Callirhoe as Reader and Heroine
Hermocrates, ruler of Syracuse, victor over the Athenians, had a daughter named Callirhoe, a marvel of a girl and the idol of all Sicily. In fact her beauty was not so much human as divine, not that of a Nereid or mountain nymph, either, but of Aphrodite herself.
(Chaer. 1.1.1-2)In his opening sentence, Chariton simultaneously evokes the serious world of the classical Greek historians and blows it away. He begins with Hermocrates, an historical character from Thucydides’s History of the Peloponnesian War. But by the end of his first paragraph it is clear that Chariton’s interest focuses not on the famous Syracusan general but on his daughter, Callirhoe (whom Thucydides never mentions). Chariton’s subject is love, not war, and we do not need to label the novels as women’s magazine literature in order to recognize that women and “women’s business,” ta gunaikeia, are foregrounded to an unusual extent in Greek romance.[9] This is evident right away in the “sexual symmetry” (to use David Konstan’s felicitous phrase) that underlies the whole narrative structure of the novel.[10] In plot terms, the heroine is just as important as the hero, if not more so; there are good reasons for thinking that Chariton’s original title for the novel was simply Callirhoe.[11] And quite apart from the title, the equal billing accorded to hero and heroine in the plot of the Greek novel is enough to highlight the foregrounding of women in romance: it marks a subtle but effective subversion of the narrative patterns of primary myth. In romance, the erotic satisfaction of two young people becomes the central motive power of the plot. Judith Perkins points out that the elite status of the protagonists means that their erotic business is also the city’s business, but she misses the Swiftian irony in Chariton’s making this the sole business of the civic assemblies in which (improbably) women and men have an equal voice.[12] This signals a profound reversal of epic values.
In Vergil’s Aeneid, Dido’s attempted seduction of Aeneas is a diversionary tactic on Aphrodite’s part, designed to deflect Aeneas from his proper business of founding Rome: only Aeneas’s pietas thwarts the goddess. In romance, Aphrodite gets her revenge: the love affair is the real business, war a poor diversion, and Aphrodite herself the unquestioned (indeed the unchallenged) recipient of pietas1There are of course limitations to the heroine’s capacity for independent adventure: Callirhoe is no liberated twentieth-century Miss. Travel itself is but the first of a series of pathe imposed on the couple by the goddess of love (8.1.3). In the process, Callirhoe loses her elite status - even her freedom - and is pushed over the edge of everything that defines her personal identity. In fact she begins her adventures by dying and being entombed, thus becoming a non-person, then a captive, then a slave - and always a potential object of predatory male lust. Even though her beauty ensures her a relatively cushioned time, Callirhoe conforms to an archaizing ideal of passive womanhood, with no control over her journeys or her own body.[13] [14] The heroines of other novels are not so lucky: they end up having to defend their chastity against a succession of pirates, robber bands, pimps, lustful Indian princes, and oriental eunuchs. In the represented world of romance, as Chariton himself sums it up, the sexual options for women are reduced to two: “honest love and lawful marriage” versus the unregulated perils of becoming a sexual object in conditions of “piracy or slavery or trials or fighting or suicide or war or captivity” (Chaer. 8.1.4). This stark duality is reflected in what Brigitte Egger calls the “splitting up of womanhood into two designs, the white and the scarlet woman”: “on the one side there is the erotically passive, chaste, faithful, ‘good’ protagonist, the Greek - and on the other side there is the erotically active, scheming, unrestrainedly raving antagonist, the Barbarian.”[15]
Is this representation of the heroine simply a projection of male fantasies? Chariton does at times allow us to see Callirhoe through the lens of a male gaze, as when the Great King is distracted from his hunting by a vision of Callirhoe as Artemis: “How wonderful it would be to see Callirhoe here, with her dress tucked up to her knees and her arms bared, with flushed face and heaving bosom!” (6.4.5-6).
