“Gender in the Ancient Novel” is really several topics. The reader of the fully extant Greek novels is immediately struck by the centrality of powerful females and the mutuality and symmetry of love between the supernaturally beautiful protagonists. The construction of gender in Petronius is utterly different, even apart from the idea that the Satyricon is a parody of the ideal romance. There, alternative masculinities and (often dysfunctional) sexuality take center stage, while marriage, chastity, and reintegration into the social fabric are absent. Apuleius offers at once a version of an ideal romance ending in marriage (Cupid and Psyche) and a subversion of the correspondence between sex and gender (cross-dressing, anormative gender roles, a universe controlled by a female force, alternative grammatical gender). All the novels investigate desire, sometimes as a force disruptive of society, and particularly pull female desire out of the shadows. Several novels, notably Daphnis and Chloe, also conspicuously denaturalize accepted constructions of male and female roles. Emerging Christian fiction, meanwhile, presents powerful women not moving toward marriage, where “bodies” play out differently in defining gender, sexuality, and selfhood. Fragments of the Greek novels will present yet other models of womanhood, sexuality, and constructed gender. The heroine may, in some novels at a metaphorical level, represent Greece as triumphantly resistant to Roman imperialism. Further, the gender identities of the central characters often differ vastly from those of the peripheral figures who are more conservatively drawn (Alvarez 1995; Watanabe 2003). None of this should be surprising, considering that “the ancient novel” is (arguably) an artificial category comprised of prose fiction written in geographically and culturally diverse locales over a period of several centuries—notwithstanding the literary conventions that make many of these works look so similar.1
The most obvious conundrum: (1) women are strikingly central, have agency, and feel desire, and (2) the relationship between the central male and female lovers is deliberately symmetrical in a way that departs from expected models of male–female relationships by the actually inappropriate standards of fifth-century Athens or Rome of the late Republic and early Empire (see Konstan 1994; Haynes 2003, 160; Goldhill 1995 for reservations). Needless to say, the situation is much more complex than this, and I will return to the second point later.
A few examples of female centrality and agency: Callirhoe survives death and abduction by pirates and makes her own decisions, while Chaereas is so resourceless that he repeatedly seeks suicide (Call. 3.5, 5.10, 6.2, 7.1). Chariton even ends the work saying that this was the story of Callirhoe. It is Chloe who is first struck with a mature feeling of love and desire even though she is several years younger than Daphnis (Daphnis and Chloe, 1.13; Winkler 1990). Notwithstanding Theagenes’ considerable development in the Aethiopika, it is Charikleia’s epic of self-discovery and homecoming. The unnamed princess in The Story of Apollonius King of Tyre is represented as pursuing her studies in music and presumably other fields (Apollonius 18); she chooses her husband (20) and bears a clever and eloquent daughter. Little Psyche “changes her sex through daring” (Apul., Met. 5.22). Heroines have power over kings through their supernatural beauty: Callirhoe is mistaken for Aphrodite (Call. 2.3), as is Psyche; Dionysius and the Great King are virtually enslaved (Call. 6.9); when Charikleia stands up in the first sections of her novel, the bandits dive for cover (Aeth. 2).
One could go on. The most recent comprehensive treatment of the topic takes for granted as a starting point “the sheer visibility of female characters within the texts,” “the exceptional emotional strength of the heroines,” and the general prominence of females (Haynes 2003, 1). If I have belabored the point, it is because some criticism seems to overlook the centrality and strength of the females. The question is, of course, why this genre at this time gives such exceptional attention to females, and/or whether their strength is undermined and contained.
The question of readership has always dominated this debate and, though an interesting subject of inquiry in itself, it ultimately solves nothing. There is certainly evidence to support the argument that women had more access to literacy in the Imperial period than earlier. Johne writes of the changed conditions of the Hellenic world: the influence of the Stoa that proclaimed the equality of the sexes, the growing number of important women such as Arsinoe, Cleopatra, and the women of the Severan dynasty, all wielding political power (Johne 1996, 151–154). The readership question is, of course, tied to evidence for the changing status of women more generally.2 Plancia Magna of Perge provides perhaps the clearest example of an elite woman wielding power and wealth in a location closer to those where many of the Greek novels were written.3
Egger points to increased educational opportunities for upper-class females in Egypt beginning in the Hellenistic era; “hundreds of papyri are written and addressed to women” (1999, 113–114); many girls are sent to school; we hear of a particular little schoolgirl named Heraidous; the Egyptian data may transfer to other Hellenized areas, though there are problems with using Egyptian data as comparanda. In general, this was a period of increased literacy (Hunter 2008, 261). Photius mentions a female reader/dedicatee: Isidora, the sister of Antonius Diogenes to whom the Wonders Beyond Thule are dedicated (Photius, Bibl. 111b). Within that narrative, Antonius makes the figure Balagrus send cypress tablets, on which a part of the fictional set of adventures of the Wonders Beyond Thule is written, to his wife, Phila.4 Haynes mentions one Aurelia Ptolemais whose easy cursive is indicative of a comfortable level of literacy (Haynes 2003, 9, and passim for further examples). Both Egger (1999) and Johne (1996) promote the idea that women had now become important recipients of literature, readers who constitute a market niche of sorts. Johne, citing the pictorial evidence—for example the wall painting in Pompeii of a woman with a wax tablet and stylus—even suggests that some of the novels were written by women using pseudonyms (1996, 163–164)—for which, however, there is no hard evidence. On the other hand, as Elsom (1992) points out, we hear quite explicitly about males being either dissuaded from or encouraged to read these love stories because of their (allegedly) pornographic content (1992, 214–215).5
Literacy figures are ambiguous. According to W.V. Harris (1989, 330), less than 5% of females vs. 10% of males in the provinces under the Roman Empire were literate. For Harris and others, the subsequent implication is that only the elites could read and write, only they had access to the expensive materials required. However, is such restricted literacy an argument against female readership, especially since, by ancient standards, 5% was not really restricted literacy (Hopkins 1991)? If literate males also represent only a fraction of the population, it seems immaterial that only half that number of females could read; the important point is that some could. Critics responding to Harris offer an alternative model: many illiterates at various social levels participated in literacy by putting their mark on a written legal text, by discovering through others the content of written decrees in the marketplace (Bowman 1991, 121–122), or by hiring a lector (Horsfall 1991, 72).6 In other words, enough women could read or had access to a reader that it is plausible to imagine a female audience (Haynes 2003, 44–45, for further references).
