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Dirty Love: The Genealogy of the Ancient Greek Novel
Tim Whitmarsh
Dirty Love
The Genealogy of the Ancient Greek Novel
Tim Whitmarsh
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Names: Whitmarsh, Tim, author.
Title: Dirty love : the genealogy of the ancient Greek novel / Tim Whitmarsh. Description: Oxford : Oxford University Press, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017049554 (print) | LCCN 2017053058 (ebook) | ISBN 9780199876594 (updf) | ISBN 9780190880781 (epub) | ISBN 9780190880798 (oso) | ISBN 9780199742653 (cloth : alk. paper)
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Preface vii
Abbreviations ix
Prelude xi
First Movement: Hellenism and Hybridity
1. Dirty Love 3
2. An Essay on the Origins of the Novel 9
3. What Is a Novel? 15
4. Epic and Novel 21
5. Sourcing Callirhoe 25
Second Movement: Persians
6. The Romance of Zarinaea and Stryangaeus 33
7. Who Was Ctesias? 39
8. Persian Love Stories? 49
9. Media Studies 59
10. Cyrus’s Sex Life 73
Third Movement: Jews
11. Return to Joseph 87
12. The Jewish Novel 93
13. Joseph in Love 105
Fourth Movement: Egyptians
14. ‘The Long Hellenistic’ 125
15. Alexander in Kohl 135
16. Whose Paradigm? 145
Fifth Movement: How Greek Is the Greek Romance?
17. How Greek Is the Greek Romance? 155
18. Romancing Semiramis 161
19. Dirty Love in Late Antiquity 169
20. Conclusion: The Foundation of Marseilles, Some Brooch Pins and the History of the Novel 175
References 181 Index 199
Preface
The research for this book was completed thanks to a grant from the Leverhulme Trust, which bought me out of my teaching at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, during the academic year 2011–12. I am immensely grateful to the trust for their support, and also to my former colleagues and students for good-humouredly tolerating my absence during that period. Many thanks also to the Arts and Humanities Research Council, who funded a series of research workshops on Greek and Near Eastern fiction in 2009–10 (a project that eventually issued in a collection of essays, Whitmarsh and Thomson eds. 2013): those workshops sowed this book’s seeds. It was a great honour to serve as the Onassis Foundation Senior Visiting Lecturer at Princeton, Berkeley, Santa Cruz and Stanford Universities in April 2011, a formative experience that allowed me to road-test and rethink many relevant issues. Heartfelt thanks to all of my hosts during that period and to those colleagues who offered valuable feedback, and most of all to the Onassis Foundation itself. Finally, Stefan Vranka at Oxford University Press has been both patient and constructive during the overlong gestation of this book.
Tim Whitmarsh
Cambridge, July 2016
Abbreviations
Abbreviations for classical authors and journals follow the standard conventions, which can be found in, for example, T. Whitmarsh ed. The Oxford Classical Dictionary, 5th ed. Oxford: online publication (http://classics.oxfordre.com/ page/abbreviation-list/#aa); all other journal titles are given in full.
ANET J. B. Pritchard ed. Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament. Princeton, 1969.
BNJ I. Worthington ed. Brill’s New Jacoby. http://referenceworks. brillonline.com/cluster/Jacoby Online.
FGrH F. Jacoby et al. eds. Die Fragmente der griechischen Historiker. Berlin/Leiden, 1923–59.
FHJA C. R. Holladay ed. Fragments from Hellenistic Jewish Authors. Chico and Atlanta, 1983–96.
KAI3 H. Donner and W. Rölling, Kanaanäische und Aramäische Inschriften. Wiesbaden, 1962–64.
OTP J. Charlesworth ed. Old Testament Pseudepigrapha. London, 1983–85.
P.Fayum B. P. Grenfell, A. S. Hunt and D. G. Hogarth eds. Fayum Towns and Their Papyri. London, 1900.
P.Hamb. P. M. Meyer et al. eds. Griechische Papyrusurkunden der Hamburger Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek. Various places of publication. 1911–
P.Oxy. The Oxyrhynchus Papyri. London, 1898–.
P.Rylands Catalogue of the Greek and Latin Papyri in the John Rylands Library, Manchester. Manchester, 1911–52.
PCG R. Kassel and C. Austin eds. Poetae Comici Graeci. Berlin, 1983–2001.
x Abbreviations
PEG A. Bernabé ed. Poetae Epici Graeci. Testimonia et Fragmenta. Leipzig, 1987–2007.
