2.2–3, omitted), where the people marvel at their beauty, beauty such as they have never seen before. The couple had already recovered from the preceding voyage before Apsyrtus got hold of them, and so the ‘recovery from the voyage’ element is not used here; its place is taken by “ordering him to take good care of them, feeling that he would make a great profit if he could sell them at the right price” (2.2.5; for the ‘care’ element see also 1.15.2; 5.9.13 with O’Sullivan [1995] 143).
The three crowd-reaction scenes are also constructed on a common model: 2.2.4 “considered them to be gods and called Apsyrtus happy”; 1.2.7 “saying it was the goddess … they prayed to her and bowed down and called her parents happy”; 1.12.1 “some said it was a visit from the gods, and others bowed down and prayed to them” (here there is no one present suitable for the crowd “to call happy”). In each case the preceding idea is, of course, ‘crowd sees the beautiful (Habrocomes and) Anthia.’41 Xenophon, just as he had standard dreams, standard love-stories and voyages, standard scenes between heroine and unwanted lovers, and so on, also had a standard basic set of theme-elements with which to construct his crowd-reaction scenes.
2.2.4 (the Tyrian crowd) following closely on the ‘great source of profit’ scene of 2.2.1, has in common with that of 5.5.8 a theme-element (2.2.4 “who had never before seen such comeliness”; 5.5.8 “seeing beauty such as he had never before looked upon”) that occurs otherwise only at 1.1.1 “<such > 42 beauty as had never before come to be either in Ionia or in any other land”, in what is really another crowd-scene43; and “astonished at the beauty of the children” in the crowd-scene of 1.12.1 can be paralleled in Xenophon only by “was astonished at their comeliness” in the ‘great source of profit’ scene of 2.2.1. The two scene types have two semi-formulae (expressing the same conceptual theme-element) in common and exclusive to themselves, and they are in close contact with each other in 2.2. These scene-types seem to have been specially associated in the author’s mind.
The profit motif and that of letting the girl recover from a voyage occur together in 5.5.8, where the pimp sees Anthia for the first time after the voyage is over; in 3.8.3–9.1, where the pirates capture Anthia in Tarsus and recognize her profit-potential before the voyage to Egypt, the same two motifs are separated by speeches and voyage narrative. This framing of material largely peculiar to a particular context with theme-elements (usually fairly hard-set verbal formulae) elsewhere found together, in a simpler context, is not unusual in Xenophon.44
The only adequate parallel for what I have presented here is provided by works of known oral background,45 e.g. the poetry of Homer and Irish Finn Tales, the one tradition in Greek, the other in prose, which I have drawn on for comparison.46 Such a comparison – extending beyond the mere occurrence of scene and formula to various tell-tale aspects of their use and character47 – leaves one with only one plausible conclusion: the Ephesiaca too is a work deriving from a background of oral storytelling.48 I have argued that it should be seen as a transitional text,49 a work still in close touch with its oral background, but composed in writing and even capable of accommodating – though I do not see these clearly in Xenophon50 – literary, even intertextual, features.51 In the company of the Greek novelists Xenophon is remarkably free of anything but the occasional suspicion of a literary debt and he is the only one to tolerate hiatus to any large extent.52
It has been suggested53 that the repetitive-formulaic character of the Ephesiaca is due to epitomization, without a hint of realization of how truly implausible such a suggestion is. How are we to envisage the supposed procedure? Was a non-repetitive, non-formulaic novel somehow reduced to a highly repetitive, highly formulaic summary? Where, then, did all the repetition come from? Or was an originally repetitive, but apparently non-formulaic, novel turned, presumably by leaving out some kind of stuffing, into a dense complex of formulae displaying remarkable balance of scale and concinnity from parallel scene to parallel scene?54 There is not a shred of evidence for such an arbitrary assumption. The salient fact here remains that “the repetitions at the different levels of theme, theme-element, and verbal formula are intimately bound up with one another as levels of the same compositional technique, and are certainly not due to an epitomator, to whom the repetition of scenes could not be ascribed.”55
Xenophon and Chariton are at once associated with each other and set off from the more “sophistic”56 novels of Achilles Tatius, Longus and Heliodorus by the use of a much less purely Attic Greek; and they share so much in the way of scene, motif and phrase that it is generally and rightly believed that one of them must have drawn on the other.57 Chariton has been (and probably still is) usually regarded as the earlier of the two. This view rests on two separate, but I suspect not unrelated, pillars, both of them made of sand.
