Drosilla and Charikles (D&C) was composed by Niketas Eugenianos in Constantinople by the mid-twelfth century, a time often described as a revival of the novel genre.Footnote 1 It is well known that the so-called Komnenian period was marked by the recovery of classical Greek, Hellenistic, and Second Sophistic literature, and that during this period composition was taught through progymnasmata.Footnote 2 This is why their literary products came out as ‘creative imitations’,Footnote 3 so it is not surprising to find elements in the novels that establish intertextual links with the earlier tradition. The Komnenian novels entered a dialogue both among themselves and with their predecessors, the Greek novels of the Second Sophistic. In this article, I will therefore offer comparisons of D&C with novels from both periods, especially with the ancient Leukippe and Kleitophon, Daphnis and Chloe, and Aethiopika, and with the Komnenian Hysmine and Hysminias and Rhodanthe and Dosikles.
The relationship of Eugenianos’ D&C with the literary tradition has been the subject of numerous studies. Some scholars have focused on its intertextual relationship with the novels by Heliodorus and Prodromos,Footnote 4 others have analysed its reworking of passages from Longus’ Daphnis and Chloe,Footnote 5 its recovery of Theocritus’ poetry,Footnote 6 and its links to religious literature.Footnote 7 This novel might accordingly be seen as rather thoroughly researched, but there is one aspect that has attracted only limited attention from modern scholars.
In Book Six of D&C, a new and rather antagonistic character appears: Kallidemos, a peasant who falls in love with the heroine and competes with the hero for her attention.Footnote 8 In his attempt to conquer Drosilla, Kallidemos delivers two long speeches in which he uses certain love stories from the literary tradition as exempla.Footnote 9 In this context he explicitly mentions some characters from Heliodorus’ Aethiopika, the protagonists of Longus’ Daphnis and Chloe, and the love stories of Polyphemus and Galatea (Theocritus) and Hero and Leander (Musaeus). In general, scholars have maintained that Kallidemos is a parodic character, who adds comedic value,Footnote 10 and that the essence of his characterization is defined by his role as a reader of the ancient novel – or even as a bad reader.Footnote 11 These assertions are supported by the fact that he misinterprets his resemblance to the characters he mentions – that is, he uses ill-chosen exempla – and, moreover, by the fact that he misreads the situation he experiences, misinterpreting the heroine's gestures. I am not going to deal with the character of Kallidemos here, but it is relevant to take previous analyses of him into account when analysing the words of Charikles, whom I will deal with in what follows.
The purpose of this article is not simply to study different aspects of intertextual relationships, but to argue that Charikles, the main character, is conscious of his condition as a novelistic hero. I will argue that he who makes allusions, and who therefore presents himself as a reader of the tradition, is the fictional character when he becomes the narrator of his own story. Such meta-discursive references in the Komnenian novels have been noted by Panagiotis Roilos, who argues that they exhibit an aesthetic refinement shared by authors and audience.Footnote 12 Roilos highlights the role of the protagonist narrator in Hysmine and Hysminias, manifesting – throughout the intertextual allusions – a self-awareness of being a narrator and a sense of belonging to a literary tradition; in the case of Rhodanthe and Dosikles, he points out a link between the reception of the genre and the voices in the novel in the character of Rhodanthe, in whose words may be recognized a recovery of the moral ideal of the heroine of the novel.Footnote 13 As regards D&C, Roilos mentions ‘the co-existence of diverse, even antithetical discourses’ in Kallidemos’ speech, which provides dialogues with the audience about cultural conventions.Footnote 14 In addition to these observations by Roilos, Ingela Nilsson has pointed out that the heroine Drosilla too has a certain knowledge about the love story tradition, suggesting that there is a literary consciousness in the heroine that comes to the fore in the scene in which Kallidemos speaks in order to seduce her.Footnote 15 What I propose to do here is to further develop this recognition and interpretation of the meta-discursive comments expressed by the hero Charikles.
