Introduction
The premise of this article is that there is material in the novel that looks more ‘Roman’ than ‘Greek’, and more recent than the novel's Classical setting suggests.Footnote 1 I divide the argument into three parts. At the end of the novel, Chaereas returns to Syracuse and publicly displays the spoils won from the east in a manner that, I argue, is highly suggestive of the Roman triumph (Part i). He then extends a grant of citizenship to the Greek element of his army and issues them cash donatives, while Hermocrates gives farmland to the Egyptians. As I demonstrate, this is characteristic of what happens upon the demobilisation of Roman military manpower (especially the auxilia) (Part ii). I then draw out the ramifications of an imperial-era author who represents Greek military exploits against the Persians, writing during a period in which Greeks were not interested in military endeavours (Part iii).
In the first instance it is necessary to contextualise the argument within the history of scholarship that interprets the novel (and imperial Greek literature more generally) as engaging in some way with the existence of Roman rule.Footnote 2 In a well-known article, Ewen Bowie argues that the absence of Rome and the preoccupation with the fifth and fourth centuries BCE in Greek literature of this period can be read as part of a nostalgic escape fantasy on the part of the Greeks, and an attempt to recreate their past glories in the face of the Roman-controlled present and their own political impotence.Footnote 3 Developing this, Simon Swain investigates ‘whether Greek classicism was an assertion of Greekness against Rome’, and how the past functions as a discursive structure that provides a way of coming to terms with or even mounting a resistance against the reality of Roman rule.Footnote 4 Imperial Greek literature also provides fertile ground for exploring the identity politics of the period. Tim Whitmarsh demonstrates how texts written during the first two centuries CE can be read for their complex expressions of cultural self-positioning, and how the novels in particular constitute a negotiation of the shifting and progressively decentred sense of Greek cultural identity.Footnote 5 In connection with Chariton specifically, the apparent absence of Rome has led scholars to detect a range of attempts to displace it into other terms, and thereby to install it within the narrative as a meaningful frame of reference. Douglas Edwards takes Chariton's claim to be from Aphrodisias (on which see below) as a starting point for interpreting the prominence of Aphrodite in the novel as a mechanism for articulating power relations between the Julio-Claudians and cities in the Greek east via the myth of Rome's Trojan origins.Footnote 6 In a series of strongly politicised readings, Jean Alvares argues that the role of the Greek soldiers in the conflict between Persia and Egypt reflects a ‘concrete political dream’ of Greek freedom and independence in the wake of Nero's Isthmian proclamation, and that they constitute a subtle warning to the Romans to ‘understand how valuable Greeks could be as friends or dangerous as enemies’;Footnote 7 he also suggests that Chariton's Greeks reflect ‘the wish-fantasy that somehow the Greeks, due to their excellence, could negotiate a real freedom vis-à-vis the Romans’.Footnote 8 Alvares therefore discerns a greater degree of anti-Roman antagonism in Chariton's novel than Edwards’ accommodationist reading might allow for.
It has also been suggested that certain ethnicities and geopolitical zones are, to varying degrees, refractions of Rome, or otherwise freighted with significance that extends beyond their narrative context. Saundra Schwartz argues that Chariton's Persia functions as a surrogate for Rome and that, though not a ‘simple allegory’, it ‘provided a framework through which Greeks could create their identity as Greeks vis-à-vis Rome’.Footnote 9 Alternatively, Steven Smith sees in Chariton's negative treatment of Athens an indictment of imperialist expansionism and therefore, potentially, of Rome.Footnote 10 The importance of Sicily (and especially Syracuse) as a setting for much of the novel has also generated some comment. For Margaret Doody, Chariton's reversal of the Athenian perspective given by Thucydides to the disastrous Sicilian expedition moves the reader into ‘the world of the resistance. In drafting the anti-Athenian Sicilian hero [Hermocrates] as the heroine's progenitor, Chariton (not himself a Sicilian) seems to be making an anti-imperial point. “Sicily” comes to represent an escape from tyranny.’Footnote 11 More specifically, Catherine Connors gestures towards the possibility that Chariton's Sicilian setting and the character of the pirate Theron may combine to allude loosely to the role of Sextus Pompeius (who caused so much aggravation for Augustus), remarking that Chariton's novel constitutes ‘an elite Greek response to Roman imperium [that] could also include playful mastery of Roman history’, and that ‘Syracuse is a place where you solve a pirate problem and begin an empire’;Footnote 12 this reading would suggest that Chariton's novel is more in harmony with Augustan ideology, whose discourse rendered Sextus a pirate and a villain. Finally, I have elsewhere argued that Chariton's choice of Sicilian setting can be related to three episodes from the middle and late Republican periods that all involve destructive Roman interventions in Sicily, one of which is Marcellus’ sack of Syracuse in 211 BCE (to which I shall return below).Footnote 13
This sketch not only indicates that Chariton's novel lends itself to politically engaged readings, but also that it is a text whose openness generates multiple, ambivalent and even contradictory results with regard to its ideological affiliations. While generally opting for one or the other, all of the scholars discussed above nevertheless acknowledge that it would do a disservice to the complexity of the novel to reduce it to such binary schemata as ‘pro-’ or anti-Roman’, or indeed to impose strict one-to-one analogies such as ‘Chariton's Persia equals contemporary Rome’. It is additionally problematic to talk in overly simplistic terms of ‘Greeks’ and ‘Romans’ given that identity is a flexible and negotiable proposition, not least in the cosmopolitan world of the Roman Empire.Footnote 14 One manifestation of this is the multiplicity of perspectives offered by the novel – Aphrodisian, Sicilian/Dorian Greek, Asian Greek, Persian and Egyptian. Chariton's text therefore resists a totalising interpretation that sees in the narrative a unified and consistent attitude towards Rome. It is safer to talk in terms of a patchwork of oblique and potentially conflicting ideological propositions, whose ramifications need not represent a forceful political statement one way or the other – though that is not to say that they cannot be read as such.