Firstly, we are told that Chariton is superior to Xenophon in his use of shared material and that this must mean that he is to be seen as the earlier of the two with Xenophon as an inferior borrower. But, even if one accepted this premise, it is glaringly obvious that one can just as well blandly state – it is hardly argument, either – that Chariton, in the normal progression of things, improved on a relatively primitive predecessor.58 There is no way forward here, I am afraid, though, as we shall see, another comparative approach is much more promising.
The second reason for declaring Xenophon the borrower is that his priority would not be compatible with a hypothesis on the origin of the novel that has in recent years, in the wish for some firm foothold, surreptitiously acquired a status approaching orthodoxy. I mean the view that the novel emerged against a background of “romantic” Hellenistic historiography, which tended to become increasingly fictionalized, and that Chariton’s novel with its – however mutually incompatible – historical elements is at the nub of this development and should be regarded as the earliest59 of the close group of novels of love and adventure to which it belongs.60
The daunting trouble with this is that there is in fact, since the mere tendency to fiction is not enough, no evident line of development from historiography to Chariton61: there is nothing in fictionalized history that anticipates the characteristic plot of the love-romance, and the works – all of them very fragmentary – that have been suggested as possible links, apart from great uncertainty on whether any of them predated Chariton, will not carry the burden of such a role: the stories of Ninus and of Sesonchosis are fictional accounts of the lives of legendary oriental monarchs, very different from the main characters in our novels, and though they contained a love-interest, it is quite unclear what part this played in the stories as a whole and how the adventures of hero and – if any – of heroine were related to each other in the plot62; and the tale of Metiochus and Parthenope, despite some similarities, appears also to have been substantially different from what we find in Chariton.63 In matters of this kind the careful observation of differences is more prudent than the enthusiastically optimistic claiming of similarities.
There is, however, a clear affinity between Chariton and historiography: so, e.g., some of his characters, including the heroine’s father, are taken from Greek and Persian history and part of the action takes place at the court of the Persian king Artaxerxes II; but there is no concern for historical accuracy and persons, events and conditions from different periods are anachronistically combined.64 How, then, is this pseudo-historiographical stance to be seen? Chariton would seem to have given us not historiography evolved into novel, but a novel fashioned on the kind of plot and motifs found in the Ephesiaca and raised to the status of literary acceptability65 by being dressed up as pseudo-history66 and supplied with an extensive, especially Homeric, literary texture. What Xenophon and Chariton, Achilles Tatius and Heliodorus have in common, as their defining stock, is not the deliberate and isolated historiographical pose of Chariton, but the fund of motifs found in Xenophon with scarcely a hint of historical setting and certainly no great debt to historiography67; that is the Ariadne’s thread to guide us through provenance and progress of the ancient novel. Chariton, the first truly literary novelist, was influenced by historiography, as Longus was later, even more deeply, by the pastoral tradition. We can dispense with the notion of the novel as the “child” of historiography by some kind of literary parturition.