A female readership, the argument goes, would account for the fantasy of female empowerment, the weakening and occasional objectification of the male, and the focus on and sympathetic treatment of the female. On the other hand, females might not be the primary intended audience of this genre. Haynes (2003) rightly cautions against the kind of essentializing which assumes that “‘woman’ is a stable category” and all female readers are alike. Further, in an androcentric society, research suggests, women may come to read from a male point of view (Haynes 2003, 4).
The readership question can be used both to show that the Greek novel is fundamentally subversive and woman-centered and to show that it is patriarchal and conservative. One of the dominant current strains in readings of the Greek romance is to focus on the ending in marriage as an endorsement of the patriarchal system, a harnessing of desire in the service of social order and a return (one supposes) to traditional gender roles after the dislocation of the protagonists, often referred to as the “civic reading.” Egger particularly emphasizes the centrality of marriage in the novels; even bandits aim at wedlock with the heroines (Egger 1994, 260–263; Haynes 2003, 156). Perkins (1995, 72–73), with reference to Egger and Elsom, says: “Romance provided an idealized depiction of the patriarchal system whose inherent purpose as a social institution was the retention and passing on of male power and privilege. … The emphasis on traditional marriage arrangements exposes the genre’s endorsement of patriarchy’s concerns.” Elsom, in a Lacanian vein, writes of Callirhoe as “carrying the phallus,” a woman who, as desirable object, becomes the dynastic link between father and son-in-law. She conveys all of her father’s prestige and social standing to Chaereas, while her own status is ambiguous (Elsom 1992, 226–227). Women are ultimately just attractive exchange objects to bind male connections. Kate Cooper sees the Greek romances as the narrative of tempestuous adolescence finally achieving restabilization in the foundation of a new household and the correct channeling of desire. Civic duty is made attractive by the celebration of desire within marriage, but ultimately civic duty is the goal (Cooper 1996, 34–36). Balot (1998), examining masculinity, notes the constant tension between Eros and the civic ideals. Desire is a destabilizing force and not compatible with the civic. It is one of the great paradoxes of the novel that it focuses on these competing interests, which are not clearly reconciled by the end of the novel.
These readings (except Balot) view the Greek romance as fundamentally conservative, preserving the values of an earlier era amid threatening social change, and re-inscribing traditional gender roles. Egger (1999, 135) suggests that the “sexual politics” of the novel involve a presentation of even more limitations on women’s actual influence and power than in contemporary reality; the women’s sexual fascination provides merely an illusion of power and invincibility. The heroine ultimately surrenders her gains and submits to the female destiny. However, Helen Morales points out, “it is only by reading teleologically—stressing the ending and downplaying the journey toward it—that we can read the novels simply as celebrating marriage. … A more phenomenological than functional reading might enjoy the digressions and reject the tyranny of teleology and its ‘civic message’” (Morales 2008, 41; cf. Doody 1997, 471).
In her lengthy, far-reaching, and somewhat eccentric reading of the origins of the novel, Margaret Anne Doody vehemently rejects the “civic” reading, instead seeing the genre of the ancient novel as linked inextricably with the mother goddess and, thus, in an essential sense, as “feminine.” Doody stresses how different the culture is of Asia Minor, the seat of so many of the novels, where one sees overt signs of the “female force” (Doody 1997, 64). A very high percentage of the famous or creative women of antiquity came from Asia Minor; the Medusa-figures of Asia Minor are not threatening but beautiful, though they are brazen (Doody 1997, 65–66). It is this view of women that she sees infiltrating the novels: “the heroines of the Greek novels may largely be champions of virtue and chastity, sophrosyne, but they are also reclamations of Medusa, unconquered” (Doody 1997, 66). Her readings of individual novels focus on female strength and female resistance to patriarchal structures. The novel is about the individual’s journey apart from law, family, and property and away from civic authority (Doody 1997, 61, 81). Doody (1997, 460–461) goes further and suggests that, of all genres, the novel offers us the fullest experience of the Feminine; as readers, we yield ourselves to the body and rhythms of the Mother, which are messy. In other words, we should gender the novel itself as feminine! Her reading, which is related to Merkelbach’s theories about the novels as coded “mystery texts” and, to a degree, to Bakhtin’s vision of the novel as a low, populist, messy, polyphonous genre, meets resistance from many camps for different reasons. Nonetheless, it is worth keeping in mind how often goddesses and women with divine powers appear in the novels, both Greek and Roman, and we should be open to a reading of even the romances that takes full account of the strength of female characters.