Two further issues complicate any attempt to make a strong general claim about Chariton's political inclinations or feelings towards Rome: the insecure date of the novel's composition, and Chariton's own claim to be a native of Aphrodisias in Carian Asia Minor. Both of these issues are important because attitudes to the ruling power inevitably fluctuate depending on time and place. The dating of Chariton's novel is notoriously vexed. The options (varying in likelihood) range from the late first century BCE to the middle of the second century CE (a terminus ante quem of 150 CE is provided by PMichael. 1), with the majority favouring either a Neronian or Hadrianic date.Footnote 15 Any bid to pin down the novel's date on the basis of its politics or supposed contemporary resonances is fraught with danger, risks circularity of argument, and is necessarily speculative. For this reason, I shall not advance any extended claims that rely on a putative date, although I have elsewhere made a case for a date of composition after the watershed moment of Nero's liberation of the province of Achaea in 67 CE and its subsequent rescindment by Vespasian;Footnote 16 I shall, however, suggest that the block enfranchisement of Chaereas’ Greek soldiers could indicate a post-Julio-Claudian (or at least post-Claudian) date.
The second complicating factor is Chariton's announcement at the beginning of the novel to be a citizen of Aphrodisias (Χαρίτων Ἀφροδισιεύς).Footnote 17 We should take this claim seriously because, as Edwards rightly observes, ‘[w]hen Chariton mentions Aphrodisias at the very beginning of the narrative … he effectively associates his account within that civic framework’.Footnote 18 Aphrodisias provides a remarkable wealth of evidence for what it was like to be a friend of Rome in the Greek east. It was a city that profited from its loyalty towards Rome during the Mithridatic and Civil Wars of the first century BCE, and advertised (by inscriptions and other iconographic strategies) the esteem in which Rome held it.Footnote 19 The Sebasteion complex in Aphrodisias can be contextualised within an iconographic repertoire that showcases Roman power, and which also evidences the claim that the city was invested in reproducing the myth of Rome's Trojan origins: among other statue bases of the imperial family in the Propylon, one is inscribed with ‘Aeneas, son of Anchises’;Footnote 20 and a set of reliefs from the second storey of the south building represent (consecutively) Anchises and Aphrodite, the flight of Aeneas from Troy with Anchises on his shoulders, and Poseidon and Aeneas.Footnote 21 Chariton's claim to Aphrodisian provenance therefore encourages an ambivalent response to a novel being consumed during Roman domination: on the one hand it is a text that problematises the exercise of (imperial) power; but on the other hand it is ostensibly written by a citizen of Aphrodisias, a city that enjoyed close and friendly relations with Rome, was ostentatiously romanising in outlook, and whose epigraphic record shows that it was populated by great number of individuals who had received the Roman franchise. Indeed, in his clerical status as ὑπογραφεύς, ‘secretary’, of the rhetor Athenagoras (Ἀθηναγόρου τοῦ ῥήτορος ὑπογραφεύς), Chariton would have been a ‘representative of the personnel who staffed civic and legal institutions in the Greek cities of the Roman Empire’, and privy to all of Athenagoras’ dealings (at least those committed to writing).Footnote 22 As a rhetor, some of his dealings may have included eminent positions on embassies to Rome and other close interactions with the Roman governmental class.Footnote 23 One might therefore reasonably expect a complex mixture of criticism and accommodation. This can be fruitfully understood in the context of post-colonial theories of ‘mimicry’ and ‘ambivalence’ pioneered by Frantz Fanon and Homi Bhabha, according to whom colonised subjects feel a combination of positive and negative feelings towards their colonisers and mimic their cultural practices (perhaps as a strategy of resistance).Footnote 24 I shall return to the possible ramifications of this theoretical framework further in the conclusion.
Finally, the question of Chariton's date and Aphrodisian identity implicates yet another relatively unknown quantity: the (intended and actual) readership. The only thing we can say for sure is that Chariton's text was being read in Egypt during the second and third centuries CE, as papyrological remains attest.Footnote 25 It is also safe to assume that, given its intertextual richness, the novel was geared towards a well-educated readership within the Greek elite with a keen literary and historical awareness.Footnote 26 There is also (albeit flimsy) evidence that allows us to conjecture a Roman readership: a disparaging reference to a certain ‘Callirhoe’ at the end of Persius’ first Satire could indicate not only a Neronian (or earlier) date but also a response by Roman readers unimpressed with the novel's quality, though the identification of Persius’ ‘Callirhoe’ with Chariton's novel is far from secure and is only one option of several.Footnote 27 Another disparaging response is perhaps evidenced by Philostratus’ letter to a certain ‘Chariton’, in which he snidely refers to the logoi of the recipient as unworthy of being remembered, though here too the identification is not certain.Footnote 28 Beyond this, it is difficult to surmise, though we can speculate on an Aphrodisian consumer base – who would likely have a degree of familiarity with and recognise allusions to Roman practices (or literary representations thereof) – and cautiously assume a wider dissemination of the novel throughout the Greek-speaking world.