SH H. Lloyd-Jones and P. Parsons eds. Supplementum Hellenisticum. Berlin, 1983.
SSR G. Giannantoni ed. Socratis et Socraticorum reliquiae. Naples, 1990.
TAD B. Porten and A. Yardeni. Textbook of Aramaic Documents from Ancient Egypt. Newly Copied, Edited and Translated into Hebrew and English. Winona Lake, 1986–.
TEGP D. W. Graham ed. The Texts of Early Greek Philosophy. 2 vols. Cambridge.
TGF B. Snell et al. eds. Tragicorum Graecorum Fragmenta. Göttingen, 1971–2004.
UPZ U. Wilcken ed. Urkunden der Ptolemäerzeit (ältere Funde). Berlin and Leipzig, 1927–57. Repr. Berlin 2016.
Prelude
Open any of the many standard reference books on the Greek novel and you will read that this genre was a late development in classical literary history, emerging in the early Roman Empire.1 Five novels survive in complete form, ranging in date from the first century ce (Xenophon’s Anthia and Habrocomes, Chariton’s Callirhoe), through the second (Achilles Tatius’s Leucippe and Clitophon, Longus’s Daphnis and Chloe) to the fourth (Heliodorus’s Charicleia and Theagenes).2 In addition, a number of papyrus fragments and later summaries of now-lost novels survive, testifying to the popularity of this genre during that era.3 Each of these is a heterosexual romance, culminating in either the marriage of the two young lovers or (if they were married already) their reunion. This genre is typically associated in the scholarly literature with three cultural forces: the reassertion of traditional aristocratic, dynastic values (since the protagonists are almost always members of the leading families in the city); the expression of a Hellenic world view, which associates civilisation exclusively with Greekspeaking communities within the traditional, classical city-state; and a normative heterosexuality, which puts marriage at the ideological heart of the city.
I have argued elsewhere that the romance texts of the Roman imperial era are much more than simple reassertions of elite, ethnocentric heterosexuality: that against the impulse to return home the genre sets a contrary, centrifugal impetus that destabilises ideological norms, and that this latter impetus gains the
1. See, e.g., Holzberg 1995 (1986), Schmeling ed. 2003 (1996), Graverini 2006a, Whitmarsh ed. 2008, Cueva and Byrne eds. 2014.
2. These dates are broadly secure, but there are areas of uncertainty. Papyri of Chariton (P.Fayum 1, first half of second century ce: Henrichs 2011: 311) and Achilles (P.Oxy. 3836, second century ce: Henrichs 2011: 308–9) provide dates before which those texts must have been composed (termini ante quem, to use the technical phrase).
3. Collected in Kussl 1991 and more fully Stephens and Winkler 1995; add now P.Oxy. 4760–62, 4811, 4945.
upper hand over time.4 This book is in one sense a continuation of that project, another attempt to demonstrate that the story told about Greek ‘culture’5 by the history of one of its central literary forms is much richer than one of straightforwardly normative ideological programming. The subject matter, however, is different this time—my aim is to trace the idea of the romance back into the Hellenistic and classical periods—and my aims are in one sense more radical. What I seek to do here, as will become clear, is to challenge what I take to be the dominant scholarly construction of Greek literary history as a whole. This in my view places far too much emphasis upon the idea of Greek cultural identity as continuous and hermetically sealed (a ‘tradition’), and not enough on its openness to new admixtures from other cultures. I shall not expatiate here on the probable ideological motives that underpin this construction, nor on its wider effects in the wider world of twentieth- and twenty-first-century politics. As I suggest in greater detail in chapter 4, however, it has been facilitated by a near-exclusive focus on poetry as the primary vehicle for Greek literary value. If, by contrast, we place prose fiction alongside poetry at the centre of our picture of Greek cultural imaginary, then that picture will come to portray a much more inventive and absorbent literary world.
This book is written as a contribution both to the scholarship on the origins of the novel as a literary form and to theories of Greek literary history as a whole. It is, however, not a linear account (in the Aristotelian mode) of invention and coherent development. I do not believe such a history could be written for the novel, for three reasons. First, ‘the novel’ is impossible to define generically with any precision: in its most capacious sense it simply means an extended fictional story in prose. Any attempt to write a linear history, then, is inevitably going to involve arbitrary inclusions and exclusions. Second, novels—in this extended sense—exist across multiple different cultures, emerging and fading at different times. Franco Moretti’s collection of essays on the novel as world literature speaks, no doubt rightly, not of a single point of origin but of ‘polygenesis’, using the term anthropologists employ to indicate technologies (such as seafaring and ploughing) that are discovered independently by different peoples.6 The novel in its most basic form is really just a written extension of oral storytelling, for which humans seem to have an innate skill. One could no more write
4. Whitmarsh 2011a.
5. A notoriously complex concept (see, e.g., J. M. Hall 2004 for a succinct discussion of the issues). Suffice it to say that in this book I take ‘culture’ not as ‘high culture’ but as a symbolic matrix that supplies the shared cognitive (and cosmopoetic, i.e., ‘world-making’) apparatus of a particular people, but also as internally contested, ever-changing, and ill-defined, endlessly absorbing and transmitting influences from other cultures.