The idea that the characters in D&C are readers of fiction has been expressed in a study by Joan Burton, who reflects on the intertextual references to Theocritus’ work and states that the characters in this novel in general are recipients of the literary tradition:
They acknowledge the weight of the past, of tradition, as well as the difficulty of originality in love, in poetry, in life. There is pleasure in all this intertextuality, the pleasure of recognition, of memory. All the characters do this. Eugenianus simply has some characters do it more successfully (that is, with more self-awareness, more self-irony) than others.Footnote 16
In a similar vein, Katalin Delbó states that almost all characters in Eugenianos’ novel become poets and/or rhetoricians in some scenes.Footnote 17
Against the background of these scholars, interpreting the novelistic characters as readers and as poets, I will analyse the hero's words with the intention of showing that he recognizes himself as part of a novelistic plot. I will argue that he activates, as soon as the adventure-time begins, a specific cognitive frame: that of the Greek novel.Footnote 18 To demonstrate this, I will offer a close reading of two passages. The first is a scene in Book Three (3.341–50) which coincides with the starting point of the story, given that it begins in medias res. The second is one of the hero's laments in Book One (1.230–57) when he is separated from his beloved and expresses his fears regarding her physical and moral integrity. In both passages, the hero imagines forthcoming events that coincide with central motifs of the novelistic genre. These predictions will then be linked with the generation of expectations, both those made explicit by Charikles and those putatively generated in the audience.
Entering the novelistic plot
D&C combines an extradiegetic narrator with intradiegetic narrators each time that characters tell their own story in embedded narratives. It begins in medias res, at the moment when the Parthians capture the protagonists in the city of Barzon.Footnote 19 Once they are locked up in separate cells, Charikles starts lamenting his fortune. His cellmate Kleandros, a fellow Greek, listens to him and, to console each other, they decide to tell the experiences that led them to fall captive to the barbarians. Charikles’ narrative begins at a festival in honor of Dionysus, where he meets other young men and they exchange epigrams and love songs. This reunion in which he participates is located at the chronological starting point of the story and works as the inception of the entire novel – it triggers all future events. It has been noted that this scene is constituted as a didactical instance for the hero, an initiation into the mysteries of Eros.Footnote 20 Listening to these stories allows Charikles to know what eros is, how it is experienced on a bodily level and how it can be mitigated. Having listened to his companions, the hero runs anxiously to see the maidens dancing at the festivity, and it is then that he falls in love at first sight with Drosilla. The character describes this event as follows:
Charikles here makes explicit the importance of having listened to these erotic stories which first cause his heart deep pain: Τί γὰρ παθεῖν μου τὴν τάλαιναν καρδίαν / δοκεῖς, … ἐρωτικῶν πληγεῖσαν ἐξ ἀκουσμάτων; (3.330–2). As the passage cited above makes clear, his feelings are a consequence of the erotic stories that he listened to. This encourages him to run and see the girls where he witnesses the beauty of Drosilla for the first time and experiences a feeling that he can only understand thanks to those previous stories: Καὶ τοὺς ἐρῶντας ἄχθος ἄλγος λαμβάνειν / γνοὺς ἐξ ἐκείνων τῶν προηνωτισμένων (3.339–40).