The argument for allusions to, or at least an awareness of, Roman institutional apparatus in the Greek novels has scholarly precedent. Koen De Temmerman catalogues a suite of institutional realia (several of which are Roman) that indicate that Chariton ‘has been influenced by the reality that he could see every day around him’; and John Hilton dissects the military tactics used by the Egyptians in the novel of Achilles Tatius and determines that these derive directly from Roman military practices.Footnote 29 My own argument seeks not only to highlight potential refractions of Rome and Roman practices, but also to suggest that they are key filters for the novel's meaning and significance. Notwithstanding my disclaimer regarding the novel's capacity to resist totalising interpretations and generate ambivalent readings, I would make the following tentative claims: that Chaereas’ appropriation of attributes and mechanisms from Rome's military institution represents a paradox – why does a character who is presented as rigidly Greek so uncannily bear the hallmarks of being Roman? – that functions to create a Hellenised version of Roman military power, thereby puncturing the contemporary stereotype that traded on the binary of ‘Greek culture’ versus ‘Roman power’;Footnote 30 and that Chaereas’ installation of a veteran enclave in Syracuse that still harbours a potential military threat, in combination with an image of Greek militarism in support of a revolt against an imperial power (Persia), constitutes a cagey exercise in self-expression and even cloaked aggression towards the ruling power on the part of the imperial Greek elite.
Part i. Chaereas the Roman triumphator
In this section I argue that Chaereas’ triumphant return to Syracuse, loaded with Persian spoils, resembles the spectacle of a Roman triumphator.Footnote 31 This is on the basis of three convergences between Chariton's text and (literary representations of) the Roman triumph: a victory parade exhibiting booty won in a recent military encounter; the theatrical and funerary underpinning of these exhibitions; and the closural function of such representations in literary texts.
Before moving on to these central points, however, it is necessary to establish what, if any, continuities existed between the Roman triumph and preceding Greek practice.Footnote 32 In fact, a parade and exhibition of spoils following a military victory was a peculiarly Roman phenomenon, distinct from Hellenistic processions such as those of Ptolemy II in Alexandria (c. 270s BCE) or Antiochus IV in Daphne (160 BCE).Footnote 33 The latter were spectacular performances of wealth and power in the tradition of religious and civic pompai rather than attaching to a specific military victory.Footnote 34 Nor do we find any evidence of continuity between the Roman triumph and Greek celebrations of military conquest. Herodotus, Thucydides and Xenophon are silent on the subject, and when later historiographers such as Polybius and Diodorus Siculus describe the festivities following a Greek military victory (none resembling those found in a Roman triumph), they do so with disapproval.Footnote 35 We can therefore safely proceed on the premise that Chaereas’ exhibition of spoils to the Syracusans after his victory over the Persians has very little (if any) basis in Greek practice.Footnote 36
Chaereas returns to Syracuse laden with spoils that read like a generic checklist of items customarily found in Roman triumphal processions. The passage is as follows (8.6.11–12):Footnote 37
προσελθὼν δὲ Χαιρέας τῷ Ἑρμοκράτει καὶ τῷ πατρὶ ‘παραλάβετε’ ἔφη ‘τὸν πλοῦτον τοῦ μεγάλου βασιλέως.’ καὶ εὐθὺς ἐκέλευσεν ἐκκομίζεσθαι ἄργυρόν τε καὶ χρυσὸν ἀναρίθμητον, εἶτα ἐλέφαντα καὶ ἤλεκτρον καὶ ἐσθῆτα καὶ πᾶσαν ὕλης τέχνης τε πολυτέλειαν ἐπέδειξε Συρακοσίοις καὶ κλίνην καὶ τράπεζαν τοῦ μεγάλου βασιλέως, ὥστε ἐνεπλήσθη πᾶσα ἡ πόλις, οὐχ ὡς πρότερον ἐκ τοῦ πολέμου τοῦ Σικελικοῦ πενίας Ἀττικῆς, ἀλλά, τὸ καινότατον, ἐν εἰρήνῃ λαφύρων Μηδικῶν.
Chaereas went up to Hermocrates and his father [Ariston] and said, ‘Receive the wealth of the Great King [Artaxerxes].’ Immediately he gave orders for a vast amount of gold and silver to be brought out. Then he displayed to the Syracusans ivory, amber and clothes, all kinds of raw materials and splendid art, and a couch and table belonging to the Great King. The result was that the whole city was filled not as it was before with Athenian poverty after the Sicilian War, but – strangest thing in the world! – with Persian plunder in peacetime.
Valuable materials, especially bullion of gold and silver, are standard fare in surviving accounts of triumphal processions, and are represented in our passage by the presence of ἄργυρόν τε καὶ χρυσὸν ἀναρίθμητον.Footnote 38 The Romans were meticulous about quantifying and advertising their triumphal gains by weight or number, and the unquantifiable (ἀναρίθμητον) amount of bullion in this instance could either be a playful nod towards this Roman practice, or imply that the amount is more than the Romans could ever dream of quantifying.Footnote 39 The next category of Chaereas’ spoils is explicitly designated as the object of public epideixis (ἐπέδειξε Συρακοσίοις), and reproduces the epideictic nature of the Roman triumph (on which see below). Ivory (ἐλέφαντα) is one of the materials singled out for mention: the triumphs of Scipio Asiaticus and L. Aemilius Paullus included thousands of ivory tusks,Footnote 40 and in Josephus’ account of the triumph of Titus and Vespasian, ivory is listed after silver and gold just as it is in Chariton.Footnote 41
The inclusion of clothes (ἐσθῆτα) and royal furniture (καὶ κλίνην καὶ τράπεζαν τοῦ μεγάλου βασιλέως) likewise reflects traditional fixtures in the triumphal procession.Footnote 42 Couches (κλῖναι) are reported to have featured on numerous occasions, and Pompey's Mithridatic triumph even boasted the couch (κλίνην) of Darius and the throne (θρόνον) of Mithridates.Footnote 43 Objects with royal connections such as couches and thrones symbolised the absence of the defeated king and, by extension, the reach of Roman power.Footnote 44 In Chariton, the presence of the Persian king's κλίνη and τράπεζα, whose royal property is now on public display in Syracuse, serves an analogous purpose. Royal clothes and furniture were also frequently paired, and they are listed together in the triumphal processions of both Marcellus and Acilius Glabrio.Footnote 45