6. Moretti ed. 2006a (section 2).
a developmental history of storytelling than one could of breast-feeding or masturbation. There is a final reason for my own caution. Since I am a specialist in ancient Greek culture—a field where narratives of invention have had a particular political significance in the modern era, especially for the consolidation of a certain kind of European supremacism—I have felt especially keenly the need to avoid any discourse of origination. This will certainly not be an account of how the Greeks ‘invented’ the novel and ‘bequeathed it to Western culture’.
An account of the early history of the novel, then, cannot and should not aim at a comprehensive chronological map; what it should strive for, rather, is a thick description of the material, analysing it locally, and speaking meaningfully about the aggregate at the conceptual level. It must be, to use Michel Foucault’s terminology, a ‘genealogy’: ‘it must record the singularity of events outside of any monotonous finality; it must seek them in the most unpromising places, in what we tend to feel is without history—in sentiments, love, conscience, instincts; it must be sensitive to their recurrence, not in order to trace the gradual curve of their evolution, but to isolate the different scenes where they engaged in different roles’.7 My specific interest in this book lies in the fact that ancient novels are so often located—both thematically and in terms of their actual production and circulation—at the junctures between different cultures (as specialists in the field have observed since at least the seventeenth century).8 Why should this be? What does it say about ‘the novel’ (whatever we take that to be)? Can it point the way to a different model of Hellenism, one that evades the tired, Eurocentric tropes of Greek genius and bequest? This is in fact a book not about creation but about blending, or—to risk a word that is substantially less fashionable now than it has been9 hybridisation. The genealogy of the ancient Greek novel is seriously impure: contaminated, cross-bred, bastardised.
My argument is not—of course—that all Greek fictional works are in their very essence culturally hybrid. I do believe, however, that there is a much higher incidence of cultural hybridisation in Greek fiction than in other areas of Greek literary production, in particular poetic ones. The reason for this has partly to do with the constrictions of form and occasion that apply to the latter: poetry encourages innovation within certain traditional generic parameters, which means that it can indeed be highly innovative, but that innovation is inevitably weighed against (and enacted against the backdrop of) its commitment to formal conservatism. Because traditional Greek literary histories have been
7. Foucault 1984: 76. The significance of this essay for classical literary studies was brought home to me by a discussion with Yung In Chae.
8. Later, pp. 9, 11.
9. Cf. e.g., Hazan 2015.
constructed around poetry, they have tended to focus upon the elements of cultural continuity, and promoted the idea of an unbroken ‘Greek tradition’.10 My aim is to demonstrate not that that model is inherently false, but that it is incomplete, and should be juxtaposed with a different one. By shifting the focus sideways and onto the (nonlinear, nonoriginary) history of fiction, we begin to see culture in terms not as a ‘thing’ handed down between the generations, like the baton in a relay race, but as the broad field within which multiple different, unpredictable literary improvisations can occur.
In formulating this second model I have been influenced by Bruno Latour, who has argued that we should see group identities not as real ‘things’ that exist independently, but rather as a nexus of sometimes incompatible models invoked severally by agents who seek to define them for their own purposes. ‘Groups are not silent things, but rather the provisional product of a constant uproar made by the millions of contradictory voices about what is a group and who pertains to what’.11 By analogy, we can say that the model of group identity projected by Greek literary history is not an organic unity with a definite shape but an agglomeration of diverse projections. Each text or genre, then, is not an ‘intermediary’—that is, a passive witness to a phenomenon that exists autonomously, a synecdochic representative of the whole—but a ‘mediator’, which is to say an articulating agent that is itself complicit in the process of group (de/re) formation.12 This does not mean that there are no enduring forces, pressures or characteristics that give shape to social units over time; rather, it means that if we attend to each individual articulation of identity, we shall shift the question from ‘what is Greek culture?’ to ‘how, when and where is Greek culture (in all its many forms) claimed?’ Prose fiction, I argue in this book, offers a very different answer to that question from the conventional one given in scholarship.
