The Ancient Novel

An Introduction

Niklas Holzberg, Christine Jackson-Holzberg

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• eBook ISBN: 9781134841714
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

This widely acclaimed book offers an introduction to the ancient novel and presents the latest research findings in the field. For this English translation, Professor Holzberg has substantially updated and expanded the German edition of 1986. Niklas Holzberg considers the ancient novel as encompassing idealistic and comic realistic narrative with central themes of love and adventure. He develops his definition of the genre and offers explanations of why this literary form was so popular during the Hellenistic period. He goes on to examine the individual texts in chronological order, providing a summary of the contents of each, relevant background information and interpretative pointers.

1
THE GENRE

Of all the television serials and dramas designed solely to entertain— some commanding an audience as large as the readership of pennydreadfuls or romantic novelettes—perhaps the most spectacular in terms of ratings over the past twenty to thirty years have been those ‘soaps’ which serialize the vicissitudes in the lives of the fabulously wealthy. In the 1980s, for example, viewers all over the world followed avidly the loves, lies and woes of American oil magnates and millionaires: regular episodes full of romance, unscrupulousness, intrigues, legal battles, dangerous journeys, devastating illness, near death, families being reunited with relatives whom they had believed dead or of whose existence they had been completely unaware, and the obligatory happy ending for each calamity, though with the next disasters coming thick and fast. The greater part of the viewing public that consumes this type of entertainment is probably unaware that the literature of ancient Greece, which is generally thought of as high-brow in content and edifying rather than entertaining, could offer readers something in many respects remarkably similar: a goodly selection of fictional prose narratives. Some of these are fully extant or survive in fragments, others are now entirely lost. Their beginnings as a genre probably lie in the late Hellenistic period, and they came into their prime in the first and second centuries AD.

A conventional plot: Xenophon’s Ephesiaca

The narrative components of these ancient novels bear a striking resemblance to the motifs which together constitute a typical plot for the kind of television soap opera described above, and an example of one such text will serve best as an introduction to a genre with which even many classical scholars are still unfamiliar. Particularly ample use of these stock motifs is made by Xenophon of Ephesus in his Ephesiaca (‘An Ephesian Story’).

The two central characters of this work are Habrocomes, a young Ephesian, and his slightly younger wife Anthia; the couple are separated shortly after their wedding and only after a long odyssey around the Mediterranean are they reunited and can settle down to live a happily married life. Habrocomes is an unusually handsome young man, intelligent, eminently capable and from a distinguished family. At the beginning of the novel he falls in love with the equally wonderful Anthia, the flames of passion being the punishment for an excessive pride in his own physical and mental qualities; this had led him to scorn Eros. The enraged god of love has him lose his heart to the 14-year-old Anthia at first sight— during a procession in honour of Artemis—and the girl is smitten with a similarly violent passion. Both suffer wretchedly for a while until their worried parents are informed of their children’s love for each other by the oracle of Apollo at Colophon and accordingly decide that the two must marry. The oracle also makes obscure references to peregrinations and tribulations in store for the couple, but then to an eventual turn for the better in their fortunes. Considering it best to act upon these words, the parents send Habrocomes and Anthia off on a sea-journey not long after the wedding. The two pledge absolute fidelity at the outset and this is very soon put to the test. After a short stop at Rhodes, where Anthia and Habrocomes bring an offering of golden armour to the temple of the sun-god, their ship is attacked by pirates and the couple are carried off to the pirate captain’s country home near the Phoenician city of Tyre; there the first mate takes a fancy to Habrocomes, while Anthia becomes the object of another pirate’s passionate desires. The first of the five books of the novel ends on a note of deliberate suspense, much like an episode of any modern television serial: Habrocomes and Anthia have been advised of the pirates’ respective love for them and ask for time to think things over, leaving the audience to wonder what the two will do in this predicament.

