CHAPTER 22

“Respect these Breasts and Pity Me”

Greek Novel and Theater

Françoise Létoublon and Marco Genre

Theater and novel seem to be two genres a priori opposed to each another in Greek literature, and perhaps elsewhere: characters incarnated by actors in roles on one side under the audience’ eyes vs. characters represented (in each meaning of the word) by one or several narrators on the other.1 The novel seems at first sight to renew the narrative tradition coming from the epics, as if it were a kind of bourgeois epic. Homer’s presence appears in Chariton, Achilles Tatius, and Heliodorus through several devices such as Homeric problems and quotations; the latter explicitly mentions that Theagenes is an offspring from Achilles, whereas Charicleia comes from Perseus and Andromeda’s union. However, as several specialists also have noted, the links between the novel and theater, comedy as well as tragedy, are very strong, and maybe still stronger than with the Iliad and Odyssey. As far as terminology is concerned, for all the success of the term intertextuality due as it seems to Kristeva, we stress the term allusion as coming from the Italian tradition (Alaux and Létoublon 1998, 145–147; cf. Morgan and Harrison 2008; Conte 1986); Chapter 21, this volume.

In both Chaereas and Callirhoe and the Aethiopica are found quotations or allusions to the same passage in Iliad 22.84 where Hecuba shows her breast to her son Hector, asking him for pity. This allusion may appear to be a symbol of the continuity of Greek literature, from Homer to the Roman empire. More specifically, this Homeric passage was already alluded to in the Aeschylean Oresteia and Euripides’ Orestes, when Clytemnestra imitates Hecuba’s gesture for her son Orestes (Choeph. 895),2 so that novelists may sometimes seem to think of Aeschylus rather than Homer. The Iliad is also subtly recalled in Euripides’ Hecuba, where the queen’s daughter Polyxena, before being sacrificed on Achilles’ tomb, reveals her own breast and asks her murderer to strike her with the sword in her breast.3 It is important to note that the mother shows her son the “breast he was nurtured with,” whereas the daughter, as a virgin, shows herself highly overstepping in this gesture. Tradition wholly refers to Homer’s characterization of the Trojan tragic queen rather than Agamemnon’s unfaithful wife. The main feature to stress is that theatricality does not begin with the invention of the tragic stage in Athens, but may actually be considered as already existing in the melodramatic position of Hecuba addressing her son from the walls of Troy, which contrasts with the scene that has Hector alone below at the foot of the city doors engaged in a discussion with himself before fighting with Achilles. Hecuba’s gesture of revealing her breast is by itself melodramatic, as the painting tradition attests.4 Thus, Clytemnestra as well as Polyxena, Chaereas’ mother (Char. 3.5. “Respect these breasts and pity me”), and the male character Aristippes, who utters, “My child, stay your hand a while! Have pity on your father! Have mercy on the grey head that raised you” in the Aethiopika 1.12.3, have Hecuba’s and Hector’s relations in mind.

We have suggested elsewhere (Alaux and Létoublon 1998) that, when the novel alludes to theater plays, it obeys two rules or laws: condensation and avoidance. Several œuvres or myths are alluded to at the same time, thus condensed in one and the same passage. On the other hand, particularly when the novel recalls a tragedy, it has to avoid too close an imitation that could dangerously approach the tragic end: for all the kinds of hindrance that the protagonists meet on their way, the novel must go on and the heroes pursue their travel, or their life through seasons in Lesbos for Daphnis and Chloe. We meet several instances of those laws’ applications in the novel corpus.

Here, we focus on the relations between the novel and theater from the more visible and exterior aspects to the deeper ones, i.e. from language and material objects to paradoxically invisible phenomena that occur in the hearts.

Theater in Words

Several texts show an extensive use of theatrical vocabulary. As early as 1894, this phenomenon was studied by Walden, who took into account the frequency in the novels of Chariton, Achilles Tatius, and Heliodorus of such words as drama, theatron, skene, and the lexical family of trag-. By qualifying the acts they accomplish as dramata, the novelists may not simply allude to their “pathetic” nature (Rohde 1876, 450), but to their real derivation from the theatrical realm. In fact, not only is the term “drama” used by the narrator to generically designate the main story (Ach. Tat. 1.3.3.), or a sub-story (Hel. 2.23.5; Ach. Tat. 8.15.4), but the characters themselves seem to resort to this term when their adventures take the form of a show that their readers could watch in the theater. For example, Thyamis and Petosiris stage a drama (Hel. 7.6.4.) that recalls the fratricidal duel between Eteocles and Polynices. Chaereas invites Clitophon to stick to his instructions and not “to spoil the drama” (Ach. Tat. 1.10.7) of Leucippe’s seduction, probably referring to a cliché largely spread by the New Comedy and mimes. The vast presence of theatrical terms in the novels testifies that the theater permeates the plot of the novels with a great number of scenes and episodes, which are sometimes intentionally unveiled by the novelists when they want to point to, according to the circumstances, the tragic or comic nature of the story. A word like drama could be used in common everyday life as an idiom, but tragodeo, tragikos, and skenographeo are not likely to occur so often in common Greek language. The metaphorical use of this vocabulary is thus surely guaranteed. As Walden (1894, 2) noticed, the theater terminology implies a metaphorical use that may come from “before them in the theater of their own day”; the metaphorical use of the word drama, referring either to the whole thread or to a series of events by a protagonist, occurs three times in Chariton, 13 in Heliodorus, and 18 in Achilles Tatius. We show below that the lexical face of the novel language constitutes an index pointing to a deeper, less visible aspect: the metaphor of theater might reveal a fundamental way of seeing human life under the Roman imperial power.