As I have mentioned, I do not propose to define ‘the novel’ in terms of an exhaustive checklist of essential generic features. This is not an evasion of methodological difficulties; rather, it is a direct confrontation of them. We simply cannot define novels in the way that we can tragedies or lyric poems, because they have no defining formal properties. It has become something of a cliché in literary studies to invoke Wittgenstein’s idea of ‘family resemblance’ in relation to genres, to speak of ‘fuzzy sets’ and of ‘polythetic definitions’.13 Even so,
10. I am speaking of general histories of the course of Greek literature as a whole, like my own (Whitmarsh 2004), and, e.g., Taplin 2000, Saïd and Trédé 2003, and R. B. Rutherford 2005. There have, of course, been a number of influential studies of Near Eastern influence on individual Greek texts, genres and eras, among them Burkert 1992, Selden 1998, M. L. West 1997, Haubold 2002 and 2012, Stephens 2003, Louden 2011, Dillery 2015.
11. Latour 2005: 31.
12. Latour 2005: 37–42.
13. E.g., Heath 2004: 167–68.
when it comes to most forms of ancient literature at any rate—hymns, dramas, historiography, fables and so forth—we can at least paraphrase Augustine and say we know what they are so long as no one demands of us a watertight dictionary entry. Novels, however, are different: partly because (as we have said) ‘the novel’ is in its essentials simply prose storytelling of a kind that is culturally universal and always prone to bleeding into other forms, and partly because Greco-Roman literary critics did not use the term. The two may be closely related: storytelling was often associated in antiquity with the nursery,14 and so prose narrative—however sophisticated—may have felt too juvenile for the austere souls who policed the canons of elite literary taste.
There are also risks in defining ‘the novel’ too strictly: we can very quickly end up with a clumsy, developmental narrative bewitched by its own teleology.15 I propose to conceive of the object of my study in terms not as a genre (in the conventional sense) at all—since talk of ‘genres’ immediately begins to suggest the organicity that I am resisting—but as an imaginative space that activates multiple interconnections: a field, or a network, or even (to risk an explicitly Deleuzian term, though Latour borrows it too)16 an assemblage. I do not mean to be obscurantist in this choice of vocabulary: I simply mean that there are available to the modern critical lexicon ways of describing the interrelatedness of things without ordering these elements hierarchically or subscribing to a linear chronology that seeks to describe the progressive emergence of generic order out of chaos. Restrictive definitions quickly become straitjackets, discouraging the shifts and connections that are necessary if we wish to fit together the elements into new, as-yet-unthought patterns.
I have, however, of course made decisions about what to include and what to exclude, and this book in its final version is the result of many years of research rather than an open-ended exploration. My focus is on heterosexual love stories of reciprocal desire. The emphasis on heterosexual rather than samesex relationships reflects the sources.17 It is not that Greeks were incapable of imagining romantic intimacy between members of the same sex, far from it. Such stories can certainly have their place within the romance tradition, where
14. Pl. Rep. 377E, Plut. Mor. 3F; see also later, pp. 3–4.
15. There is much to admire in Holzberg 1995 (1986): 28–42 and Ruiz Montero 2003 (1996), but they are vulnerable to this accusation.
16. Deleuze and Guattari 1987, index s.v.; Latour 2005: 2. I am grateful to my colleagues in both the Cambridge ‘Classics Theory’ group and the international ‘Postclassicisms’ team for enlightening discussions of these issues.
17. Lollianus’s now-fragmentary Phoenician Affairs, probably written in the second century ce, may have a same-sex flavour: see Winkler 1980: 173–74 for this interpretation (and more generally Henrichs 1972, Stephens and Winkler 1995: 314–57).
they can serve as powerful counternarratives, relativizing and disturbing the primary heterosexual discourse.18 Such relationships, however, were commonly imagined to arise within, and to sustain and be sustained by, communities. Of course there are exceptions, both in reality and in the literary imagination, showing that love crosses boundaries. Gods took mortal lovers like Pelops and Ganymede. The Theban Laius fell for the Elean Chrysippus, though that relationship was far from ‘romantic’. Lysias’s speech Against Simon tells of a nearmurderous love triangle between two Athenian males and a Plataean boy called Theodotus, the object of both the other men’s desire. In Xenophon of Ephesus’s Anthia and Habrocomes, a Byzantine man called Aristomachus runs off with a Perinthian boy. None of these tales, however, unites a Greek and a non-Greek. Pederastic sexuality was, by and large, understood by Greeks as a distinctively Greek phenomenon.19 What is more, in general, the heterosexual romance was a more powerful vehicle for the kind of cultural experimentation that I shall be considering, because hybridization is ultimately a reproductive metaphor: exogamous heterosexuality threatens existing categories because it carries with it the danger that new beings will be formed who cannot be accommodated within these categories.