Helen Morales, also eager to explore resistant reading, offers another approach using ancient theories of optics along with a modified use of Laura Mulvey’s theory of the male gaze. The heroines are, of course, the objects of the male gaze, but their beauty is such that the male viewer/voyeur is sometimes incapacitated (Morales 2004, 159). Callirhoe even becomes a sort of demagogue (Call. 4.1.10), holding satraps in her sway, thus threatening male political authority. Morales accepts Doody’s view of the heroines as unconquered Medusas and further describes this aspect of viewing the female, though with more reservations than Doody about the positive powers of Medusa, but balances this emphasis with a discussion of violence against females and the “consumptive gaze” of Clitophon viewing Leucippe as she is apparently being disemboweled. “There is a fantasy of female empowerment through exhibitionism on offer in Leucippe and Clitophon, especially in those scenes where looking at Leucippe causes men, metaphorically at least, to be stricken, slain and stupefied” (Morales 2004, 160). What Morales ultimately concludes is that both readings are present—not in some indecisive indeterminate sense, but rather in a fuller sense that both readings are “on offer.”7 Further, “voice and gaze … function as … principles that organize male and female experience differently” (Morales 2004, 229). In the figure of Melite, however, Morales sees a different paradigm, a woman who returns the gaze and breaks the logic of female objectification, a female viewing subject, a fairly sympathetic desiring female (Morales 2004, 223).8 In a sentiment that echoes both Bakhtin’s theories of the heteroglossia of the novel and Selden’s image of the trope of syllepsis or “double logic,” Morales concludes: “[i]t is the novel’s ambivalence, its holding on to more than one story at the same time, which makes it important for feminism” (Morales 2004, 231; Selden 1994). (Morales invokes Barbara Johnson 1998, The Feminist Difference, 13, for the idea that the novel is a place where “impasses can be kept open.”)
As many critics have pointed out, the extant Greek romances may not be entirely representative of the original nature of the genre. Fragments reveal signs of a much more varied repertoire than has survived, where scandal is more prominent than love and marriage (Winkler 1980; Barchiesi 1999). Morales sees in Iamblichus’ Babylonian Tales a possible marriage between women (unless one of them is a eunuch!), breaking quite dramatically the pattern of young elite heterosexual love. One of the women is named “Mesopotamia,” while other characters in the work are named “Tigris” and “Euphrates,” all of these indicating territories occupied by Rome at the time, raising the possibility that Iamblichus is using the familiar image of the woman’s body as land and expressing resistantly the disorder and coercion that ensue under Roman rule (Morales 2006, 85–88). This anti-imperialist reading of the Greek novel is one championed by Haynes (2003, 161), even in regard to the extant Greek novels in the conclusion of her study:
Why was the feminine constructed in this particular way across these texts? This book has proffered the hypothesis that the most striking manifestations of novelistic femininity were at least in part conditioned by the need to assert an almost provocative sense of Hellenic superiority. The heroines resist violation and so the borders of Greek cultural integrity remain uncontested.
David Konstan’s work on “sexual symmetry,” to a degree an elaboration of Foucault (see further in the following text), has been very influential in the readings of gender and sexual relations in the Greek novel. Konstan stresses the rupture from the asymmetrical models of desire seen in Plato, where the older erastes pursues the younger and more passive eromenos. In the novel, eros is instead a reciprocal passion between social equals of the same age and, rather than a disruptive force, is the basis for enduring relationships leading to marriage. This symmetry also provides the structure of the novels, as each trial faced by one of the lovers is mirrored by a challenge to the other (Konstan 1994).9 As Skinner (2005, 275) says, “Thus we can presently sketch out a trend toward sexual symmetry but cannot yet explain it, much less grasp its real-life implications.”
Is this symmetry limited to the novels? Is it a social phenomenon, a literary construct? In part because of Foucault’s lengthy discussion in the History of Sexuality vol. 3, Plutarch’s Dialogue on Love (Amatorius or Erotikos) has dominated this discussion (Foucault 1986; cf. Goldhill 1995, 144–161, for response). A conscious response to Plato’s Symposium, the dialogue debates the advantages of love of boys vs. love of women and concludes with a crescendo of praise for women and marriage—as well as a wedding.10 While the philosophical debate itself, like Plato’s, took place long ago, an upheaval occurs in the present: a beautiful and wealthy young widow, Ismenadora, is in love with a youth at least 10 years her junior. Part way through, the dialogue is interrupted by the report that she has abducted the youth and intends to marry him, which she does at the end.
