Ideal Themes in the Greek and Roman Novel

Jean Alvares

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000456516
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire antique

This book explores the areas in which novels such as Chariton's Callirhoe and Heliodorus's Aithiopika are ideal beyond the ideal love relationship and considers how concepts of the ideal connect to archetypal and literary patterns as well as reflecting contemporary ideological and cultural elements.

Readers will gain a better understanding of how necessary is an understanding of these ideal elements to a full understanding of the novels' possible readings and their reader's attitudes. This book sets forth critical methods, subsequently followed, which allows for this exploration of ideal themes.

Ideal Themes in the Greek and Roman Novel will be an invaluable resource for scholars of these novels, as well as ancient narratives and classical literature more generally. Scholars of cultural and utopian studies will also find the book useful, as well as some undergraduate students in all these areas.

1 Introduction

DOI: 10.4324/9781003036647-1

The importance of considering ideal themes: an overview

When one considers the extant ancient Greek novels (Chariton’s Callirhoe, Xenophon of Ephesus’ Ephesiaka, Achilles Tatius’ Leukippe and Kleitophon (L & K), Longus’ Daphnis and Chloe (D & C) and Heliodorus’ Aithiopika), an obvious feature is their ideal depiction of the love relationship.¹ For early critics, this ideal and sentimental dimension undermined the ideal novel’s status as worthwhile literature (Morgan, “Make-believe” 176–77; Bowie, “Who” 150–51); likewise for early modern scholars, such as Beck, Rhode and Perry. The study of the Greco-Roman novel is now respectable, primarily due to a focus on these texts’ “serious” aspects, such as history, politics, sexual attitudes and especially, with the more sophistic novels, the complexity of their literary construction and engagement with identity issues.

The novels are often referred to as “ideal” or “idealized,”² but there has been little systematic study of their ideal elements beyond the couple’s physical beauty, high aristocratic status, final triumph over obstacles and happy end. As detailed later, the couple’s ideal relationship shows greater faithfulness, equality and freedom and less violence and compulsion than was common in then-current Greco-Roman society, although heroines are generally subordinated to the patriarchal order. But a novel’s full ideal dimension is found in that totality of ideal images, themes, motifs, narrative patterns and other elements which work together to create an idealizing presentation of the material world, human life, history and destiny. Further, even decidedly non-ideal novels (e.g., L & K and Metamorphoses) evoke many ideal elements, if only to sharpen their sardonic bite as hopeful delusions are crushed. This book’s central concern starts (ontologically, if not chronologically) from the question: “Exactly how are these romantic novels ideal, and why is this important?” From which logically proceeds the follow-up question: “What methods are most suitable for the study of these ideal elements?” Thus, the purpose of this book is: (1) To demonstrate why the study of ideal elements is important; (2) to describe some methodologies to study these elements; and (3) through producing analyses and reading of passages from the novels and of the individual novels as a whole, to prove the usefulness of this approach.

I assume three postulates, later clarified:

1. The novel’s protagonists’ considerable physical beauty, positive moral qualities and enjoyment of divine favor align with their aristocratic origins and sometimes to an exemplary homeland (Syracuse, Meroe) or place of maturation (e.g., the relatively uncorrupted Lesbian countryside). The protagonists are often displaced versions of a struggling divinity, of the archetypal marvelous child or quest protagonist.
2. For the ideal protagonists to fully enjoy their love, they require a worldly/cosmic order congruent with such human needs, and thus, ideal elements of myth, religion and philosophy appear. Having a superior community is also needed, and thus, elements (events, processes, etc.) of history, ideology and ideal manifestations of the political unconscious are found, allowing readers to imagine “the possibility that reality could be like a Greek novel” (Morgan, “Make-believe” 229).
3. The chief archetypal structures are related to coming-of-age/initiation/quest myths. The Odyssey also furnishes important paradigms. Reflecting Frye’s mythos of comedy, our novels are ideal in showing that the universe has the potential for decent, if flawed, protagonists to overturn baleful laws, shatter obstacles and enjoy true romance and marriage, a metonymy for the creation of a new society.

This deeper understanding of a text’s ideal elements helps us more fully situate the novels in their wider historical–cultural contexts, not only in terms of the era of their initial composition and reception, but also as part of more extensive historical and cultural processes that governed their Nachleben. This study also touches on relationships between society, politics, history and varied cultural productions and reveals cultural and political processes still at work. Accordingly, in concluding sections, I show how each individual novel contains an implied stance toward the believability/plausibility of the ideal.

My project is rather experimental in its goals and choice of methods. There are other critical approaches that would have been useful but that have not been utilized. And, because the main topics of each of my subsections are worthy of a book-length treatment, my treatment will necessarily be at times quite schematic. My hope is that this work will be prolegomenon to further studies by other scholars, for whose input I earnestly hope. See more on this in my concluding chapter.

