The Representation of Slavery in the Greek Novel

Resistance and Appropriation

William M. Owens

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000754643
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

This volume offers the first comprehensive treatment of how the five canonical Greek novels represent slaves and slavery. In each novel, one or both elite protagonists are enslaved, and Owens explores the significance of the genre's regular social degradation of these members of the elite.

Reading the novels in the context of social attitudes and stereotypes about slaves, Owens argues for an ideological division within the genre: the earlier novelists, Xenophon of Ephesus and Chariton, challenge and undermine elite stereotypes; the three later novelists, Longus, Achilles Tatius, and Heliodorus, affirm them. The critique of elite thinking about slavery in Xenophon and Chariton opens the possibility that these earlier authors and their readers included literate ex-slaves. The interests and needs of these authors and their readers shaped the emerging genre and not only made the protagonists' slavery a key motif but also made slavery itself a theme that helped define the genre.

The Representation of Slavery in the Greek Novel will be of interest not only to students of the ancient novel but also to anyone working on slavery in the ancient world.

1
Ephesiaca

Enslavement and folktale

Introduction

Xenophon of Ephesus’ Ephesiaca and Chariton’s Callirhoe are the two earliest novels of the novels that survive. Evidence does not allow for chronological precision, but Xenophon may have written his novel sometime in the late first or early second century CE.¹ The novel concerns the adventures of Habrocomes and Anthia, both of noble families in Ephesus. They see each other at a festival and fall in love. They begin to waste away, but after their parents learn from an oracle the reason for their ailment, they are married. Soon after, in response to the same oracle, they set out on a voyage to Egypt. Disaster strikes when Phoenician pirates capture them and take them as slaves to pirate headquarters at Tyre in Phoenicia. As beautiful enslaved youths, Habrocomes and Anthia are vulnerable to sexual exploitation. They also must endure the ever-present threat, sometimes the reality, of punishment. Early on, they are separated and made to suffer the slavery separately. Anthia passes from owner to owner, each time having to fend off a potential rapist. Before they are reunited and regain their freedom, Habrocomes’ and Anthia’s experience of slavery will have constituted a considerable portion of the novel.

Xenophon’s Ephesiaca is both the least studied and least admired of the surviving novels.² The perceived poor quality of Ephesiaca and the entry for its author in the Suda (an encyclopedia compiled at Byzantium in the tenth century CE) that the novel comprised 10 books prompted Erwin Rohde to speculate that the surviving text was an epitome of a longer, more coherent work.³ The arguments in the ensuing debate are complex, and the epitome theory can neither be fully proved nor refuted. Nonetheless, it is legitimate to consider the present text, be it epitome or original, as coherent on its own terms.⁴ As Aldo Tagliabue notes in an important reappraisal of the author, Xenophon was “in full artistic control of his novel.”⁵ Tagliabue demonstrates how Xenophon has constructed the development of the protagonists’ love from its beginnings as sexual desire to a spiritual connection that will transcend death. As a novelist, however, Xenophon also made artistic choices that distinguish Ephesiaca from the other surviving novels: a plot driven by action with an emphasis on both linguistic and compositional repetition; intertextual references on a thematic, rather than a linguistic, level to a limited number of well-known works, such as the Odyssey and the Phaedrus; a simplified moral vision of good versus bad that concludes in an unambiguous happy ending. These artistic choices have produced a work that in Tagliabue’s view “leans” toward paraliterature, a simpler novel that intentionally avoided the complexity of narration, theme, and moral vision associated with a literary work.⁶

Xenophon’s representation of his protagonists’ slavery constitutes additional evidence of his artistic command. He contrasts, for example, Habrocomes’ and Anthia’s metaphorical enslavement to love with their experience as actual slaves and reflects this contrast in a modulation of the novel’s literary affinity, associating slavery to love with love elegy and narrating the protagonists’ actual slavery through folktale paradigms. In certain situations, the elite protagonists adopt behaviors stereotypically associated with bad slaves. Xenophon treats the protagonists’ bad-slave behavior sympathetically while acknowledging elite sensibilities regarding slave behavior. A contrast with Habrocomes’ old tutor, a good slave who perishes, suggests that the protagonists’ bad-slave behavior was necessary for them to survive in slavery and to escape from it.

The author’s portrayal of secondary characters points to sympathy for slaves in general, not just the protagonists. Xenophon depicts real slave characters, that is, characters who were not enslaved elites, as kind and humane. These real slaves offer the protagonists important sympathy, wise advice, and genuine assistance. Habrocomes and Anthia have a close relationship with their personal slave attendants, Leucon and Rhode, who are captured with them and who thus become their masters’ fellow slaves. At the end of the novel, the protagonists refashion their lives after slavery with these characters, now the protagonists’ fellow ex-slaves. Two other real slaves, Lampon and Clytus, show special sympathy for the heroine within the context of their limited agency. Lampon even saves Anthia’s life. In contrast, not all but many of the protagonists’ masters are cruel and unjust. They subject the protagonists to physical punishment and sexual coercion; they judge the enslaved protagonists unjustly and harshly because they are slaves. The paraliterary opposition of good and bad, noted by Tagliabue in the context of antagonists who would thwart Habrocomes and Anthia in the realization of their love, is also evident in the conflict between good slaves and bad masters.