Foucault reads the dialogue as marking a major cultural shift away from the love of boys with its asymmetry that had marked the Greek discourse of desire in earlier centuries, and he sees the relative symmetry of the erotics of the novel as part of this trend. Plutarch, appropriating the vocabulary of homoerotic desire, transfers it to an appreciation of women as deserving partners—even as Platonic facilitators of recollections of the divine (766E). At the same time, he offers a portrait of female desire and female initiative in love—an older woman who takes the place of the erastes, contesting the earlier paradigms of homoerotic passion (Foucault 1986, 193–210). However, as Goldhill, in particular, has stressed, the relationship between the discourse of the dialogue (praising marriage and the sophrosyne of women) and the narrative (the lawless abduction of the youth by a woman) is far from straightforward (Goldhill 1995, 155, 159, and passim; cf. Cooper 1996, 154). Foucault, according to Goldhill (1995, 161), has listened to the philosophy, but not followed the narrative with all its ironies and ambiguities. Foucault has also generally come under fire from Classicists for creating too rigid and linear a cultural history of ancient sexualities; McGlathery (1998, 206; cf. Sissa 2008, 195–206) points out that he almost completely neglects the Roman side where symmetrical love and desire are certainly the anomaly. The important point for the present subject is that the dialogue does not simply compare the erotic desirability of boys vs. women, but presents marriage as a union of something like equals, and provocatively defends even the idea that a woman could lead. These are new ideas that mirror the gender dynamics of the novel. Marriage is not viewed in Plutarch as the subjugation of desire to civic duty or the reining in of dangerous women so much as it is seen—relative to earlier times—as a congenial pairing of minds. Clearly, the aggressive behavior of Ismenadora does not conform to Plutarch’s vision of a conjugal meeting of minds, but we need not then ironize and discard the central speeches of the dialogue.11 Foucault may have magnified the importance of this dialogue as an indication of a more general shift, and he has perhaps overlooked the narrative complexities, but he has at least shown persuasively that, universal or not, there is in the air a new attitude toward marriage, which is also evident in the novel.12
Perhaps too much has been made of Foucault and of the paradigms of asymmetrical desire set forth in Plato. In Sex and Sensuality in the Ancient World, Guilia Sissa, while largely skirting discussion of the ancient novel, urges us to relegate the pederastic model to one segment of Greek elite society and to think in terms of “sensuality,” the desire to be desired, which takes away the dichotomy of active and passive, and to consider the ways the ancients gendered sensuality as feminine (Sissa 2008, 8, and passim). Writing of the many omissions in her book, she says (2008, 193):
I could have shown how the Greek novel, in particular Longus’ Daphnis and Chloe, plays with the bucolic setting, to come to the conclusion that nature has nothing to teach, and that desire—male desire—has to be learned from a feminine and technical source. The pleasure of the senses is, again and again, a skilful expertise, which men derive from women and which has to find the right intensity between rape and incompetence.
Indeed, it seems to me that the Greek novel, with its focus on the supreme physical beauty of the heroine, desired by all, is a perfect model for Sissa’s radical re-thinking of models of sexuality and sensuality in the ancient world. Sensuality is clearly feminine in the novel; the heroine radiates this power of her femininity, which transcends, or simply does not belong to, the world of social reality. More could be done in this vein, leaving aside the preceding problems, overvexed as they are.
The rise of Christianity during the period of composition of most of the ancient novels considered in this chapter is connected with a whole new set of discourses and practices around marriage, chastity, gender, and women’s roles generally (see Konstan and Ramelli in this volume). The Acts of Thecla, within the Apocryphal Acts of Paul, demonstrates most clearly the appropriation of novelistic motifs toward a different purpose in emerging Christian promotional texts. Thecla, who is engaged to be married, is smitten with Paul because of his spiritual message and decides to lead a celibate life. Her decision provokes the wrath of the civic authorities, who condemn her to death; a series of miracles follows. The repressed eroticism of Thecla’s love of Paul and his message, her independence and determination, and her defiance of death—all are characteristic of various novelistic heroines. Her failure to burn at the stake has evoked comparisons with Charikleia’s. Thecla’s resistance to marriage and procreation, though, obviously sets her apart, her sexual renunciation locating her firmly in the new Christian tradition in which disciples awaited the coming of Christ and the end of the world, expressing their separateness from civic society through the purity of their bodies (Brown 1988, 61). The influence may not all move in one direction; it has been suggested that the focus of the Greek romance on marriage may be a reaffirmation of the institution in the face of Christian renunciation, and certainly the repeated references to the chastity of novelistic females and males make sense in light of an apparent increased interest in chastity in Christian circles—though the dating and degree of awareness of Christian practice make this a problematic proposition.
Despite the similarities between Thecla and the novelistic heroines, critics generally focus on the opposition between the absolute chastity of the Christian heroine and the romance heroine’s progress toward marriage and assimilation (capitulation) to the subordinate role of the woman in marriage within civic society. Thecla and her sisters defy secular authority and aim to dismantle the structures of society. According to Virginia Burrus, chastity makes the Christian heroine autonomous in a way the novel heroine cannot be because her journey leads to marriage, while “the Christian chastity story … is explicitly opposed to the political and social orders and above all to marriage” (Burrus 1987, 59). In most criticism of the Christian novella, the pagan texts are read as conservative and champions of traditional roles for women necessary for the furtherance of civic values, against which the Christian material radically and subversively rewrites gender roles. Aubin (1998, 260), citing Cooper and Perkins as defining the ideological task of romance as the preservation of the idea of social stability through marriage, says, “the Apocryphal Acts use the heroines to overturn the values drafted by the blueprint of romance.” She also observes that Thecla “supersedes Paul in authority and masculine license” (Aubin 1998, 264); she is masculinized, Paul feminized, confounding gender signifiers. While romance teaches the difference between the sexes, it is the job of ApocActs to confound readers on this point (Aubin 1998, 272).
