The Oxford Handbook of the Second Sophistic

by Daniel S. Richter

  In conclusion, it is difficult, even impossible, to assess the socio-cultural reasons for this shift from marital constancy in the earlier novels to an emphasis on the intact physical body that, from a literary point of view, transforms the narrative pulse of the story into one of delay and deferral, with increased (and more explicit) erotic content. At the same time, I have already pointed out that these two romances, divergent as they are, demonstrate, each in its own way, their skill in confronting the normative topoi of their predecessors through humor, irony, and “clever refashioning of traditional themes,”31 with a self-conscious awareness of their works as fiction. Various theories have been offered to account for the rise of the novel in general, whether a new focus on the role of private emotions and selfhood, or the product of a supposed reorganization of sexual protocols in the imperial period. This change not only foregrounds the erotic at the expense of all other concerns, for male as for female, but emphasizes the reciprocal basis of the marriage bond.32 As Whitmarsh observes, “the emergence of romance is even more difficult to relate to particular historical changes, because it was, it appears, composed outside of civic institutions.”33 Nevertheless, some have claimed that the marriage of elites formed the basis of civic stability, or was itself a symbolic celebration of the social order and its presiding deities—its veil of power.34 Hence the focus on an initiatory scenario that sees legitimate wedlock as the only desired outcome in the socialization of the young.35. Conversely, the genre, in its elaboration of “adventure time,” has been termed a form of escapist literature that enlivened the predictable rhythms of humdrum life.36

  The trials and tribulations suffered by the protagonists in a world beset with uncertainty away from home may be exciting, but also indicative of what has been called an “age of anxiety” in which “identity politics” are held up to disquieting confusion.37 In the end, it must be said, “cultural forms like literature do not straightforwardly reflect a pre-existing reality. . . . Rather they offer a framework for perceiving it,” and must, in the broadest sense, answer to the tastes of their readers on intellectual and aesthetic grounds.38 In the period of the Second Sophistic, the genre has evolved to include both the more playful and the more serious aspects of life, without ever really questioning in the end the prescribed roles for masculine and feminine identities or compromising the need to tame erotic desire in the service of social respectability. Leucippe’s ardent defense of her person in maintaining her chastity against all odds when confronted with the lustful Thersandros gives her the right to speak with a newfound eloquence (6.21–22). It attests to the larger role granted to women on a par or even at a higher level than men that no other genre granted them. But Leucippe’s choice of Artemis over Aphrodite obeys the rules of male hegemonic authority, as she learned the hard way, and which the course of the entire novel shows she cannot gainsay. Chloe, on the other hand, begins to diminish in stature the more that Daphnis grows into manhood, with all its attendant responsibilities (as well as his newfound knowledge about sex). While the projection into the future of their life together just before they are wed in the last book promises to restore the symmetry of their partnership in all their pastoral activities, it is no accident that her previous ascendancy over him gives way to his mastery of the skills of life, whether as musician, storyteller, or gardener, which in the presence of the city folk earns him the anagnorisis of his parentage well before hers. On their wedding night, Daphnis is the teacher, following Lycaenion’s lessons, and “for the first time Chloe learned that what had happened on the edge of the woods was nothing but shepherds’ games” (4.40.3).

  This brief discussion of the two sophistic novels cannot, by necessity, begin to encompass the richness of their literary textures nor the subtleties of their narrative art that have gained critical admiration over the last several decades. While the novel was formerly relegated to the margins of Greek literature and its products often scorned as unworthy heirs to the classical tradition, today’s climate of opinion has undergone a quite drastic shift in the assessment of the value of these works as cultural artifacts. Aided by theoretical considerations in a number of domains (e.g., feminism, narratology, postcolonialism, etc.), by a rediscovery of imperial Greek literature as a whole in a new emphasis on the diffusion of Hellenic identity and Hellenization itself, and by a widespread interest in gender identity, both masculine and feminine, along with constructions of the body and investigations of emotion, the novel has garnered a substantial (and increasing) bibliography, which in particular has shed much-needed illumination on both Longus and Achilles Tatius.39

