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Greek Identity and the Athenian Past in Chariton: the Romance of Empire

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Greek Identity and the Athenian Past in Chariton: the Romance of Empire Greek Identity and the Athenian Past in Chariton: The Romance of Empire ANCIENT NARRATIVE Supplementum 9 Editorial Board Maaike Zimmerman, University of Groningen Gareth Schmeling, University of Florida, Gainesville Heinz Hofmann, Universität Tübingen Stephen Harrison, Corpus Christi College, Oxford Costas Panayotakis (review editor), University of Glasgow Advisory Board Jean Alvares, Montclair State University Alain Billault, Université Paris Sorbonne – Paris IV Ewen Bowie, Corpus Christi College, Oxford Jan Bremmer, University of Groningen Ken Dowden, University of Birmingham Ben Hijmans, Emeritus of Classics, University of Groningen Ronald Hock, University of Southern California, Los Angeles Niklas Holzberg, Universität München Irene de Jong, University of Amsterdam Bernhard Kytzler, University of Natal, Durban John Morgan, University of Wales, Swansea Ruurd Nauta, University of Groningen Rudi van der Paardt, University of Leiden Costas Panayotakis, University of Glasgow Stelios Panayotakis, University of Crete Judith Perkins, Saint Joseph College, West Hartford Bryan Reardon, Prof. Em. of Classics, University of California, Irvine James Tatum, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire Alfons Wouters, University of Leuven Subscriptions and ordering Barkhuis Zuurstukken 37 9761 KP Eelde the Netherlands Tel. +31 50 3080936 Fax +31 50 3080934 [email protected] www.ancientnarrative.com Greek Identity and the Athenian Past in Chariton: The Romance of Empire Steven D. Smith BARKHUIS & GRONINGEN UNIVERSITY LIBRARY GRONINGEN 2007 Book design: Barkhuis Cover Design: Nynke Tiekstra, Noordwolde Printed by: Drukkerij Giethoorn ten Brink ISBN-13 9789077922286 Image on cover: Socrate arrachant Alcibiade des bras de la volupté, Jean- Baptiste Regnault, (1754–1829); Location: Paris, musée du Louvre; © Photo RMN / © Gérard Blot Copyright © 2007 the author All rights reserved. No part of this publication or the information contained herein may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronical, mechanical, by photocopying, re- cording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the authors. Although all care is taken to ensure the integrity and quality of this publica- tion and the information herein, no responsibility is assumed by the pub- lishers nor the authors for any damage to property or persons as a result of operation or use of this publication and/or the information contained herein. τῷ ἀρίστῳ πάππῳ Table of Contents Acknowledgements IX 1 INTRODUCTION: QUESTIONS AND CONTEXT 1 1 What is Hermocrates Doing in a Love Story? 1 2 History and Empire in the Novel 6 3 Narratology and Focalization 13 4 Callirhoe and Chaereas 18 2 CULTURE AND EMPIRE IN REPRESENTATIONS OF ATHENS 23 1 Cultural Capital & Military Golden Age 24 2 Democracy and Tyranny 32 3 A Figure for Rome 43 3 CHARITON’S ATHENS: MAKING MEN, WOMEN, AND STATES 50 1 Syracuse 51 2 Callirhoe 64 3 Theron 73 4 Dionysius 76 5 East & West, Tyranny & Democracy 80 6 Chaereas Among the Egyptians 87 7 The New Power Couple 94 4 ATHENIAN MYTH AND DRAMA 99 1 Theseus and Ariadne 99 2 Menander and the Influence of Athenian Drama 104 3 Euripides 111 4 Sophocles 117 VIII TABLE OF CONTENTS 5 ATHENIAN LAW, RHETORIC, AND IDENTITY 120 1 Lysias and Forensic Oratory 120 2 Citizens, slaves, and torture 127 3 Asianism & Atticism: Blurring the Lines 134 4 A Panegyric Discourse? 140 5 Demosthenes and Aeschines 145 6 HISTORIOGRAPHY AND EMPIRE 153 1 The Prologue 153 2 Novel Approaches to Thucydidean Historiography 155 3 Xenophon’s Legacy: Persia and Power in the Athenian Imagination 163 4 Paradigms of Empire and The Invasion Motif 176 5 Rome and the Imagined World 192 7 CHAEREAS AND ALCIBIADES 199 1 The Paradigm of the “Great Individual” 202 2 “Parallel Lives” 212 3 Eros, Philosophy, Politics 225 4 Conclusion 244 8 BIBLIOGRAPHY 249 9 INDICES 265 Index locorum 265 General Index 274 Acknowledgements This book began, quite unexpectedly, while viewing Etruscan pottery at the National Museum of Tarquinia, during my participation in the Summer School of the American Academy in Rome in 2001, under the inspirational direction of Ann Vasaly. Jeffrey Henderson, always enthusiastic, encourag- ing, and gracious with his time, was the ideal guide as I began this project in its nascent form as a dissertation. The Department of Classical Studies at Boston University deserves many, many thanks, especially Wolfgang Haase, Patricia Johnson, Steve Scully, and Zsuzsanna Várhelyi. I owe a special debt of gratitude to Ilaria Marchesi, my friend and colleague at Hofstra Univer- sity, for her strong, consistent support in both my didactic and scholarly pursuits. Bryan Reardon read this work in its early stages as a dissertation, and has been a most cordial, enthusiastic correspondent. Tim Whitmarsh and Catherine Connors have been careful, sensitive readers, and this book’s strengths are due to their recommendations and insights. I extend my most heartfelt gratitude to Maaike Zimmerman, whom I met in Rethymnon in 2005, and who has since been a wonderful colleague and an enthusiastic, nurturing, and scrupulous editor. Bill and Joanne Wilde deserve special men- tion for their love and support. I will be forever grateful to my parents Ste- ven and Kathleen Smith for giving me the tools to discover and pursue this path. Finally, I express my lasting love and affection to Richard Wilde, without whom none of this would be possible. 