These readings, by overlooking some of the subversive elements in the Greek novels so far discussed, by looking to the novels’ endings in marriage and pushing aside the heroines’ strength and the hero’s passivity, create a greater divide than may be warranted between the aims of Christian and pagan novels. Instead of viewing the romance as a point of opposition, it may be better to view social norms themselves as the point against which the Christian texts rebel and to see pagan romance as a more congenial antecedent, a text in which women already showed independence and display their chastity prominently, upon which the Christians build, and/or to view the pagan texts as coopting some Christian preoccupations (deathlessness, chastity, female autonomy) to enrich the narrative. By the fourth century, Cooper tells us, Thecla became immensely important as a role model for women seeking figures with their own identifying characteristics. Cooper stresses that we do not have direct evidence for the audience of the ApocActs for the earlier period of the second and third centuries, which would correspond more closely to the era of the pagan novels’ floruit. By the fourth century, however, “imitation of the heroine became the vehicle of identification for female audiences, and the gesture of sexual renunciation took on an increasingly well-documented importance as a model for women of all classes” (Cooper 1996, 67). The insight is intriguing in light of earlier discussion of intended audience: is it not possible that the pagan novels were situated similarly in society?
Because of Peter Brown’s magisterial study, renunciation and the body have become focal points in thinking about the way that Christians took a new direction in defining their relation to the civic and spiritual worlds. Gender constructs are reconfigured particularly around the issue of abstinence where women could achieve reputations at least as great as men. In the absence of marriage, in any case, traditional roles are undone. I would suggest that the kinds of reconfigurations of gender and body seen in the novels intermingle with the new Christian ideology. The women in the Greek novels have already shown a strength that challenges the traditional patterns of masculine behavior, which is not at odds with their sisters in the Christian novella (Brown 1988, 61.)
As noted at the beginning of this essay, the construction of gender in Petronius and (differently) Apuleius differs radically from the picture we see in the Greek novel. The twisted world of Petronius’ Satyricon, often seen as a deliberate parodying of Greek Romance, is filled with figures who do not conform to recognized gender categories and who trouble the categories themselves, at least as recent critics have attempted to formulate them. In this world where unyielding sex priestesses and witches dominate weak and impotent men, where castrated cinaedi actively seek the passive role with other males, where Roman ideals of masculinity seem utterly absent—in this world that is paradoxical and anormative in so many other ways, “gender” (like genre) as a structuring category collapses.
While scholarship has moved past the question of whether Encolpius, Ascyltus, and Giton are “homosexuals,” it is perhaps a convenient way to start. Several decades ago, Wade Richardson, retaining the now-contested category of “homosexual” in reference to the protagonists, suggested that the sexual world of the work combines Greek and Roman behaviors and attitudes, with the idea that practices of pederasty are Greek importations and that they may be presented here as part of the Greek setting (Richardson 1984). Craig Williams’ landmark study, Roman Homosexuality, following contemporary trends in the study of ancient sexuality, disposes of the designation: in the Roman world, we do not find identities associated with sexual preference, as in the contemporary world, but rather a set of practices and “protocols” that mark the individual as penetrator or penetrated (he eschews the more prudish “active and passive”), and thus gender him/her as masculine or feminine (Williams 2010, chapt. 1, especially 17–19). “Within the Roman discourses to which we have access, the master terms are masculinity and femininity and not heterosexuality and homosexuality, in other words that the most deeply underlying concepts have to do with what we could call gender rather than sexuality” (Williams 2010, 263–264). In Petronius, the cinaedi of the Quartilla episode (Sat. 16–26) are a perfect example of the way Roman literature (and Roman culture more generally?) portrayed those unmasculine men who desired the passive role: disgusting, aggressively sexual, Eastern, effeminate (Williams 2010, 191–214). On the other hand, as Richlin (2009, 82) shows by a close examination of particular passages, the protagonists “live outside the law” in terms of their failure to conform to the patterns of active/passive, masculine/feminine laid out by Williams, for example. At times, Ascyltus appears to be the active and at times the passive partner; the same applies to Encolpius (Richlin 2009, 85–87). Although one would expect that any implication that a man had played a woman’s role would be understood as an insult and that a man would never admit to having been penetrated, this is exactly what happens at 9.6–10 when Ascyltus says “I was your frater the same way in the garden that the boy is now in this motel” (Richlin 2009, 85). Further, the protagonists are clearly not considered cinaedi of the sort that appear in the Quartilla episode. Thus, the practices that should gender certain characters as feminine are confused. Add to this the question of Encolpius’ failed masculinity in his long period of impotence.
However, as Rebecca Langlands has forcefully argued, gender and sexuality are not, even in Roman culture, purely a matter of who is penetrating whom phallically.13 The model of active and passive can be limiting and has the effect of effacing the complexity of female roles and other aspects of the masculine and feminine. Doody (1997, 110) calls attention to the women of the Satyricon whose power is close to the divine, Oenothea above all, who “bears the goddess in her name.” Doody points to the fragmented poetic passage at 134 in which Oenothea pronounces her vast powers over the universe, which has much in common with Isis’ speech in Apuleius. Through the powerful women and the impotent men, the Satyricon, in Doody’s (1997, 112–113) view, “calls the bluff of the masculine ideal,” and “‘feminizes’ a male narrative, dealing comically and critically with the masculine ethos and the masculine experience.”