But (as Brigitte Egger rightly observes) the novel gives equal space to the admiring female gaze: not only servants and crowds, but high status women like Rhodogune and Statira fall prey to Callirhoe’s charms and embrace her as a sister.[16] It is perhaps this - with the continual stress on the heroine’s chastity - that gives the depiction of Callirhoe in this novel its curiously asexual character.[17] Moreover, Callirhoe is depicted - much more strongly than her male counterparts - as an “athlete of virtue,” victorious in the fight against pathos; and one of her chief weapons is her paideia. Far from being a dumb blonde, she is represented as an educated Greek woman, defeating oriental courtiers (and even the Great King) by her superior philosophia[18]Callirhoe is also depicted as a writer of letters and an initiator of clandestine correspondence. There is a wonderful scene late in the story where Callirhoe, now reunited with her first husband Chaereas, writes a very private letter to her abandoned second husband Dionysius and enlists the aid of the captured Persian queen Statira to deliver it:
Callirhoe felt that it was proper to show her gratitude by writing to Dionysius. This was the only thing she did without telling Chaereas, for she was aware of his innate jealousy, and so took pains to keep it from him. Taking a writing tablet, she wrote the following:
“Callirhoe greets Dionysius her benefactor (for you are the one who freed me from pirates and slavery). Please, do not be angry. Indeed, I am with you in spirit through the son we share, and I entrust him to you to bring up and to educate in a way worthy of us. Let him have no experience of a stepmother. You have not only a son, but a daughter as well: two children are enough. Marry them to each other when he becomes a man, and send him to Syracuse so that he may also see his grandfather. My greetings to you, Plangon. This I have written with my own hand. Farewell, good Dionysius, and remember your Callirhoe.”
Sealing the letter, she hid it away in her bosom....
As she was about to leave the ship, she leaned unobtrusively towards Statira and, blushing, handed her the letter, saying, “Give this letter to poor Dionysius; I trust him to your care and the king’s. You must both comfort him. I fear that he may kill himself now that he has been parted from me.” The women might have gone on talking and weeping and embracing, had not the pilots given the signal for putting to sea. (Chaer. 8.4.4-9)This novel tacitly presupposes a network of elite literate women, writing and exchanging their own letters - and letters of a sort they would most definitely not want their husbands to read.[19] I am reminded of Claudia Severa, the wife of the Roman governor on Hadrian’s Wall, whose letter inviting a friend to her birthday party (and signed in her own hand) survives as a lone voice of femininity among the residue of military officialdom dug up in the Vindolanda tablets from 111 C.E.[20] In Chariton’s novel, women’s literacy is an unsensational assumption, and not simply at the pragmatic level of letter-writing: Callirhoe is explicitly described (more than once) as πεπαιδευμένη, “educated.”[21] She is depicted as a woman marked at a quite profound level by the cultural formation of Greek paideia, giving her the rhetorical resources to wrestle with her ethical dilemmas, and the philosophical σωφροσύνη to resist (with aristocratic contumely) the rather ham-fisted advances of the Persian eunuch Artaxates soliciting sexual favours for the king.[22] Callirhoe is not the only fictional heroine to be represented as deploying the resources of a philosophical education. The fragmentary Parthenope (another early novel) depicts its heroine as taking part in a discussion on love with the philosopher Anaxime- nes.[23] At the other end of the genre, Heliodorus’s Charicleia is presented as “a self-confident and, to a certain extent, emancipated intellectual” who “studies and discusses with the philosophers and theologians.”[24]
How does this fictional representation correspond to the realities of Chariton’s world? We could cite Callirhoe as an additional datum in the small but growing body of evidence for women’s literacy in Hellenistic Egypt and the Greek East.[25] We might also ask whether the novel was a genre expressly aimed at a female readership.
Greek prose romance has been a neglected feature of Greek literature until comparatively recently, and its earlier 20th-century scholars hailed it as a rare glimpse into late Greek ‘popular’ literature, evidence of a newly-prosperous middle-class reading public with distinctive emotional needs. However, the ‘popular’ label has been challenged by more recent studies of ancient literacy and book production.[26] Before the invention of the printing press, there was no mass market for books, and recent estimates of the evidence for literacy in the ancient Mediterranean world rarely go higher than 15% of the population.[27] Moreover, the numbers of novel fragments among the surviving papyri do not warrant the label ‘popular’ in any statistical sense.[28] As Simon Swain puts it, there is no real reason to dispute the current consensus that “the readership of the novels was to be found primarily among the establishment class...its quality and rank should not have been doubted.”[29] [30]Nonetheless, the label ‘popular’ does, I believe, convey something important about this literature. Northrop Frye’s definition of popular literature as “what people read without guidance from their betters” fits Greek romance very well:
We finally come, at the bottom of the hierarchy, to popular literature, or what people read without guidance from their betters. Popular literature has been the object of a constant bombardment of social anxieties for over two thousand years, and nearly the whole of the established critical tradition has stood out against it. The greater part of the reading and listening public has ignored the critics and censors for exactly the same length of time....Any serious discussion of romance has to take into account its curiously proletarian status as a form generally disapproved of, in most ages, by the guardians of taste and learning, except when they use it for their own purposes. The close connection of the romantic and the popular runs all through literature.