Though a simple comparison of Xenophon and Chariton will, as we have seen, not provide us with criteria for deciding the question of priority, our new awareness of Xenophon’s formulaic technique does, however, offer a more than plausible basis for a decision on this crucial question in the history of prose fiction.68 Where material shared by the two novelists is in Xenophon’s case part of his complex apparatus of composition by formulaic theme and theme-element, we see a real difference: so, e.g., Xenophon has a number of crowd-reaction scenes, all of them fashioned with the same scaffolding of standard elements; Chariton has five crowd-reaction scenes with scarcely anything in common, and without Xenophon to compare him with we would not know that one of these scenes (1.1.16) clearly, though it has only some of the standard elements, corresponds to Xenophon’s characteristic scheme.69 In general, what we find in Chariton is a faint and fragmentary reflection of Xenophon’s typical compositional technique: he does not have most of Xenophon’s typical scenes at all and where there is thematic coincidence, his material, though clearly parallel, is only partially so. There is no doubt in my mind where this evidence points, since to maintain that Xenophon took the scene at “Char. 1.1.16 (which by itself would have no signs of being a stock scheme), elaborated it to some extent, and treated the result as a kind of literary straight-jacket in composing crowd-scenes, and that moreover all the repetition in the Ephesiaca” – without any correspondence in Chariton – “is to be explained from such beginnings, is absurd.”70
The thumb-nail early history of the novel resulting from this and in accord with other evidence would be: an oral tradition of tales of love and adventure led to the composition in writing, as a transitional text, of the Ephesian Tales of ‘Xenophon’; it was followed, probably at no great interval, by Chariton’s novel of Callirhoe, which took the primitive plot and, by clothing it in the guise of historiography and providing it with an intertextual apparatus, attempted to raise it to the level of literary acceptability; all this took place probably around or not long before the middle of the first century C.E., in time to allow the likely reference to Chariton’s Callirhoe in Persius’ (34–62 C.E.) first satire (1.134) ca. 60 C.E. and to provide Petronius (ob. 66) with the basis for his generally acknowledged parody of the ideal Greek romance of love and adventure in the Satyrica towards the end of Nero’s reign (54–68 C.E.).71
The next writer after Chariton to show knowledge of Xenophon is Aristaenetus (ca. 500); then come the entries in Hesychius of Miletus (6th c.) and the Suda (10th c.); and his novel was also mentioned by Gregory of Corinth (11th/12th c.). For the text of the Ephesiaca we are entirely dependent on seventeen-and-a-half pages of tiny writing in a small manuscript written towards the end of the 13th century and now preserved in the Laurentian library in Florence; this famous little book also contains a text of Longus, about half of Achilles Tatius, and is, apart from a few fragments, our only witness for Chariton; these form a nest of less edifying reading hedged in on both sides by works better suited to the eyes of pious monks. Still in manuscript, the Ephesiaca was seen by Angelo Poliziano, who published an excerpt from the first book in Latin translation (1489), by H. Stephanus (Henri Estienne, ca. 1550), and Bernard de Montfaucon (1700); the Perilaus episode was used by Massimo Salernitano as the basis of one of his novellas (1476) and from there indirectly influenced Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet (ca. 1595).
In 1700 Anton Maria Salvini made a transcript of the manuscript text, to which his attention had been drawn by Montfaucon, and published an Italian translation of the novel in 1723. In 1726 the first printed text, based on a copy of a copy of Salvini’s transcript, appeared in London, edited by Antonio Cocchi. The Greek text has been edited sixteen times73 in all, always until 2005 by people who had either themselves not seen the manuscript at all or, while claiming to have seen it, frequently misreported it nonetheless. Of the older editions the most notable, apart from the editio princeps, are those of Locella (1796) and Peerlkamp (1818), both with variorum commentary. Very many scholars, some of them men of high reputation,74 have given their critical attention either to the whole text, chief among these being the famous Tiberius Hemsterhuis, or to the occasional passage.
Opinions on Xenophon’s merits as an author have varied very widely.75 So, for example, from being “no less sweet” than Xenophon of Athens (Poliziano, 1489) and “sweet and delightful to read” (J.A. Fabricius, 1728) he has become a “person of truly limited mind” (Rohde, 1876) and “a wretched scribbler” (Lesky3, 1971) of whose work we supposedly have, in any case, only an epitome; and the Ephesiaca has been variously called “a silly little novelette” (G.A. Bürger, 1775) and “this gem of a novel” (E.H. Haight, 1943). Over the past two centuries judgments on it have been overwhelmingly negative and it has become the fashion to refer to it in disparaging terms.76
Whatever one’s aesthetic response to the Ephesiaca may be, it has, I hope, become clear that it is a most interesting document, crucial in the history of prose fiction.
1 I offer a sketch, all in English, of the material and views published (with much untranslated Greek) in my 1995 book on the Ephesiaca and in the Latin preface to my 2005 Teubner edition, with some response to critics and with fresh thoughts and emphases here and there. Lack of space has prevented treatment of some topics: on the novel as originally a concatenation of separate stories or novellae see Trenkner 1958 (esp. 178); cf. O’Sullivan 1995: 95 and on the implications of this for characterization in the Ephesiaca ibid. 38–39n9 with the crossreferences there. Those interested in narratology should see Morgan 2004: 489–92. The introduction to the new Loeb Ephesiaca (Henderson 2009: 200–2 and 209–10) contains, I discover, more or less a precis of my views. Henderson’s text and especially his version of bits of my apparatus criticus have, by the way, somehow become a minefield of error, including errors in the use of Latin.