Formally (to return to my criteria for inclusion), these stories are told in prose, over a certain length, in a written form designed to circulate beyond the place of composition. Not all of them are free-standing—that is to say, some are embedded in texts dealing with other themes—but all have an internal coherence, a consistent focus on the passionate love of two individuals for each other. This focus on desire serves as a point of identification for readers, who are thereby encouraged to view the satisfaction of desire as the ethical ‘point’ of the story. These features can be understood as broad principles to aid navigation through a complex body of material, but they are not the markers of a definite, distinct literary genre: you will not, for example, always find in the texts discussed in this book a sense of ‘tradition’, invoked by self-conscious signals of affiliation and an accumulated store of narrative devices.
Many of these stories will be unfamiliar to those whose reading in the scholarship on ancient novels stretches back no more than half a century.20 Sometimes, however, it is necessary for scholarship to go backwards to go forwards: many of the texts I discuss were also addressed in the roomier accounts
18. Whitmarsh 2011: 159–63.
19. Generally on same-sex relationships in the novelistic tradition see Morales 2008: 44–52.
20. Many of the texts I cover can, however, be found in the useful compendium Stramaglia ed. 2000. See also Whitmarsh 2013: 11–34 (esp. 25–34), and the various essays in Whitmarsh and Thomson eds. 2013.
of Erwin Rohde (Rohde 1960 (1876)) and Martin Braun (Braun 1938). The (in some respects) narrower and deeper boreholes dug by ancient novel scholarship of the last fifty years have allowed us to develop powerful critical strategies, but we have lost what was most important and urgent about the thinking in this field for those early pioneers. I still find myself returning to the question posed by the thirty-one-year-old Rohde near the start of The Greek Novel and Its Predecessors: ‘from which hidden wellsprings did there arise in Greece something that was entirely ungreek?’21 Rohde’s answer to his own question— in effect: the novel is in fact of unimpeachably Greek ancestry—is wrong, but it was the right question to ask. That answer was shaped by nineteenth-century German nationalism, which promoted cultural and ethnic purity; Rohde was also (under the influence of his friend Nietzsche) conducting a veiled attack on Christianity, which he saw equally as a malign Eastern influence on Hellenic rationality.22 I am sure that there will be those who see this book as equally political in its focus on the fluid, the contingent, the hybridised. For sure: but it is better to be upfront about these things than simply to accept established narratives on trust.
In line with this emphasis upon the contingent rather than the linear, I have written the book in smaller chapters than usual, each belonging to one of five ‘movements’. The musical metaphor is designed to draw attention to the recurrent themes that bind each movement, and the book as a whole, together. Like a symphony (to compare small things with great), this book is designed to be experienced (i.e., read) in a linear progression, but it also contains many internal echoes and interconnections. The first movement establishes the intellectual context for this foray into the world of the novel: what questions are being asked, and why. It also introduces the motif of intermarriage, which will be the guiding threat throughout the rest of the book. Intermarriage is the ultimate narrative expression of hybridisation; and it is a striking fact that so many of these culturally hybrid tales place cultural hybridity at their hearts. The middle three movements are built around a particular conjunction between the Greek world and another: the Persian, the Jewish and the Egyptian. In the final movement I turn to ‘the Greek novel’ as conventionally understood, which is to say the five extant romance texts dated to the period of the Roman Empire (Xenophon’s Anthia and Habrocomes, Chariton’s Callirhoe, Achilles Tatius’s Leucippe and Clitophon, Longus’s Daphnis and Chloe and Heliodorus’s Charicleia and Theagenes), and the related fragments. The point of this is not to create a climactic finale up to which the previous movements have led; rather,
21. Rohde 1960 (1876): 3, which I quoted (in the original German) as the epigraph to Whitmarsh 1998.
22. See further later, p. 11.
it is the opposite: to show that these texts, which have occupied the centre stage in much recent writing about the novel (and about Greek literature itself), take their place in a much bigger constellation. Considering them in this way allows the choices taken by these authors to be seen not as natural, predictable and authoritative but as tactical interventions in a larger system of literary production.
Hellenism and Hybridity
Dirty Love
Love stories are our subject, and these are dangerous things.