Outline of the coming chapters

In the next section of this chapter, I provide a background on how the novels were read, on their implied readership, decentering and hybridity and inherent heteroglossia, relationships between truth, history and fiction, the past and the sublime and the possibilities of character development. In the second chapter, I more thoroughly describe the chief critical approaches I utilize. I focus on myth-symbolic-structural criticism, centered particularly on the work of Northrop Frye, and detail some central archetypal patterns our novels utilize. Fredric Jameson’s work will be central in my analysis of the novels’ ideological dimensions, the varied voices of the political unconscious and the “double vision” of texts and protagonists, while Ernst Bloch’s process philosophy suggests how novel’s ideal elements present a vision of the eternally desired Not Yet. Then, I shall first briefly discuss the more ideal conception of marriage and family life, principally as offered by Plutarch, and then consider the problematics of desire in its various forms, such as educational and illimitable desire. The central ideal vision posits that desire, although often transgressive, can be somehow be accommodated to social norms and individual wants and need not, as in other genres, lead to tragedy. Lacanian theory will be particularly useful to explicate the confusion about what exactly characters desire, and concerning various words of the father which try to control both desire and identity. In the third through fifth chapters,³ using my critical toolbox, I shall analyze Chariton’s Callirhoe, Longus’ D & C and Heliodorus’ Aithiopika. In the sixth and seventh chapters, I shall demonstrate the importance of ideal themes within works that reject or parody the ideal elements of ideal novels, focusing on Achilles Tatius’ L & K and Apuleius’ Metamorphoses. In producing my readings, I will proceed comparatively, for example, reading Callirhoe and the Aithiopika as concerning resistance to empire, D & C and the Aithiopika as stories of marvelous children, and D & C as a story whose protagonists are saved despite their lack of conventional paideia against L & K whose protagonists (may) achieve their happy end despite a corrupting paideia. One ideal dimension appears in how famous (but tragic) myths and narratives are recast with better (and sometimes stranger) endings. For example, Callirhoe will not only recall the abducted and returned Kore, but will be a kind of Helen, yet here the East–West conflict brings some benefit to both sides. A short eighth chapter will reflect upon the usefulness of my methods, where further work could be done, and why a focus on the ideal aspect of literature would be beneficial for literary study and social progress.

Some general background

Authors, readers and hybridity

How Greco-Roman novels were read and should be interpreted is endlessly debated. I agree with Schmeling that the novels were unserious (although sophisticated) pleasure reading for sentimentally inclined elite readers, whose high status and literary sophistication is the most reliable point we can make about novel’s “implied” readers (Xenophon 133). Bakhtin notes the novels’ considerable amounts of undigested heteroglossia, the voices of different cultures, traditions and perspectives; it seems reasonable that such heterogeneous novels, unsupported by traditions for writing and reading them, combined with their diverse nature, allow for multiple readings hypostatically joined (Morgan, “Make-believe” 222–24). Exacting critics produce very different interpretations, often because of their unprovable perspectives on issues regarding love, society and particularly religion. There is simply no way to prove whether the religious sentiments of Heliodorus or Apuleius, for example, are sincere or not. Philip the Philosopher’s reading of Heliodorus, Leo the Philosopher’s poem on Achilles Tatius’ novel (Anth. Gr. 9.203) and Macrobius’ reading of D & C show the possibility of ideal readings. I will take my positions on these issues and offer my justifications, and my best hope is to make a case that some (maybe many) readers (but certainly not all) would be sympathetic to my interpretation. My own “implied/ideal reader” is one who, whether seriously or not (probably Apuleius), is attuned or attracted to expressions of the ideal.

It is uncertain if any of the novel’s authors (even of the fragments) were from mainland Greece, and only Petronius is assuredly Roman; Chariton, Longus, Achilles Tatius and Xenophon of Ephesus were probably Greek. Authors of the era of the so-called Second Sophistic and later engaged in all manner of reworkings of the Hellenic literary tradition, some quite radical. Our novels all to some extent stand in contrast to canonical center of Greek literature; for example, Callirhoe contrasts more archaic “Dorian” virtue with “Athenian/Ionian” culture, amoral and accommodationist to imperial power; Longus contrasts rustic naturalness with urban distortions; in Charikleia’s odyssey, Greek Delphi furnishes an island of Calypso, and near utopian Meroe the true home where Charikleia must regain her identity, she being also, unlike her Odysseus prototype, an agent of significant historical change. The Latin Metamorphoses of the half-Numidian, half-Gaetulian Apuleius, adapted from a Greek original, telling of a Romanized Hellene who ends up abandoning Greece to practice law in Rome while serving Egyptian Isis, his protector in a world uniformly corrupt, presents its own dizzying cultural horse dancings. Whitmarsh (Narrative and Dirty Love) goes further; not only are the novels themselves hybrid in genre, but, in a sense, they are about that hybridity which arises when different cultures confront and cohabit (sometimes willingly, sometimes not) with each other, its interpenetrative, hybridizing politics played out in various cultural recastings.

Blurring of line between history, fact and truth: the anagogic sublime

Because the ideal is often seen as fantasy, the barrier between fact and fantasy, between truth and falsehood, is an important critical issue. The Greek novel was “drastically undertheorized” with no word existing for the genre (Morgan, “Make-believe” 176; also Reardon, Form 50). There seems a considerable experimentality in the novels’ composition, but we need not assume the author started with no idea of where the narrative was going, although major changes of direction sometimes occurred during composition.⁴ Further, because prose had been traditionally used for history and philosophy, the prose novel often blurs the line betw...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• List of abbreviations
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Theoretical background
• 3 Chariton’s Callirhoe
• 4 Longus’ Daphnis and Chloe
• 5 Heliodorus’ Aithiopika
• 6 Achilles Tatius’ Leukippe and Kleitophon
• 7 Apuleius’ Metamorphoses
• 8 A brief concluding postscript
• Bibliography
• Index