After that moment of self-reflection, Charikles continues his narrative. He describes his beloved as a moon, appropriating a commonplace of amorous discourses well known from the novelistic tradition. In the Aethiopika, Kalasiris, who acts as the hero's assistant and partly as the heroine's surrogate father,Footnote 22 relates the first encounter between the lovers Charikleia and Theagenes; to the question whether the young woman had excelled in the ceremony, he answers: ὥσπερ καὶ τὴν σελήνην εἰ διαπρέπει τῶν ἄλλων ἀστέρων ἠρώτας (‘That is like asking whether the moon shines more brightly than the other stars!’).Footnote 23 In one of the Komnenian novels, Hysminias uses this image for describing the appearance of his beloved in a dream: καὶ μικροῦ δεῖν καὶ αὐτὴν τὴν ψυχὴν ἀπεφύσησα, εἰ μὴ καὶ τὴν Ὑσμίνην εἶδον ἐν μέσῳ κατὰ σελήνην ἐν ἀστράσι (‘I would have all but expired had I not seen Hysmine in their midst, like the moon amid the stars’).Footnote 24
Within Eugenianos’ novel the same metaphor appears in the words of Kleandros to describe his beloved in Book Two: φεῦ φεῦ, μὰ τὰς Χάριτας, εἶπες ἂν βλέπων … μητρὸς Σελήνης, πατρὸς Ἡλίου τέκνον. (D&C 2.74 and 76: ‘alas, alas, by the Graces, you would have said if you saw her … that she was a child whose mother was Selene and father Helios’). It is relevant to recall that the hero thus hears these words just moments before he begins his own narrative.Footnote 25 Moreover, we find this formulation in Kallidemos’ words for describing the superlative beauty of the heroine: Γυνὴ γὰρ εἶ σύ … γυνὴ δὲ πασῶν τῶν καθ’ ἡμᾶς καλλίων, … ὡς ἡ σελήνη τῶν προλοίπων ἀστέρων D&C (6.420–4: ‘For you are a woman … a woman lovelier than all those among us … as is the moon among the other stars’). These are all more or less equivalent expressions.
Charikles then mentions the will of Dionysus. So far in the story nothing has been made known about this god, and it is not until D&C 3.409–11 that it becomes clear that the god had in fact appeared to Charikles in a dream and led the maiden to him. The presence of a tutelary god of the union between the protagonists is a commonplace of the genre, to be noted for instance in Hysmine and Hysminias, where Eros himself plays this role, and in Rhodanthe and Dosikles, with the figure of Hermes.Footnote 26 An audience familiar with the genre notices that these two elements are characteristic of it, and that goes also for the final element in his enumeration: the setbacks Charikles will have to suffer before being able to obtain marriage: the flight, the dangers, the abduction (D&C 3.346–8). As pointed out by Niklas Holzberg, the adventures of the Greek novel in general consist mainly of the experimentation with these kinds of situations: ‘The adventures … consist mostly of separation and between times brief reunions, enslavement and threats to their lives, be it from robbers, a storm, shipwreck or from rivals.’Footnote 27
Pain is another constant of the genre. An analysis of the different scenes of falling in love in the ancient novels reveals that the heroes feel a deep pain that they sometimes find inexplicable. Kleitophon experiences a succession of contradictory emotions: admiration, amazement, trembling, shame and embarrassment, and eventually loss of appetite, unbearable pain and difficulty in falling asleep.Footnote 28 In Daphnis and Chloe 1.17.2–4, the hero takes on a taciturn air, suffers from chills, blushes at the sight of his beloved, loses his appetite, and grows pale; and even his flock is discouraged like him and does not understand the cause of his emotions: ‘Whatever is Chloe's kiss doing to me?’ and ‘Oh, what a strange disease! I don't even know what to call it!’Footnote 29 – doubts which will be settled in a dialogue with Philetas, telling him and Chloe about Eros. In the Aethiopika, Theagenes is crestfallen, absent, restless, distressed (Aethiopika 3.10.4–11.1) and declares his situation to Kalasiris, although he is ashamed to specify the cause: ‘I am in terrible trouble, but I am too ashamed to tell you what it is’; then it is the old man who puts it into words ‘You are in love, my son!’ (Aethiopika 3.17).Footnote 30 In the Komnenian novels too, the protagonists experience the pain of love. When it comes to understanding such emotions, Hysminias in the novel by Makrembolites receives assistance and sentimental education from his cousin Kratisthenes,Footnote 31 and is initiated by Eros and Hysmine through a series of dreams.Footnote 32 In the novels by Prodromos and Eugenianos, the heroes understand the cause of their grief: Dosikles in Prodromos’ novel understands automatically after seeing the girl;Footnote 33 Charikles, as noted above, has been instructed by listening to erotic epigrams and songs.