At the beginning of the second book the suspense is first heightened, with the couple deciding to commit suicide as a means of escaping the imminent danger, but then the pirate captain claims Habrocomes and Anthia as slaves for himself; he takes them with him to Tyre, together with Leucon and Rhode, hitherto the pair’s own slaves. The captain’s daughter Manto now falls in love with Habrocomes, is rejected even after several propositions and, in her disappointment, takes a revenge which leads to the separation of the couple. Like Joseph at the mercy of Potiphar’s wife, Habrocomes is accused by Manto before her father of trying to rape her, is duly flogged and cast into prison; Manto is given in marriage to a Syrian, and Anthia, who has been passed on to her as a slave along with Leucon and Rhode, must accompany her mistress to her new home in Antioch. From this point onwards the story switches back and forth from Habrocomes to Anthia, describing their respective experiences in for the most part very short instalments; here again one is reminded of modern television serials where one episode consists of a succession of single scenes lasting often barely a minute. The rest of the second book alternates in six passages between Habrocomes and Anthia, with three for each. We are told how Anthia is forced by Manto to marry a goatherd who is, however, sympathetic to the girl’s misery and does not lay a finger on her; how Manto’s husband falls in love with Anthia, whereupon Manto orders the goatherd to kill the girl, but he again is moved by pity and sells her instead to Cilician merchants; how Anthia is shipwrecked on the way to Cilicia, captured by the robber Hippothous and his men, almost sacrificed by them to the god Ares, but rescued by Perilaus, a magistrate from Tarsus, during a raid on the robbers; how, finally, she is asked by Perilaus for her hand in marriage and is only able to negotiate a delay of thirty days for her answer. Whilst all this is going on, Habrocomes, his name cleared after only a brief spell in prison, is searching for his wife, but always arrives just a little too late. This (mis-)timing is throughout the novel an effective means of linking together a succession of adventures—a device, incidentally, also used in modern television serials. On his release Habrocomes learns from the goatherd himself of Anthia’s unconsummated marriage with him and of her renewed enslavement; at the end of the second book he reaches Cilicia, where he meets with and befriends the robber Hippothous, who had managed to escape during the raid on his band.

On the way to Cappadocia, where Hippothous hopes to recruit new men for his band, each of the two friends tells his life-story. In the robber’s case this takes the form of a novella inserted by the author into the plot of the novel; it relates the tragic tale of Hippothous’ love for a youth. Meanwhile, with the thirty-day postponement over, a suicidal Anthia procures poison from an Ephesian doctor, but after the burial she wakes up in her tomb, the potion having been a mere sleeping draught; grave-robbing pirates take her to Alexandria and sell her into slavery. Habrocomes sets out for the city not long after this, having heard about the plundered tomb and left Hippothous’ company; in Egypt there now await further threats to the couple’s mutual fidelity. Anthia, whose new master, an Indian, is making serious advances, is able to stall him for the moment by claiming that she had been dedicated to Isis at birth and must serve for one more year, while Habrocomes, who has been shipwrecked in the Nile Delta on his way to Alexandria, is sold by plunderers to an elderly army veteran in Pelusium, is propositioned by the old man’s enamoured wife, but rejects her. At the end of the third book the wife kills her husband and Habrocomes, whom abhorrence for the deed moves to a final ‘no!’, is accused by her of the murder and brought before the prefect of Egypt in Alexandria.

The beginning of the fourth book prepares the ground for a third line of action which is to extend the plot of the novel: Hippothous has started to look for Habrocomes and after passing through Egypt he and his newly-formed band of robbers reach Ethiopia. Habrocomes has meanwhile been tied to a cross on the banks of the Nile and is praying in his distress to the sun-god; a sudden gust of wind knocks him into the river, but he is fished out at the delta and sentenced to death by fire; he is saved again, this time when the river overflows its banks, and the prefect puts him into prison until an explanation can be found for such miraculous happenings. The scene now changes briefly to Anthia and her fate, then back to Habrocomes, who is set free and decides to continue his search for Anthia in Italy. She meanwhile has been taken to Ethiopia as a member of the Indian’s entourage and there she falls again into the hands of Hippothous, although neither recognizes the other; in the last episode of the fourth book her determination to remain a faithful wife is once more endangered by the advances of one of Hippothous’ men; he tries to rape her and she kills him with a sword. For this she is thrown into a trench with two huge dogs, but is protected from them by another robber, who loves her and secretly feeds the animals.

