S. and W. present new and stimulating responses to old but fundamental questions of novel studies: how is the origin of the novel connected to questions of intercultural relations, and what is the role of Rome in the Greek novel? Both build on their own earlier work (articles by S.; W. in Returning Romance [2011], and W. and S. Thomson, Romance between Greece and East [2013]) to develop or synthesise landmark contributions that scholars of ancient narrative will need to take into account. While W.’s study has implications for Greek prose as a whole, S.’s work will be of great interest to those concerned with Roman imperial culture and the eastern provinces.
S.’s study focuses on two related issues: the workings of fidelity's dark antithesis, adultery, and the role of law in the novels. These issues are related because the suspicions, acts and ramifications of adultery lead to the eleven trial scenes that punctuate the three fully extant Greek novels that feature extended criminal trials: Chariton's Callirhoe, Achilles Tatius’ Leucippe and Clitophon and Heliodorus’ Ethiopian Story. She suggests that the three novels that form the core of her study participate in the reception of two fundamental moments in the development of Roman imperial law and legal practices: Augustus’ legislation on marriage and adultery (18 bce–9 ce) and Caracalla's Constitutio Antoniniana, which opened up Roman citizenship to all free inhabitants of the empire (212 ce). As the plot of Chariton's Callirhoe is driven by its heroine's marital status and the anxieties of both of Callirhoe's husbands about her fidelity, it responds to the Augustan laws that ‘valorized correct marriage’ (p. 36) for imperial elites and transformed the private matter of adultery into a matter of public concern. While also reflecting a world in which adultery was a crime, Achilles Tatius (unsurprisingly) injects a ‘jaded view of the unintended consequences of [adultery] legislation’ and an emphasis on the ‘futility of pursuing charges of adultery through the courts’ (p. 143). Leucippe and Clitophon also highlights the consequences of the simultaneous operation of multiple legal systems in the Roman Empire. Achilles Tatius uses the ambiguous legal status of Clitophon and Melite's marriage as well as the conflicts over jurisdiction and asylum between the civic court and the Temple of Artemis in Ephesus to explore how certain individuals could manipulate overlapping legal systems to their own best advantage in a world right before the Constitutio Antoniniana opened up Roman citizenship and thus Roman law to all. Heliodorus’ Ethiopian Story, however, belongs to a moment after the Constitutio Antoniniana, when Greeks were processing the Roman concept of patria potestas that now applied to all freeborn people. While Charicleia's multiple fathers have been explained in several intriguing ways (e.g. W., Studies in Heliodorus [1998], D. Elmer, TAPA 138 [2008]), S. adds patria potestas to the conversation, a legal concept that also plays a role in the Athenian trials of Cnemon's family. She also explores how Charicles’ prosecution of Theagenes for kidnapping may reflect discussions about abduction marriage (raptus) after Constantine legislated exceptionally harsh penalties for this crime in 326 ce. Such potential reflections of Constantine's reforms to Roman family law have important implications for securing a fourth-century date for the novel. I would have liked to see more discussion of the possible connections between Constantine's legislation on a father's repudiation of his rights to patria potestas over an abandoned child and the complicated interactions between Charicleia and her biological father in the novel's final book.
In searching for the impact of Roman law on the Greek novel, S. focuses not so much on the details of law as on ‘the Gestalt of legality’ (p. 13) represented in the novels. This is a productive approach that allows S. to derive responsible conclusions about the texts’ reflections of the real world, despite fiction's inevitably fuzzy and piecemeal approach to the realities of various times and places. In the introduction S. outlines a sound method for distinguishing between the multiple (and often overlapping) legal contexts and traditions at work in the novels (memories of Athenian law derived from Attic oratory, allusions to famous legal moments in Greek literature, and the contemporary mixture of Roman and local law). But it can prove harder to carry out this ideal in practice. For example, S. sees the Roman law that gave a master the power of life and death over his slaves behind Chaereas’ night spent torturing his slaves after he kicks his wife apparently to death because he suspected her of adultery. While torturing slaves was certainly a common method of investigation for Romans, it also appears in Lysias (1.18) in the same sort of ‘bedroom showdown’ that Chaereas believes he has just enacted. Although S. states that her strategy is ‘thick description’ of the evidence, on occasion I would have appreciated more analysis. I was particularly intrigued by her reading of Achilles Tatius’ play with the legal status of Clitophon and Melite's marriage by having the couple perform parts of demotic Egyptian, Greek and Roman marriage customs, and I would have liked to see S. spell out exactly how this works and what the ramifications of this were for Achilles Tatius’ approach to parallel jurisdictions (cf. S., Ancient Narrative 1 [2000–2001]). While it is natural that novelists’ reactions to Roman law would not be schematic and easy to parse, I was less convinced that the Constitutio Antoniniana made a significant difference between Achilles Tatius and Heliodorus. Indeed, Heliodorus also features the conflict of different jurisdictions (Persian court vs temple of Isis at Memphis and Delphi vs Meroe) even if his characters do not seem to manipulate the resultant loopholes in the way Achilles Tatius’ do.