Seen in the light of these shared features, Charikles’ sense of the impending dangers is striking for its novelty: he is the only novelistic hero who can predict the adventures that arise after falling in love and prior to marriage, which is the point of arrival in both ancient and Komnenian plots – the very closure of these novels. It should be noted that in Prodromos’ novel too, the hero predicts potentially forthcoming events in a lament: for instance, he imagines his beloved being forced by a barbarian.Footnote 34 Nevertheless, there is a crucial difference here: in Rhodanthe and Dosikles, this is the first lament (since the novel begins in medias res), but Dosikles utters it only after he has been captured by the barbarians and not immediately after he has fallen in love.
I argue that Charikles’ knowledge of future events can be explained by the hypothesis that he is a connoisseur of the literary genre in which he acts and exists. The epigrams and love songs that he listens to in the first scene of the novel (according to the story time), and that are the concrete sources from which he learns about love, are mainly about the pain provoked by female beauty and by Eros, but none of them mentions a series of dangers to be experienced before concluding the union. The knowledge of the dangers to come could not have been gained from instruction by the epigrams, since no such mention is made in them. On the other hand, we cannot neglect that they are topoi of the Greek novel genre. The protagonists’ elopement occurs in Aethiopika 4.17.3–5, in Leukippe and Kleitophon 2.30–5, in Rhodanthe and Dosikles 2.458–85 and in Hysmine and Hysminias 7.7.1. In all cases, except for in Prodromos’ novel, the elopement is followed by shipwreck (Aethiopika 5.27.7; Leukippe and Kleitophon 3.4.3–3.5; Hysmine and Hysminias 7.8.1). As for the abduction, it occurs only in Daphnis and Chloe 2.20, where the heroine is taken away by the Methymneans.Footnote 35 A consideration of the main events of the novelistic tradition supports my argument that the wisdom of Charikles comes from his knowledge of this literary genre.Footnote 36
As a theoretical underpinning, I rely on the concept of cognitive frame. According to Marvin Minsky, ‘a frame is a data-structure for representing a stereotyped situation.’Footnote 37 It can be thought of as a network of nodes and relations that has a fixed part, which is adapted to different contexts, and a variable part. The information contained in the fixed part comes from long-term memory, that is, the content it possesses is acquired by previous experiences or cultural consumption. The variable part archives content in specific situations, as they are experienced or perceived. These frames are lodged in our memory and allow us to understand the appropriate behavior in a given situation and also to predict what will happen next. As other cognitive scholars have point out, narratives participate in the construction of our mental schemas and, consequently, influence our interpretation of experience. In David Herman's words: ‘Narratives, thanks to the way they are anchored in a particular vantage point on the storyworlds that they evoke, and thanks to their essentially durative or temporally extended profile, do not merely convey semantic content but furthermore encode in their very structure a way of experiencing the world.’Footnote 38
In light of this reasoning, Charikles can predict the flight, the perils and the abduction of his beloved, because they are three of the main events in the traditional novelistic plot. The experience of that initial scene in which he learns about eros and falls in love at first sight activates the cognitive frame of the novels in the character Charikles, and thus his ensuing behaviour will be influenced by this knowledge. With this in mind, let us move on, or rather, back to the lament of Charikles in Book One.
Predicting fate on the basis of contemporary stories
The scene that concerns us here is found in Book One of the novel, but within the story it is chronologically later than the one analysed above. Towards the end of Book One of D&C, the protagonists, who have been captured by the invading Parthians, are locked up in separate cells and both lament the situation in which they find themselves. In one of the laments uttered by Charikles, we find a series of predictions that, once again, coincide with events known from other novels.
Charikles here echoes the misfortunes that other novelistic heroines have suffered and imagines that Drosilla may suffer the same. Roilos has noted how the lamentations of both Drosilla and Charikles (their pathētikai ēthopoiiai, as he refers to them), ‘suggest interesting intertextual affinities of the author with his Byzantine predecessors.’
