Utopian themes in Three Greek Romances.
Delivered at the International Conference on the Novel, ICAN 2000,
Wednesday, July 26, 2000
Dr. Jean Alvares, Department of Classics and General Humanities,
Montclair State University, Upper Montclair, New Jersey, 07043 USA.
alvaresj@mail.montclair.edu;
www.chss.montclair.edu/classics/alvares.html
When we consider the utopias of the Greco-Roman world, we think of those of Plato, of Iambulus and Euhemerus as transmitted by Diodorus, the utopian experiment of King Agis as described by Plutarch; sometimes we include the primitive paradise, such as Homer's Ethiopia or Hesiod's Golden Age, plus various apocalyptic Kingdoms of God, and the comic utopias of Aristophanes. But utopian studies, as now conducted, consider not only formal utopias, but utopian themes, which can exist in even the most naturalistic literary work, if only ironically. The Greek romances are often called ideal, but a fuller description of their ideal elements needs to be presented beyond the usual references to the couple's idyllic love, fidelity and enjoyment of the happy end. Today I would like to give the preliminaries of such a description, relying particularly on the methodologies of Northrop Frye, Ernst Bloch, and Fredric Jameson. An understanding of these utopian themes and their presence within these texts can better illuminate their full reception by their readers, as well as their place within their intellectual and ideological contexts and in the progress of historical change. For those interested in teaching the ancient novel in a wider literary and humanistic context, these investigations will also yield valuable information. Since I am in the intermediate stages of this project, I look forward to and solicit your comments.
Before I consider the novels individually, let me review the major critical approaches I have found useful.
Although many elements of Frye's myth-critical methods are suspect, his survey of the characters and patterns of romance remains invaluable. Frye, with the structuralists, stresses how literary creation and reception depend largely on preexisting patterns, sometimes referred to as archetypes, although there is nothing metaphysical about them. That the Greek romances’ basic plot is so easily described fits Frye's dictum that most romances are rigidly conventional, being based on patterns of action, character and image proven to best express various conceptions of, desires concerning and feelings about human life and the world. Later fictions are often simply realistic displacements of these ideal patterns of signification. And since the conceptions, desires and emotions expressed by these patterns remain valid even today, these patterns, due to their constant employment, have, through long association, acquired a certain weight of meaning independent of their context.
Note how often our texts themselves point out these archetypes, implicitly directing the reader toward a greater significance for their characters and events. For example, Chariton’s Callirhoe is compared to, and mistaken for, a goddess; thus Dionysios, suspicious of her real identity, informs Leonas that "historians and poets tell us that divine beings are compelled to associate with mortals," and, later, Chaireas and Dionysios imagine some god has abducted or tried to seduce Callirhoe. It is recognized that, while the romances are not mystery texts, they do employ many of the same narrative and symbolic patterns as do myth and cult, which provide a space wherein individuals could imaginatively experience a better world. The romance also provides such a space; these archetypal patterns, having brought their burden of meaning into the text, allow the reader to experience the events and characters of romance as another expression of these views of human life, nature and the divine.
The Greek romances largely conform to the patterns of Frye's muthos of romance, whose six phases describe the protagonist's life, adventures, achievements and their ultimate significance. The outlooks of comedy and romance, for Frye, are basically positive, and at their heart utopian. The first three phases of romance detail the hero's life: his mysterious birth, his usually innocent upbringing, and finally his adventures, journeys and Quests, at whose end the elements of a new society appear, for example, Perseus founding Mycenae. The final three phases concentrate more on society and its wider concerns and contemplation of what has happened. Thus in the fourth phase an innocent (or superior) world is initially in view, and the hero must defend its purity which, in the Greek romances, is embodied in protagonists' virginity and the erotic fidelity.
Such myth-thematic criticism highlights those patterns informing our romances and the reader's interpretation of them, patterns recalling images of a more ideal society or the creation of one, and its defense, maintenance, and continuation, as well as those elements pertaining to the individual perfection of the protagonists and their erotic bond.
