Romantic Paradises : The Rôle of the Garden in the Byzantine Romance

Littlewood, Antony Robert

doi:10.1179/030701379790206484

Cited by 22 publications

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“…Littlewood also assimilates Leucippe with Clitophon's garden. 10 Drawing upon the erotically charged vocabulary in Clitophon's description of the garden, he proposes an allegorical reading of it and regards the hedges and walls as symbols for Leucippe's virginity. Bartsch (1989: 52-3), for her part, observes that the meadow on the painting in the novel's prologue is described in equally erotic vocabulary.…”

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A Flowery Meadow and a Hidden Metalepsis in Achilles Tatius

Temmerman¹

2009

The Class. Q.

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It is commonly known that Achilles Tatius' Leucippe and Clitophon is set apart from the other ancient Greek novels by its narrative technique. 1 It is the only extant Greek novel in which the story is narrated by the protagonist himself. 2 The novel's prologue is set in Sidon, where an anonymous narrator beholds a painting of Europa's abduction by Zeus and gives a lengthy description of it (1.1.2-13). The painting is simultaneously viewed by a young man who turns out to be Clitophon, the hero of the novel, and the two men begin a conversation about the power of eros. Clitophon is invited by the primary narrator to tell about his own experiences with eros. Once Clitophon has started his narration (1.3.1), the primary narrator never intervenes, and the frame narrative in Sidon is apparently never resumed. 3 This note contributes to the wider issue of narrative structure in Achilles Tatius. I argue that Clitophon's portrayal of Leucippe at the end of the first book (1.19) contains a deliberate reference to the frame narrative and thus constitutes an example of the narratological device of metalepsis, defined by G. Genette as 'a deliberate transgression of the threshold of embedding'. 4 Metalepsis, then, is the slippage between different levels of narration, or, in M. Fludernik's words, 'the move of existants or actants from any hierarchically ordered level into one above or below'. 5 In SHORTER NOTES 667 8 We are very grateful to Rhiannon Ash, Mikolaj Szymanski, and CQ's referee for suggesting various improvements. 1 The novel is usually dated in the early second half of the second century A.D. See OCD 3 s.v. Achilles Tatius and E. Bowie, 'The chronology of the earlier Greek novels since B.E. Perry: revisions and precisions', Ancient Narrative 2 (2002), 47-63, at 60-1, who proposes A.D. 164 as a terminus ante quem. 2 On the uniqueness of this homodiegetic narration in the novelistic corpus, see, among others,

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