Romanesque Thread and Theater Plot: the Ideal Novels and New Comedy

In Aristophanes’ plays, one could state that comedy as a genre is a parody of the tragic, a way of removing the political conflicts while transposing them in a ridiculous (Knights) or utopic (Lys., Eccl., Thesm.) manner, and thus it appears as a form of catharsis (cf. Carrière 1979 on the carnavalesque aspects of Aristophanes). Aristophanes does not seem as strongly present in the novels as Aeschylus and Euripides, but the fact that, in Achilles Tatius, a character in the trial opposing Clitophon, Leucippe, and Melite to Thersander imitates Aristophanes explicitly (Leuc. and Clit. 8.9; see Brethes 2006) indicates the importance of the comedies for the novelist. However, the evidence of strong links to the so-called New Comedy is more frequently met. Menander and his Latin followers had based their comedies on family life as opposed to an external world populated by robbers, soldiers, and pirates who are all eager to kidnap young girls (and sometimes boys). This genre provided writers with some models of familial dramas, already turned to bourgeois plots: Chariton’s and Xenophon’s plots clearly show this familial core, as well as many details in the other ideal novels. We can include the narrative of Daphnis and Chloe from the finding of the children in Book 1 (Hunter 1983, 23–26; Morgan 2004, 150–154), to their progressive discovering of love, to their eventual recognition by their actual parents, and their marriage in Book 4, after the recognition of Daphnis first and then of Chloe. The parallel between Charicleia as a child abandoned soon after birth by her mother, both of the pastoral foundlings nurtured by animal mothers, and their respective symbola, is striking. One of the most visible features linking the novels to New Comedy may be called failure of matrimonial strategy: Clitophon’s father in Achilles Tatius wants his son to marry his half-sister Calligone; Heliodorus shows how the adoptive father of Charicleia as well as her actual father later want her to marry the young man they chose for her. In Daphnis and Chloe, the adoptive parents show such intentions for the foundlings, and after their recognition, the actual parents will do so too. The interest for the reader consists in how the will of the young characters will overcome those strategies.

In several cases, individual characters seem to come directly from New Comedy and Theophrastus’ Characters: for example, in Daphnis and Chloe, Gnathon represents the type of the parasite; Satyros in Leucippe and Clitophon, the servus callidus (Satyros evokes e.g. Syros, Sostratos’ slave in Dis exapaton by Menander); in the Aethiopica, Knemon’s name also comes from the same source.

Fathers and Sons

The relationship between the protagonist and their parents is often problematic, as in the comedies of Menander, Plautus, and Terence, as Konstan has brilliantly analyzed (cf. Konstan 1987, 1994; cf. also Crismani 1997). In Chariton’s novel, Chaereas is torn between the love for Callirhoe, which urges him to sail away from Syracuse, and the affection for his parents, who beseech him not to leave them, echoing a famous Homeric passage (as seen above). In the Ephesiaca, Anthia’s and Habrocomes’ parents, when they see their children touched by lovesickness, ask the oracle of Colophon for advice, and the god’s answer prompts the decision to marry them, without a detailed conflict (1.6.2–7.1). Clitophon, Achilles Tatius’ protagonist, has to face a still more serious problem: as in the fragmentary Georgos of Menander (5–22), the father of the protagonist has already arranged his marriage to his stepsister.5 In Achilles Tatius’ case, comedy is echoed not only by a generic reprise of the situation, but also in the rhetorical figures. For example, the metaphor entailed in the verb makhomai (to fight) is present also in the monologue by which Clitophon tries to describe his interior conflict: the authority and respect toward his father urges him to obey to him, but Eros is a powerful judge who threatens to burn him with his fire-arrows (1.11.3). In Longus, a conflict between children and parents is central when Lamon first proves Daphnis’ high ascendance through showing the tokens found with the baby, while Chloe did not yet appear as valuable a wife for him (4.20–30).