2 On the author’s name and homeland see p. 47 below.
3 There is a more detailed epitome in O’Sullivan 1995: 20–29.
4 From the start the story is full of gods, which gods depending on where the action is taking place at each juncture.
5 This form of the name, with an H (a rough breathing in Greek) is the correct one, as Hemsterhuis already saw: beside “Anthia” (from the Greek for “flower”) the name will be intended to mean “he of the lovely hair” and for Xenophon “fine/lovely” will have been habros, not abros. Herodotus (no rough breathing in his dialect) and inscriptions (generally no breathings at all) are, pace Ruiz-Montero 1981, not promising sources of assistance here. On personal names in Xenophon in general see Hägg 1971.
6 The correct form (favored by meter 1,12,2; 5,4,11), as opposed to “Antheia”; further O’Sullivan 2005: 3 (note on line 47).
7 Gärtner 1967: 2060, typically captious, talks of an extension to Anthia of Eros’ campaign against Habrocomes, but the plot requires an enamored girl and Habrocomes’ beauty is a natural enough cause of her reaction: note the actual wording at 1,3,1: “they see each other and Anthia is captivated by Habrocomes, and Habrocomes is overcome by Eros.”
8 Further O’Sullivan 1995: 20–1 with notes, 91–92 with nn.47 and 48.
9 On the meaning of the Greek here see O’Sullivan 1995: 22–23 with n.4.
10 The introduction of Rhode and Leucon at all at this point is to prepare for their role later on, in book 5.
11 The lovers are thus separated and are not reunited until 5,13,3.
12 The definite article is slightly odd, but too much has been made of it: see O’Sullivan 1995: 125–26; cf. Odyssey 4,640 (introduction of Eumaeus) with S. West ad loc. in Heubeck, A., West, S. and Hainsworth, J.B. 1988. A Commentary on Homer’s Odyssey. Vol. I. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
13 Note how the all-controlling author makes Manto’s “selling” fib coincide with the truth, as his plot requires.
14 See p. 48 below.
15 On the slight time-flaw here see O’Sullivan 1995: 24n8.
16 This is to get Habrocomes out of the way and let things progress suitably in Tarsus.
17 Of whom he can know nothing, a good example of the kind of fault that must be attributed to Xenophon himself, not to any kind of editor (see O’Sullivan 1995: 91).
18 The difference between this and Callirhoe’s reaction in Chariton 1,9 is due to the fact that Anthia wakes in the tomb as a failed suicide, whereas Callirhoe never wanted to die. Gärtner’s criticism (1967: 2083–84) is, despite O’Sullivan 1995: 25n10, still repeated by Holzberg 2006: 71–72 (cf. 11986: 63–64) as his trump card for Xenophon’s dependence on Chariton!
19 On the presence of “men” see O’Sullivan 1995: 25n11; on the supposedly missing journey from Cappadocia back to Tarsus ibid. 127–28.
20 It seems that Habrocomes now sees the end of the oracle as referring to his being with Anthia’s corpse as Aegialeus is with Thelxinoe (contrast Gärtner 1967: 2067).
21 On the parents’ death see O’Sullivan 1995: 132n57.
22 A good example of plot-dictated implausibility to be attributed to Xenophon himself, not some putative editor; further O’Sullivan 1995: 90.
23 The Greek term historikos was applied to a narrative prose author, whether of factual history or of a fictional story.
24 For a possible fourth novelist with the same name see Reeve 1971: 531n1.
25 Though I do not think it at all critical for the number of books, it is worth noting that, whereas in the text of the novel the lovers’ names almost invariably (exceptions at 2,8,1; 2,10,4 and 5,10,6; the order at 1,12,2 and 5,4,11 is metrically determined) appear in the order “Habrocomes and Anthia” (cf. the constant “Leucon and Rhode”) and in the narration of their experiences and adventures those of Habrocomes always come first, in the five book-titles and the subscription they are always in the order “Anthia and Habrocomes.” This suggests that the titles do not come from the author himself. The order of names in the Suda is that of the text.
