The Oxford Handbook of the Second Sophistic

by Daniel S. Richter

  You think that the Greeks will remember [memnêsesthai] your words when you are dead. But those who are nothing while they exist, what will they be when they exist not?7

  Like English, Greek can use the present tense to report what an author says in his text, even after his death, and the allusion indicates that Philostratus is not only addressing the novelist Chariton but also understood the letter in exactly the metaliterary way I have suggested. Ironically, his assertion that Chariton would be forgotten after his death in fact confirms that the novel was remembered and read in sophistic circles. The reference to Chariton as “nothing” may be a derogatory reference to his social status (he introduces himself as clerk to a rhetor) or to the literary merit of his novel; but it is tempting to see in it support for the (now generally abandoned) hypothesis that “Chariton of Aphrodisias” (“Charming of Lovesville”) might be a pseudonym, too appropriate for a romantic novelist to be true.

  These considerations not only suggest, contrary to current orthodoxy, a dating for the novel early in the second century but also associate it by personal connection with the sophistic mainstream. It is therefore no surprise that Callirhoe embodies a number of concerns central to contemporary sophism.

  First is its recourse to the past. The sophistic practice of inventing speeches that might have been given at crucial junctures of Greek history was a device to recapture a historically defined Greek identity, in general limited to a classical world before the conquests of Alexander (and certainly before the advent of Rome). Philostratus records (VS 522) that in a famous speech, Dionysius of Miletus played the role of Demosthenes denouncing himself in the Athenian boulê after Chaeronea, and mentions another speech in which he impersonated Arcadians defending themselves on a charge of being mercenaries, probably set in the fourth century BCE. The exercise was not merely about imitating the language and techniques of the Attic orators, but required both speaker and audience imaginatively to leave their own time and place to become classical Athenians. Chariton’s novel is set in the aftermath of the Athenian defeat in Sicily in 413 BCE. The heroine is Hermocrates’s daughter, and her identity is repeatedly defined by reference to his victory.8 However, although the story is thus anchored to the classical past, the setting is not consistently maintained. The historical Hermocrates died in 407 BCE, before the end of the Peloponnesian War. In the novel he is still alive at the end of the story. The Peloponnesian War ought therefore to be ongoing throughout the time-frame of the novel, but there is no sign of it. Athens is at peace and open to traders from Sicily. Asia Minor, including Miletus, is under Persian control, which was not the case before 387 BCE. The Persian king is called Artaxerxes, probably intended to be identified with Artaxerxes Memnon, who acceded in 404 BCE, but whose reign did not coincide with the lifetime of the historical Hermocrates. In the seventh book, the romantic story is caught up in an Egyptian rebellion against Persia, which seems to amalgamate details from several historical events, including the capture of Tyre by Alexander.9

  Although Chariton introduces himself as the narrator of the novel in a short prologue,10 he describes the institutions of the Persian Empire in the present tense, as if they were still in existence. In other words, the novelist has constructed a fictitious narratorial persona more or less contemporary with the events he narrates, who addresses a similarly constructed narratee.11 The exercise of projecting oneself and one’s audience empathetically into an ideologically validated past is essentially the same in speech and narrative fiction, and the classical period of the novel’s setting coincides exactly with that of the sophistic orations. It was perfectly permissible in sophistic speeches to add fictitious detail to strengthen the argument: narrow fidelity to the historical record was not a cardinal virtue. Similarly, Chariton, while producing a “historical” novel, has not adhered slavishly to the historical record. Indeed the deviations from historical truth should be read as intentional markers of the narrative’s creation of a counterfactual history, where the Peloponnesian War has been replaced by the travails of romantic love. It has been suggested that the “historical” nature of the earliest Greek novels is the result of a genetic connection with Hellenistic historiography, with its interests in emotion and spectacle, but it makes more sense to see the novel as engaged in the same imaginative adaptation of the past as the sophists.12

  Chariton’s past is ideologically constructed. The geographical structure of the novel marginalizes Athens in favor of Greek cities of the west and east, Syracuse and Miletus.13 Although the Sicilian Expedition provided opportunities for rhetorical reconstruction, Syracuse is not part of the normal declamatory repertoire. There may be a sophistic agenda here. The demotion of Athens is of a piece with Chariton’s disavowal of doctrinaire Atticism; the rhetor Dionysius appears, from analysis of the clausulae of the fragments of his orations to have been a moderate Asianist. It may also be a marker of the novels’ sense of doing something generically new that they either turn their backs on Athens or depict it unfavorably, though intertextually aligning themselves with the Athenian literary tradition.