The Central Place of Love

The resemblance between the standard plot of New Comedy and the novel is striking, as Canfora (1987) noticed. In both genres, two youngsters of astonishing beauty have to undergo a series of adventures and dangers before they can get married. However, the novels move away from New Comedy by introducing a mutual and at-first-glance love between the two protagonists (cf. Rousset 1981; Létoublon 1993, 137–140; Konstan 1994). Because Achilles Tatius puts the whole Love narrative in Clitophon’s mouth, the birth of love between Clitophon and Leucippe does not appear mutual and instantaneous, as it does in the other novels, but Clitophon alone falls in love at first glance, whereas he has to find out ways for seducing Leucippe, which will be difficult and sometimes frankly comic (partly because of his own awkwardness, which contributes to making him an “anti-hero,” according to Brethes 1999). Thus, Achilles Tatius skillfully inserts in his novel the cliché of the love approach, which was used widely in New Comedy. For instance, to escape detection by Konops (his name means “Mosquito,” a character bringing to mind the durus ianitor of New Comedy), Satyros tells him an interesting Aesopic fable on the lion and the mosquito; to get to the room of Leucippe, Clitophon resorts to his servus callidus Satyros. Clitophon’s attempt to have sexual intercourse with Leucippe is prevented by the intervention of her mother, who had been awakened in the middle of the night by a macabre premonitory dream that echoes the one dreamt by Sostratos’ mother in Menander’s Dyskolos (406–417). Longus’ novel is in some respects atypical because the two children are gradually initiated to Eros, but it does take up the themes of the “foundling” (a key element in Heliodorus’ novel, but only for Charicleia) and the recognition, two classical features of New Comedy.

A Happy Dénouement Recalling New Comedy

The peripeties the two protagonists are involved in are multiplied in space and length and are finally paid off by a marriage and/or a banquet in which both of the families take part—in the novel, the whole city may sometimes be involved. Unlike in New Comedy, in the ancient novel the problem of the different social classes seems to be marginal and limited to Longus’ novel: Daphnis happens to be recognized first, and his family does not accept Chloe as a fitting fiancée until she also has wealthy parents. On the other hand, the concern with the legitimacy of love and the importance of virginity occurs both in New Comedy and in the novels (cf. Crismani 1997, 77). In a fragment of the Menandrean comedy Sikyonos (361–374), a father expresses his joy after finding out that his daughter is alive and has not lost her virginity. Likewise, the concern with the virginity of the heroine is central in the end of Achilles Tatius’ plot: the crowd rejoices when Leucippe succeeds in the test of the cave of Syrinx (8.14.1–2), proving that she is still a parthenos. Heliodorus’ novel ends with a virginity test that concerns both Theagenes and Charicleia, and ironically, since they are pure, they are fitting offerings to be sacrificed. Other features appear to evoke tragedy rather than comedy, though they could be seen in New Comedy as a parody of tragedies.

Oimoi ego

As already said in the earlier remark on theater–lexical tools occurring in the novels, the main characters in the novels often see themselves as tragic heroes or heroines. Nevertheless, the narrator remains always the leader of the play. He knows how to cut the tragic thread at the moment where it could surpass the limit: for example, when the hero or heroine feels the situation as being so desperate that death only seems possible for her or him, an unforeseen event or unexpected friend interposes, who prevents suicide and causes progress in the plot and new peripeties. It happens even in the unsophisticated Ephesiaca: thus, Habrocomes exclaims “image κακοδαίμονες, ἔφησεν, ἡμει̑ς” (2.1.2), and Anthia echoes “φευ̑ τω̑ν κακω̑ν, ἔφη” (2.1.5); again, Anthia “image πάντα ἄδικος ἐγώ, φησί, καὶ πονηρά,” “οἴμοι φησὶ τω̑ν κακω̑ν” (4.6.6), οἴμοι τω̑ν κακω̑ν λέγουσα (5.8.7), Habrocomes “φευ̑, ἔφη, τω̑ν κακω̑ν” (5.10.4). They develop their laments into tragic monologues (Habrocomes: 2.1.2, Anthia: 5.4.11), topically decide to die as soon as possible (2.1.6 ἀποθνῃσκωμεν), and accuse their fatal beauty for all their unhappiness (2.1.3: image τη̑ς ἀκαίρου πρὸς ἑκατέρυς εὐμορφίαν; 5.5.5: image κάλλος ἐπίβουλον, λέγουσα, image δυστυχὴς εὐμορφία, 5.7.2: image κάλλος δικαίως ὑβρισμένον). Without quoting the whole passage, we may put forward a statement: the more sophisticated the novel, the more brilliantly those laments will be introduced and develop, but they follow the same schematic model borrowed from the classical tragedies (Pletcher 1998, 21, saw that, when Charicleia “kept on ‘tragedizing’, she was not only lamenting tragically, but she was also quoting from Euripides’ Hecuba 349: τί γὰρ με δει̑ ζη̑ν”). The repetition of the topoi sometimes produces a comical effect. It is difficult to decide if the novelist wanted his audience to laugh or at least to smile. Nevertheless, the frequency of Clitophon’s attempts to kill himself after each apparent death of his beloved (five times, if our sum is right) leads us to think of a parodic feature (cf. Létoublon 2006).

Theater Tools in the Novel Plot

In several cases, the novel characters meet theater actors with their apparatus (clothes, sceneries, tricks), and those tools are sometimes used by the main characters as a disguise (Heliodorus 6.11: Charicleia and Kalasiris disguise themselves as beggars and joke about the resultant effect; see Fusillo 1990, 41), whereas they may entrap them in other ones. In Achilles Tatius’ novel, the theatrical tools are actually on the scene: Satyros retrospectively tells that Menelaus and he pretended to perform the sacrifice using a blade-retractable sword that had once belonged to a declaimer of Homer who bravely died fighting against robbers (3.20.4–7). Leucippe had endured a fake sacrifice with bloody entrails filling a fake stomach hidden under garments (3.21.1–2).