On 1 April 1 320, Emperor Constantine approved a law governing rape. Its contents for the most part reflect familiar, depressing habits of ancient thought. The only consent that counts is that of the parents; if a liaison has taken place against their wishes, but with the girl’s own approval, then she, the girl, will be treated as equally culpable. In fact, she is culpable (albeit less so) even if she has been raped—for there is always more, the law asserts, that a young woman can do to keep herself out of the way of predatory men.1 For all the repugnancy of the views undergirding it, the law may have been designed to prevent an even more deplorable practice. Judith Evans Grubbs’s influential interpretation takes it as an attempt to combat a widespread acceptance of ‘abduction marriage’: rape that is subsequently legitimised as matrimony.2
But the law also contains an unexpected provision. ‘Since it is often the case that parents’ stewardship of girls is played false by the stories (fabulis) and depraved exhortations (pravis suasionibus) of nurses’, the law decreed, any nurse found to have acted in this way was to have molten lead poured into her mouth and throat.3 Since seduction and rape (from this perspective) are different in degree, not in kind, anything and anyone that inveigles unwanted erotic thoughts into the souls of young girls is complicit. Love stories, therefore, have their own parlous, corrupting power. The fear here is not that the young woman will be seized by force, but that erotic narrative will turn them into willing participants—which is, of course, just as bad from the parents’ point of view (which is all that counts). And could there be a more symbolic, or indeed more gruesome, way of silencing the dangerous voice of the storyteller than this?
The law’s provision partly reflects an anxiety about nurses, who had a singular power within the Greco-Roman household: entrusted with the care of the young and privy to the most intimate secrets, yet not part of the biological
1. Codex Theodosianus 9.24.1. On the arguments for preserving the transmitted date of 320, see Evans Grubbs 1989: 60.
2. Evans Grubbs 1989. Morales 2016 argues that the background of sexual violence against women presumed by the law is refracted in complex ways through a wide variety of late-antique literary texts.
3. Codex Theodosianus 9.24.2.
family and so not fully trusted, they provoked a very particular kind of fear.4 In literature they can be faithful servants, like Homer’s Eurycleia: she knows the household stories, but just about manages to keep them to herself—after a modicum of violence inflicted on her by Odysseus, who grabs her by the throat (the throat, the channel of speech, again)5 and warns her against disclosing his identity to Penelope. Yet when they act on their own initiative and take it upon themselves to put their knowledge to use, they can imperil the entire domestic apparatus. So the unnamed nurse in Euripides’s Hippolytus attempts to persuade Phaedra to act on her passion for her stepson by telling her erotic tales of divine passion. ‘You’re in love: so what? You are not alone’.6 It is the nurse, indeed, who ends up catalysing the tragedy, by telling Hippolytus of Phaedra’s feelings. If Constantine had had his way, she would have come to a horrible end. As it is, this anonymous figure merely dwindles out of the story, destined for the colder grave of indifference.
Greco-Roman antiquity seems to have associated the telling of stories of romance, excitement and adventure with old women. In Apuleius’s Metamorphoses, the inset tale of Cupid and Psyche is told by a ‘crazy, drunken old woman’ to the captive Charite, to try to ease her fears.7 The Latin phrase anilis fabula ‘an old woman’s tale’—suggests a story that could be as suspect, both factually and morally.8 It is possible that this link tells us something substantial about the samizdat origins of such stories; after all, there is evidence from Homeric times onwards that the women of Greek households were the stewards of family narratives in other contexts (notably through lamentation).9 Stephanie West, indeed, has argued that elaborate, sophisticated romances like Chariton’s Callirhoe had their origins in stories told around the loom by spinning women.10 Whatever the truth of this, it is likely that the attribution of such stories to women was also a patriarchal strategy designed to discredit, simultaneously, both these dangerous stories and the old women who, now that they could no longer be subordinated to the function of child production, excited fear in authoritarian males.
But erotic stories could be subversive when told by men too—particularly by men who were seeking to influence young women. In Achilles Tatius’s romance
4. Karydas 1998 discusses literary aspects of the presentation of nurses in early epic and tragedy; for later, fictional texts see Alaux and Létoublon 2002; Tilg 2013.
5. Hom. Od. 19.480.
6. Eur. Hipp. 433–81 (quotation from 439).
7. Apul. Met. 4.27 (cf. 6.25).
8. Stories told in the nursery are held to be untrustworthy in sources from Plato to Macrobius: see Massaro 1977 and Graverini 2006b: 88–93.
