Callirhoe Orans: Women as Religious Practitioners
The ritual imprinting of the landscape of romance with temples and shrines marks a subtle but significant change from the modalities of primary myth. In epic, as in romance, the gods have shrines and are recipients of cult, prayer, and sacrifice.[44] They are (as they continued to be in Hellenistic popular belief) the invisible agents of wind and weather, protectors of strangers, senders of portents, inspirers of courage or sleep.[45] Their anger is invoked as the root cause for human misfortune.[46] But, over and above these enduring religious functions, the gods of epic play a much more active and visible role as characters in the narrative.
You can expect to meet the gods anywhere - on the beach, boarding a ship, sitting beside you on the bench at a banquet. They readily adopt a variety of human forms, and can successfully disguise themselves as stranger, friend or family mem- ber.[47] But you will always know when a god has been speaking to you - vera incessu patuit dea.*[48]This sense of the transparency of the physical world to the presence of the gods (what Judith Perkins calls “the elision between the divine and human”[49]) remains an essential component of romance, but its modalities have subtly shifted. In the landscape of secondary myth, you do not expect to meet the gods themselves walking casually on a beach. Neither do the novelists exploit the privileged authorial viewpoint of the epic poets to peer beyond the barricades of the sensible world. The gods are to be encountered much more properly and decorously - though none the less really for that - in the sacred locations prescribed and sanctified by ancient custom. These temples and shrines provide space for women to act as religious practitioners - though the “priestess” of Aphrodite’s rural shrine outside Miletus is a low-status shrine attendant rather than a cultic official (zakoros, 3.6.4-6), treated with some condescension by Callirhoe and Plangon (3.9.1-2).
More importantly, they provide space for women to pray (to be themselves) in private (cf. ερημία? 3.10.4).[50] There are feasts and festivals in plenty in this story, and the gods are treated with appropriate public deference, but for individuals the normal mode of approach to the divine is in private prayer. This fact in itself represents a perceptible shift in religious sensibility, something that brings Chariton’s painted world indefinably closer to the world of the mystery cults and of early Christianity than to the world of epic.What does Callirhoe pray about? Unsurprisingly, “women’s business” ta gunaikeia, figure large in her religious world view: birth, copulation, and death. Callirhoe is no feminist: she is essentially a conventional daughter of the elite, her ambitions echoing those of her parents and their society - marriage, motherhood, security, good reputation. Thus her prayers (as women’s prayers tended to do in the ancient world) circle around these conventional female concerns.[51] She prays for a husband (1.1.7). She prays for the safety of her child (3.2.12f; 3.8.7ff). She laments the dead (3.10.4-8; 4.1.2-24). She adopts the conventional ritual postures for women in Greek religion: in suppliance ('ικετεία) she loosens her hair, falls at the feet of the goddess and kisses them (8.8.15; 1.1.7); in ritual lament, she adopts black clothing and throws dust on her head (3.10.4-8; 4.1.2-24).
But circumstances, and the machinations of the goddess, drive her out of the comfortable cocoon of elite maidenhood; and it is as a traveller, entering the perilous zone of the sea,[52] that Callirhoe becomes most vulnerable and develops a more mature and self-confident relationship with her personal despoina, Aphrodite.[53] Her experience of apparently motiveless suffering moves her from a simple prayer-pattern of petition and thanks to blame and reproach at Aphrodite’s injustice (3.2.12f; 3.8.7ff.), from the prostrate posture of the suppliant to standing in silent accusation before the goddess (7.5.2ff).
The end of the narrative, however, brings her back to a child-like trust in Aphrodite:Just before she went on board, Callirhoe made an obeisance to Aphrodite. “I thank you, Lady,” she said, “for what is happening now. You are reconciled to me now; grant that I see Syracuse too! A great stretch of sea separates me from there; an ocean is waiting for me that is frightening to cross; but I am not frightened if you are sailing with me” (8.4.10).
Paradoxically, it is when she travels beyond the confines of the Greek landscape that the power of Callirhoe’s deity becomes most evident. As we have seen, Chariton places his characters in an imagined landscape whose most prominent features are visual signs of the presence and power of the Greek gods - especially Aphrodite. The gods of Babylon, by contrast, are anonymous and (apparently) impotent - or implicitly identified with the gods of the Greeks. When Callirhoe is about to appear in the king’s courtroom in Babylon, her trusted servant Plangon tells her to treat the courtroom as if it were the temple of Aphrodite herself (5.5.7); and Chariton effectively ensures that that is how we read this barbarian cityscape. On the human level, his Greek heroes have to contend with Persian and Egyptian competitors, but in the divine realm Aphrodite has no rivals. Even among the Greek gods, Aphrodite dominates the sacred landscape of the novel;[54] the only other deity mentioned as the recipient of prayer is the quintessentially Hellenistic Tyche (Fortuna).[55] And this spatial henotheism has its counterpart in the personal religion of Chariton’s characters. It is not that anyone makes a choice between Aphrodite and other gods: there is no contest between ‘false’ and ‘true’ conceptions of divinity, and no attempt to argue for a kind of ‘God behind the gods’ in the manner of pagan philosophical monotheism. It is simply that, within this narrative world, there is only one deity worth talking about - or talking to.
D.