The fifth and last book brings the protagonists of the three lines of action one after the other to Italy, although they are not actually reunited there; a fourth story-line is introduced by changing the scene to Rhodes for a while, where the two slaves Leucon and Rhode, the account of whose fate has been broken off in the second book and is now picked up again, have in the meantime been freed and are now rich. The first episode of the book deals with Habrocomes, who spends some time with an old fisherman in Syracuse and listens to the man’s life-story, this taking the form of another inserted novella. After three episodes with Hippothous and three with Anthia, these alternating with each other, and after the start of the new story-line featuring Leucon and Rhode, we learn that Habrocomes has next gone to Nuceria in southern Italy and is earning his living as a quarry labourer. Hippothous has meanwhile moved to Egypt with his band and, after being once again the sole survivor of a raid, he sets sail for Sicily; the raid had been organized by Polyidus, a relative of Egypt’s prefect, and Anthia, who has been rescued from her trench by the second of her robber admirers, soon falls into the hands of Polyidus. She escapes his advances by fleeing to the temple of Isis; an oracle tells her that she will shortly be reunited with Habrocomes, but for the moment she becomes the victim of Polyidus’ jealous wife, who has her sold to a brothel-keeper in Tarentum. She is able to dodge her duties in his house by faking an epileptic fit, until at last—and we are told this immediately after the news of Habrocomes’ quarry labouring—Hippothous, who in the meantime has married an old woman, inherited her fortune and come to Tarentum in the company of a young male beloved, sees the girl, recognizes her as Anthia and is told what has happened to her. In the following episodes Habrocomes, then Anthia and Hippothous arrive in Rhodes and all encounter Leucon and Rhode there.

In order to delay the imminent happy ending as long as possible, the author divides events in Rhodes into three recognition scenes. First, Habrocomes meets Leucon and Rhode in the temple of Helius beside a pillar which they had had erected next to Habrocomes and Anthia’s earlier offering of golden armour and which was inscribed in memory of the couple. Secondly, Leucon and Rhode discover Hippothous and Anthia in the temple of Helius a day after finding there a lock of hair together with an inscription naming Habrocomes and his wife, an offering just brought by Anthia. Thirdly, Habrocomes hears of this reunion, runs through the city shouting ‘Anthia!’ and meets the others by the temple of Isis. They spend the rest of the day telling each other their stories and in the night Habrocomes and Anthia swear that neither has broken their former vow of fidelity; on the morrow they all return to Ephesus and live there together happily ever after.

The surviving texts

Written about the beginning of the second century AD, the Ephesiaca is both in its use of the narrative motifs we have just considered and in its narrative technique, which will be discussed later, quite clearly related to a number of other ancient works of prose fiction. The following is a list of such texts with, for the moment, details only of the authors, titles (or rather, in some cases, the titles generally used today), and of the manuscript history:

1. Fully extant in manuscripts from the Middle Ages are, in addi-tion to Xenophon of Ephesus’ Ephesiaca, the novels Chaereas and Callirhoe of Chariton, Leucippe and Clitophon of Achilles Tatius, Daphnis and Chloe of Longus, and Heliodorus’ Aethiopica (‘An Ethiopian Story’). These have survived in parchment codices which are comparable to modern books in their outward appearance. In ancient Greece and Rome all texts were originally written on papyrus rolls and, together with pieces of ancient parchment codices, numerous fragments of such rolls have been discovered over the past hundred years, most of them conserved in Egypt’s desert sands. Finds from ancient novels include portions of the above-named works of Chariton, Achilles Tatius and Heliodorus, and in addition:
2. Fragments of the novels Ninus, Sesonchosis, Metiochus and Parthenope, Chione, Calligone and Herpyllis, further of Lollianus’ Phoenicica (‘A Phoenician Story’) and other smaller remnants, the contents of which can barely be ascertained; the classification of these unidentified pieces as the type of narrative prose under discussion here is in any case dubious. Over and above these there have survived from the Middle Ages:
3. Summaries of the contents of two lost novels: Ta huper Thoulen apista (‘The Wonders Beyond Thule’) of Antonius Diogenes, and Iamblichus’ Babyloniaca (‘A Babylonian Story’). Fragments of both from ancient and medieval times also still exist.