The role of disguise may even be noted in the Ephesiaca, where Thelxinoe happened to wear a man’s clothes for her escape from Sparta with Aigialeus, as the latter tells Habrokomes (Eph. 5.1.7), and Anthia lies twice about her identity (4.3.6 and 5.5.4). In Achilles Tatius, as usually more brilliantly, it is Clitophon who flies from Thersander’s house disguised as a woman, with Melite’s robe (6.1.2). Fusillo (1990) evokes for this passage the tradition of Achilles hidden among Lykomedes’ daughters. In Heliodorus, Theagenes and Anthia, prisoners in the powerful Arsake’s luxurious house, pretend they are brother and sister.

Delaying Tactics

Like on the stage, a common feature in the novel shows a frequent effect of delay in the characters meeting one another. It is particularly striking in the Ephesiaca because of the extreme plans of the novel. Habrocomes nearly constantly arrives in the very place where he could have found Anthia one day or some days before, but he realizes that she just left when he arrives there. The device is also present, in a less parodied way, in Chaereas and Callirhoe: as soon as Chaereas, because of unjustified jealousy, kicks Callirhoe’s belly, the whole narrative will rely on symmetries and delays in their search; the empty graves each of them builds for keeping the other one’s memory is the best symbol of this. Another example is Chaereas’ letter telling her “I’m living!,” read by Callirhoe’s husband who faints with the very words used in the Iliad for describing the heroes’ death, but will act later to avoid a meeting of his rival and his wife (cf. Létoublon 2003).

Apparent Death

A well-known motif in Greek novels is that of the apparent death of the heroine (see Bowie 1996, 101, among many references to the so-called Scheintod), which occurs in Achilles Tatius several times, and leads Clitophon to wish for death for himself. In Heliodorus, Thisbe’s dying instead of Charicleia may appear as a variant of the motif—at least Theagenes believes she actually died. A more specific motif occurs both in the Ephesiaca and Chaereas and Callirhoe in a strikingly parallel: Anthia and Callirhoe both fall into a kind of catalepsy resembling death (Char. 1.8–9; cp. Eph. 3.5.9–8.3). In both cases, the apparent death lasts so long that they are mourned for and buried with rich funerary offerings. Robbers who see the funerals plan to steal the tomb, and in both cases, when they find the dead woman living, they first believe they are meeting a ghost. The reason of Anthia’s catalepsy is a poison she drank because she wanted to die, while Callirhoe was stricken by the jealous Chaereas. The plot progression in both stories is very similar, although Chariton’s style makes his novel much more interesting. The details in both the texts are similarly dramatically told, as if they came from the same model, maybe a play seen on a stage.

Actors and Audience

Theater consists in a show incarnated on a stage by actors before an audience viewing them. In the novel, we meet some actors and their tricks, as discussed in the preceding text, but we never follow an actual play staged. However, as said in the beginning of this chapter, novelists make extensive use of the technical vocabulary of theater: as Walden has already shown, those words are taken as metaphors. The actors met by the protagonists became themselves heroes of miniature novels, taken in a tempest or an attack by pirates. Thus, the genres seem to mix themselves, or at least exchange some of their specific characteristics.

Among the metaphorical uses of the novel, we thus sometimes find actors in their profession; we also meet some occasional audiences for an unforeseen spectacle, which seems to happen several times in Heliodorus. Alaux and Létoublon (1998) suggest that the fight between Thyamis and Petosiris, the two sons of the Egyptian priest Kalasiris, was seen by the whole audience as a revival of Kastor and Polynice’s fight at Thebes. Moreover, a large number of details in the narrative show a strong dramatic character: at the end of the novel, the sacrifice of both Theagenes and Charicleia (intended by King Hydaspes for the Ethiopian Sun and Moon gods); Charicleia’s attempt to get her father to recognize her; the already mentioned race of Theagenes on a horse and a bull and his fight against a giant; Charicleia’s request to wait for Persinna (who is called the instigator or playwright of the show); the intervention of Sisimithres (the leader of the Gymnosophistes); and the painting of Andromeda being delivered by Perseus that is brought out to the public space under the eyes of the crowd in order to prove Charicleia’s ascendance through her resemblance with the heroine on the painting. However, we want to emphasize particularly the episode of the first sight and love between Theagenes and Charicleia that happened in the large stadium of Delphi under the attentive look of Kalasiris, who even tells Knemon that “the whole of Greece was there, looking at them.” The narrative puts under our very eyes a splendid PanHellenic feast, recalling the best of epinikia from the time of Pindar and Simonides.