S.’s central questions generate many insights into the novels under consideration. For example, her work reveals how thoroughly Chariton's novel is structured by legal detail, how Achilles Tatius actually validates adultery and legal subversion, how Heliodorus uses the trial scene to comment on different forms of government and how the novels have a very Roman concern with the horror of punishing people without regard to their social status. Throughout S. analyses how rhetoric is masterfully applied in characters’ speeches, which supports the thorough declamatory background of the writers and readers of these texts (Calpurnius Flaccus 2 Natus Aethiops would have been a useful parallel for Charicleia's paternity suit). It is likewise intriguing that readers were not expected to enjoy trial scenes for the gradual revelation of facts. As the reader mostly knows who is guilty and who is innocent before the trial begins, the appeal lay in comparing the narrated truth against different characters’ presentation of reality in the courtroom. Thus, more analysis of the exceptions would be welcome: for example, Leucippe's virginity ordeal. While the available evidence does not indicate exactly who wrote novels in the Roman empire, after reading S.’s study one cannot help but believe that Chariton was indeed a practising rhetor's assistant, as he says in the first line of his text, and one can easily understand why Byzantines thought Achilles Tatius was a lawyer.
W.’s ambitious and timely goal is to realign narratives about the history of Greek literature by focusing on prose texts that allowed experimentation and cultural interaction in a way that the formally constrained poetic tradition did not. He sees prose fiction as a mode of writing that is particularly adapted to this type of experimentation and uses the presence of intermarriage (exogamy) in many of these texts as an index and metaphor for how they are formed by and highlight cultural hybridity. W. sets out ‘to trace the idea of the romance back into the Hellenistic and classical periods’ (p. xii) and suggests that this project can help scholars rethink the history of Greek literature. To do so, W. treats a number of texts that have been considered marginal to Classics, and the greatest achievement of his book is to place these understudied texts at the centre of an intervention in the history of Greek literature. Imitating a symphonic structure, he organises his study into a prelude, a first movement of meditations on the nature of the novel, three movements on Greek texts about Persians, Jews and Egyptians respectively, and a final movement that returns to the basic paradigm of the fully surviving Greek novels.
The first movement on Persians treats several Greek stories about Persians that feature intercultural desire and discourses of hybridity: Ctesias’ story of Zarinaea and Stryangaeus (via P. Oxy. 2330, Nicolaus of Damascus and the tenth-century On Virtues and Vices), various Near Eastern stories from Herodotus and Chares of Mytilene (via Athenaeus), and Xenophon's Cyropaedia. He makes the intriguing suggestion that Herodotus’ revisionist accounts of woman-snatching could have been produced by Persian and Phoenician traders in response to Greek myths and develops a new way of reading the Cyropaedia’s Pantheia episode as a commentary on the text's interrogation of desire in political contexts. The second movement focuses on stories about Joseph, a popular novelistic hero of Greek and Jewish literature of the Hellenistic and early Roman Imperial periods. W.’s analysis of Joseph and Aseneth as a sophisticated meditation on cultural difference in dialogue with the Potiphar's wife tradition is persuasive and provides the best example of the book's argument. The third movement turns to Egypt, in particular multi-ethnic Alexandria and The Alexander Romance. It is refreshing that W. treats the Romance as a text with literary ambition, stressing how it explores the malleability of identity. Thus, he suggestively explains the jarringly comic Nectanebo and Olympias episode that opens the Romance as an ironic commentary on political fictions of divine parentage. The study concludes by setting Chariton and Xenophon of Ephesus’ validation of endogamous Greek love in a Greek city against the earlier tradition of exogamous love stories explored in the earlier movements. He suggests that the Ninus fragments might in fact represent a contemporary first-century ce romance that rejected endogamy (Ninus’ cousin) for exogamy (Semiramis) as earlier romances had done. It is noteworthy that many of the paradigms of ‘dirty love’ W. explores are not just exogamous; they are also complicated by a pre-existing partner and the shadow of betrayal. Circling back to the fully extant novels, one could also consider why they privilege first love.