26 The transmission of numbers in Greek manuscripts is notoriously unreliable and there are similar errors elsewhere in the Suda (including variant readings within its own tradition).
27 Suggested by Rohde 1876: 401 (= 31914: 429) with n.1 and elaborated by Bürger 1892.
28 Hägg 1966; O’Sullivan 1995: 99–139. I always regarded Hägg as having done enough to slay the epitome-dragon on his own (cf. O’Sullivan 1995: 10,102–35 [132]), but the power of academic inertia (often, no doubt, among those who had read neither Bürger nor Hägg, at least with any care) was too strong until very recently. For the relationship between Hägg’s work and mine in this regard see Hägg 2004: 10.
29 Attempts to date authors on linguistic usage alone (so, recently e.g. Ruiz-Montero 1991 on Chariton; cf. Hernández Lara 1994) are futile. Scholars with a knowledge of Greek that few have today have varied wildly in their estimates in this regard; and, however (pseudo-)scientific one’s approach, alone the fact that one is attempting, if one’s aim is to attain any accuracy at all, to date an author not only in relation to others, but within his own writing life of perhaps fifty years should give one pause. There is a parallel here to the over-close dating of papyrus hands.
30 Further O’Sullivan 1995: 3–4. It is worth noting that the “ruler” had a blood-relative with the Greek name “Polyidus” (5,3,1).
31 Further O’Sullivan 1995: 4.
32 O’Sullivan 1995: 4–9 considered, for the sake of circumspection, both scenarios and concluded that whether or not Perilaus is taken as an irenarch, in either case he does not provide us with a firm basis for dating Xenophon.
33 This central point is entirely missed by Rife 2002, who misrepresents the position taken by me (see n.32 above), takes various ill-conceived pot-shots at what he thinks I say, appropriates some significant points of mine, and ends up with something remarkably like my conclusions. His approach has, in any case, a fatal flaw: instead of trying to show that the kinds of things said of Perilaus (except, of course, for “in Cilicia”) would fit an irenarch, he needed to show – and this would have been impossible, as I had already demonstrated – that they could not fit other peace-officers that we know existed long before 116/117 C.E.
34 Further O’Sullivan 1995: 8–9.
35 This is not as surprising as it might seem: to see what is “revealed” (so, Hägg 2006: 144 [cf. “mostrato” 2002: 23], an outstanding Kenner of the Ephesiaca and its secondary literature; cf. also now Trzaskoma 2010: xxvi–xxvii, xxxvi) in my 1995 book one has, because of the way the relevant material is distributed through the novel, to rearrange the text extensively and then engage in further painstaking analysis. Claims of a prior gnostic access to the insights thus acquired, especially if they are anything but borne out in voluminous publications, should be taken with more than a pinch of salt.
36 It is not enough just to register in passing that the Ephesiaca is somehow formulaic: to deal successfully with Xenophon at any level, textual or literary(-historical), one must engage closely with his formularity and internalize a strong sense of its complexity, including its flexibilities and occasionally infelicitous inflexibilities. Such engagement should, e.g., forestall “emendation” of 3,12,4–5 (Konstan 2007: 38–40): further O’Sullivan 1995: 86–87, 106 with n.12.
37 For much fuller illustration and analysis of Xenophon’s compositional technique see O’Sullivan 1995: 30–68, also 103–22, 127 with n.42, 129–30, 141–43, 152–53, 154–61, 167, 174–87, and index 1 (pp. 201–6) s. vv. aural effects, crowd scene, dream, formula(e), formulaic density, keywords, motif, old man, prose, recitation, scene(s)/theme(s), theme-element(s), transitional text, transitions, unformulaic passages, voyaging and lodging; for comparison with works of acknowledged oral background ibid. 69–96.
38 What follows is adapted, with all Greek translated, from O’Sullivan 1995: 64–67. Formulae satisfying strict criteria of definition (ibid. 19) are underlined with an unbroken line when they occur at least twice within the quoted texts or with a broken line --------- when they occur only once in them. Repeated keywords are underlined with an unbroken line. A dotted line extending _______ or --------- , or linking two such lines, indicates that material closely analogous to that above the dotted line also occurs elsewhere with the words more heavily underlined (further ibid. 31). The passages chosen are the most convenient for use here, not at all the most impressively formulaic.
