Callirhoe Patrona: Women in the Landscape of the Gods
The “sexual symmetry” of romance is spatially actualized in the protagonists’ voyages across the Mediterranean landscape. Unlike Odysseus’s faithful wife Penelope, Callirhoe does not wait at home for her husband to return to her; her travels (albeit involuntary) and her husband’s search for her are central to the narrative structure of the novel.
Callirhoe’s adventures are played out in a nostalgic, fantasy landscape carefully set in an idealized “Hellenic” past which simultaneously evokes and subverts the historical past of the classical orators and historians.[36] For Callirhoe, the Mediterranean is the “Greek sea” which links her with Syracuse and from which a Greek ship may still come and save her (5.1.3). As an “island woman,” she laments that crossing the Euphrates means being “shut up in the depths of barbarian land where the sea is far away: What ship can I hope will come sailing after me from Sicily now?” (5.1.5-6). Babylon, the despotic capital of the Persian Great King, is described in technicolor terms which stress its foreignness, its distance from everything ‘Greek’ (5.2.2-9, 5.4.5-6). It is peopled with satraps and eunuchs kowtowing[37] to the King, a ‘barbarian’ population which is naturally gunaimanes (5.2.6) - though Chariton slyly implies that barbarian and Greek reactions to female beauty are not essentially different, and takes delight in setting Callirhoe up as a victorious ‘Miss Ionia’ in a beauty contest with ‘Miss Asia’ (5.3.49).[38]We can see this imagined landscape as the fictional counterpart of Pau- sanias’s Description of Greece, a nostalgic evocation of a vanished world imprinted with the cultural memories of Greek mythology and history.[39] We could see it as a form of Hellenistic wallpaper, evoking the idealized landscapes that decorate the walls and mosaics of the villas of the elite - of the novels’ readers, in other words - across the Greco-Roman world from Pompeii to Antioch.
In Chariton’s landscape, the most sig-nificant visual markers are Greek temples and Greek monuments: tombs, temples, and shrines are the visible elements that define both urban and rural space, imprinting the presence of the traditional Greek gods on both town and countryside.[40] Shrines and sanctuaries function in this narrative world as the dominant locations for the interpenetration of the human and the divine, a place for personal encounter with the deity through public festival and personal prayer.[41] Robin Lane Fox points out that in the Greco-Roman world the cults of the gods shaped both civic time and civic space, marking the public calendar with festivals and processions that brought the ‘silent women’ of antiquity out into the public spaces of the city, so that the encounter of men and women and the encounter with the gods happen in the same time and space.[42] Similarly, religion (sacred space, sacred time) plays an essential role in the plot of romance, creating opportunities for wellborn women to escape the confines of the home and meet their lovers. It is at just such a festival that Chaereas and Callirhoe first set eyes on each other, falling headlong in love and precipitating the whole plot of the novel (1.1.4-6). The rural shrine of Aphrodite, close to Dionysius’s country estate, plays a pivotal role in the plot. This is the place where the goddess is accustomed to make her appearance, attracting visitors from the city to pay homage (2.2.5). It is here that Dionysius falls in love with Callirhoe (2.3.5-8, 2.5.1-12), and in the same shrine that Chaereas discovers that his wife is still alive (3.6.3-5). Sanctuary space provides precisely a place for the active presence of the gods in the human world, a place where human interactions are brought into the divine realm and acquire transcendent significance.The power to act on this landscape - to construct the monuments that give it its transcendent significance - is of course the prerogative of the elite: building temples and tombs is one of the prime ways the super-rich impose their own cultural dominance on the landscape.[43] It is interesting, then, to find that in the novel Callirhoe herself is empowered by her husband to act upon this sacred landscape by assuming the role of patron, building and designing a magnificent tomb for Chaereas:
[Callirhoe] went to look for a site on which to build the tomb.
A place near the shrine of Aphrodite attracted her, so that posterity also might have a reminder of her love. But Dionysius begrudged Chaereas such proximity, wishing to reserve this site for himself...so he said, “My dear, let us go to the city, and there before the walls let us construct an imposing and conspicuous memorial that from afar it may be visible to men on the waters.” (4.1.4-5)Callirhoe is very much the active patron here, choosing the site, commissioning “a vast labour force with no expense spared,” and orchestrating a lavish funeral procession with herself as the star performer (4.1.4-12). We may see here an echo of the real power exerted on the sacred landscape by elite women in the Greek East through patronage, whether of buildings or (less visibly) of cult associations.
C.