An affinity to the type of novel represented by the texts listed above is found in four other novels. These use essentially the same narrative technique as the others, but in their narrative motifs they clearly parody the themes treated there. Probably the oldest of the four is the Latin text Satyrica (‘A Story from the Land of the Satyrs’) of Petronius, which survives only in medieval extracts and fragments. In Greek we have a fragment of the novel Iolaus and, further, the so-called Ass Romance in an abridged version falsely ascribed to Lucian; this epitome is entitled Loukios e Onos (‘Lucius or the Ass’). The fourth of the texts is the Latin Metamorphoses of Apuleius, which is better known as The Golden Ass, the title given to it by St Augustine.

In the Ass Romance, to give an example, the place occupied in novels of the same type as the Ephesiaca by two lovers is taken by a young man who has been changed into an ass. His experiences are either represented as a comic distortion of the usual adventures undergone elsewhere by the two lovers—he is once faced, for instance, not with death, but castration—or they are depicted in a harshly realistic manner. Such variations immediately raise one question: do these four ‘comic-realistic’ novels with their unmistakably parodic features belong to the same genre as the above-listed novels with their idealizing representation of real life? This, in turn, leads us to the very difficult problem of finding a definition for the literary form ‘ancient novel’, a task which is further complicated by the fact that the relevant handbooks generally include under this heading other types of narrative prose fiction, such as ‘utopian novel’ or ‘epistolary novel’. These are in some respects akin to the two kinds of novel named above in their subject-matter and narrative technique, but are in other respects also quite different. Ancient literary critics, moreover, are of little help here, because the treatises from late antiquity that deal with questions of literature see no need to discuss narrative prose fiction, indeed they do not even have a name for it. The terms ‘novel’, ‘romance’, Roman, etc., were coined at a much later date. ‘Romance’ is derived from the medieval French word used to describe longer verse or prose narratives written not in the language of the scholars, Latin, but in the vernacular, i.e. a Romance tongue. ‘Novel’—first used in its present sense in the seventeenth century—comes from the Italian term novella, a short story of the (‘new’) type written by Boccaccio in his Decameron.

Ancient labels

The reason why ancient literary theorists, otherwise at pains to find comprehensive definitions for most other literary forms, ignored the novel is doubtlessly that they did not count it as true ‘literature’. Fortunately we have passing references to the subject, dating in Greek from the Byzantine period and in Latin even from late antiquity; these serve as a kind of substitute terminology and do suggest that at least a certain group of longer fictional prose narratives was associated with a fairly specific type of story in terms of content. Where such texts are mentioned, they are called drama, (suntagma) dramatikon (‘dramatic narrative’) or komodia in Greek and fabula or mimus in Latin. Ancient readers clearly felt reminded by the tales told in the novels of stories staged in drama, and there are two very good reasons for this. First, the structure of some of Euripides’ later tragedies and, more especially, of all extant comedies by Menander, Plautus and Terence is dictated by the tangled fortunes of two lovers happily joined together only at the end of the work, much the same as in novels like the Ephesiaca. Secondly, one important criterion in ancient definitions of ‘comedy’ is its realistic content. Epic poets and tragedians adapt material taken from mythology and thus from the realm of fantasy, far removed from reality; historians, by contrast, record real happenings. These two very different processes are in a manner combined in comedy, because the author there invents his stories, but deliberately makes them seem very true to life. Such fictional reproduction of everyday life in the ancient world is something also found in the novels mentioned above. In its broadest sense the term suntagma dramatikon—one most probably already in use in late antiquity—means ‘fictional narrative depicting the kind of everyday life otherwise portrayed in comedy’.

Characteristics of the idealistic and comic-realistic novels

Given these paraphrastic labels, it may be inferred that for a certain type of prose narrative a certain type of story was not only anticipated by the readers, but was also automatically visualized a priori by the authors themselves. In their case such fixed notions meant that, within the framework of the story, their choice both of individual motifs and of the various devic...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Author’s Note
• 1. The Genre
• 2. The Rise of the Genre
• 3. The Idealistic Novel In Early Imperial Times
• 4. The Comic-Realistic Novel
• 5. The Idealistic Novel In the Age of the Second Sophistic
• Select Bibliography