Slavery to love: servitium amoris

Xenophon anticipates Habrocomes’ and Anthia’s enslavement when they meet at a festival and fall in love. The god Eros, incensed at handsome Habrocomes’ disdain for all others, declared war and made the protagonist his war captive (1.3.2, αἰχμάλωτος). Habrocomes concedes defeat in a soliloquy, in which he laments that he is compelled to be a slave to a girl (1.4.1, νενίκημαι καὶ παρθένῳ δουλεύειν ἀναγκάζομαι). He is humiliated by his unmanliness and cowardice (1.4.2, ὦ πάντα ἄνανδρος ἐγὼ καὶ πονηρός).⁷ For her part, Anthia feels shame at feelings unbecoming to a maiden (1.4.6). Both protagonists waste away, loving one another from afar and keeping the cause of their suffering secret (1.5.1–4). Their suffering is physical as well as mental. Habrocomes loses his manly vigor (1.5.5, τὸ σῶμα πᾶν ἠφάνιστο). There is no explicit reference to Anthia becoming enslaved to love; however, she suffers the same symptoms. Her parents note that her beauty is fading (1.5.6, ὁρῶντες αὐτῆς τὸ μὲν κάλλος μαραινόμενον) with no clear cause. Xenophon has aligned the lovesickness of both protagonists with the motifs of elegiac slavery to love, servitium amoris: personal humiliation, mental anguish, and physical suffering.⁸

Other novel protagonists become slaves of love; however, Xenophon alone draws a contrast between his protagonists’ metaphorical slavery and their looming nonmetaphorical enslavement.⁹ The connection is signaled soon after Habrocomes and Anthia fall sick. Their worried parents consult the oracle of Apollo at Colophon, who assures them that things would work out but not before their children are forced to endure terrible suffering and dreadful labors (1.6.2, δεινὰ … πάθη καὶ ἀνήνυτα ἔργα), including a journey from home across the sea (ὑπεὶρ ἅλα) and chains (δεσμὰ δὲ μοχθήσουσι).¹⁰ The supernatural device of the oracle connects the protagonists’ metaphorical slavery to their future actual enslavement, when they will endure the humiliation, mental anguish, and physical suffering associated with actual slavery: separation from one’s home, hard labor, and constraint.¹¹ First, however, Habrocomes and Anthia marry and are able to relieve their suffering as “slaves” of love. For a while, they are happy. “Their whole life was a festival (1.10.2, ἑορτή τε ἦν ἅπας ὁ βίος αὐτοῖς) and everything was full of cheerful feasting. They also forgot what had been prophesied (ἤδη καὶ τῶν μεμαντευμένων λήθη).”

(Folk)tales of real slavery: learning to think like a slave

The protagonists’ nonmetaphorical slavery begins when Phoenician pirates capture them on the way to Egypt and take them to Tyre. Xenophon frames the narration of his protagonists’ experience as nonmetaphorical slaves through two folktale types. The motif associated with Habrocomes’ slavery is familiar from the story of the Hebrew slave Joseph and the wife of the Egyptian Potiphar, his master (Genesis 39): A protagonist rejects a woman’s advances. She then accuses him falsely. The protagonist is punished.¹² Xenophon uses the “Potiphar’s wife” tale twice in his account of Habrocomes’ slavery. When the protagonist is a slave at Tyre and Manto, his master’s daughter, tries to force him to have sex with her. He rejects her and Manto falsely accuses him to her father, who then has Habro-comes tortured. Xenophon repeats the motif when Habrocomes is a slave in Egypt. Cyno, the wife of his new owner, also tries to seduce the hero. But in this case, the woman proposes, in addition, to kill her husband. After Cyno commits the murder, Habrocomes rejects her. Greek versions of the tale type feature aristocratic protagonists. Rejected by Bellerophon, Sthenoboea laid a false accusation against him to her husband Proteus. Phaedra condemned her stepson Hippolytus to his father, Theseus.¹³ But in the Genesis version, Joseph was a slave in Egypt, like Habro-comes. Xenophon appears to follow a tradition in which the tale involved slavery.