The allusion of Charikles’ words to this genre motif is further expanded into three main possibilities: Drosilla may be forced by some enemy to serve him wine (1.238–239); her master might strike her (1.240–242); or, finally, Chrysilla, the wife of their Parthian master, may poison her out of jealousy (1.245–246).Footnote 40
Roilos moves on to how these situations might be read as allusions to the novel by Prodromos, an important model for Eugenianos, and how there are also similar scenes in that by Makrembolites. Importantly, however, ‘Eugeneianos’ narrative does not develop these fears into reality.’Footnote 41 While Roilos thus recognizes these features as intertextual and metanarrative, I wish to expand that textual perspective by seeing them as part of cognitive frames along the lines described above. Charikles’ enumeration is extensive and mentions also other experiences typical of this novelistic genre. In his study of the mind of fictional characters and their readers, Alan Palmer highlights that characters ‘create their own narratives, their own perspectives on the storyworld of the novel; and the extent to which their own narratives are consistent with the narratives of the narrator and of readers will obviously vary’.Footnote 42 This explains well what we have observed in the quoted passages from Eugenianos’ novel: how Charikles builds a narrative in his imagination, based on events from ancient and contemporary novels.
It has been noted above that Charikles, in D&C 3.347–8, predicts the abduction of Drosilla. This idea appears also in verse 230 of Book One, the difference being that here it is no prediction but a past event. She, like him, has been abducted by the Parthians and is held captive in a cell. Charikles then details a series of experiences that she might suffer during her confinement. The first is to become a sex slave: Τίνος μετέρχῃ λέκτρον ἀρχισατράπου; (D&C 1.237). This is what happens to Rhodanthe with the barbarian Gobryas, who considers himself the owner of her body and (unsuccessfully) tries to force himself on her (Rhodanthe and Dosikles 3.150–289). The second is to become a house slave: Ποῖός τις ἐχθρὸς νῦν φανείς σοι δεσπότης / ἐκ δακτύλων σῶν τὸν κρατῆρα λαμβάνει; (D&C 1.238–9), a situation experienced by Hysmine who becomes a slave after the separation and shipwreck (Hysmine and Hysminias 9.5.3–10.9.3). The third fear expressed by Charikles is that his beloved will be the object of the barbarian chief's possessive passion: ἢ καὶ Κρατύλος οὗτος ὀφθαλμὸν λίχνον / ἐπεμβαλεῖ σοι (D&C 1.243–4). As already mentioned, this situation is experienced by Rhodanthe, as well as by Charikleia, who in the Aethiopika becomes the object of Thyamis’ passion, incapable as he is of restraining himself when looking at her (Aethiopika 1.24). The last danger anticipated by Charikles is that a jealous woman will poison his beloved in order to eliminate her: Πρὸ τοῦ τυχεῖν δὲ τῆς Χρυσίλλας ὁ φθόνος / διαφθερεῖ σκύφῳ σε δηλητηρίου (D&C 1.245–6). A similar situation is experienced by Rhodanthe (Rhodanthe and Dosikles 8.428–59) and also Charikleia is about to be poisoned but is saved by a maid's mistake (Aethiopika 8.7.2).
I have argued that the activation of the cognitive frame is what generates the predictions of Charikles in 3.345–9, and this passage from Book One can be used to support that argument. The imagination of Charikles coincides with the motifs or topoi of the novel genre. In the other novels, the heroes do not display this knowledge in advance but only experience these situations as the plot creates them. Therefore, I argue that Charikles has some knowledge of the literary genre that allows him to make predictions about future events.
Last but not least, I would point out that Charikles’ predictions in Book Three are general – that is, they coincide with the primary motifs appearing in almost all the extant works of the genre – whereas those pronounced in Book One are more specific, clearly alluding to the novels of Prodromos and Makrembolites. The temporal structure of D&C not only serves the purpose of linking this work to the novels of Heliodorus and Prodromos, but is relevant for the construction of the hero, whose awareness of being part of a novelistic plot becomes greater with the passing of time.
The result of the expectations of Charikles and his audience
I close my analysis with a few words on reception. Seen in a cognitive perspective, the activation of certain frames that we have seen in Charikles is the same that occurs in the mind of the readers. I have set out to show how Charikles has the knowledge that is necessary to recognize similarities between his own story and any other novelistic plot. The audience, in turn, can recognize the common elements between this and other novels since, from the very first lines they notice the generic affiliation and thanks to their previous reading their understanding of the storyworld and the plot are facilitated.Footnote 43 It is worth noting that the plot of D&C departs from many of the commonplaces of the genre. The situation of Drosilla in the captivity of the Parthians is surprising: she does not suffer any of the actions her beloved predicts. She only experiences some of the inner emotional states he mentions, like lamentation and eyes brimming with tears, and she also shares with her beloved her fear of Kratylos being consumed with passion and gazing at her lasciviously (D&C 1.289–352), but the action of the barbarians that the hero expects is not triggered.