Chaereas’ appearance in a general's uniform (σχῆμα ἔχων στρατηγοῦ, 8.6.7)Footnote 46 also contributes to the sense that the scene is modelled on (or appropriates elements from) a Roman triumph.Footnote 47 The triumphator is also distinguished by his dress, a purple robe. For example, Josephus’ account of the triumph of Titus and Vespasian in 71 CE describes the triumphatores as ‘clothed in traditional purple’ (πορφυρᾶς δ᾿ ἐσθῆτας πατρίους ἀμπεχόμενοι).Footnote 48 In Chariton, however, it is Callirhoe who is adorned in purple (Τυρίαν ἀμπεχομένη πορφύραν, 8.6.7), thereby arrogating to herself what would conventionally be the sartorial province of the male triumphator. This could be because Chariton is not in the business of straightforward correspondences, but is free to anatomise and redistribute triumphal elements as he sees fit; it may also indicate an implicit feminisation of Roman triumphal paraphernalia (and, by extension, the ritual as a whole) at the hands of Callirhoe, as well as reflecting Callirhoe's own status as a powerful female. It is further possible that the entry of a ship laden with spoils specifically recalls the triumph of L. Aemilius Paullus over Perseus of Macedon in 167 BCE. Livy's account of the event reports how his galley sailed up the Tiber loaded with booty (including royal tapestries), while the crowd gazed on from the thronged river-banks. Likewise in Chariton, crowds fill the space (πᾶς ὁ λιμὴν ἀνθρώπων ἐνεπλήσθη, 8.6.5; ταχέως οὖν ὁ λιμὴν ἐπληροῦτο, 8.6.10) to watch the ships of Chaereas (who is shrouded by Βαβυλωνίοις παραπετάσμασιν, 8.6.5) enter the harbour.Footnote 49
Chariton may also be aware of the ideological and ritual underpinnings of the triumph. First, the spectacular, or even theatrical, overtones of Chaereas’ return incorporate the intentional pageantry and theatricality that underlie the Roman triumph.Footnote 50 Polybius’ account of the institution defines it as an exercise in ecphrasis, whose job it is to bring before the eyes of the people the achievements of the victorious general (6.15.8). In Chariton too, Chaereas and Callirhoe are revealed to the assembled Syracusans in an overtly theatrical way. On entering the harbour in their ship, they are screened behind a σκηνή (8.6.5), from which they are dramatically revealed to the crowd when the curtains are drawn back (εἱλκύσθη τὰ παραπετάσματα, 8.6.7) – the semantic range of σκηνή embraces the idea of a tent, but also that of a theatrical stage.Footnote 51 The crowd is dazzled by the sight, which is described as a ‘spectacle beyond description’ (θέαμα λόγου κρεῖττον, 8.6.8).Footnote 52 Second, the origins of the Roman triumph have been partially explained as linked to the pompa funebris (funeral procession).Footnote 53 In Chariton, the appearance of Callirhoe on a golden bier at her funeral procession (ἐπὶ χρυσηλάτου κλίνης, 1.6.2) is designedly echoed by her later re-entry into Syracuse with Chaereas and the spoils (ἐπὶ χρυσηλάτου κλίνης, 8.6.7).Footnote 54 Finally, just as Roman triumphs were a means of ritual closure symbolising Rome's conquest over an enemy, Westall has demonstrated that their representations in literature were also a means of literary closure in both Greek and Latin historical narratives across a range of genres, including historiography and epic.Footnote 55 In Chariton's text, Chaereas’ ‘triumph’ is a central feature of the novel's closural tableau at the end of the final book, and his placement of this event therefore reproduces the literary function of the Roman triumph.
It is in this connection that we must distinguish between several possible modes of engagement with the Roman triumph on the part of Chariton. It might be that its closural function in a literary context indicates that Chariton is reflecting a principally literary phenomenon rather than an extra-textual reality. The latter, however, could take a number of forms, for example autopsy in Rome, reports from eye-witnesses and other species of (Aphrodisian) gossip, or familiarity with visual representations such as those exemplified by the Arch of Titus or Trajan's Column. However, certainty in the matter is impossible, speculation too hazardous to be fruitful, and in any case the options are not mutually exclusive.
Triumphs are exhibitions of Roman power linked to a specific military victory or conquest. According to my reading, Chaereas’ ‘triumph’ at the end of the novel parallels the Roman triumph in content, form and function (both social and literary); Chariton usurps its apparatus and furnishes the Greek Chaereas with the attributes of a Roman triumphator. I would also like to redeploy a suggestion I have advanced elsewhere regarding the significance of the Syracusan setting of this event, and especially the inclusion in Chaereas’ booty of ‘all kinds of raw materials and splendid art’ (πᾶσαν ὕλης τέχνης τε πολυτέλειαν).Footnote 56 The capture of Syracuse by M. Claudius Marcellus in 211 BCE at the end of the Second Punic War was a major turning point in Roman history and precipitated the absorption of Syracuse into the prouincia of Sicilia. The event was also proverbial for marking the introduction of Greek luxury into Rome and, following from the accounts of Polybius, Livy and Plutarch, it is the scholarly consensus that the spoils of Syracuse prompted in the Romans an artistic appreciation that had hitherto not existed.Footnote 57 Livy regards Marcellus’ seizure of statues and paintings as marking the beginning of Rome's career of sacrilege towards the Greeks,Footnote 58 and Plutarch reports that Marcellus carried off the majority of beautiful artefacts (τὰ πλεῖστα καὶ κάλλιστα) from the city. Especially given the inclusion of artwork, Chaereas’ return of Persian spoils can be read as the restoration to Syracuse of that which had been taken by the Romans. Livy reports that Marcellus’ triumphal procession on the Alban Mount featured a personified representation of Syracuse (simulacrum captarum Syracusarum).Footnote 59 The end of Chariton's novel therefore stages a triumphal procession that redresses the imbalance, and constitutes a powerful meditation on the effect of Rome's military activities during its rise to Mediterranean domination.