39 This textual supplement is hardly in doubt; see O’Sullivan 1995: 59, 64–67, 175 and 1986: 82.
40 “prayed to” translates Hemsterhuis’ unquestionable emendation; see O’Sullivan 1982: 57.
41 The theme-element “beauty such as they had never seen before” (see 2,2,4; 5,5,8; cf. the use of “be astonished”, with its implication of at first sight) is omitted from 1,2,7, where it would not be appropriate: Anthia had often been seen by her fellow-citizens. In 1,1,1 we have a version of the theme-element adapted to suit the context (see n.43 below).
42 Translation of a supplement proposed in O’Sullivan 1982: 54.
43 The bones of the first page of the novel are those of a crowd-scene: “<such > beauty as had never before come to be either in Ionia or in any other land (1,1,1) … they gave their attention to the boy as to a god … there were even some who on seeing him bowed down and prayed to him (1,1,3).” This is fleshed out with a full introductory description of the hero’s beauty and attainments.
44 Compare also, e.g., 1,5,5–6 with 2,6,3 (O’Sullivan 1995: 40), 1,1,1–3 (ibid. 66n43) with the crowd-scenes at 1,12,1 and, especially, 2,2,4, also 5,1,6–7 with 3,2,4 (ibid. 54 and 58–59).
45 One should not (as, e.g. Reardon 2004 does) confuse talk – Proppian or not – of folktale, which has been the basis of much literature, with a proper formal demonstration of real oral affinity.
46 O’Sullivan 1995: 69–98.
47 E.g. the use of a formula in more than one situation (O’Sullivan 1995: 94–95), the retention of a formula inappropriate in a particular context (ibid. 86–87), and a whole series of oral/aural phenomena (ibid. 92–94). Besides, the theory of a popular, oral background will economically account for various flaws in the narrative hitherto attributed to different causes (author’s incompetence, epitomization: see especially Gärtner 1967: 2060–70 with O’Sullivan 1995: especially 134).
48 A view now accepted by, e.g., Hägg 2006: 166–67 (cf. 2002: 23–24) and 2004: 10,24, Merkelbach 1995: 346– 47 with n.4 (et per litteras). The notion that Xenophon was only aping a popular/oral style (e.g. Ruiz-Montero, most recently 2003: 60) comes ultimately (and nowadays, as is, alas, the use, often without acknowledgement) from Dalmeyda, who (1926: XXVII–XXXI) explained the few formulae he was aware of (see O’Sullivan 1995: 15–16) as due to the author’s wish to give his story “un air de conte populaire.” If Dalmeyda were alive today, I suspect he would himself be too intelligent to want to apply such an explanation to the true complex mass of Xenophon’s formularity, which is certainly the result of tradition and habit, not of deliberate policy. The idea that Xenophon was only copying an oral style fails to grasp the enormous difficulties of composition in such a formulaic idiom for someone for whom it had not become – by the force of repetition and habitual practice – something of a language within a language. To gain some appreciation of the great difficulties involved, try translating the Ephesiaca so as to preserve its formulaic texture, a task I have in hand at present.
49 O’Sullivan 1995: especially 96–97.
50 On the kind of thing one can encounter in this connection, presented as rock solid, see O’Sullivan 1995: 97n61.
51 Since Capra 2009: 47n85 expressly acknowledges the accommodating nature of my theory in this respect, it is surprising to find him in the same sentence talking of my presentation of it as “radical”.
52 For an examination of hiatus in relation to the epitome theory see O’Sullivan 1995: 135–39.
53 By Weissenberger 1996: 184–85 (picked up by Holzberg 2001: 74 and 2006: 71; contrast Bürger, Dalmeyda, Merkelbach, Gärtner: see O’Sullivan 1995: 14–16, 154) in his lengthy review of O’Sullivan 1995. Weissenberger says (p. 184) that, persuaded by Hägg and myself, he no longer believes at least in Bürger’s epitomator – the only one we had! – and goes on to see the formulae in the Ephesiaca as possibly the work of “an epitomator” (185). His position at least needs much clarification. In general he seems to grasp at purely theoretical straws in a rather blinkered way in the manner of an advocatus diaboli, and his review suffers from the fact that he shows virtually no knowledge (even in his quotations from the secondary literature) that he could not have had from the book he was reviewing (see also nn.55 and 69 below).