The Marxist criticism of Ernst Bloch views these and other utopian elements as part of a wider history of humanity's imagining of a better world; his three volume The Principal of Hope demonstrates how the dream of a truly human society perpetually haunts all our productions, literary and otherwise. But not all of these utopian imaginings are mere wish-fulfillment; some can be classed as anticipations of future developments (Bloch's 'objectively real possible'), on the principle that social improvements (defined as those which remove our slavery to Necessity and alienation) must first appear in the imagination and its productions and be disseminated before they are actualized.
My third important influence is Frederick Jameson, especially his The Political Unconscious. His analysis stresses how contradictions and oppressions within society exert so powerful an effect on our consciousness that our literature cannot help but reflect them, even when these conditions are an 'absent cause' determining what cannot be addressed. While literature, created primarily for the upper classes, often serves to justify or obscure these contradictions, nevertheless imaginative literature sometimes reveal the lineaments of a more concrete solution grounded in the social practice and potential of the author's society, and it is these that Jameson’s analysis would have us seek.
These preliminaries over with, let us consider the more obvious expressions of utopian thought in Chariton's Chaireas and Callirhoe, Heliodorus' Aithiopika and Longus' Daphnis and Chloe, with a particular focus on Chariton's romance.
That romance, to the extent it is a story of Syracuse, Hermocrates and Callirhoe, generally conforms to Frye's 4th phase romance; an ideal Syracuse has been proven by Hermocrates' defeat of Athens, and now its excellence must protected and maintained. This is undertaken in the persons of Chaireas and especially Callirhoe as they labor to safeguard their fidelity and moral purity. Being children of the first and second men of Syracuse, they also represent the next generation of Syracuse’s rulers. Further, their child, the excellence of whose upbringing and return is insisted upon, and whose future history is linked to the mythical paradigms of heroes like Cyrus and Amphion, promises for Syracuse a future of further excellence. Thus the outcome of the couple's adventures not only maintains the present, but also provides for Syracuse's future.
As noted above, Callirhoe is often depicted as a goddess come to earth, and there are considerable parallels between her adventures and sufferings and the myths of Demeter and Kore, the goddess who descends through a type of death into a lower world, overcomes its powers, and rises again to gain new honor and bring benefit to mortals. Both girls are abducted from Sicily and endure symbolic death, and are compelled, due to trickery and force, to unwillingly undergo marriages with somebody of undoubted nobility; Both Demeter and Chaireas, pursing their lost beloved, are disguised and assume servitude. Both heroines also remain in some way tied to the lower realm; Kore must return yearly to Hades, and Callirhoe leaves her child with Dionysios to be raised; Kore and Demeter receive new honors after their return, and likewise Chaireas and Callirhoe return with new status and riches. As the struggles of Demeter and Kore created a new, beneficent relationship with the gods that persons of varied nationalities can share in, the crowd of Greek and non-Greeks Chaireas brings with him obtain a home in this superior Syracuse due to their relationship with the couple. These evident correspondences with the Kore paradigm would give Callirhoe's story the undertones of a myth wherein a better relationship between humans and the divine was forged.
Chaireas' own story reflects the 3rd phase quest romance. His labors, however, which involve penitential suffering in pursuit of a woman clearly his superior, recall those more spiritualized quests of medieval romance, whose heroes suffer in service to a lady who raises the young man to a higher level, Goethe's eternal feminine that draws us upward. Considering Callirhoe’s status as the avatar of Aphrodite, a fundamental power that can even overrule Tyche, on an archetypal level Chaireas returns to Syracuse not only having attained heroic honor through his deeds, but having been thoroughly converted into a faith which he had earlier held imperfectly.
As Bloch's survey shows, a persistent utopian dream concerns a world made friendly to the fulfillment of want, desire and passion, as seen most simply in the dreams of a land of Cockaigne or Luikkerland. But utopias based on this dream have more substantial expressions, for example the matrices of carefully matched passions of Fourier's Phalansteries, or in the utopia of artistry and unalienated labor of Morris' News from Nowhere. Obviously the Greek romance provides a fantasy of the fulfillment of erotic desire, but the utopian hypothesis goes deeper, suggesting that, in a proper world, devotion to erotic ideals could bring about a greater success for society as well as for the individual than the pursuit of the usual motivators of history, such as wealth, status and power. Thus Chaireas' erotically motivated exploits reproduce the successes of Alexander, Xenophon, Leonidas and the Athenians at Salamis, and his triumph is presented as superior to that of Hermocrates, for he brings to Syracuse not the poverty of Attika, but the riches of Persia.