The formulas of New Comedy and Greek romance were demotic and popular formulas, like their counterparts now, treated with condescension by the highbrows, one form of condescension being the writing of such tales themselves, as academics write detective stories today.As Frye frames it, the question is not about numbers but about the relationship with the literary canon: “curiously proletarian” here is an index of literary taste, not of social class. Frye’s characterization (including the backhanded tribute paid to this kind of literature by elite writers) opens up the possibility of doing justice both to the facts of ancient literacy and to the curiously ambivalent character of the genre itself.[31] As a written text, Chariton’s story can only ever have circulated among the literate strata of society. But the ancient romance (unlike the modern novel) never achieved the literary status of a “school text.” Chariton was certainly not prescribed reading on any school syllabus: indeed, what little evidence we have suggests that such tales were frowned on by schoolmasters and despised by the self-appointed guardians of the literary canon. If the novels were read at all (and they would not have survived otherwise), they were read for pleasure.[32] And this fact in itself subverts the statistical indications of popularity based on literacy levels and the distribution of papyrus fragments. For a text whose circulation was not “artificially boosted” (in Goold’s words) by the school curriculum, the distribution - based, like almost all our papyrus evidence, precisely on remains from the lesser metropoleis which could not sustain a rhetorical school - is in fact rather impressive.[33] The mere existence of this body of literature, with its ambivalent relationship to the literary canon, pushes back the rather narrow window-frames through which we attempt to view the intellectual and emotional life of Greco-Roman antiquity, in much the same way as the domestic architecture and decor of Pompeii opens up new vistas of visual understanding. The relative simplicity of the early novels’ narrative style, the relative clarity of their paratactic prose - the closest Greco-Roman parallel I know to the narrative texture of the NT - gives us an insight into a world of leisured reading (extra-curricular reading) that we would never have guessed at from reading Lucian or Tacitus. And if (following Tomas Hagg) we are prepared to extend our definition of “readership” to the possibility of read-
ing aloud to a domestic audience, there is no obvious reason why women should not be included in such a definition.[34] [35] How do the women of early Christian narrative fit into this picture? It must be said that very few of the women named in the NT belongs to the social world of Callirhoe and Statira. The almost-mythical Candace, queen of Ethiopia, with her pious eunuch treasurer (Acts 8:27) has her novelistic counterpart in Statira, queen of Babylon, and the not-so-pious Artaxates, eunuch and adviser to the Great King of Persia. Berenice, wife of the He- rodian Agrippa II, coming into the court “with great pomp” (Acts 25:13, 23) would also be at home there: eastern petty princes like the Herods belonged to the same social level as the novel’s Dionysius. Parasitic on this elite world is the retainer class, represented in the novel by Plangon, the quick-witted and resourceful wife of Dionysius’s steward Phocas - and in the NT by Joanna, wife of Chuza, Herod’s steward (Lk 8:1-3). But the majority of NT women belong to a class all-but-invisible in the rarefied social world of Greek fiction, but none the less real for that. Raffaella Cribiore’s studies in the papyri reveal that A striking type of woman emerges from some of the most eloquent letters, and particularly from those written or subscribed by the sender herself: a relatively independent person, who sometimes travelled to pursue her business interest or to maintain family relationships, took care of financial matters, often sent and received goods of some value, and did not shrink from occasionally addressing male relatives and dependents in a sharp, peremptory tone....It is especially women’s letters that are part of archives that illuminate a woman’s place in family and society, her relationships with other women and her male relatives and subordinates, her upbringing, the level of education she had attained, and her familiarity with writing. Socially, this is probably where we should put the women of Acts and the Pauline epistles, Phoebe and Chloe, Tabitha and Sapphira, Lydia and Priscilla - and the independent and feisty women of the gospels like Mary Magdalene and Martha who support Jesus on his travels, entertain and argue with him. Below them again - at the bottom of the social scale - are the anonymous women of the Gospels and Acts: the prostitutes and slaves (Rhoda), the village women who come to be healed or bring their children for a blessing, women of no social import. In romance their world is evoked only as a foil for the beauty and nobility of the heroine, a shadow world from which she has to be rescued. In the Gospels and Acts, by contrast, they play a significant (though receptive) role in the narrative of salvation because their lives are transformed by their encounter with Jesus. B.