The witches, whether divine or infernal, are not the only model of the feminine; Circe, her maid, Tryphaena, but more memorably, the Widow of Ephesus, mortal women who exhibit desire, are ambiguous figures, rupturing the normative model of female chastity. While the widow is most obviously seen as proof that no woman is chaste, Eumolpus’ narrative is famously met with three different reactions by his audience (Sat. 113), and can also be read as the story of female sexuality defeating death. For example, as Doody (1997, 112) reads the scene, “the widow has freed herself from the rule of male law,” in part by (literally) exposing the male body. For Langlands (2006, 7), the tale of the Widow of Ephesus is a prime example of the way chastity cannot be maintained in the face of reality rather than a heavily moral story.
The “Milesian Tale” as a genre, as far as one can tell, characteristically defies social norms, including—or perhaps especially—those governing gender and sexuality (see Tilg 2007 for recent discussion). In both the Widow of Ephesus and the Boy of Pergamum, traditionally cited as prime examples of the genre, Petronius supplies, even in embedded tales, examples of love object turning subject, flipping the tables, exhibiting desire, complicating the picture of pursuer/pursued, hence also of “masculine” and “feminine.” In Sissa’s terms, the cinaedi, Giton, Circe, Tryphana, the Widow and others exhibit the softness and sensuality of desire and of the desire to be desired and thus are feminine in an abstract sense. The norms of masculinity, meanwhile, have largely disappeared.
The Metamorphoses of Apuleius presents yet more confusing and contradictory portraits of women and gender than any of the previous novels. Like Petronius, Apuleius describes a world populated largely by the non-elite, teeming with witches in the first few books and scheming adulterous women in the last several. Yet, in the middle of the novel, Apuleius places the romance-like, woman-centered fabula anilis of Cupid and Psyche, and at the end he offers redemption in the form of an omnipotent female divinity (of course, many read the ending as ironic, and it should also be noted that the appearance of Isis as savior is superseded by the subsequent appearance of Osiris who is said to be the god of gods, on which more later). Several women (Psyche, Charite, Plotina) take on masculine characteristics, and several men (Cupid, Tlepolemus) are androgynous or engage in cross-dressing. Lucius himself is a confused combination of the phallic (as a donkey bearing an outrageously large member) and the passive.
Again, the treatment of gender in the Metamorphoses should be considered in the context of the nature of the work as a whole. Just as, in Richlin’s words, the Satyricon and its characters “live outside the law,” Apuleius’ book, narrated by an ex-donkey describing his sensibilities while a donkey, cannot be expected to follow conventional rules about anything. In an article that radically rethinks the nature of the Milesian Tale, Tilg (2007, 179) points out that, in the first few lines of his work, Apuleius has re-gendered the place-names Hymettos, Isthmos, and Taenaros from the otherwise universally masculine to feminine (1.1: Hymettos Attica, Isthmos Ephyrea, Taenaros Spartiaca) by using feminine attributive adjectives. The term “vocis immutatio” of the prologue, Tilg (2007, 175) argues, signals in rhetorical terms a deviation from traditional standards of prose composition—a specialty of Apuleius’. Tilg (2007, especially 193) argues that such linguistic deviation was a feature of the Milesian Tale, which characteristically used anormative language in a style that matched the low-life content of the tales. I would like to suggest that this clear and emphatic re-gendering of nouns—thrice, lest we miss it—is also a sign, like other covert signs in the Apuleian prologue (about Egyptian papyrus in particular), of a re-thinking of gender and gender roles in the novel as a whole (on grammatical gender, see the essay “Gender” by Corbeill 2010, which begins by considering the centrality of grammatical gender in Romans’ thinking about sex and gender). And, indeed, virtually the next thing Lucius tells us is that he was heading to Thessaly where not only are witches dominant, but where he is related to Plutarch through his mother (Met.1.2).
Many features of Apuleius’ portrayal of women have been debated at great length by critics: the overlaps in the descriptions of the powers of the witches of Books 1–3 and the powers of Isis, with the usual conclusion that the witches are “anti-types” of Isis (see Frangoulidis 2008 for discussion and a new angle), the role of erotic seduction and lust, the “serviles voluptates” that plunge Lucius into his life as an ass, the omnipresence of adultery initiated by women, particularly in Books 9 and 10, and the frequently accompanying acts of jealousy and vengeance, culminating in the hair-raising story of the multiple murderess who is destined to mate with Lucius in the theater in Book 10. Most often, these sorts of observations are accompanied by moralizing readings: Lucius (and the rest of the world) is too interested in fleeting physical pleasures and is led astray by women; women, apart from the female divinity Isis, are something men should be wary of, should not be seduced by.
Yet, the effect of the preceding observations is to create a misogynist Apuleius, which is surely an imbalanced view. Lucius’ world also encompasses the tale of Cupid and Psyche, entirely a woman’s tale (except for the fact that, of course, its real author is male), narrated by an old woman to a young woman about a woman, substituting female labors centered around cooking, weaving, and cosmetics for male heroic exploits, granting a woman a katabasis and ending with the birth of a daughter. There are too many ways to read the tale,14 but we might read it for the moment as imagining a female-authored fantasy of love and marriage in which a male and female (especially the female) both mature, both enjoy lawful and pleasurable sensuality, get married, and live happily ever after (Relihan 2009, 82–85; Finkelpearl 2012). In Relihan’s (2009, 84–85) words, “it is the story of the equality of man and woman, a story of maturity within the real world.” In this respect, the tale has much in common with the Greek romance and all its accompanying questions about the centrality of the female. Yet, here we are explicitly told that it is a woman’s tale, a fabula anilis (see Lev Kenaan 2000).15 A daughter, Voluptas (“sensuality?”), is born from the union. With its fantasy of marriage to Love himself, it is difficult to interpret Cupid and Psyche within the frame of the patriarchal “civic reading” described in the preceding text. It would be gratifying for some of us to feel secure in transferring this model of female narration and audience to the Greek romance, but risky.
