Callirhoe wished to speak to Aphrodite herself.

So first she took her son in her arms, and thus afforded a beautiful sight, the like of which no painter has yet portrayed, nor sculp­tor fashioned, nor poet described before now; for none of them has represented Artemis or Athena with a baby in her arms.

This scene comes from a Greek novel, probably written about the same time as most of our New Testament texts.^{[2] [3] It tells a story, essentially a simple story, of the kind that has retained its popularity down the centu­ries: boy meets girl; boy and girl (both improbably young and beautiful) fall in love; parents oppose the marriage; boy and girl fall into a decline; parents relent. (The Romeo and Juliet echoes are no coincidence: Shake­speare’s plots owe quite a lot to the Greek romance tradition.) But in Greek romance the wedding bells signal the beginning of the couple’s troubles, not the end. Jealousy rears its ugly head. Chaereas, the hero, kicks his pregnant wife Callirhoe in a rage. She falls down in a swoon, is taken up for dead, and is buried with much pomp and lamentation in a splendid tomb overlooking the sea - only to be rescued and abducted by a gang of pirates. And that’s just Book 1! The rest of the novel traces the journeys of the hapless couple, chasing each other around the Mediter­ranean, before the final reunion and triumphant homecoming in Book 8.}

At one level, the religious dimensions of this scene are obvious. It takes place in a temple: it shows us the heroine at prayer, addressing her patron goddess Aphrodite. It shows an intimate and close personal relationship between the female subject and the divine - though Callirhoe is not afraid to argue with the goddess. So it allows us to explore the role of women within the accepted parameters of ancient religion: sacred space, public cult, private prayer. Probe a little further, however, and something odd is happening. As Callirhoe poses for the cameras with her infant son in her arms, the narrator deliberately and explicitly invokes the visual representa­tion of divinity in the religious artwork of antiquity: Callirhoe is compared (to their disadvantage) with the virgin goddesses Artemis and Athena as depicted by painters, sculptors, and poets. There is an apparent elision here of the boundaries between divine and human that makes us wonder what is going on here, theologically speaking, in terms of the self-understanding of ancient Greek religion. The irony of this scene deepens when we set it against the representational world of early Christian narrative. Despite her beauty and status, Callirhoe defines her own identity in terms of suffering. Here is a heroine who has endured a series of dramatic status reversals - including death and resurrection. Is there (as Glen Bowersock has argued) a deliberate parody of the Gospel narrative here?^[4] Is Callirhoe being set up as a kind of female Christ-figure? And the irony intensifies when we con­sider that this scene was being written (and read) probably around the last quarter of the first century CE, around the same time that Luke was paint­ing in words what was to become one of the dominant visual images of Christianity - the virgin Madonna holding her divine child.

Chariton, the novel’s otherwise unknown author, describes himself as clerk to the rhetor Athenagoras in Aphrodisias, just up the Lycus valley in Asia Minor, not far from Colossae (Chaer. 1.1.1). His work is widely ac­cepted as the first complete extant example of Greek romance, a genre that was to continue to flourish, with increasing sophistication and complexity, right through late antiquity until it (apparently) lost out to its nearest mar­ket rival with the growth of the Christian martyr-acts and apocryphal ta­les.^[5] Most scholars would agree that Chariton’s novel is not primarily a religious text; it is a romantic fiction.^[6] But that does not mean (as van den Heever suggests) that we should not take it seriously. Even (perhaps espe­cially) escapist fiction can reveal a society’s shabbiest secrets, or open windows into its profoundest hopes and dreams: as a reviewer of Stephen Spielberg’s work has said, “It is a truism that the movies that are most en­lightening about a society's values and aspirations are those which have been gigantic successes in that society, rather than those purporting to ad­dress one or other of the major problems besetting it.”^[7] As Judith Perkins observes,^[8]

The power of discourse inheres precisely in this remarkable ability it has to set its agenda and mask the fact that its representation both has an agenda and that there could be other representations and other agendas. Every representation is by its very nature partial and incomplete. A representation of “reality” must leave something out, even as it puts some­thing in. A culture’s discourse represents not the “real” world, but rather a world mediat­ed through the social categories, relations, and institutions operating in the specific cul­ture. Another way of saying this is that every representation reflects some cultural “inter­est,” and, therefore, discourses in a society never just float free. They are informed by, and they help to constitute, the society’s particular preoccupations and intentions.

Whatever its original audience and purpose, Chariton’s romance merits our serious attention. It offers a significant first-century representation of women and religion in Hellenic culture and society: and as such, it pro­vides a valuable foil for reading the representation of women and religion in early Christian narrative.

A.