9. Alexiou 2002 (1974): 10–14; Sultan 1999.
10. S. R. West 2003a.
Leucippe and Clitophon, composed in the mid-second century bce, we read of the male protagonist and narrator trying to court his beloved Leucippe by telling her about various manifestations of eros in the natural kingdom: the peacock fanning his tail, the magnet attracting iron, female and male datepalms pining for each other, the union of the spring Arethusa and the river Alpheus, the romance of the viper and the moray eel. ‘While I was saying this’, he says, ‘I kept looking at the girl, to see how she was reacting to this erotic lecture (akroasin . . . erōtikēn). She seemed to be signalling that she was listening not without a certain pleasure’.11 Clitophon’s seduction of Leucippe, against the will of both his father and her mother, begins with stories; and it is doubtful that the authors of Constantine’s law would have approved. Musaeus’s poem Hero and Leander similarly depicts its male protagonist wresting the beautiful young Hero from the duty imposed upon her by her parents, again by telling her mythical romances: Heracles enthralling himself to Omphale and Atalanta’s submission to Melainion. ‘With these words he persuasively turned aside (parepeisen) the reluctant girl’s mind, distracting her heart with love-generating stories’.12 In each of these cases—hard though it is to imagine this, from a modern perspective— the act of storytelling would be perceived to sit on a spectrum of sexually corrupting acts, at the other extremity of which sits violent rape.
Love stories are dangerous in part because they can corrupt the souls of their listeners. ‘Erotic stories fuel the appetite’, says Achilles Tatius’s Clitophon, explaining why a song about Apollo’s pursuit of Daphne stimulated his desire for Leucippe.13 A whole tranche of Stoic philosophy, to which Plutarch’s How to Listen to Poetry is the heir,14 was dedicated to teaching young men how to listen to fanciful stories without corroding their souls through psykhagōgia, ‘spiritual distraction’. It took a lot of careful instruction to teach the young not to take such tales at face value, and to see the moral truths that lay beneath the superficially titillating surface. Constantine’s law makes it very clear that the souls of the young were held to be particularly vulnerable to such distractions.
Yet they threaten also because of their content. Erotic stories often involve dislocation and disruption. Dirt, as Mary Douglas has shown, offends because it disturbs the taxonomy of social order. Shoes are not dirty in themselves, but they are when placed on a table. Food is not dirty, but it is when it is on one’s clothing.15 Stories, similarly, become (as we say) ‘dirty’ when they involve desires
11. Ach. Tat. 1.16–19.1. On the stimulating power of stories in Achilles Tatius see Goldhill 1995: 66–71.
12. Mus. 146–59. On Musaeus’s use of Achilles see Kost 1971: 29–32 and Dümmler 2012: 419–27; see further chap. 19 later.
13. Ach. Tat. 1.5.6.
14. Hunter and Russell 2011: 13–15.
15. Douglas 2002 (1966): 44–45.
that are deemed socially inappropriate and threaten the crossing of established social boundaries. The Greeks did not think of eroticism itself as foul, at least until the arrival of Christianity (at which point stories began to be called ‘impure’ simply because they contained sex).16 Individuals were not dirty, nor were their genitalia.17 Problems only arose when they (the individuals or the genitals) met in improper combinations: it was this that made the stories about them aiskhra (‘disgraceful’) or akolasta (‘licentious’).18
In fact, erotic narratives are commonly about misplaced desire. One might almost say that that is the very condition of their narrativity. No one wants to read about appropriate sexual behaviour: about young people who do exactly as their parents tell them, or about the unremarkable sex lives of married couples. In part this is because both narrative and eroticism are generated not by the unproblematic fulfilment of desire, but by its (temporary) frustration. Consummation must be deferred, to create a narrative arc. An erotic narrative needs obstacles, or it is not erotic; and the most immediate form of obstacle, in many narratives, is the illicit nature of the love itself, which is to say, the moral boundary that needs traversing.
Desire, in its narrative form, is generated by distance. According to one ancient etymology (false, it hardly need be said), desire (pothos) ‘pertains not to that which is present, but to that which is elsewhere (allothi pou) and distant (apontos)’.19 We might think of Musaeus’s Hero and Leander, 20 with its story of the separation of the two young lovers by the Hellespont. That narrow strait is the physical materialisation of the narrative requirement for distance. But such boundaries are not just physical: they are symbolic too. In Hero and Leander and Achilles’s Leucippe and Clitophon alike, the young female lover is kept separate from others by parental sequestering. It is a social norm, not brute geography, that interposes the gap between the inception and the consummation of desire. In Chariton’s Callirhoe, the fathers of the two lovers are political enemies, in the manner of Romeo and Juliet. In such cases there is no physical barrier, but there are barriers all the same. In some cases, indeed, the barrier can be entirely symbolic: this is the case in incestuous narratives, where the gap is
16. See, e.g., Photius on Achilles Tatius and ‘the excessively shameful, impure nature of the ideas’ (τό
Bibl. 66a).