Nonetheless, it is fairly clear that Apuleius has juxtaposed this female narrative with that of Lucius, whose journey is more spiritual and philosophical, involving a (relative) renunciation of sensuality and the material world. The happy life with husband and child is female, while the choice of a less material life belongs, appropriately, according to the paradigms of Plato’s Symposium and others, to the male. However, here, Apuleius has rather confounded the picture because this spiritual life is lived under the aegis of Isis the mother. While we hear in the last few pages about subsequent initiations into Egyptian male cults, it is Isis who dominates the book. Lucius, ex-phallic animal via the female rose, is now engaged in proto-Christian bodily denial, renunciation, and passivity, and no longer embodies the ideals of Roman masculinity.
The foregoing discussion has critically surveyed recent thinking on gender, women, and men in the novels, and suggested possibly fruitful directions to advance the question(s). As stated at the beginning, gender in the novel is many topics, and it might not even be legitimate to try to tie them together as if they were one. I have tried to bring out several points, taking a progressive rather than pessimistic view of both the status of women and the flexibility of the categories of masculine and feminine, viewing all the novels as experimenting with alternative ways of constructing gender and gender roles. It is not only the Christian novella, seeking to promote otherworldly values and to escape the civic that gives women an equal footing with men, or the Roman novels that twist and undo recognized categories, but even the fully extant canonical Greek romances give space to rethinking society’s traditional roles in which women are subordinate to men and exist mainly to bear children and manage the household. If we enlarge that canon with the more radical fragmentary novels where sexuality is freer and gender roles more flexible, then the radical moments in the canonical Five may be seen in another light.
1 A further complication of the topic “gender in the novel” is that it will here include discussion of “gender” as a set of cultural behaviors and concepts distinct from biological sex, sexuality, the status and roles of women, and masculinity. The Oxford Handbook of Roman Studies has interestingly devoted three chapters to the topic: Gender, Women, and Sexuality. The current volume includes a chapter on “Greek Love,” but does not otherwise separately cover the topics that a reader will expect to see addressed in this sort of writing. Therefore, because of space constraints, I have addressed these various topics as they seem most relevant to the particular texts being discussed without asking every question about every text. I also take it for granted that the reader either has some sense of the interconnections of these subjects or will look elsewhere for more specific definitions. Haynes 2003, for example, provides much theoretical background in her discussion.
2 The connection between the possibly altered status of real women in the Hellenistic and Imperial periods and their portrayal in literature is obviously problematic. A female readership could certainly account for the prominence, beauty, and strength of female characters, but it is not as obvious that the right of women to own property, for example, would necessarily lead to novelistic heroines being portrayed as supernaturally beautiful. Historians insistently remind us that even fiction is composed by real people living in a real material world, and I have therefore tried to allude to those realities—see the next note. At the same time, the Greek romances are highly stylized and fantastical, and my comments here tend toward an examination of the fictional portrayals of and discourses about gender.
3 I have found Mary Taliaferro Boatwright’s 1991 fascinating article on Plancia Magna very useful for undoing some assumptions about the lived lives of women in the provinces in the early imperial period. What follows here is a summary of the highlights of that piece. Looking outside of literary–philosophical texts, some epigraphic sources offer evidence that women in Asia Minor in the Roman imperial period held prominent positions in their cities as priestesses, benefactors, and even magistrates; controlled their own wealth; and had legal capabilities far greater than those of their counterparts in the centers and in other periods. Plancia Magna of Perge, though perhaps atypical, is a startling figure: apparently inheriting as much of the family fortune as her brother, she dedicated a gateway to the city dated somewhere around 119–122 CE in which her father and brother are identified by their relationship to her, rather than vice versa, and which included more statues of women than of men (252, 255, 256, 261). She may have been legally sui iuris, with no male guardian, and, more strikingly, apparently held the position of demiourgos; “her name, as the eponymous magistrate of the city, would be used to date all public documents for the year of her magistracy (254). Boatwright argues that Plancia Magna is not an isolated instance of female power (258):
Contradicting the picture provided by the literary evidence, however, are hundreds of inscriptions and coins from Hellenistic and Roman Greece and Asia Minor that attest women such as Plancia Magna, unnoticed in the literary sources. These women were priestesses, gymnasiarchs, theatrical game producers, and the like, as well as magistrates. … These publicly visible women belie the stated attitudes and “norms” of the time.”
However, as Boatwright explains, these very political women were represented in public in guises that reinforced traditional gender roles—as Pudicitia or Ceres, creating an ambivalent image as both politically powerful and personally retiring (261). The more public women like Plancia Magna then exerted an influence on imperial women and their roles more generally, providing this double-edged model. Boatwright stresses the disjunction between the image of women in epigraphic and numismatic sources and those in literature, yet the novels, most of them emanating from precisely the same geographic and social context, feature a different kind of smart, capable woman.