In the first passage analysed here I noted that the epigrams did not include the information that Charikles turned out to know. We can connect that now with the fact that the only coincidence between Charikles’ predictions and the real situations experienced by Drosilla is attached to the physical-emotional and inner sphere, but not to the events. It shows that there is a difference between what we may consider common knowledge about love and tales of love, and the specific knowledge displayed by Charikles which has a close affiliation with the novelistic tradition.
Finally, one should note that the effect generated by the expectations shared by the main character and the audience at the end is not fulfilled. In this sense, D&C generates a surprise effect in its audience by not fulfilling the expectations of reworking the anticipated motifs of the genre.Footnote 44 In a genre with stereotypical motifs and sequences of events, such as the Greek novel, Charikles’ predictions, placed in the early part of the narrative, emphasize prior reading expectations and are thus expected to be confirmed through the novel as a whole. Here too, I rely on cognitive narratology to argue that the development of the plot generates a surprise effect in the audience, as well as in the hero, given that both share the same expectations. According to Yuan Yuan, such surprise takes place when there is a discordance between what is actually happening and the initial expectations, which depend on the frame activated by the audience (and, in this case, the main character).Footnote 45
Concluding remarks
My analysis of Charikles’ words in comparison with scenes from the novelistic tradition indicate that the hero of Eugenianos’ novel alone predicts a novelistic plot immediately after falling in love. He clearly has an awareness of the characteristics of the genre and, moreover, a self-awareness as a novelistic character. On the other hand, the narrative structure of the novel, distributing narrative portions that complement the main narrative in the mouths of different characters, merits close attention. The fact that the allusions to other works of the genre are made by the hero and not by the external, heterodiegetic narrator indicates that they are not mere allusions to stereotypical motifs, but must be considered in relation to the conceptualization of the character. The generic awareness that I identify, then, is not only attributable to Eugenianos as belonging to a particular literary circle and a particular context of production, but is expressed by the hero of the novel and thereby indicates a specific knowledge of the genre. I would like to add that since the character of Charikles was constructed as a recipient of ancient and, especially, contemporary novels, then he himself could be redirected to the twelfth century, even though the novel presents a time and space without correlation to the factual world. The introduction of elements proper to the socio-cultural context of production of the novels is not surprising, and has also been recognized in the works of Prodromos and Makrembolites.Footnote 46
At the beginning of this article, I noted the relevance of considering previous analyses of Kallidemos when investigating the construction of Charikles as a reader of the genre. In light of the analysis performed here, what then is the main difference between Charikles and Kallidemos? And why do we laugh at the one and not at the other, if both of them act as if being in one of the novels they read? The answer lies on the one hand in the actantial distribution – that is, in what kinds of character they are and which roles they have to play.Footnote 47 Charikles is still the hero, and the genre demands that he triumphs; Kallidemos, though a mismatched antagonist, indeed is one. More importantly, within the novel, Kallidemos is a source of laughter while Charikles is a source of admiration. Most importantly, the prior information that Charikles has about the novel genre turns out to be reinforced by the stereotypical situations that he experiences – while one might think that he exaggerates the risk of his situation, he certainly does not misinterpret it. The information stored in his memory, thanks to his previous reading, is complemented by the recognition of similarities in his actual experience, and therein lies the basis of his fears.
Paloma Cortez is a fourth-year Ph.D. student at the University of Buenos Aires. Her research focuses on imitation and composition in Eugenianos’ Drosilla and Charikles, with a particular focus on the characters’ generic self-awareness and the heterodiegetic narrator. She is interested in the Greek novel, ancient and Komnenian alike, and in the didactics of classical literature.