Thus, the vocabulary of theater in the novel invites the readership to “see” some episodes as plays inserted in the novel, be it by the author or by a secondary character who stages a scene for the other ones, and produces thus a strong presence in the novel (which was called enargeia) (Auerbach’s Mimesis may still be referred to, though we do not agree with the analysis of the recognition scene with Eurykleia in Odyssey 19). Among the uses of the word theater, in Heliodorus, let us stress an interesting description of a ring that Charicleia owned as a symbolon. On the ring, a stone had been incised, and the brilliant ekphrasis shows a pastoral world represented as a poimenikon theatron:

A young boy was shepherding his sheep, standing on the vantage point of a low rock, using a transverse flute to direct his flock as it grazed, while the sheep seemed to pasture obediently in time to the pipe’s melody. One might have said that their backs hung heavy with golden fleeces; this was no beauty for art devising, for art had merely highlighted on their backs the natural blush of the amethyst. Also depicted were lambs, gamboling in innocent joy, a whole troop of them scampering up the rock, while others cavorted and frolicked in rings around their shepherd, so that the rock where he sat seemed like a kind of bucolic theater; others again, reveling in the sunshine of the amethyst’s brilliance, jumped and skipped, scarcely touching the surface of the rock. The oldest and boldest of them presented the illusion of wanting to leap out through the setting of the stone but of being prevented from doing so by the jeweler’s art, which had set the collect of the ring like a fence of gold to enclose both them and the rock.

This piece of Heliodorus’ art may induce us to hypothesize that Longus’ pastoral was not inspired uniquely by Theocritean poetic tradition, but that some theater plays existed that had staged shepherds and their pastoral and musical loves. Likewise, in an episode in Daphnis and Chloe, after the tale told by Lamon, Philetas plays music on the pipe he sent his son Tityros to retrieve, and both young protagonists mime the erotic pursuit by the goat-footed god of the nymph called Syrinx, until she wishes to escape and disappears among the reeds; in his anger, the disappointed god cuts the reeds, and then transforms his anger by playing music out of the instrument he thus invented. This episode in Daphnis and Chloe leads us to reevaluate the relationship of theater and myth, but the ekphrasis in Heliodorus suggests that theater might be linked to poetry at the very origin of pastoral narrative. The point we want to make here is that, in the novel, characters may sometimes become either actors or spectators of a scene on an improvised stage. Thus, on Charicleia’s ring, the stone and the sheep are turned into a theater with actors.

Theater and Myth Meet in the Novel

I have examined elsewhere (Létoublon 2013) in more detail the four or five myths in Daphnis and Chloe (Phatta, Pitys, Syrinx, Eros in Philetas’ garden, and Echo), stressing their paradigmatic use. In the other novels, I find other more literary ways of alluding to both myth and theater. Three of the main myths of Greek theater find a particular development in the novels, particularly in the Aethiopika: Phaedra and Hippolytus, the Oresteia, and Oedipus and his family. Phaedra was known mainly from Euripides, the Oresteia from Aeschylus and the two Electras by both Sophocles and Euripides, and Oedipus from both Aeschylus’ Seven against Thebes and Phoenician Women. Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex and Oedipus at Colonus are also possible sources for the character of Kalasiris. When Theagenes and Charicleia eventually meet in Ethiopia, they are supposed to be sacrificed to the goddess Artemis, which reminds us of Euripides’ Iphigenia in Aulis since she is actually King Hydaspes’ daughter (who does not know it, however). When Theagenes, whom she often calls her brother, is promised to be sacrificed to the same goddess, Iphigenia in Tauris is also recalled. Besides, this tragedy could be alluded to by the sophisticated reprise in the macabre scene of the false sacrifice of Leucippe (Ach. Tat. 3.15; cf. Mignogna 1997).

In the Aethiopica, Theagenes has to ride on both a horse and a bull, jumping from one to the other in a very striking race in which his life is in danger—this scene alludes to several well-known pieces of epic (the horse race in Il. 23) and theater (Hippolytus’ death entangled in his reins in Euripides’ eponymous tragedy, but also in Sophocles’ Electra the fiction of Orestes’ death in a horse race told by himself in order to deceive Clytemnestra and Aegisthus). In Achilles’ novel, the episode of Callicles’ fatal horse fall (1.12), announced by a messenger with typical tragic features, has a clear correspondence with Euripides’ Hippolytus, as Degl’Innocenti Pierini has exhaustively shown (cf. Degl’Innocenti Pierini 2003).

Phaedra and Hippolytus appear in Heliodorus’ novel through “Knemon’s novel” mainly,6 and also through Theagenes’ relation to Arsake and her servant. The character of Thisbe stands at the intersection of Theagenes and Charicleia’s story and Knemon’s novella: she dies as a substitute for Charicleia since her killer Thyamis believes in the shadow of the cave that Thisbe is Charicleia; a writing tablet will be found on her corpse, which resumes a part of Knemon’s novella; and her story is still unknown as well by the reader than by Knemon himself. This tablet relates her also to Euripides’ Phaedra.