Those who read the Big Five as conservative vis à vis the status of women look to the endings as affirming a woman’s subordinate role in the city as child bearer. Yet, by their strength and assertiveness, the authors have marked them as capable of a different kind of civic involvement, such as that of Plancia Magna. Certainly, the heroines of the novel are not prominent civic figures bestowing their benefactions on the city, but, just as Plutarch’s dialogue points to a different paradigm for thinking about male–female relations, so do these prominent imperial women suggest that the writers of the novels may have been starting from a divergent model of womanhood. The women of the novels present, perhaps in altered form, this same contradictory mix of power and submission.
4 The complications of the narrative structure of the Wonders Beyond Thule are notorious, but Phila is an actual historical figure who lived in the time of Alexander the Great. In Sandy’s translation: “He presents Balagrus writing these things to his wife and transcribing the contents of the cypress tablets so as to communicate them to his wife” (111b). Though the distancing device of the many layers of narrative make it hard to tell exactly what is happening, it does sound as though Phila is the designated recipient of the novelistic adventures.
5 For example, a doctor, Theodorus Priscianus, lists reading Iamblichus as a therapy for impotence (2.11, p. 133 Rose). Though most of the extant Greek novels are not terribly pornographic (save for certain passages in Leucippe and Clitophon), lost novels by Iamblichus and Lollianos, for example, are more explicit.
6 The point is further made in various essays of the volume that literacy was not so inextricably tied to the elite; graffiti and magical papyri are indications that people of all social levels were literate (Bowman 1991, 123); a bricklayer left behind his reflections on laying bricks (Horsfall 1991, 59); the fable was clearly a genre aimed at the non-elite. This leaves open the question of the readership of the novel: it need not be exclusively aimed at the elite even though it chronicles their lives. For further and broader consideration of the culture and sociology of reading in antiquity and the nature of “reading communities,” see Johnson 2009, 320–30.
7 Montague, with reference to Showalter, similarly suggests that we read the romances (her focus is on Daphnis and Chloe) as a “double-edged discourse,” which contains both a dominant and a muted text, perhaps a male-centered text which contains within it a women’s text (Montague 1992, 246). Montague 1992 and 1994 both engage with the question of violence in the novel via comparison with the modern Harlequin romances, suggesting that its appeal is not only to males, but also to females who may be able to process feelings about violence via these texts, which are explicitly designed for a female audience.
8 It is important to keep Melite (as well as Lykainion) in mind as a foil to the evil destructive desiring females so often mentioned in the same breath, such as Kyno in Xenophon or Arsake in Heliodorus. Goldhill 1995, 150–1, distinguishes and yet ultimately equates these women.
9 Konstan’s thesis has been challenged in certain details by, for example Haynes 2003, 160, who asserts “there is no exact ‘symmetry’ as Konstan would have it … it is the heroines who are stronger and make the relationship work.”
10 Two other texts are frequently brought in as comparanda: Plutarch’s Coniugalia Praecepta and Lucian’s Erotes. The former, advice on marriage, is credited with recommending a harmonious reciprocity in the conjugal bond, demonstrating a new sense of respectful interchange between husband and wife. Wohl 1997 objects that the relationship as described is actually based on male domination of the female, where female = body, male = mind, and the male project is to master his bodily instincts. Lucian’s work, also acutely conscious of Plato’s Symposium, is a debate over whether boys or women provide the lover more pleasure, where the argument in favor of pederasty wins the day, raising the question of whether Plutarch’s praise of women and marriage really marks a social trend or not.
11 Plutarch’s endings often undercut the main ideas of his dialogues. See Wohl 1997 on the paradoxical ending of the Coniugalia Praecepta. The DIO ends with a long description of kuphi, a kind of mystical incense whose mind-altering spiritual qualities are completely at odds with the insistence on the superiority of the rational in the rest of the piece.
12 How to address the tension between discourse and narrative? It is worth noting in any case that Pisias, who equates the love of women with love of prostitutes, is so abhorrent that he enrages the level-headed Plutarch (752B–C), and that Ismenadora is so outrageous as to be clearly a comic worst-case provocation.
13 Langlands 2006, 7. Langlands focusses on pudicitia, a state of bodily control that is accessible to women as well as men. In the case of what she terms the “playful genres,” including the novel, she observes that pudicitia is exposed as a futile ideal. Langlands also interestingly notes that women in the novel who possess pudicitia, such as Charite and Plotina, are strangely androgynous creatures. See also previous text on Sissa who discards the active/passive model.
14 Psychological interpretations of the tale of Cupid and Psyche, mostly by non-Classicists—as well as of the Metamorphoses as a whole—offer fruitful ways of detaching gender in the abstract from roles of women and men in the work. See Relihan 2009, 86–7, for a useful chart and bibliographical references. I agree with Relihan in putting aside the allegorical reading, which seems a distraction from the very real-life nature of the tale.
15 Lev Kenaan 2000, especially 381–7, interestingly complicates the picture here. The story is designed by the old woman to address the particular private circumstances of Charite’s plight; it is an oral tale of comfort between women. Yet, the male Lucius overhears and writes down the story, thus creating two perspectives. It is the written text, authored by the philosophizing male that is opened up to the allegorizing of later writers such as Fulgentius. The immediate, personal, literal version of the tale is the fabula anilis, which we hear only through Lucius the intermediary.
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The reader should consult the bibliography to this chapter for further reading. The most basic texts on women in the novel are: Haynes 2003, which is full of information and ideas; the earlier works by Egger and Elsom; Doody 1997 for a strong goddess position; Morales; and Richlin. For more general reading on sexuality, see Williams, Skinner, and Sissa.