54 Whatever scenario one tries to play out here, none is remotely satisfactory and they all leave an impossible burden of anything resembling proof on whoever would espouse them; they simply have not been thought through at all.
55 O’Sullivan 1995: 99–100. This crucial point is missed by Weissenberger 1996: 184–85; even if the argument were not as watertight as I believe, it is there. Cf. n.53 above. On the authenticity of the formulae et sim. see also n.69 below.
56 I.e. writing under the influence of the Second Sophistic, a literary-linguistic movement that had its heyday in the mid-first to second century C.E.
57 See O’Sullivan 1995: 145–66; recently, e.g., Reardon 1996 (= 22003): 320 and 2004, who sees Xenophon as the imitator.
58 Cf. Nickau 1966: 544, Plepelits 1976: 7, O’Sullivan 1995: 145–66, Kytzler 1996 (= 2003): 347.
59 Linguistic considerations also play a role here (especially since Papanikolaou 1963 and 1973), but cf. n.29 above and O’Sullivan 1995: 146n7, 168n44.
60 See Reardon 1969: 295n12 and 2004: especially 184, 190, 191; cf., e.g., Hägg 1983: 17–18, 111–14, 243–44 and 2006: 145–46 (the uneconomical idea of a double origin, from oral storytelling [Xenophon] and historiography [Chariton], I do not find attractive), Morgan 1993: 186–87, Goold 1995: 10–12, 15, Meckelnborg and Schäfer 2006: VIII–X. Even if the talk is sometimes of influence vel sim. and expressions of strict generic development are avoided, it is clear that what is envisaged is a primary impulse shaping the novel at its birth.
61 For another dissenting view on Chariton’s provenance from historiography, although for a different reason, see Whitmarsh 2005: 604–5.
62 See O’Sullivan 1995: 166n39.
63 Hägg 2006: 138–41 (cf. 2002: 17–19), Hägg and Utas 2003: 213–50.
64 See further Hunter 1994: especially 1056–64 (with earlier literature), also, e.g., Reardon 1996 (= 22003) 324, 325–28.
65 Further O’Sullivan 1995: 96, 166.
66 Even proponents of a historiographical origin of the novel talk of Chariton’s practice in a tell-tale way. So, e.g., Reardon 1996 (= 2003) 325–26: “[Callirhoe] purports … to be a historical novel, in the sense that some of its characters and its background are supposedly drawn from Greek history. But this is superficial.”
67 In other words, Xenophon is not Chariton unaccountably denuded of history, but the more or less authentic representative of a tradition of story-telling that Chariton “historicized” to fulfill the expectations of literature.
68 Further O’Sullivan 1995: 154–66.
69 The presence of such material in Chariton at all is, of course, strong confirmation (contra Weissenberger: see n.53 above) of the authenticity of the formulaic character of the Ephesiaca.
70 O’Sullivan 1995: 157. Weissenberger 1996: 188–89 misrepresents my argument here and wrongly sees it as dependent on the theory of oral background, from which it is kept carefully distinct (cf. O’Sullivan 1995: VII).
71 See O’Sullivan 1995: 168–70.
72 Further O’Sullivan 2005: V–XXXIV.
73 See O’Sullivan 2005: XVIII–XIX (a few of the publications listed there hardly deserve the name “edition”; so, most recently, Miralles: 1967); since then A. Borgogno, Romanzi greci: Caritone d’Afrodisia, Senofonte Efesio, Longo Sofista a cura di A. B., Torino 2005 (which I have not seen, but cf. Borgogno, A., “Contributi per un’ edizione degli Ephesiaca di Senofonte Efesio.” Invigilata Lucernis 25, 2003: 31–47) and J. Henderson 2009 (Loeb; see n.1 above).