Part ii. Roman provincial manpower and the demobilisation of Chaereas’ army
The treatment of the demobilised soldiers at the end of the novel – grants of cash and land after military discharge; enfranchisement; veteran settlement – is striking, and presents a pattern that is recognisable as the way Romans rewarded military service.Footnote 60 In this section I argue that, in addition to his characterisation as a Roman triumphator, Chaereas’ benefactions to the Greek and Egyptian soldiers (who follow him from Cyprus back to Syracuse) are modelled on the actions of Roman generals after their armies have been demobilised. I further suggest that Chaereas’ emphasis on the fair treatment of his soldiery, involved as he is in a provincial revolt against the imperial power of Persia, is a fictionalised reflection of the threat posed by the (oft-mistreated and exploited) provincial manpower to the stability of the Roman Empire. In combination with the exhibition and triumph of Greek militarism, and Chaereas’ retention of military veterans loyal to him, this serves as a stark warning to an overbearing imperial power.
As with the Roman triumph, here too it is necessary to determine what, if any, Greek precedents there are for the Roman practices. In general terms, ancient Greek society saw a close relationship between military service and social status. According to Pausanias, Miltiades freed slaves who fought with him at Marathon, and Thucydides reports that Brasidas both liberated the helots who served under him and settled them at Lepreon on the Lacedaemon–Elis border.Footnote 61 Indeed, in Athens, military service was an expectation of citizenship.Footnote 62 More formally, the institution of the cleruchy created a connection between land grants and service in the army, and was a principle mechanism for colonisation abroad. This involved parcelling out conquered land to citizens (in the case of Athens in the fifth and fourth centuries BCE), or veterans and mercenaries (in the case of Alexander and the successor kingdom of the Seleucids), in return for which they were liable for military service in the future.Footnote 63 This differs from the benefactions in Chariton insofar as the Greeks and Egyptians receive (respectively) citizenship and land as a reward for a campaign on which they have already served. A closer parallel for Chaereas’ benefactions is evidenced epigraphically by the so-called ‘Cretan dossier’ of the late third century BCE found in the Delphinion at Miletus. On the promise of citizenship and cleruchic allotments, the Milesians had enlisted at least 1,000 Cretan mercenaries for aid in hostilities against Magnesia.Footnote 64 Cash donatives were also occasionally utilised as a reward upon discharge, for example by Alexander, who issued to his 10,000 veterans 1 talent each in 324 BCE.Footnote 65 As should be clear from this survey, there are more potential models on which Chariton could have drawn than in the case of the Roman triumph, and indeed the earlier designation of the Greek soldiery fighting for the Egyptians as ‘mercenaries’ (μισθοφοροῦντες) has plausible historicity.Footnote 66 Yet there is nothing to match the regularised and more systematic practices of the Roman army, especially after its professionalisation by Marius and subsequent Augustan reforms. More crucially, the combination of these benefactions with Chaereas’ resemblance to a Roman triumphator is unlikely to be coincidental.
In Chariton, the benefactions occur as follows. After Chaereas has displayed his triumphal spoils to the Syracusans, he suggests the enfranchisement of the 300 Greeks who had served under him in capturing Tyre. Once this is voted into law, Chaereas gives them each a donative of a talent, and Hermocrates awards farmland to those Egyptians who had decided to follow Chaereas back to Syracuse (8.8.13–14):
μετὰ ταῦτα πάλιν Χαιρέας εἶπε ‘καὶ τούσδε τοὺς τριακοσίους, Ἕλληνας ἄνδρας, στρατὸν ἐμὸν ἀνδρεῖον, δέομαι ὑμῶν, πολίτας ποιήσατε.’ πάλιν ὁ δῆμος ἐπεβόησεν ‘ἄξιοι μεθ’ ἡμῶν πολιτεύεσθαι· χειροτονείσθω ταῦτα.’ ψήφισμα ἐγράφη καὶ εὐθὺς ἐκεῖνοι καθίσαντες μέρος ἦσαν τῆς ἐκκλησίας. καὶ Χαιρέας [δὲ] ἐδωρήσατο τάλαντον ἑκάστῳ, τοῖς δὲ Αἰγυπτίοις ἀπένειμε χώραν Ἑρμοκράτης, ὥστε ἔχειν αὐτοὺς γεωργεῖν.
After this Chaireas resumed. ‘And these three hundred, Greeks all, my brave band, I beg you, grant them citizenship.’ The people called out, ‘They deserve to be our fellow citizens! Let's take a vote on it!’ A decree to that effect was enacted, and the men took their seats and joined the assembly. Chaireas granted each of them a talent, and Hermocrates apportioned land to the Egyptians so that they could have farms.
Let us first consider the benefactions of cash and land. The 300 Greeks are each awarded 1 talent (equivalent to 6,000 denarii, or 24,000 sesterces).Footnote 67 After the Civil Wars, Augustus overhauled the organisation of Rome's military apparatus.Footnote 68 In earlier periods, rewards after discharge (praemia militiae) consisted in land (missio agraria), but after 13 BCE they were generally cash (missio nummaria), fixed in 5 CE at the value of 12,000 sesterces for those who had completed a minimum term of twenty-five years service.Footnote 69 As for grants of land, these had been an earlier form of praemia.Footnote 70 Chariton is explicit that the land given by HermocratesFootnote 71 to the Egyptians is to be for farming (ὥστε ἔχειν αὐτοὺς γεωργεῖν), and in this respect he seems to be alive to the conventional idea that veterans discharged from the Roman army turned to agricultural activities.Footnote 72 Indeed, poor quality of farmland upon discharge (and the unfairness of Roman military service generally) was, according to Percennius, a causative factor in the Pannonian mutiny of 14 CE.Footnote 73 Chaereas’ and Hermocrates’ grant of cash and land to the Greeks and the Egyptians therefore neatly parallels the Roman custom of praemia militiae.