  If Chariton shares the sophistic disposition to use the past as a way to define what it means to be Greek, he is equally concerned to do so geographically and culturally. From Herodotus onward, it was a trope of Greek thought to define Greekness by constructing a series of antithetical “others.” Like many of the novels, Callirhoe presents a Hellenocentric plot, moving from a Hellenic center to a barbarian periphery and back again.14 Its principal polarity is the canonical one between the Greek west and the Persian east, which carries the usual barbarian markers of an absolute king, servile eunuchs, scheming satraps, and sensual women.

  Callirhoe’s story takes her from her true love and first marriage to Chaereas in Syracuse, which is depicted as a fully functional democracy, to a reluctant but expedient second marriage to Dionysius in Miletus, and thence to Babylon, where the Persian king hears a legal dispute between Dionysius and the satrap Mithridates, whom he accuses of trying to steal his wife. Miletus is nominally under Persian governance, Dionysius is described as a friend of the Great King, and there is no sign of functioning civic institutions, though the Persian presence seems not very oppressive and limited to attending ceremonial occasions. It would be neat if Chariton had a world-scheme shading from democratic Syracuse in the west to Persian despotism in the east, with Miletus occupying an intermediate position, culturally and politically as well as geographically. It does not work quite so simply, however. The lack of political activity in Miletus is simply due to the exigencies of this section of the plot, which is set in the private space of Dionysius’s country property. No negative markers of luxury and effeminacy are attached to Ionia. Chaereas admittedly makes a point of recruiting only Dorians into his mercenary force to fight the king (7.3.8), but his comments are focalized and expedient, and do not entail any authorial dialectic of Dorian superiority over Ionians. Dionysius is no less proficient and successful than Chaereas in the military arena, and his repeatedly stressed culture (paideia) is in no sense a symptom of Ionian softness. Although devoted to the memory of his first wife, and guiltily infatuated with Callirhoe, he is no habitual philanderer, and wrestles virtuously with emotions which he thinks unworthy of him.

  Greece is conceived as a cultural unity, despite the occlusion of Athens at its geographical center. The sea between Syracuse and Miletus connects rather than separates them: for Chaereas it is the means by which he can follow Callirhoe, and for her the means by which she can imagine rescue or return. The real division is between Greece and Persia, with the frontier specifically at the crossing of the Euphrates (Callirhoe 5.1.3), which also marks the structural division between the two halves of the novel, stressed by a second preface and résumé of the story-so-far at the beginning of book 5. Up to that point in her journey up-country, Callirhoe had heard Greek being spoken and could see the sea that connected her to Syracuse. Beyond the Euphrates she can see only an endless stretch of land inhabited by barbarians. To her the
river represents “the starting-point of the greater part of the king’s land” (from which the Greek-speaking cities of the coast and their hinterland are differentiated). Narrative time stands still while Callirhoe utters a passionate lament on the bank of the river. Crossing it is a symbolic moment of severance from home and family, from which she is separated by the entire cosmos (5.1.6). The river crossing appears to erase her true identity and constitutes a virtual death.

  Chariton’s Babylon possesses many of the traditional appurtenances of the Greek construct of Persia, but the polarity it represents is in some respects a surprising one. The case between Dionysius and Mithridates is held in a formal court of law, in which the king is advised by a council of his “friends” (5.4.5). This is a very constrained autocracy, with no sign of the arbitrary exercise of power, cruelty, and sexual perversion that will characterize Heliodorus’s representation of the Persian satrap’s palace. Inevitably, the king falls in love with Callirhoe, but he is inhibited by fear of public opinion and shame before his own wife from taking advantage of his position of absolute power in order to impose his will on her (6.1), and he even resists the temptations offered by his eunuch confidant (6.3). Even when the eunuch convinces him that, as Callirhoe has no husband, no approach to her can be considered as adultery, the king still insists that she must not be subject to compulsion and everything must be conducted in secrecy. It is the eunuch who offers the most radical antithesis to true Greekness. Having been brought up in a great tyranny, he considers nothing impossible for the king and himself (6.5.10), and confronted by Callirhoe’s free spirit resorts to threats of violence against Chaereas and herself. Chariton gives us Persian servility but not the tyranny.