  FURTHER READING

  These suggestions are for Anglophone readers. Translations of both Longus and Achilles Tatius in Reardon 2008 and their respective Loeb editions (Longus: Henderson 2009; Achilles Tatius: Gaselee 1969). For Longus, see also Morgan 2004 (with introduction and commentary). For Achilles Tatius, see Whitmarsh 2001, with introduction by Helen Morales. For comparison of the two works, Alvares 2006 and notably, Whitmarsh 2011, 69–107. Individual critical studies: Longus: on major themes such as religion, art, education, mimesis, pastoral, and intertextuality, see variously, Chalk 1960, Gillespie 2012, Hunter 1983 and 1996, Montiglio 2012, Nimis 2001, Pandiri 1985, and Zeitlin 1990. For Achilles Tatius: on major themes such as character, parody, ekphrasis, rhetoric, narrative, myths, landscape, psychology, and intertextuality, see Ballengee 2005, Brethes 2012, Chew 2000, Goldhill 1995, Martin 2002, Nimis 1998, Reardon 1994, Webb 2006, Whitmarsh 2003, and Zeitlin 2012. Morales’s 2004 in-depth study (the first of its kind) is essential reading. Finally, see Bartsch’s 1989 pathbreaking book on the role of description in Achilles Tatius, which, together with Morales, albeit in different ways, probes the unusual features of this visually inflected text.

  The study of the ancient novel has profited from an enormous increase in bibliography over these last years, often with multiple contributors to edited volumes. Whitmarsh 2011 is a good place to start, but see also Panayotakis, Zimmerman, and Keulen 2003, Schmeling (1996) 2003, Swain 1999, and Tatum 1994, and Zeitlin 2016, along with supplements to the publication Ancient Narrative on specific themes.

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Alvares, J. 2006. “Reading Longus’ Daphnis and Chloe and Achilles Tatius’ Leucippe and Clitophon in Counterpoint.” In Authors, Authority, and Interpreters in the Ancient Novel: Essays in Honor of Gareth L. Schmeling, edited by S. Byrne, E. Cueva, and J. Alvares, 1–33. Ancient Narrative Supplement 5. Groningen.

  Ballengee, J. R. 2005. “Below the Belt: Looking into the Matter of Adventure-Time.” In The Bakhtin Circle and Ancient Narrative, edited by B. Branham, 130–163. Ancient Narrartive Supplement 3. Groningen.

  Bartsch, S. 1989. Decoding the Ancient Novel: The Reader and the Role of Description in Heliodorus and Achilles Tatius. Princeton, NJ.

  Bierl, A. 2009. “Der griechische Roman—ein Mythos? Gedanken zur mythischen Dimension von Longos’ Daphnis und Chloe.” In Antike Mythen: Medien, Transformationen und Konstruktionen, edited by U. Dill and C. Walde, 709–739. Berlin.

  Bouffartigue, J. 2001. “Un triangle symbolique. Eros, Aphrodite et Artémis dans le roman de Leucippé et Clitophon.” In OPORA la belle saison de l'hellénisme. Edited by A. Billaut, 125–38. Paris

  Bowie, E., and S. Harrison. 1993. “The Romance of the Novel.” JRS 83: 159–178.

  Brethes, R. 2007. De l’idéalisme au réalisme: Une étude du comique dans le roman grec. Cardo 6. Salerno.

  Brethes, R. 2012. “How to Be a Man: Towards a Sexual Definition of the Self in Achilles Tatius’ Novel Leucippe and Clitophon.” In Narrating Desire: Eros, Sex, and Gender in the Ancient World, edited by M. P. F. Pinheiro, M. B. Skinner, and F. I. Zeitlin, 154–181. Berlin.

  Briand, M. 2006. “Formes et fonctions fictionnelles de la ‘muthologia’: Énonciations en catalogue et résumés dans les romans grecs anciens.” Kernos 19: 161–175.

  Chew, K. 2000. “Achilles Tatius and Parody.” CJ 96: 57–70.

  Chalk, H. H. O. 1960. �
�Eros and the Lesbian Pastorals of Longus.” JHS 80: 32–51.

  Effe, B. 1982. “Longos: Zur Funktionsgeschichte der Bukolik in der römischen Kaiserzeit.” Hermes 110: 65–84.

  Effe, B. 1999. “Longus: Towards a History of Bucolic and Its Function in the Roman Empire.” In Oxford Readings in the Greek Novel, edited by S. Swain, 189–209. Oxford.

  Foucault, M. 1988. The History of Sexuality. Vol. 3, The Care of the Self. Translated by R. Hurley. New York.

  Gaselee, S., trans. 1969. Achilles Tatius: Leucippe and Clitophon. Rev. ed. Cambridge, MA.

  Gillespie, C. 2012. “Creating Chloe: The Aesthetics of Education in Daphnis and Chloe.” In Aesthetic Value in Classical Antiquity, edited by I. Sluiter and R. Rosen, 421–446. Leiden.

  Goldhill, S. 1995. Foucault’s Virginity: Ancient Erotic Fiction and the History of Sexuality. Cambridge.

  Henderson, J., trans. 2009. Longus, Daphnis and Chloe: Xenophon of Ephesus, Anthia and Habrocomes. Cambridge, MA.

  Hunter, R. 1983. A Study of Daphnis and Chloe. Cambridge.