74 See the bibliography in O’Sullivan 2005: XIX–XXVIII and the “viri docti” listed on pp. XXX–XXXII.
75 Further O’Sullivan 1995: 9–13.
76 See, e.g., Anderson 1989: 126, Reardon 1991: 35–36, 37–38, 108–9, 116–18, 123. In very recent years a rather sudden, unmediated trend has emerged representing Xenophon, nowadays still generally seen as far the weakest of the Greek novels, as a highly sophisticated author, something of a philosopher (Dowden 2007, Doulamis 2007) and even a metaliterary theoretician on such matters as orality (König 2007) and space (Bierl 2006) in the novel. The burden of argument that such ideas, at any rate when they go beyond mere banalities, entail has, I feel, not been fully realized. The notion (Ruiz-Montero, e.g. 1994: 1116, most recently 2003: 59; cf., e.g., Bierl 2006: 79n34, citing Ruiz-Montero 1994) that the Ephesiaca is a conscious exercise in rhetorical apheleia (“simplicity,” which, properly understood, has nothing whatever to do with Xenophon’s remarkably repetitive narrative simplicity) is a particularly bogus red-herring based on misinterpretation and misapplication of the relevant Greek rhetorical texts; especially crass is the misrepresentation (Ruiz-Montero 1982: 318) of Demetrius, On Style 4,196, where he is talking merely of the epanaleptic repetition in the interests of clarity of the Greek particle men (“on the one hand”).
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Weissenberger, M. 1996. Review of O’Sullivan 1995. GGA 248: 176–91.
Whitmarsh, T. 2005. “The Greek Novel: Titles and Genre.” AJP 126: 587–611.
Gärtner, Hans. 1967. “Xenophon von Ephesos.” Realencyclopädie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft, IX A 2: 2055–2089. Out of date, but still in many respects a fundamental presentation of facts and controversies.
Hägg, Tomas. 1966 (printed 1969). “Die Ephesiaka des Xenophon Ephesios: Original oder Epitome?” Classica et Mediaevalia 27 118–161. Republished (translated into English and bibliographically updated) in Parthenope (below): 159–198. The long overdue refutation of Bürger’s epitome theory of 1892, presented by Hägg with characteristic modesty and restraint.
Hägg, Tomas. 2002. “Il romanzo greco: modello unico o pluralità di forme?”. In Il romanzo, III: storia e geografia, edited by F. Moretti, 5–32. Torino. Revised, English version (“The Ancient Greek Novel: a Single Model or a plurality of forms?”) in The Novel, I, edited by F. Moretti, Princeton: Princeton University Press (2006), 125–155. Sets out the view that the novel developed from the “convergence of two main strands, a popular one with an oral prehistory (as demonstrated by O’Sullivan) and a more ‘bookish’ one, from the beginning with a strong attachment to history.”
Hägg, Tomas. 2004. “Forty Years in and out of the Greek Novel: a Memoir.” In Hägg, Tomas. Parthenope (below) 9–28. An agreeable account of the life-long involvement of a most impressive scholar with the Greek novel, starting with and repeatedly returning to Xenophon of Ephesus.
Hägg, Tomas. 2004. Parthenope: Selected Studies in Ancient Greek Fiction, edited by Lars Boje Mortensen and Tormod Eide. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, University of Copenhagen. A most useful collection of essays by Hägg, several of them concerning Xenophon of Ephesus.
O’Sullivan, James N. 1995. Xenophon of Ephesus: his Compositional Technique and the Birth of the Novel. Berlin and New York: De Gruyter. Argues on the basis of a close, revealing analysis of the Ephesiaca and comparative studies, inter alia, that the Greek novel had its origin in a tradition of oral storytelling.
O’Sullivan, James N. 2005. Xenophon Ephesius, De Anthia et Habrocome Ephesiacorum Libri V, edidit James N. O’Sullivan. Monachii et Lipsiae: K. G. Saur (Bibliotheca Teubneriana). Seems to be accepted as the standard edition of the Greek text; with introduction, bibliography, extensive apparatus criticus, and index verborum.
Trzaskoma, Stephen M. 2010. Two Novels from Ancient Greece: Chariton’s Callirhoe and Xenophon of Ephesos’ An Ephesian Story: Anthia and Habrocomes. Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company. Lively, generally reliable translation with useful introductory material.