1 Introduction: Questions and Context 1 What is Hermocrates Doing in a Love Story? In the prologue of his novel, Chariton announces to his readers that he will narrate a love story that took place in Syracuse. The narrative begins, how- ever, not with the lovers themselves, but with a figure from Greek historio- graphy: “Hermocrates, the general of the Syracusans, the one who defeated the Athenians, had a daughter named Callirhoe” (Ἑρµοκράτης ὁ Συρα- κοσίων στρατηγός, οὗτος ὁ νικήσας Ἀθηναίους, εἶχε θυγατέρα Καλλιρόην τοὔνοµα, 1.1.1).1 What is a military general from Greek history doing in a supposedly fictitious love story? One answer is that, despite Chariton’s de- scription of his story as a πάθος ἐρωτικόν, the novel is more than just a love story. It is the aim of this book to attempt to define what else this novel is. From the very beginning, Chariton declares that Athenian history has shaped his romantic narrative and he invites his readers to consider how his erotic fiction intersects with Athenian historiography. It will become clear though that the novel is far more than a playful response to Athenian historiography, that in fact a whole range of Athenian texts and Athenian discourses partici- pate in the constitution of the novel. As the narrative continues, readers of Chariton’s Callirhoe2 will encoun- ter a marked dissonance between characters who profess to despise Athens ————— 1 All quotations of Chariton are taken from Reardon’s Teubner edition (2004). Translations are my own. 2 I follow Plepelits (1976: 28ff.), Goold (1995: 3–4), Reardon (2004: v), and Whitmarsh (2005b: 590, 600), who take the final words of the novel as an indication of the work’s ti- tle: Τοσάδε περὶ Καλλιρόης συνέγραψα (8.8.16). The 13th century Florentine manuscript known as Conventi Sopressi 627 (F) declares at the beginning of each book: τὰ περὶ χαιρέαν καὶ καλλιρρόην ἐρωτικὰ διηγήµατα. But the much earlier Michailidis papyrus (2nd century CE) gives the title as τὰ περὶ Κα[λλιρόην] διηγήµατα. The tendency to title the novel in English as Chaereas and Callirhoe is understandable, though, since the story is about a romantic pair. Whitmarsh writes of the title τὰ περὶ Καλλιρόης that, “there is an air of intrigue and scandal to the phrase” (2005b: 606), as a woman becomes the subject of an apparently historiographic narrative. Whitmarsh therefore suggests as an ideal English rendering The Affair of Callirhoe, “replete with comparable double entendre” (2005b: 606). 2 GREEK IDENTITY AND THE ATHENIAN PAST IN CHARITON and a narrative voice which continually quotes and emulates classical3 Athe- nian authors. It is precisely that narrative dissonance which this book inves- tigates. Chariton’s historical novel, probably written between the mid- to late-1st century CE,4 unfolds in the Sicilian city of Syracuse and in the east- ern cities of Miletus and Babylon in the years following Athens’ disastrous military expedition to Sicily (415–413 BC). In her 1992 paper entitled “Ima- ges d’Athènes dans les Romans grecs,” Estelle Oudot wrote that what little attention is given to Athens in Chariton’s novel is an evasive tactic, an in- tentional trivialization of Athens as a way of avoiding its monolithic pres- ence in the classical past. But given the novel’s classical setting, there is ————— 3 For the concept of Greek classicism in the early imperial period I follow Simon Swain: as a strategy for consolidating the identity of Greek elites under the empire, classicism “found two complementary modes of organization” (1996: 7). First, in terms of language and literature, classicism formalized the grammar of favored authors and genres and es- tablished normative literary practices. Second was “a more general classicism character- ized by looser and more flexible formulations which reflect the fact that the Greek past was not the preserve of the Greek elite alone but was open to use by other groups includ- ing non-Greeks. It is clear that there were attendant risks in this project. The search for cultural and political authority involved idealizing the past, and the result of this idealiza- tion was that it was always open to negotiation to say what the past actually was …, and to say what authority it conferred on whom (particularly since non-Greeks could appro- priate the Greek past or even suggest that modern Greeks had no real connection with it)” (7). I reject however the notion that the attitude toward and representation of a classical Athens in Chariton’s text is univocal.
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