  Hunter, R. 1996. “Longus, Daphnis and Chloe.” In The Novel in the Ancient World, edited by G. Schmeling, 361–386. Leiden.

  Hunter, R. 1997. “Longus and Plato.” In Der antike Roman und seine mittelalterliche Rezeption, edited by M. Picone and B. Zimmermann, 15–28. Basel.

  Johnson, W. A., and H. N. Parker, eds. 2009. Ancient Literacies: The Culture of Reading in Greece and Rome. Oxford.

  Konstan, D. 1994. Sexual Symmetry: Love in the Ancient Novel and Related Genres. Princeton, NJ.

  Lalanne, S. 2006. Une éducation grecque: Rites de passage et construction des genres dans le roman grec ancien. Paris.

  Martin, R. P. 2002. “A Good Place to Talk: Discourse and Topos in Achilles Tatius and Philostratus.” In Space in the Ancient Novel, edited by M. Paschalis and S. A. Frangoulidis, 143–160. Ancient Narrative Supplement 1. Groningen.

  Merkelbach, R. 1988. Die Hirten des Dionysos: Die Dionysos-Mysterien der römischen Kaiserzeit und der bukolische Roman des Longus. Stuttgart.

  Montiglio, S. 2012. “The (Cultural) Harmony of Nature: Music, Love, and Order in Daphnis and Chloe.” TAPA 142: 133–156.

  Morales, H. 2004. Vision and Narrative in Achilles Tatius’ “Leucippe and Clitophon”. Cambridge.

  Morgan, J. R. 1996. “Erotika mathemata: Greek Romance as Sentimental Education.” In Education in Greek Fiction, edited by A. Sommerstein and C. Atherton, 163–189. Bari.

  Morgan, J. R. 2004. Longus, Daphnis and Chloe. Oxford.

  Nimis, S. 1998. “Memory and Description in the Ancient Novel.” Arethusa 31: 99–122.

  Nimis, S. 2001. “Cycles and Sequence in Longus’ Daphnis and Chloe.” In Speaking Volumes: Orality and Literacy in the Greek and Roman World, edited by J. Watson, 185–198. Mnemosyne Supplement 218. Leiden.

  Núñez, L. 2008. “Mythes enchâssés dans un roman grec: Achille Tatius entre erudition et divertissement.” Pallas 78: 319–334.

  Panayotakis, S., M. Zimmerman, and W. Keulen, eds. 2003. The Ancient Novel and Beyond. Leiden.

  Pandiri, T. A. 1985. “Daphnis and Chloe: The Art of Pastoral Play.” Ramus 14: 116–141.

  Pecere, O., and A. Stramaglia, eds. 1996. La letteratura di consumo nel mondo greco-latino. Cassino.

  Perkins, J. 1995. The Suffering Self: Pain and Narrative Representation in the Early Christian Era. London.

  Pinheiro, M. P. F., M. B. Skinner, and F. I. Zeitlin, eds. 2012. Narrating Desire: Eros, Sex, and Gender in the Ancient World. Berlin.

  Plepelits, K. 1980. Achilleus Tatios, Leukippe und Kleitophon. Stuttgart.

  Reardon, B. P. 1994. “Achilles Tatius and Ego-Narrative.” In Greek Fiction: The Ancient Novel in Context, edited by J. R. Morgan and R. Stoneman, 80–96. London. Reprinted in Oxford Readings in the Greek Novel, edited by S. Swain, 243–258. Oxford, 1999.

  Reardon, B. P., ed. 2008. Collected Ancient Greek Novels. 2nd ed. Introduction by J. R. Morgan. Berkeley, CA.

  Rohde, E. 1914. Der griechische Roman und seine Vorlaüfer. 3rd ed. Leipzig.

  Segal, C. P. 1984. “The Trials at the End of Achilles Tatius’ Clitophon and Leucippe: Doublets and Complementaries.” Stud. Ital. 3rd ser. 2: 83–91.

  Schmeling, G., ed. (1996) 2003. The Novel in the Ancient World. Leiden.

  Swain, S. 1996. Hellenism and Empire: Language, Classicism, and Power in the Greek World,AD50–250. Oxford.

  Swain, S., ed. 1999. Oxford Readings in the Greek Novel. Oxford.

  Tatum, J. 1994. The Search for the Ancient Novel. Baltimore, MD.

  Trapp, M. 1990. “Plato’s Phaedrus in Second-Century Greek Literature.” In Antonine Literature, edited by D. A. Russell, 141–173. Oxford.

  Webb. R. 2006. “Rhetoric and the Novel: Sex, Lies and Sophistic.” In A Companion to Greek Rhetoric, edited by I. Worthingon, 526–541. Oxford.