The inclusionary act of enfranchisement (that is, the extension of citizen rights) to the 300 Greeks is likewise distinctly reminiscent of Roman practices, and bears on the issue of the threat posed by military forces who felt that they lacked a stake in the Empire.Footnote 74 We can be more specific. Non-citizens were strictly forbidden from enrolling in the legions, but were eligible for service in the auxilia, who were defined by their non-citizen status.Footnote 75 Upon discharge, auxilia might receive citizenship, which ‘served as capital in the creation of large armies’ and was ‘the ultimate goal of the auxiliary’.Footnote 76 During the later Republic, military commanders could award citizenship: this right was conferred on them by the passing of lex on each occasion, though it later became a prerogative that fell to the emperors.Footnote 77 Chaereas’ request that the enrolment of the Greeks within the citizen body be legally enshrined (ψήφισμα ἐγράφη) could potentially reflect this type of scenario. There is no clear-cut evidence for the practice under Augustus, who wanted to ‘preserve the status of the citizen’, and it is only under Tiberius that we have direct evidence (albeit sporadic) for individual grants of citizenship to auxilia.Footnote 78 Block grants of citizenship (that is, to entire units) tend to be thought of as a Flavian (or possibly Claudian) innovation. There is strong evidence that, with the increased military activity under Claudius, and as bronze military discharge certificates (diplomata militaria) indicate, there was a ‘growing incorporation of the auxilia into the imperial system’ and ‘systematic extension of citizen rights’ to units of auxilia.Footnote 79 It is possible that there was a block grant of citizenship in the time of Claudius or Nero, but the earliest example that can be dated with certainty is from the 70s CE;Footnote 80 certainly, grants of citizenship in lieu of material praemia were the norm by the Vespasianic period, which reflects the more general pattern of increased numbers of citizenship grants in the later Julio-Claudian and Vespasianic periods in contrast with the earlier Principate.Footnote 81 The enfranchisement of Chariton's 300 Greeks therefore strongly resembles the block grants of citizenship offered to auxilia that were common from the Flavian period onwards, and is perhaps suggestive of a date of composition during or after this period. It is also distinctive that the Greeks receive both citizenship and cash donatives, because, according to Roman practice, the auxilia do not receive cash in addition to citizenship until the time of Hadrian, during whose reign occurs the first recorded instance of a donative to an auxiliary.Footnote 82
It also needs emphasising that it is only the 300 Greeks who receive the franchise. In the first instance, the marginalisation of the Egyptians makes sense insofar as it reflects actual Roman policy that even freeborn Egyptians were not allowed to enrol in the auxilia unless they had been subject to the prefect's approval.Footnote 83 The restriction of the franchise to Greeks is also relevant to the ideological apparatus governing Rome's policy towards its extension of citizenship. Chaereas’ proposal for a block grant of citizenship to the Greeks cuts both ways. On the one hand it alludes to the importance of offering the auxilia (and provincial manpower at large) a full stake in Roman society, but on the other hand it is a stake that is restricted to a particular group. Roman cultural hybridity was founded on the principles embodied in Romulus’ asylum, with its absorption and inclusion of other peoples and nations.Footnote 84 Syracuse's fastidiousness in the extension of citizenship to anyone other than Greeks therefore presents a more exclusionary model than that exemplified in Romulus’ asylum. The combination of these seemingly contrasting interpretations – extension of the franchise to non-citizen manpower; restriction of the franchise to the Greeks – actually has a clear message: namely, that the Romans, in their grants of citizenship to non-citizens, should privilege the Greeks. In the hierarchy of nationalities that populate the Mediterranean world, Greeks rank above Egyptians.Footnote 85 Moreover, an Aphrodisian might have a particular investment in the idea that Greeks are rewarded by the Romans for military service. In a letter to the Ephesians and subscript to the Samians, both of which the Aphrodisians later had inscribed, Augustus refers to the privileges he has granted the Aphrodisians on account of their courageous actions (including the killing of sixty of the enemy) when Labienus captured their city in 39 BCE;Footnote 86 and in a letter to a certain Stephanus, again inscribed by the Aphrodisians, he expresses his hope that they will be protected as if his ‘fellow citizens’ (ὡς ἐμοὺς πολείτας).Footnote 87
The uprisings of Arminius, Tacfarinas, Gannascus and Julius Civilis during the first century CE repeatedly exposed the Romans as being reliant on and vulnerable to the auxilia, which consistently outnumbered legionaries.Footnote 88 In the case of the Batavian revolt of 69–70 CE specifically, Julius Civilis famously roused the German and Gallic provincials by manipulating their resentment at the unfair terms on which they served under the Romans.Footnote 89 They undertake all the risk (he says) while the Romans reap the reward, and ‘the provinces are won by the blood of the provinces’ (prouinciarum sanguine prouincias uinci).Footnote 90 The important point is that the auxilia and the wider bodies of provincial manpower could pose a genuine threat to Rome and required careful management. Remarkable emphasis is also placed on Chaereas’ treatment of his men. During discussions with his army about returning to Syracuse, he reminds them that there are Egyptians among their number who must not be forcibly resettled far from their families (8.2.14):Footnote 91
τῶν δὲ Αἰγυπτίων πολλοὶ πάρεισιν, οὓς οὐ προσῆκεν ἄκοντας βιάζεσθαι, καὶ γὰρ γυναῖκας καὶ τέκνα ἔχουσιν οἱ πλείονες, ὧν οὐκ ἂν ἡδέως ἀποσπασθεῖεν· κατασπαρέντες οὖν εἰς τὸ πλῆθος διαπυνθάνεσθαι ἑκάστου σπεύσατε, ἵνα μόνον τοὺς ἑκόντας παραλάβωμεν.