The novels remind us of Aeschylus’ Oresteia: Knemon’s father accusing his son of forgetting a son’s duty is a straight parody of Hecuba with Hector and Clytemnestra with Orestes in the Choephoroi. Once more, it appears difficult to decide whether the writers intended the readership to recognize the source alluded and to laugh or at least smile at the subtlety of those allusions when recognizing such references.

Theater in the Mind

In another set of cases, the novelists seem to invent a kind of dialogue held by the main character between himself and Eros or in himself alone: thus, in D&C, Daphnis speaks with himself, looking for plausible reasons he could invent for seeing Chloe during winter:

He screwed up his courage to make some excuse and push his way through the doors: and he asked himself what was the most convincing thing he could say. “I’ve come to get a light for a fire.”—“But didn’t you have neighbors two hundred yards away?”
“I’ve come to ask for some bread.”—“But your bag’s full of food.”
“I need some wine.”—“But it was only the other day you had the grape harvest.”
“A wolf chased me.”—“And where are the wolf’s footprints?”
“I came to hunt the birds.”—“Well, you’ve caught them: why don’t you go away?”
“I want to see Chloe.”—“Who’d admit that to a young girl’s father and mother?” Stumbling against obstacles on every side, he said to himself: “All of these remarks sound suspicious. It’ll be better to say nothing. I’ll see Chloe in the spring, since it doesn’t seem fated for me to see her in the winter” (3.6.2–4, trans. Gill in Reardon).

In Achilles Tatius, Clitophon looks also for a way of entering in closer contact with Leucippe, and he finds help from his servant Satyros:

Satyros went outside, and, left to myself, I took his advice to heart, I tried to whip up my courage to face the maiden. “How long will you keep silent, sissy boy? What use is a spineless soldier in the service of a virile god? Are you waiting for her to make the first move?”
   Then I answered myself: “Come to your sense, you fool. Aim your love shafts at the proper target. You have another softly maiden in your own family: desire her, gaze at her; marriage with her is in your power.”
   I thought I had convinced myself, but the voice of Eros replied from deep down in my heart: “Such insubordination! So, you would take up the sides with arrows and fire? If you dodge my arrows, you won’t evade my fire. And even if you douse that with your high-minded self-control, I will catch up with you on my wings.” (2.5)

In Chariton 2.11, we read a similar monologue by Callirhoe who thinks Chaereas dead, discovers she is pregnant, while awakening wealthy Dionysios’ passion; she is lying on her bed with Chaereas’ portrait on her belly, and she thinks of deliberating with herself: there are three voting persons about her suicide—her husband, thought to be dead; the child she is bearing; and herself. The result of the vote is two against one—her own vote actually. Thus, the majority wants her to live, in a parody of Greek democratic habits in the classical period, long passed away.

This kind of theater, neither comic nor tragic, seems to happen in life itself. It may be related to the idea that the world is a stage. In fact, as it has been said before, stage-terms massively permeate the vocabulary of the ancient novel, whose characters often qualify the vicissitudes they undergo as dramata. Different reasons can be given for the substantial presence of stage-terms in the novels. In the Hellenistic era, theater had profoundly changed due to the spectacles of mimes and pantomimes (Walden 1894), and, as Perry puts it, “the great tide of drama, that is to say fondness for the spectacle of men and women in action with all its excitements, peripeties, personal emotions, and character displays, had long since overflowed the dike of the stage, which had once contained it, and now was pouring into all the literary forms where narrative could be anywise employed.”7 In addition, it is perhaps worth considering that, in the Imperial Age, the association between life and theater-play enjoyed great success among the Stoic and Cynic philosophers (see Curtius 1953; Dodds 1965; Trédé 2002), by whom the novelists may have been influenced. The metaphor owed its celebrity to Plato who, in the Laws, compared the human being to a puppet moved by his passions and having his only chance of salvation in holding on to the “golden string” of reason (644d–e–645a). Plato’s condemnation of the actors was very harsh since they are capable of imitating and propagating any behavior and value, including those opposed to the good Constitution of the City, the only and authentic reflection of the Good (see, e.g. Catoni 2008, 275 ff.). A turning point probably was the Hellenistic era when the Cynics and the Stoics put forward the idea that living like an actor could be a virtue, given his capacity of adjusting himself to the changing and unpredictable circumstances of life.8 This idea was taken up by such authors as Lucian (see, e.g. Nekyomantia 16) and Marcus Aurelius (7.3), and their representation of the human condition seems to be shared by the novelists who were living at the same time. The idea that the Tyche presides over human lives is repeatedly stressed by the characters of the ancient novels (Hld. 5.6.3; Ach. Tat. 1.3.3, Char. 4.4.2), who lay curses on the playwright of their lives (Hld. 5.6.3), narrate their vicissitudes qualifying them as dramata (Hld. 2.29.4; 6.8.5; Ach. Tat. 8.15.4; 6.3.1; 8.5.2), and try to persuade themselves that it is inevitable to play their roles till the end (Ach. Tat. 6.16.6). However important philosophical reflection was for the novelists, the metaphor of the human being as a puppet was deeply rooted in their works and destined to continue and increase its success in the following centuries (Curtius 1953). Indeed, the lexicon used by the protagonists confirms the close relationship they perceived between novel and theater and gives the impression that characters have freshly come out of a play and therefore feel the necessity to break the scenic illusion.9

Notes

1 The most common case seems that of one narrator who may be the author—Chariton for Chaereas and Callirhoe, Xenophon for the Ephesiaca, Longus for Daphnis and Chloe; the Aethiopica show the case of a plurality of narrators beside the author (Heliodorus), such as Calasiris and Knemon; cf. Morgan 2004.