  Whitmarsh, T., trans. 2001. Achilles Tatius: Leucippe and Cleitophon. With introduction by H. Morales. Oxford.

  Whitmarsh, T. 2003. “Reading for Pleasure: Narrative, Irony and Erotics in Achilles Tatius.” In The Ancient Novel and Beyond, edited by S. Panayotakis, M. Zimmerman, and W. Keulen, 191–205. Leiden.

  Whitmarsh, T., ed. 2008. The Cambridge Companion to the Greek and Roman Novel. Cambridge.

  Whitmarsh, T. 2011. Narrative and Identity in the Ancient Greek Novel: Returning Romance. Cambridge.

  Zeitlin, F. I. 1990. “The Poetics of Eros: Nature, Art, and Imitation in Longus’ Daphnis and Chloe,” In Before Sexuality: The Construction of Erotic Experience in the Ancient Greek World, edited by D. Halperin, J. J. Winkler, and F. I. Zeitlin, 417–464. Princeton, NJ.

  Zeitlin, F. I. 2008. “Religion.” In The Cambridge Companion to the Greek and Roman Novel, edited by T. Whitmarsh, 91–108. Cambridge.

  Zeitlin, F. I. 2012. “Gendered Ambiguities, Hybrid Formations, and the Imaginary of the Body in Achilles Tatius.” In Narrating Desire: Eros, Sex, and Gender in the Ancient World, edited by M. P. F. Pinheiro, M. B. Skinner, and F. I. Zeitlin, 113–134. Berlin.

  Zeitlin, F. I. 2016. “Romancing the Classics: The Hellenic Standard and its Vicissitudes under the Empire. Ancient Narrative 13: 37–65.

  CHAPTER 27

  THE ANTI-SOPHISTIC NOVEL

  DANIEL L. SELDEN

  FEW aspects of Greek literary culture from the mid-first to the mid-fourth century CE did not in some measure fall under the influence of the Second Sophistic, and the “ancient novel” is no exception.1 “[N]o city,” Graham Anderson observes, “at any period in the Empire would have been too insignificant to receive a visit from some sophistically colored figure,”2 and we can extend this formulation to literary works as well. Whatever place romance occupied within the hierarchy of literary genres under Imperial rule, their relation to the Second Sophistic constitutes one important index to their meaning, whether they availed themselves of Sophistic literary devices or pointedly refused them.

  Ancient Mediterranean romance—to judge by its surviving fragments—flourished from the fourth century BCE through the seventh century CE,3 bookended roughly, at one end, by the Macedonian foundation of Alexandria in 331 BCE and, at the other, by ʿAmrū ibn al-ʿĀṣ’s capture of the city in 641 CE, under the directives of the Rāshidūn Ḫalīfah ʿUmar ibn al-Ḫattāb. Attested in a wide variety of Mediterranean and Levantine languages—including Imperial Aramaic, Greek, Late Middle Egyptian, Demotic, Latin, Hebrew, Coptic, Syriac, Armenian, Georgian, Samaritan, Pārsīg, Arabic, and Geʿez—only three of the surviving Greek novels show any significant affinity with the oratorical display culture of the Second Sophistic that Philostratus describes in his Lives of the Sophists: Achilles Tatius’s Leucippe and Clitophon, Longus’s Daphnis and Chloe, and Heliodorus’s Aethiopica 4—that is, somewhat under 1 percent of the extant novelistic corpus, a figure that hardly argues for the centrality of the Second Sophistic to the life of the Levantine-Mediterranean romance as a whole. Were it not for the popularity that these three works enjoy today, so exiguous a corpus would hardly merit
mention, though how and why certain Greek novels should have availed themselves of Second Sophistic literary devices (priëm),5 while the majority resisted or ignored them is a complex matter, albeit, from the viewpoint of the constellation of the genre, one of both historical and interpretive importance. Other chapters in this volume deal with novels attracted into the orbit of the Second Sophistic.6 This chapter, therefore, will focus on contemporary romances that gravitated elsewhere or mounted resistance.

  27.1

  A comparison (súnkrisis) between the opening of Dio of Prusa’s first oration On Kingship and the inaugural episode of the Alexander Romance, antiquity’s most successful novel,7 makes clear the difference in character between what amount to competing representations of the life of Alexander the Great.8 Alexander appears as one of the favored topoi of the period: Philostratus cites Dio as exemplary of the Imperial sophist,9 and hence his orations provide a benchmark against which to measure both the commonalities of the romances and their deviations.10 Ostensibly delivered before the emperor Trajan,11 Dio’s speech opens by comparing (sunkrίnein) the Macedonian monarch Alexander III with the Assyrian king Sardanapalus.