But there are a lot of the Egyptians here, and it's not a good idea to force them to come along if they don't want to. Most of them have wives and children, and they wouldn't be happy to be separated from them. So I want you to spread out through the army and quickly ask each of them so we only take with us the ones who want to go.
In practice, veterans frequently settled far from their native land and integrated successfully into their new communities, though this was not always the case.Footnote 92 The narrator then tells us that, on Cyprus, the soldiers prefer to follow Chaereas than return to their families, and that those whom he does not take back to Syracuse he sends home with a share of the spoils (8.3.11–12):
πάντες γὰρ ἤθελον ἀκολουθεῖν Χαιρέᾳ καὶ προετίμων αὐτὸν πατρίδων καὶ τέκνων … τοὺς δὲ ἄλλους πάντας ἔπεμψεν οἴκαδε, διανείμας αὐτοῖς μέρη τῶν λαφύρων, ἵνα χαίροντες ἐπανίωσι πρὸς τοὺς ἑαυτῶν, ἐντιμότεροι γενόμενοι· καὶ οὐδεὶς ἠτύχησεν οὐδενός, αἰτήσας παρὰ Χαιρέου.
[E]veryone wanted to go with Chaireas and preferred him to their homelands and children … Everyone else he sent home, distributing shares of the plunder to them so they would return happily to their families as more notable men than when they had left. No one who asked for something from Chaireas failed to get it.
Even his deception of the Tyrians (in persuading them to open their gates) involves the claim that they are Greek soldiers who have not received the pay that they are owed (τὸν μισθὸν οὐκ ἀπολαμβάνοντες, 7.4.5). Finally, in his letter to the Persian king, Chaereas urges that he pardon the Egyptians in order to secure the loving and loyal support of the Egyptian soldiery (στρατιώτας ἀγαθοὺς φιλοῦντάς σε … ὡς φίλοι, 8.4.3). All of these examples highlight Chaereas as a commander who takes the needs of his soldiers seriously, and allude to the risks associated with abrogating one's duties in this respect.
Though ostensibly reconciled with the King, Chaereas’ band of demobilised soldiers hints at a residual metus hostilis and military threat. His choice over whom to take back to Syracuse is governed by their military potential (they are described as εὐζώνους, 8.3.12).Footnote 93 Alvares is absolutely right to refer to the establishment of Chaereas’ ‘micro-empire’ in Syracuse, and it is worth pondering what the implications of this might be if read in an imperial context.Footnote 94 In his discussion of the Year of the Four Emperors, Tacitus makes two comments that resonate with Chaereas’ situation at the end of the novel and render him a potential protagonist in the fragmentation of imperial power structures.Footnote 95 The first is that, after the death of Nero, it became apparent that an emperor could be created somewhere other than Rome (posse principem alibi quam Romae fieri); the second (put in the mouth of Mucianus) is that it is the army who creates an emperor (posse ab exercitu principem fieri sibi ipse Vitellius documento).Footnote 96 If the novel was being read in a climate such as this, in which someone with the support of a loyal army could hypothetically be acclaimed emperor in a location distant from the centre of imperial power, then Chaereas does indeed look like a subversive proposition with relevance to the imperial period.
Part iii. Greek militarism in the imperial period
The combined results of Parts i and ii – Chariton's Hellenised representation of Roman military apparatus that poses a threat to an imperial power – can be marshalled as part of a wider debate about how Greeks were perceived in the imperial period. When Chaereas addresses his soldiers prior to the attack on Tyre, he compares them to the 300 who fought under the Spartan Leonidas at Thermopylae against the Persians in 480 BCE (7.3.11):
Ἕλληνες ἐν Θερμοπύλαις τοσοῦτοι Ξέρξην ὑπέστησαν … εἴς τε τὸ μέλλον ὄνομα καταλείψετε τῆς ἀρετῆς ἀθάνατον καὶ ὡς πάντες ὑμνοῦσι τοὺς μετὰ ὈθρυάδουFootnote 97 ἢ τοὺς μετὰ Λεωνίδου, οὕτω καὶ τοὺς μετὰ Χαιρέου τριακοσίους ἀνευφημήσουσιν.
The same number of Greeks stood up to Xerxes at Thermopylai … For the future, you'll get an undying name for courage, and just as all sing the praises of Othryadas and his three hundred or Leonidas and his three hundred, so too will they proclaim the glory of Chaireas and his three hundred!
In his declamation on the topic of Leonidas at Thermopylae, the Augustan orator L. Cestius Pius (so Seneca reports) articulated the following tripartite stereotype: ‘Every city has its claim to fame: Athens is celebrated for eloquence (eloquentia), Thebes for religious ritual (sacra), Sparta for war (arma).’Footnote 98 Romans cultivated and encouraged the stereotype that Spartans were good at war.Footnote 99 There is even tantalising evidence in the form of an inscribed imperial subscript to suggest that Sparta provided military assistance to Rome at least until the time of Claudius, and the subscript includes a reference to the Spartans’ military renown.Footnote 100 At any rate, to the Romans of the early imperial period, Spartans had a reputation for martial prowess, especially given that theirs was the only city in Achaea that still had any military or naval muscle.Footnote 101 Chaereas’ comparison can therefore be seen as co-opting a stereotype endorsed by the Romans, and using it to represent a Greek force successfully aiding in a rebellion against an imperial power; this is reinforced by the fact that the military apparatus employed by Chaereas at the end of the novel derives precisely from Roman practice, thereby perpetuating the broader stereotype of ‘Greek culture’ versus ‘Roman power’.Footnote 102 But in militarising the Greeks, Chariton also inverts this broader stereotype, and offers a corrective to the traditionally negative view of Greek soldiers (except the Spartans) held by the Romans.Footnote 103 The reader is thus offered a snapshot of the way in which traditional stereotypes could be manipulated for the purposes of cultural self-positioning.
