This paper seeks to highlight and assess the presence of allusions to Roman military apparatus in Chariton'sChaereas and Callirhoe. In the introduction, I contextualise the argument within the history of scholarship on the novel, and discuss issues relating to the author's date, Aphrodisian provenance and readership. I then divide the argument into three parts. At the end of the novel, Chaereas returns to Syracuse and publicly displays the spoils won from the east in a manner that, I argue, is highly suggestive of the Roman triumph (Parti). He then extends a grant of citizenship to the Greek element of his army and issues them cash donatives, while Hermocrates gives farmland to the Egyptians. As I demonstrate, this is characteristic of what happens upon the demobilisation of Roman military manpower (especially theauxilia) (Partii). I then draw out the ramifications of an imperial-era author who represents Greek military exploits against the Persians, writing during a period in which Greeks were not interested in military endeavours (Partiii).
In this article I make three interrelated claims about Chariton's use of ἀγαθὸς δαίμων in connection with the protagonist Chaereas, who is believed to be dead. First, that it reflects a funerary formula peculiar to inscriptions from Caria, and therefore potentially supports the author's declaration to be a native of Aphrodisias in Caria; second, that the use of this funerary formula suggests an awareness of events subsequent to the death of Nero (especially the series of false Neros), which has ramifications for the novel's date, use of imperial history, and ideological thrust; and third, that numismatic evidence from Alexandria supports an association between Chaereas and Nero.
Chariton's Chaereas and Callirhoe is a Greek novel that is extremely rich in historical and historiographical allusions. Virtually all of those so far detected derive from Greek texts and events in Greek history. In this article I shift the focus to Roman history, and suggest that Rome is not as absent as it is usually supposed to be in the Greek novels. In support of this claim, I propose that Chariton's choice of Sicily as a topographical setting can be related to three episodes from the Republican period that all involve Roman interventions in Sicily. Section I: the removal of Callirhoe (described at the beginning of the novel as an ἄγαλμα) from Syracuse recalls Verres’ provincial mismanagement of Sicily (73–71 BC), specifically his removal from Syracuse of Sappho's statue. Section II: the character of the pirate Theron is freighted with markers that point to the ‘pirate’ Sextus Pompey and his conflict with Octavian from 42–36 BC. Section III: Chaereas’ triumphant return to Syracuse at the end of the novel, loaded with spoils from the Persian king, symbolically reverses and redresses Marcellus’ sack of Syracuse in 211 BC. These all have significant ramifications for how readers (ancient and modern) approach the Greek novels.
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This work establishes and explores connections between Greek imperial literature and Latin poetry. As such, it challenges conventional thinking about literary and cultural interaction of the period, which assumes that imperial Greeks are not much interested in Roman cultural products (especially literature). Instead, it argues that Latin poetry is a crucially important frame of reference for Greek imperial literature. This has significant ramifications, bearing on the question of bilingual allusion and intertextuality, as well as on that of cultural interaction during the imperial period more generally. The argument mobilizes the Greek novels—a literary form that flourished under the Roman Empire, offering narratives of love, separation, and eventual reunion in and around the Mediterranean basin—as a series of case studies. Three of these novels in particular—Chariton’s Chaereas and Callirhoe, Achilles Tatius’ Clitophon and Leucippe, and Longus’ Daphnis and Chloe—are analysed for the extent to which they allude to Latin poetry, and for the effects (literary and ideological) of such allusion. After an Introduction that establishes the cultural context and parameters of the study, each chapter pursues the strategies of an individual novelist in connection with Latin poetry: Chariton and Latin love elegy (Chapter 1); Chariton and Ovidian epistles and exilic poetry (Chapter 2); Chariton and Vergil’s Aeneid (Chapter 3); Achilles Tatius and Latin love elegy (Chapter 4); Achilles Tatius and Vergil’s Aeneid (Chapter 5); Achilles Tatius and the theme of bodily destruction in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Lucan’s Bellum Civile, and Seneca’s Phaedra (Chapter 6); Longus and Vergil’s Eclogues, Georgics, and Aeneid (Chapter 7). The work offers the first book-length study of the role of Latin literature in Greek literary culture under the empire and thus provides fresh perspectives and new approaches to the literature and culture of this period.
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