Further, this most obviously historical of the extant romances is particularly rich in idealistic depictions of society that can be set against then-current contradictions, such as the spread of despotism and the decline of even quasi-democratic institutions, and, for the Greeks, the tension between their rich cultural tradition and the realities of Roman power. While Chariton's Persia is no allegorical figuration of Roman rule, in his description of Persian despotism his reader could intuit a discourse about the realities of his own life under Roman power, as well as the elements of an imaginable alternative. While Chariton's ideal government is one guided by a first man (a view promulgated by Stoic and Cynic speculations), several successful democratic processes appear, for example, when the Syracusans come together in the theater (even the women!), and their public request that the couple be married is acceded to. The Egyptians 'elect by show of hands' their king, as the Persian women elect Rhodogyne to face Callirhoe in the beauty contest. City life in Asia Minor in Chariton's era was marred by aristocratic rivalries; note how Hermocrates, being philopatris, bows to public will and allows his daughter to marry his rival’s son, and how members of the Syracusan Demos and Boule are united in their desire to join the embassy to retrieve Callirhoe. A common dream of Utopia is the international inclusive state. The rhetoric of Rome as well as Judeo-Christian apocalyptic expressed this ideal, as did Chariton's romance. A multiethnic micro-empire, comprised of Dorians, Aradians, Cypriots, and Egyptians, spontaneously arranges itself around Chaireas and follows him to Syracuse, a marked contrast to the Persian empire, which must use force to hold itself together. Further, in Syracuse Chaireas' three hundred Dorians are given immediate citizenship, and even the Egyptians are provided for by grants of farmland from Hermocrates. Women in literature often operate as a sign for the marginalized and powerless; yet note how Callirhoe and Statira create and promise to maintain channels of communication and influence, while never falling into bitter rivalries like the men. This activity embodies the hope for alternative ways of action and communication, in contrast to the prevailing rules of power and status. Indeed, the passive qualities of the hero of Greek romance parallels the alternative vision of heroism through suffering offered by Christianity. And Syracuse itself, free and well-governed, certainly embodies the Greek dream (if only a dream) of independence from Roman domination.
Now to Heliodorus' Aithiopika. Romance's various phases, as seen in a complete cycle of tales, can describe the protagonist's whole career. To the extent the Aithiopika is Charikleia's story, it conforms to 1st, 2nd and 3rd phase romances that narrate the hero's mysterious birth, upbringing in innocence and subsequent adventures. The mysterious child's father in undisplaced myth is a god (such as fathered Romulus and Jesus), reduced in more realistic versions to an important mortal, such as a king. Although technically Hydaspes' daughter, Charikleia, conceived as Persinna viewed a painting of Andromeda (whom she resembles exactly), is like a Platonic form come to Earth. The marvelous child is frequently abandoned and, upon the resumption of its true identity, creates or restores an entire society, as did Romulus. One method of renewal is through the incorporation of outside elements; in C & C Callirhoe's child will inherit the best of Asia before his return to Syracuse, thus combining (and linking) the two worlds to the betterment of both. A more profound merging of worlds occurs in Charikleia, who is raised at Delphi by the priest Charikles, and obtains a second foster father in the Egyptian priest Calasiris and finally marries Theagenes, descendent of Achilles, that paradigm of Greek aretê. Charikleia and Theagenes as future rulers will blend the best of Ethiopia, Greece and even Egypt.
More obviously utopian is Meroe itself, associated with Herodotus' ideal Ethiopians who repelled Persian aggression. Meroe's government, ruled by a priest-king and an advisory council of philosopher/saints, the Gymnosophists, which pursues, in the worship of the Sun and Moon, a celestial harmony, shows parallels with later philosophical utopias like Campanella's City of the Sun, as well as the solar-oriented theologies of later antiquity.
In terms of more concrete figurations, the multiethnic state that appears only at the end of C & C is already in place, for Hydaspes rules a world-spanning empire that includes Eastern and Western Ethiopians and has allies in the Troglodytai, Blemmyes, and even the Seres. Further, Hydaspes' Ethiopians are able to successfully resist a dishonest, expansionist power, rather like Hermocrates repelled the Athenians. And while Meroe is no obvious democracy, there is, as in Syracuse, fruitful interaction between populace and Hydaspes, as the final events reveal.