The idea of Chaereas’ victory over the Persians, aided by a crack squad of 300 Greeks, is all very well as an exhibition of Greek braggadocio, but the fact remains that, under the Pax Romana, Greeks were all but absent from military affairs. Bowie has surveyed the epigraphic evidence for Greek presence in the auxilia, legions and the three military equestrian posts, and concluded that Greeks represent only a very small number.Footnote 104 The evidence relating to auxilia specifically is extremely slim: there are only four instances of attempts to mobilise regiments from within Greece or western Asia Minor, and all of these belong to special circumstances at the end of the second century CE.Footnote 105 The epigraphic evidence is paralleled by what Bowie terms an ‘invisibility of uiri militares among πεπαιδευμένοι [that is, writers of the imperial period]’, which contributes to the conclusion that imperial Greek society ‘had very little place for Roman military structures’ (in stark contrast to western provinces).Footnote 106 The spectacle of Greek military prowess facing off against a huge empire raises the possibility that Chariton is articulating a response to Roman power on the part of the Greek elite, perhaps stoked by Vespasian's rescindment of the freedom given to Achaea by Nero; yet it is a response that remains toothless and confined to prose fiction.
Chariton's depiction of Greeks courageously fighting against Persia conjures memories of Greek military strength of a bygone era. Plutarch warns potential Greek statesmen against mentioning the subject of Plataea (as well as Marathon and Eurymedon) lest it stoke inappropriate patriotism in the crowd.Footnote 107 The suggestion that Chaereas’ military activities reflect an anti-imperial sentiment, or at least a problematisation of imperial power, gains further traction in the context of Schwartz's observation that Chariton's Persia can be read as a refraction of Roman imperial power.Footnote 108 Chaereas feels that he has been ‘tyrannised’ (τετυράννηκε) by the Persian king,Footnote 109 and indeed the analogy between Roman tyrants and servile provincial subjects on the one hand, and the Persian tyranny over the Egyptians and Asia Minor in Chariton on the other, is one that is readily available.Footnote 110 The representation of Greek military strength is therefore at odds with contemporary reality, and the denouement of Chariton's novel presents one possible response to this reality on the part of the Greek elite.
Conclusion
Meaning is processed in relation to other things and frames of reference: texts; visual media; one's own experiences. At a theoretical level, reading for Roman presence is a legitimate interpretative strategy.Footnote 111 This would especially be the case for a reader in the imperial period interpreting a novel that is so obsessed with empire and power relations. Such a reader will wonder: how does Rome fit in?
Part of my answer has to do with reading practices. Historiographical narratives are a way of commenting on the present in order to affect the future, and scholarship has demonstrated the extent to which historiography is composed in a didactic mode; it is a genre geared towards encouraging the mobilisation of past exempla in the service of the present and the future.Footnote 112 Herodotus, for example, can be read as an admonition to Athens about its imperial conduct and how to treat its ‘allies’; Tacitus’ narrative of the Batavian revolt can be read as a warning to Trajan about how to treat provincial manpower in order to prevent civil unrest; Cassius Dio is as much about the Severan present as it is about the past. Hence, I suggest, part of the ‘message’ of Chariton's novel is to be found in its overtly historiographical form – a form that is designed to be read with an eye on the present, and the lessons that can be learned from the past.
The latitude and elasticity of the genre of the novel, allied as it is to historiography, encourages this mode of reading.Footnote 113 The novel is an ostensibly ‘low-impact’ form that displaces serious issues into the framework of a love story which plays out over the Mediterranean. Chaereas’ militarism – in combination with the resemblance to Roman military apparatus and the good treatment of his army – amid a provincial revolt against an imperial power relocates the issue of the danger of provincial manpower into the context of the Greek world, and establishes the Greeks as a hypothetical military presence. Yet in the world of the imperial present, this can only ever be a fantastical expression of Greek elite wishful thinking.
I return to the paradox stated in the introduction, namely, that the ethnically Greek Chaereas engages in practices that appear so Roman. First, it is a symptom of the peculiar identity politics involved in being Greek in the Roman Empire: Chaereas is a product of the period's (often contradictory) strategies of self-representation. While the characteristics he adopts from the Romans are all from within the military sphere and thereby reflect the dominant stereotype of Romans as being good at war, it also inverts this stereotype by remilitarising the militarily impoverished Greeks.
A second strand to Chaereas’ simultaneously Greek and Roman identity can be read in fruitful counterpoint with post-colonial theory. Fanon explores the psychology of colonial subjectivity, and formulates how colonised groups end up ‘internalising’ their colonised status and emulating their oppressors.Footnote 114 Bhabha develops this idea into the concepts of colonial ‘mimicry’ and ‘ambivalence’, according to which the colonised subject adopts the coloniser's institutions and image, thereby legitimising the authority of the coloniser's power and discourse by reflecting it back at the coloniser, potentially eroding their own identity in the process; this is not necessarily a symptom of powerlessness and loss of agency, but ‘at once a mode of appropriation and resistance’ by virtue of the colonised subject's irruption in and disruption of the coloniser's strategies of representation.Footnote 115 This theoretical framework can provide an interpretative lens for Chaereas. His (notionally fifth-century BCE) appropriation of Roman military apparatus serves to Hellenise the Roman army and render its practices as Greek, which perhaps reflects a Greek discourse that sees Romans and Roman history as Greek in origin – Dionysius of Halicarnassus is the most obvious example.Footnote 116 Yet this ‘playful mastery of Roman history’ also has a flip side,Footnote 117 insofar as the remilitarisation of the Greeks is facilitated by Roman means. In this light, Chaereas’ character at the end of the novel well expresses the ambivalent subjectivity of living under Roman dominion.