  The antithesis presented here by the oriental “other” is a very mild one, essentially restricted to sexual ethics and dealing in degrees of conformity to convention and respect. The narrative distances the king from the worst excesses of autocratic monarchy and unloads them on to the eunuch, who pressures Callirhoe in ways not sanctioned by the king himself. Although the fictional setting in the late fifth and early fourth centuries BCE superficially retains the bipolarity of the classical worldview, it lacks the profound significance that once it had. For Chariton and his readers, the greatest anxieties are not the threats posed by an ideologically charged enemy, but concerns about behavior within a broadly agreed spectrum of values. The stereotypical “other” is thus reconfigured to meet the needs of the unipolar world of the empire, characterized by its cultural homogeneity and apparently permanent peace and security.

  The novel’s concern with civilized behavior crystallizes around its interest in paideia, a central concept of the sophistic mentality, and the crucial differentiator between elite and nonelite. The investment of large resources of time and money in nonpractical education, so as to master archaic but culturally endorsed linguistic modes and to deploy the whole intertextual arsenal of the classical canon, was a signifier of wealth and status so powerful that the education itself came to be seen as the necessary qualification for membership of the elite. More overtly, education was held to improve a person as a human being, so that to be a pepaideumenos meant to be a person of refinement, taste, and general decency. Chariton attaches greater emphasis to paideia than any other extant novelist, and though he never specifies exactly what it consists of, it is clearly an elite aspiration, recognized as such by both the narrator and the characters.15

  Paideia is associated most closely and frequently with Dionysius, and signifies both his social status and his sense of propriety. On his first appearance, he is described by his steward as surpassing all Ionians in wealth, birth, and paideia (1.12.6), a bundle of qualities that encapsulates his elite status completely. This view is echoed verbatim by the narrator (2.1.5), except that wealth and birth are combined under the heading of social status (axiôma). As Dionysius wrestles with his feelings for Callirhoe, the narrator calls on his status as pepaideumenos and an aspirant to virtue (aretê) to explain his scruples (2.4.1), and more graphically to characterize his battle not to drown in a sea of passion (3.2.6). When Dionysius has to tell Callirhoe of Chaereas’s reappearance at Babylon, he is able to do so with tact and sensitivity because he is pepaideumenos and intelligent (phronimos; 5.5.1). This combination recurs when he learns that he has lost Callirhoe forever, and is enabled to control the display of his emotions by reason of his intelligence (phronêsis) and paideia (8.5.10). These passages are formally in narrator-text, but the word pepaideumenos is dialogic; that is, the narrator is, as it were, quoting Dionysius’s self-definition. Callirhoe herself is quick to sense that paideia is central to Dionysius’s conception of himself when she flatters his humanity (philanthrôpia) and paideia as the qualities that would lead him to return her to her family (2.5.11).

  In these passages, paideia denotes not so much the process of education as the civilized refinement and culturally correct behavior that result from it. In one passage, however, the educational aspect of paideia is foregrounded. Dionysius’s fears before the trial are exacerbated by his understanding of the inconstant nature of Eros, which, as a pepaideumenos, he has derived from his knowledge of poetry, sculpture, and mythology (4.7.6). To the Second Sophistic mentality, the two senses of the word are not distinct. The pepaideumenos configures the knowledge and skills acquired through elite education as internalized values, display of which confirms his moral and social superiority. Paideia, in other words, is the mechanism which enables social status and moral worth to be elided. Chariton’s portrait of Dionysius exposes this hidden ideology with great perception, and suggests that he was an acute observer of the sophistic elite.

  The particular virtue which Dionysius derives from paideia is mastery of his passions. He demonstrates this both in his behavior toward Callirhoe, against whom he refuses to use compulsion, and, less successfully, in his self-projection to his peers and his household, from whom he tries to hide his infatuation, considering it adolescent in itself and, when focused on a woman whom he believes to be a bought slave, unworthy of his social position (2.4.1). In a remarkable scene, Chariton stages this inner conflict as one between passion and reason, figured through metaphors of storms at sea and military assault. It is, of course, a struggle which Dionysius cannot win, and in trying to fight it at all he is setting himself in opposition to one of the novel’s basic generic assumptions, that love is paramount. The protagonist Chaereas is differentiated from Dionysius precisely in his failure to control his emotions: he sets the plot in motion by kicking his wife in a fit of jealousy, and repeatedly gives way to suicidal despair, from which he is always saved by his faithful friend, Polycharmus. Only once, toward the end of the novel, is Chaereas granted paideia, in a situation where it marks his cultural superiority to the Egyptian leader of the rebellion from Persia (7.2.5). Chaereas is not literally uneducated, but he has not internalized the values of his education in the way that a true pepaideumenos like Dionysius can. This is partly a matter of years and maturity, but also of innate temperament; even at the end of the novel Callirhoe avoids arousing his innate jealousy (emphytos zêlotypia, 8.4.4). Even Callirhoe is allowed more paideia than her male counterpart: first, when she uses her paideia and intelligence to control her anger toward the Persian eunuch (6.5.8), and second, when she sensitively consoles the Persian queen after her capture (7.6.5).