2 Cp. Hom. Il. 22.83–5: Ἕκτορ, τέκνον ἐμόν, τάδε δ᾽ αἴδεο καὶ μ᾽ ἐλέησον / αὐτήν, εἴ ποτέ τοι λαθικήδεα μαζὸν ἐπέσχον / τω̑ν μνη̑σαι; Aesch. Choeph. 895: Ἐπίσχες, image παι̑, τόνδε δ᾽ αἴδεσαι, τέκνον, / μαστόν; Eur. Or. 527: ὅτ᾽ έξέβαλλε μαστὸν ἱκετεύουσά σε / μήτηρ; Eur. El. 117: ἔδειξε μαστὸν ἱἐν φοναι̑σιν; Char. Chaer. and Call. 3.5. 6.4 quotes Il.: τέκνον , ἔϕη, τάδε δ᾽ αἴδεο καὶ μ’ ἐλέησον / αὐτήν, εἴ ποτέ τοι λαθικήδεα μαζὸν ἐπέσχον; Hld. Eth. 1.12.3. καὶ, image τέκνον, ἐπίσχες μικρὸν, ἐλεγεν, οἴκτειρον τὸν γεννήσανταμ φείσαι πολιω̑ν αἴ σε ἔθρεψαν. We emphasize both the words literally echoed in this passage (ἐπίσχες in Aeschylus and Heliodorus; αἴδεο καὶ μ᾽ ἐλέησον from the Iliad in αἴδεσαι in Aeschylus, more prosaic οἴκτειρον in Heliodorus; μαζὸν in Homer, μαστόν in Aeschylus and Euripides) and the changes brought by every author: the origin of the Aeschylean ἐπίσχες may be found in Hecuba’s Homeric ἐπέσχον: the mother who provided her breast in the earlier text uses the same word for asking her child to stop his murdering hand. The most visible change in Heliodorus is from the mother to a father, which implies the absence of the breast and the comical effect of the white hair that nourished the child.

3 Eur. Hec. 560–1: μαστούς τ᾽ ἔδειξε στέρνα θ᾽ ὡς ἀγαλματος / κάλλιστα (Talthybios’ narrative of Polyxena’s death); 564–5 Ἰδου̑, τόδ᾽εἰ μὲν στέρνον … / παίειν προθυμῃ̑, παι̑σον (he reports Polyxena’s last words). This gesture and words are anticipated by Polyxena’s allusion to her mother’s breast in v. 424: image στέρνα μαστοί θ᾽, οἵ μ᾽ἐθρέψατ᾽ ἡδέως.

4 This tradition actually refers to Polyxena rather than Hecuba: for example, Panfilo Nuvone, Le sacrifice de Polyxène, 1531, private collection; Giovanni Francesco Romanelli (1610–1662), Le sacrifice de Polyxène, New York, MOMA; Giambattista Pittoni (about 1733–1735) painted Polyxena going forth to Achilles’ tomb (Louvre) and the sacrifice (Munich), but Polyxena is seen from behind, as a way for avoiding the representation of a virgin’s breast.

5 Sometimes, as in this case, comedy is echoed not only by the allusion to a scene, but also by the reprise of the same metaphor. Both Clitophon (Ach. Tat. 1.11.3) and the protagonist of the Georgos have to choose whether to obey their father or Eros, who threatens them with fire arrows. This interior struggle is expressed by the verb μάχομαι. On stepmothers in Greek literature, see Watson 1995.

6 The parallel between Knemon and Hippolytus on the one hand, and between Demainete, his father’s wife, and Phaedra on the other, is very close. Instead of dying like Hippolytus, Knemon fled from Athens to Egypt. Demainete left an inscribed tablet like Phaedra. The trial narrated appears as the result of the avoided tragedy.

7 Perry 1967, 146. According to Perry 1967, 140, “the novel is drama in a new quantitative dimension, not different in the nature of its substance and purpose from stage-drama, whose limits it transcends, but multiplied in respect to the number or length of its acts and capable of indefinite extension.”

8 Rohde already thought that the collective values of the city had disappeared in Greek culture under the Roman empire, giving way for expressing the individual through the synthesis of the novels. For recent accounts of this remark, see Goldhill 2000 and 2001.

9 Some cases of possible passage from the novel to theatre or vice versa are attested. Lucian reports that a Ninus (Pseudologistes 25) and a Parthenope (De Saltatione 2.54), namesake of the protagonist of the fragmentary novel Metiochus and Partenope, were characters of pantomimes; Persius (1.134) mentions a Callirhoe as the protagonist of a mime. A mime featuring a Leucippe is attested by Pap. Ber. Inv.13927: see Manteuffel 1929; Cunningham 1987; and Mignogna 1996.