In a project of this scope it is always hard to outline one's limits. I am sympathetic to W.’s urge to avoid rigidly defining the novel, but at times his definition of the object of his study as ‘heterosexual love stories of reciprocal desire’ (p. xv) in prose can feel simultaneously too capacious and not capacious enough. By including stories embedded in texts with recognised genres (e.g. history) or episodes within texts that are novelistic but not love stories (e.g. Cyropaedia), an episode in a larger text can be made to stand in for an entire tradition. For example, the story of Zarinaea and Stryangaeus is taken as both representative of Ctesias’ Persica and a romance tradition that validated exogamous love. But the potential complications of the approach appear clearly in this example. W. suggests that this episode (and the entire Persica) ‘was a significant hypotext for prose romance’ (p. 42), based on similarities between Stryangaeus’ epistolary lament and the letters in Chariton and Achilles Tatius. But one of the reasons so much can be said about this letter from a lost text is that Demetrius commented on it in On Style. Thus, one wonders whether this tale of Scytho-Persian love was influential due to themes of intercultural romance or whether Stryangaeus’ letter was valued for its style by the rhetorical and literary critical tradition. While novelists were surely influenced by episodes as well as full texts, I would have welcomed more discussion of what is at stake in discerning material contributions to literary history in individual parts of a complete work. On the other hand, by restricting the subject of study to heterosexual love stories, W. must exclude texts that would support and deepen his project. For example, the story of Aḥiqar is discussed as an example of an ancient ‘planetary novel’ (p. 19), yet it must be excluded from the main argument since it is not a love story but a tale of a wise advisor and family betrayal. W. is right to stress that the novel's inability to be pinned down by one definition is a large part of the form's vitality and success, but to decide to focus on love stories as the earliest instances of ‘the Greek novel’ is to remain constrained by the influence of the big five. Widening the object of study to include texts like Aḥiqar that cross cultural boundaries by means other than love would allow a more radical re-evaluation of the Greek literary tradition and perhaps even transform a study of prose fiction into an interrogation of prose. W.’s work is an important step in that direction.
In lieu of formal synthesis, W. invites readers to draw connections between the book's many subsections, and, indeed, his study will provoke many productive lines of inquiry. Several larger questions arose from my reading. First, how should scholars handle different types of intercultural interaction in literature? That is, how should we evaluate the continuum between the sharing of common motifs (e.g. Potiphar's wife) and outright translation? Does Greek literature contain a translation project that has remained more hidden than Latin's because it can only be traced in less canonical texts? Second, how should we account for the original context of material that has been imported into Greek in some way? Would it matter to a Hellenistic Greek reader of Joseph and Aseneth that the basic story derives from Genesis? Finally, many of the texts W. discusses are connected to historiography, and this could be explored further. In particular, it seems to me that the history behind these stories is as important an intertext as allusions to earlier literature. For example, The Alexander Romance certainly plays up Alexander's hybrid identity to an exaggerated degree, but the historical Alexander himself notoriously seems to have raised questions about his paternity. To downplay the recurrent link between intercultural novelistic texts, ‘real history’ and contemporary politics is to ignore an important part of the picture.
A few small points about the dates of texts studied by W. follow. Thanks to K. Coleman (Acta Classica 54 [2011]) we are no longer entirely ‘in the dark’ (p. 29 n. 20) about the date of The Ephesian Story, since it refers to topography that postdates the 79 ce eruption of Vesuvius. While the new Sesonchosis papyrus that may provide a second-century ce terminus post quem for the text appeared after W.’s research was complete, it is unclear why Sesonchosis is placed in the first century ce and the ‘same cultural milieu as Chariton’ (p. 26). Since a key reference to the Odyssey appears in the β recension of The Alexander Romance, probably composed between 300 and 550 ce, it should have been flagged as probably late in an analysis of the Romance’s postulated Hellenistic phase (p. 138). The typo (p. 5) that dates Leucippe and Clitophon to the mid-second century bce (instead of ce) would be misleading to a non-specialist.
While W. encourages novel studies to enter exciting new territory, S. allows us to look at well-trodden aspects of the novels from a fresh perspective. Both books draw considerable strength from their different interdisciplinary methods, and I believe such approaches point the most productive way forward for novel studies.