The folktale involving Anthia is related to a type described by Thompson as the “Escape from an Undesired Suitor.”¹⁴ In this tale, a woman employs guile, craft, or even violence to defend her virtue. Xenophon offers six versions of the motif in shorter and longer forms. The heroine’s slave status is clear or implied in five of the six iterations. These repetitions reflect not only Anthia’s steadfast loyalty to her husband but also how her situation as a slave forced her to rely on various forms of guile and, in one desperate instance, violence.¹⁵ Habrocomes also is changed by his experience as a slave. In the first version of the “Potiphar’s wife” tale, he was dismissive of the torture he would face for rejecting Manto. In the second version of the tale, the possibility of torture weighs heavily on him, and he considers, if only briefly, murdering his master. Through repetition of these traditional tales, Xenophon emphasizes how both Habrocomes and Anthia adapt to the conditions of slavery by acting and thinking like real slaves, that is, slaves who would lie to their masters or slaves who might even commit violent acts against them to defend their sōphrosynē.

Habrocomes and the “Potiphar’s wife” tale

At Tyre, the pirates who had captured and enslaved Habrocomes and Anthia turn them over to Apsyrtus, their commander. Accompanying them are their slaves Leucon and Rhode (1.14.1), who are now the protagonists’ fellow slaves. Xenophon describes them as Habrocomes’ and Anthia’s syntrophoi (2.3.3), a term that suggests the possibility that back in Ephesus Leucon and Rhode had each been brought up with their masters, a social motive for the close relationship with their (now-former) masters in Tyre.¹⁶ As individuals accustomed to slavery, Leucon and Rhode play an important role in the first iteration of the Potiphar’s wife tale. Xenophon uses their pragmatism toward their new pirate masters as a foil for the elite idealism of the newly enslaved protagonists.

After Manto falls in love with Habrocomes, she confides in Rhode and tasks her with acting as a go-between. Manto reminds Rhode that she is a slave; she promises her great rewards if her efforts prove successful and dire punishment if they do not. Rhode does not know what to do. She is still devoted to Anthia, her former master, but fears the wrath of Manto, the new master. Rather than approach Habrocomes, she confides in Leucon. Leucon takes the matter in hand and brings the four slaves, himself and Rhode, Habrocomes and Anthia, together in conference (2.3.7–9).

Accustomed to slavery, Rhode is concerned that Manto’s desire for Habrocomes will split the syntrophoi apart and present a danger to them all.¹⁷ “Leucon,” she says, “we are totally done for. We are going to lose our dear friends” (2.3.7, νῦν οὐκέτι τοὺς συντρόφους ἕξομεν). Leucon reflects the same concerns in the meeting. He first reminds everyone not only that they are syntrophoi – but also that they are fellow slaves now as well (2.4.1): “What are we going to do, dear friends (σύντροφοι)? Slaves (οἰκέται), how do we take counsel?”¹⁸ While ostensibly deferring to Habrocomes, Leucon reminds the protagonist that his choice will have consequences for them all. His implicit advice is to give in to Manto (2.4.2): “So, take counsel as to what seems right to you, save us all and don’t overlook those subject to the anger of masters (μὴ περιίδῃς ὀργῇ δεσποτῶν ὑποπεσόντας).” Although Leucon sees that everyone’s safety is at risk, he continues to defer to the authority of his former master.

Habrocomes seems unaware of the predicament because, perhaps, he does not understand what it means to be a slave. His only work, as it were, was “to love Anthia and be loved by her” (2.4.1, οὐδὲν ἔργον ἦν ἢ φιλεῖν Ἀνθίαν καὶ ὑπ᾿ ἐκείνης φιλεῖσθαι). This was before he learns of Manto’s designs on him. After Leucon informs him of the situation and implies that he should give in, Habrocomes responds in outrage (2.4.4):

I am a slave, but I know how to honor my agreements. They have power over my body, but I have a free soul (τὴν ψυχὴν δὲ ἐλευθέραν ἔχω). Let Manto threaten me now, if she wants, with the sword and the noose and hot plates and everything that the body of a slave can endure (πάντα ὅσα δύναται σῶμα ἀναγκάσαι οἰκέτου). I will never willingly do injustice to Anthia.

Habrocomes continues to uphold the elite honor code in which he was raised. He will keep his promise to Anthia. To do this, he is prepared to endure all sorts of physical punishment.¹⁹ There is something Stoic in his defiance and the distinction he draws between the slavery of his body and the freedom of his soul and his disdain for phy...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction: degradation and resistance
• 1 Ephesiaca: enslavement and folktale
• 2 Callirhoe: narratives of slavery explicit and implied, told and retold
• 3 Two novels about slavery
• 4 Daphnis and Chloe: slavery as nature and art
• 5 Slavery and literary play in Leucippe and Clitophon
• 6 Aethiopica: love and slavery, philosophy and the novel
• Afterword: conclusions summarized and two points of speculation
• Bibliography
• Index