17. Carson 1990 argues for an intrinsic connection in the Greek imagination between women and dirt, but in fact she also demonstrates that marriage—‘putting her in her place’—is an effective antidote to this dirtiness. Women are dirty only when they are out of place.
18. As Plutarch describes Aristides’s Milesian Tales at Crass. 32.3. Lucian’s Amores a mischievous text—refers to the pleasure that comes from akolasta stories (1).
19. Crat. 420a.
20. See chap. 19 later.
paradoxically created by excessive proximity. There are a surprising number of Greek stories of incestuous romance, among them those of Perdiccas and his mother Castalia,21 Antiochus I and his mother-in-law Stratonice,22 Myrrha and her father Cinyras,23 and Antiochus of Antioch and his daughter.24
In erotic narratives, desire is usually dangerously dislocated: the Greeks spoke of an atopos pothos, an ‘out-of-place yearning’.25 What is distinctive about novels, I submit, is that they resist succumbing to the temptation simply to judge and condemn this ‘dirty love’, and offer instead something more complex, empathic and challenging. In a novel, a figure like the Iliad’s Helen would become a more rounded character than Homer’s ‘cold, evil-contriving dog’, whose union with Paris was responsible for the suffering of male warriors.26 Certainly, the poetic tradition could offer a more positive, even celebratory account of transgressive passions. Already in Sappho’s lyrics we find a Helen endowed with agency, will and purpose; her pursuit of her own desires is presented as an exemplum for the poet to follow, and thus implicitly legitimised according to the poem’s moral scheme.27 But the female poet is also aware of how outrageous she is being, and the male lyric tradition quickly reverts to aggressive condemnation of Helen.28 In tragedy, those experiencing transgressive desires are given room to express themselves, often with sensitivity (e.g., Phaedra in Euripides’s Hippolytus)— but all the same, transgressive desires inevitably lead to disastrous outcomes. The erotic elegies of Mimnermus (seventh century bce), Theognis (sixth century), Antimachus (late fifth and early fourth century) and Hermesianax (third
21. The story is preserved in the late-antique Latin Aegritudo Perdicae. That some kind of Greek original lies behind this poem is suggested by ps-Soranus, Vita Hippocratis 5 (where Perdiccas is said to have fallen ill with love now with a concubine called Phila).
22. Plut. Dem. 38, Luc. De dea Syr. 17–18, App. Syr. 10 and the many sources cited at Lightfoot 2003: 373–74 n.1 (and see her full discussion at pp. 373–79). This story was also performed as a pantomime (Luc. De Salt. 58; Swain 1992: 77–78 speculates that Plutarch’s version of the story may be modelled on a pantomime version). Dalley 2013: 120 argues that Stratonice is calqued on the legendary Semiramis (on whom see chap. 18).
23. Ovid, Met. 10.298–502. Greek predecessors were found in Panyassis fr. 27 PEG (where the father is called Theias; cf. fr. 23 for another incest story); TGrF adesp. 5d; Plato Comicus PCG frr. 1–8; BNJ 755 T1 (Xenophon of Cyprus, who may or may not precede Ovid).
24. Apollonius King of Tyre 1. On the reconstruction of the Greek original of this Latin text see Kortekaas 2004: 53–72. Helen Morales’s analysis of Greco-Roman stories of incest is keenly awaited.
25. Ar. Eccl. 956.
26. Hom. Il. 6.344; see her analogous self-recriminations at 3.173–76, 3.180, 3.403–4, 6.354–58, 24.762–64.
27. Sapph. 16 Voigt.
28. In my view, the male poetic tradition quickly closes ranks against Sappho’s rereading of Helen’s active agency: I agree with Hutchison 2001: 160 that Alcaeus fr. 283 Voigt ‘could easily be read, in part, as reaction’ against Sappho 16. See also Aesch. Ag. 1455–61 (and note Clytemnestra’s subsequent ‘don’t blame Helen’—hardly a ringing endorsement, given the queen’s presentation in the play). Helen remained, however, a morally contested figure (see, e.g., Gorgias’s Encomium of Helen).
