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Reinventing Maternity in Chariton's Callirhoe University of New Mexico UNM Digital Repository Foreign Languages & Literatures ETDs Electronic Theses and Dissertations Spring 4-10-2020 Reinventing Maternity in Chariton's Callirhoe Christine Ellis University of New Mexico - Main Campus Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/fll_etds Part of the Classical Literature and Philology Commons Recommended Citation Ellis, Christine. "Reinventing Maternity in Chariton's Callirhoe." (2020). https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/ fll_etds/139 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Electronic Theses and Dissertations at UNM Digital Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Foreign Languages & Literatures ETDs by an authorized administrator of UNM Digital Repository. For more information, please contact [email protected], [email protected], [email protected]. i Christine Ellis Candidate Foreign Languages and Literatures Department This thesis is approved, and it is acceptable in quality and form for publication: Approved by the Thesis Committee: Professor Osman Umurhan , Chairperson Professor Lorenzo F. Garcia, Jr. Professor Monica Cyrino ii REINVENTING MATERNITY IN CHARITON'S CALLIRHOE by CHRISTINE ELLIS B.A., CLASSICS, UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA, 2017 THESIS Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts Comparative Literatures and Cultural Studies The University of New Mexico Albuquerque, New Mexico May 2020 iii Dedications This thesis is dedicated to the parents in my life: Patrick and Karen MacLean Christa and Michael Delk Jenny Blumer iv Acknowledgements My thesis would not have been completed without the direction, support, and editorial advice of my thesis committee. I would like to express my deep gratitude to each of you individually, but I also appreciate your collective voice and demonstration of academic collaboration and mentorship. To Professor Luke Gorton, thank you for your eagle-eyed catches on my Greek and punctuation. Your encouraging words and edits helped make this process much more bearable. To Professor Lorenzo F. Garcia, Jr., thank you for your enthusiasm for my project and inspiration to keep digging, learning, and reading. Your knowledge about ancient Greek particles and Homeric scholarship have helped to expand my thesis beyond what I believed possible. To Professor Monica S. Cyrino, for your keen eye for style and grammar and your tireless patience with my overwrought prose. You have made me a better writer and your contribution to this thesis is immense and appreciated. Thank you for always having the perfect word. Finally, thank you to my advisor and mentor Professor Osman Umurhan, for always pushing me to make my transitions smoother, my sentences less awkward, and my thesis more apparent. Thank you for questioning my assumptions about texts and for pushing me to extend my areas of interest. Above all, thank you for being there to lend an ear when I was frustrated with the project. I must also thank my peers and classmates at the University of New Mexico for your support. I am profoundly grateful to Noah Holt and Lauren Alberti for always being across the hall and willing to laugh off our frustrations, to Ryan Gomez for giving me a confidence boost every time we spoke and for being my musical buddy, and finally to my roommate Cole Carvour for staying with me through the ups and downs, for the late night laughs and early morning grumbles, for being the most supportive roommate a person could ask for. Thank you all for believing in me and in this thesis. v Reinventing Maternity in Chariton’s Callirhoe By Christine Ellis B.A., Classics, University of Arizona, 2017 M.A., Comparative Literatures and Cultural Studies, University of New Mexico, 2020 Abstract This project analyzes Chariton’s construction of maternity in his Greek novel Callirhoe. I argue that Chariton heavily employs intertexts and allusions throughout his novel, especially with regard to his female protagonists. Through these allusions, Chariton is not only able to insert himself and his work within the literary canon, but he is also able to develop his genre by juxtaposing his heroine with those of the genres of tragedy and epic. Topics of analysis range from debates about killing one’s child to the importance of marital memory. By the end of his novel, Chariton is able both to establish the ideal traits of a female character within the novel and also develop the important topos of the blended family. vi Table of Contents INTRODUCTION ......................................................................................................................................... 1 Intertextuality, Genre, and Gender in the Novel .................................................................................... 1 Intertextuality .......................................................................................................................................... 3 Genre ....................................................................................................................................................... 6 Gender ................................................................................................................................................... 12 Chapter Synopsis ..................................................................................................................................... 15 Chapter 1 ..................................................................................................................................................... 18 Mother Knows Best: Chariton’s Play with Tragic Expectations ............................................................ 18 Introduction ............................................................................................................................................. 18 Mothers in Distress: Evoking Medea in the Greek Novel .................................................................... 22 Motivations, Deliberations, and Outcomes ........................................................................................... 37 Motivations ............................................................................................................................................ 39 Deliberations ......................................................................................................................................... 47 Outcomes ............................................................................................................................................... 60 Conclusion ................................................................................................................................................ 65 Chapter 2 ..................................................................................................................................................... 67 A Penelopian Helen ..................................................................................................................................... 67 Introduction ............................................................................................................................................. 67 Myths of Penelope ................................................................................................................................. 69 Myths of Helen ...................................................................................................................................... 70 Knowledge as a Connector of Characters ............................................................................................. 71 Memory and Forgetfulness as a Family Connection ............................................................................ 84 Conclusion .............................................................................................................................................. 102 Conclusion .................................................................................................................................................. 104 References .................................................................................................................................................. 108 1 INTRODUCTION Intertextuality, Genre, and Gender in the Novel The ancient Greek novels have seen a steady increase of attention in scholarship recently. These texts provide a fun and exciting story for scholars of Greek, and recent work on the use of intertextuality by prose authors has sparked fresh avenues of inquiry otherwise overlooked, especially in regard to the complex uses of intertextuality and allusion produced by ancient novelists. From the conception of the first Greek novel, Chariton’s Callirhoe, around the mid-first century BCE, Greek novels have struggled to find a legitimate place in the ancient canon. They are often ridiculed by ancient authors, such as Persius and the Roman emperor Julian, for being simplistic and almost vulgar: …multum gaudere paratus, si cynico barbam petulans nonaria vellat. his mane edictum, post prandia Calliroen do. …[the one] ready to laugh a lot, if an insolent whore pulls on a cynic’s beard. To these ones I present a playbill in the morning and Callirhoe after lunch. (Persius Satire 1.132–134) Despite this unenthusiastic reception, however, the novels continued into the fourth century CE, having their heyday in the second century.1 The overlying topoi of the Greek novels, which may have accounted for their popularity despite their
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