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Further Readings

Alaux, J. and F. Létoublon. 2005. “La grotte et la source. Paysage naturel et artifice dans Daphnis et Chloé et Leucippé et Clitophon.” In Lieux, décors et paysages de l’ancien roman des origines à Byzance, edited by B. Pouderon and D. Crismani. Lyon: Maison de l’Orient et de la Méditerranée, pp. 57–74.

Auerbach, E. 2003. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (rev. ed.). Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Bakhtin, M. 1981a. The Dialogic Imagination (rev. ed.), edited by M. Holquis. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Bakhtin, M. 1981b. “The epic and the novel: Towards a methodology for the study in the novel.” In The Dialogic Imagination, edited by M. Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press, pp. 3–40.

Bartsch, S. 1989. Decoding the Ancient Novel: The Reader and the Role of Description in Heliodorus and Achilles Tatius. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Bing, P. 1988. The Well Read Muse: Present and Past in Callimachus and the Hellenistic Poets. Göttingen: Vandenhœck & Ruprecht.

Boulic, N. and F. Létoublon, forthcoming.“Pirates in the library.” In Proceedings of ICAN 2008, edited by Marilia Futre Pinheiro. Groningen: Barkhuis & Groningen University Library.

Bowie, E. 2005. “Metaphor in Daphnis and Chloe.” In Metaphor and the Ancient Novel, Ancient Novel Suppl. 4, edited by S.J. Harrison, M. Paschalis, and S. Frangoulidis. Groningen: Barkhuis, pp. 68–86.

Bowie, E. 2005. “Metaphor in Daphnis and Chloe.” In Metaphor and the Ancient Novel, Ancient Novel Suppl. 4, edited by S.J. Harrison, M. Paschalis, and S. Frangoulidis. Groningen: Barkhuis, pp. 68–86.

Bowie, E. 2008. “Literary milieux.” In The Cambridge Companion to the Greek and Roman Novel, edited by T. Whitmarsh. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 17–38.

Branham, B. 2005. “The Bakhtin circle and ancient narrative.” In The Bakhtin Circle and Ancient Narrative, edited by B. Branham. Ancient Narrative Supplementum 3. Groningen: Barkhuis, pp. xi–xxiv.

Brethes, R. 2007. De l’idéalisme au réalisme: une étude du comique dans le roman grec. Salerno: Helios.

Briand, M. 2009. “Le sexe des passions et des vertus. Anthropologie culturelle, métafiction et rhétorique dans le roman d’Achille Tatius.” In Passions, vertus et vices dans l’ancien roman, edited by B. Pouderon and C. Bost-Pouderon. Lyon: Maison de l’Orient et de la Méditerranée, pp. 329–353.

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Cameron, A. 1993. The Greek Anthology from Meleager to Planudes. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Cameron, A. 2004. Greek Mythography in the Roman World. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Canfora, L. 2004. “Le roman.” In Histoire de la littérature grecque à l’époque hellénistique, edited by L. Canfora, M. Raiola, and L. Sanchi. Paris: Éd. Desjonquères, pp. 199–206.

Carson, A. 1986. Eros the Bittersweet: An Essay. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Chew, K. 2000. “Achilles Tatius and parody.” Classical Journal, 96: 57–70.

Connors, C. 2008. “Politics and spectacles.” In The Cambridge Companion to the Greek and Roman Novel, edited by T. Whitmarsh. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 162–181.

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Curtius, E.R. 1983. European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages: Princeton: Princeton University Press. (1990 with a new afterword by P. Godman).

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De Temmerman, K. 2007. “Where philosophy and rhetoric meet: Character typification in the Greek novel.” In Philosophical Presence in the Ancient Novel, edited by J.R. Morgan and M. Jones. Ancient Novel Supplementum 10. Groningen: Barkhuis & Groningen University Library, pp. 85–110.

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Apart from the “Big Five Novels,” see the main pieces of Greek theater alluded to in the novels: Aeschylus’ Oresteia; Sophocles’ Suppliant Women, the Oedipus plays, and Electra; Euripides’ Phoenician Women, Orestes, and Hecuba. Among secondary literature, see, particularly, The Cambridge Companion to the Ancient Novel, edited by Timothy Whitmarsh (2008; especially Morgan-Harrison’s “Intertextuality,” Bowie’s “Literary Milieux,” Goldhill’s “Genre,” and Morales’ “The History of Sexuality”). Apart from this collection, see also Alaux and Létoublon (1998); Anderson’s (1982) Eros Sophistes: Ancient Novelists at Play; Carrière’s (1979) Le carnaval et la politique; and Cueva’s (2004) The Myths of Fiction: Studies in the Canonical Greek Novels. See also Walden’s (1894) “Stage terms in Heliodorus’ Aethiopica.” For the relationship between play with theatrical situations and dialogues in the novel as a testimony of polyphony, see Bakhtin’s œuvre and the third Ancient Narrative supplement, which is devoted to this relation.