  The fact that Dionysius loses the battle against his passions does not mean that his paideia is structurally devalued. In fact, the novel, especially in its portrayal of Dionysius, inscribes and explores the moment of transition in the conception of the self in the early empire charted by Foucault (1984) and Konstan (1994), when classical paradigms of gender relationships, rooted in disparity and male self-control, gave way to the idea that reciprocal passionate love could form the foundation of personally satisfying and lasting marriage. Chariton in effect dramatizes the transition in the confrontation of his two main male characters, but he avoids taking sides. Although Chaereas is to some extent rehabilitated by his milita
ry successes, through which he can assert a conventional masculinity, he remains the most problematic and unendorsed of the genre’s heroes: the novel’s happy ending is disturbed by suggestions that Callirhoe’s life is not about to relapse into uneventful happiness. Dionysius, on the other hand, although he plays the generic role of the unwanted rival, possesses the virtues that the hero so conspicuously lacks, and is allowed a sympathetic inner life unparalleled in any other extant novel. As a study of alternative amatory paradigms, Callirhoe remains acutely and sensitively poised, reflecting the cultural tensions of the moment of its composition, despite its setting in a period several hundred years earlier.

  That dramatic setting enforces a classical geography, and excuses the absence of the central fact of the imperial period: the power of Rome. If Chariton was truly a native of Aphrodisias, he came from a city with particularly close links with Rome, among whose sculptures appear to be representations of scenes from the Aeneid.16 When she returns to Syracuse with Chaereas at the end of the novel, Callirhoe leaves her son (whom Dionysius believes to be his child but who in fact is Chaereas’s) in Miletus with Dionysius, with a request to send him to Sicily when he grows up (8.4.6). Just as the story of a beautiful woman with two husbands casts Callirhoe as a second Helen,17 so the idea of the son of a woman who is closely associated with, and indeed mistaken for, Aphrodite, suggests a parallel with Aeneas, son of Venus, and his journey from Asia to Italy to become the founder of the Roman race. However, it is very difficult to substantiate an explicitly pro-Roman reading of the novel. Rather the concerns of the Greek elite in the Roman Empire and their accommodations, to mutual advantage, with the governing power are reflected in the novel in the relations between the Greek cities of Asia and Persia. This is not to suggest anything as crude as that we should read Chariton’s Persia as Rome-in-disguise, with the potentially anti-Roman agenda that implies, though we have seen that the historical Dionysius held a position under Hadrian which Philostratus could describe as satrap. It is rather that Chariton takes for granted, and is interested in exploring, a world where Greek identity must be negotiated and maintained in the absence of full political autonomy. The historical inaccuracies of his mise en scène can be partly explained as the imposition of contemporary circumstances on the historical record. For instance, we have a late fifth-century Greece where there is no war and in which easy communications exist. The provincial authorities of the governing power work in association with the local aristocracies. Just as Greek cities regularly referred disputes and complaints to the emperor in Rome, and sent sophists as part of the delegation, so in the novel Dionysius’s accusation that the satrap Mithridates has tried to seduce his wife is referred to the Great King. At the hearing, the king is accompanied by friends and freedmen, and some unspecified “fellow judges” (5.4.8); the opposing sides are allowed to present their arguments, and despite Mithridates’s dramatic production of Chaereas, whom both Callirhoe and Dionysius had believed dead, due judicial processes are observed.18 All this reflects the kind of legal procedure with which Chariton (who introduces himself as a lawyer’s clerk) and his audience would have been familiar; we might even speculate that there is a respectful reflection of the dealings of the real Dionysius of Miletus with the Roman court. The relative mildness of Chariton’s Persia speaks to the Greek experience of Roman rule in the first centuries CE better than would an attempt to recreate the despotic theocracy of the historical Persia of the classical period. The location of the novel’s Greek center in the Italian west and the resultant marginalization of democratic Athens are perhaps a further reflection of the Greek elite’s accommodation with the realities of Roman rule. There is nothing as simple as a pro- or anti-Roman agenda being played out: the point is that the fiction can dramatize the aspirations and fears of its Greek elite readership without committing itself to a contemporary setting.