Thyamis' story has interesting implications concerning human character. Later Egyptian papyri attest to the considerable problem of anachoresis, an individual’s abandonment of civic life, often to become a so-called 'brigand'. An increasingly burdensome Roman administration, with the cooperation of local Egyptian elites, was largely responsible for this. Brent Shaw has shown how imprecise and ideological the very designation 'brigand' could be, and how such individuals were often reincorporated into Roman society. Thyamis' history illustrates this process. He is forced illegally out of his proper office by his brother working with the corrupt Persian princess Arsake, which drives Thyamis to become leader of the infamous Boukoloi. The later transformation of Thyamis from lustful bandit prepared to murder Charikleia to a high priest of Memphis is more acceptable if personal evil is considered a function of social conditions rather than of innate character, a basic tenant of many utopian programs, such as Robert Owen's, as well as the thinking of the modern welfare state.
To the extant that Meroe is a protagonist (as is Israel in the Hebrew Bible), its story is a 4th phase romance, where an idealized society already exists and must be defended and improved, again in the purity and identity of Charikleia. As Chaireas’ lack of trust brought about Callirhoe's removal to Asia, so Hydaspes' anticipated lack of faith makes Persinna exile their child. In the end, both men learn a valuable lesson about their wives’ fidelity as well as about divine providence. A more fundamental problem is the Ethiopian's custom of human sacrifice. Jameson points out the substantial challenge to utopian reform posed by a society's still-living remnants of various prior means of production and their social formations, some quite primitive. This Eithiopian custom epitomizes all those stubborn survivals of previous epochs that still consume human lives. Thus the trials the young couple endure at Meroe preliminary to their marriage symbolize those necessary struggles that must accompany the clearing away of the unusable past. Marriage is itself symbolic of a new society, and, as in modern weddings, the past is not completely negated; something old must be present, here Charikleia's recognition tokens, which represent the secrets of her origins, as well as Andromeda's portrait, which she exactly resembles, connecting Charikleia the recreatrix with the original suffering creatrix of Ethiopia and thus to Eliade's primal creative epoch. Again, one recalls in early Christian and medieval writing (see also Vergil's 4th Eclogue) how the future was presented as the past replayed. Charikles too appears, both as part of her past to be incorporated into her future, but also, since he is a priest of Apollo, as a potential and important link to Greece.
Finally, Longus’ Daphnis and Chloe, whose many utopian elements are evident ? echoes of the primitive rural paradise, the presentation of a childhood innocence reproducing humankind's primordial guiltlessness, plus gods actively safeguarding their worthy favorites. Yet the romance clearly details many horrific social realities, such as the practice of child exposure, the utter power of masters over slaves, the predatory rule of city over countryside. But further utopian elements are found in the ways Longus combines the nearly mythic and the almost realistic.
Daphnis and Chloe is primarily a second phase romance that describes the protagonists' ideal upbringing, one verging on comedy, which for Frye centers on marriage, fertility and the forming of a new society, whose successful heroes are more lucky than effectual. Here too are marvelous children, conceived normally by high ranked urban aristocrats, as in New Comedy. This paradigm connects the other utopian themes, since marvelous children in myth often create or renew society; we are explicitly told that Eros intends to make Chloe a muthos, which, as MacQueen as shown, is a paradigm for a new type of relationship between male and female. But a more significant model for society will be created also.
In the romances of Chariton and Heliodorus ideal political states already existed, which were then defended and improved by the protagonists. But the utopia of D & C's beginning is potential, its preliminary conditions existing in the natural innocence of human beings and the benevolence of physical nature and its indwelling gods. But to develop those potentials, art, so strongly thematized throughout the text, must come into play. A reoccurring item of Bloch's survey was the vision of a humanized nature, which is no rude physical world to be brutally reworked, but rather a cooperative nature remade for humanity, and its earliest expressions is that of the created garden ? an feature that figures prominently in Longus. The prominence given to art underscores the ability of human intellect and effort to remake the world; thus Chloe's beauty can only be fully manifested when given an urban makeover, as only within a garden are plants able to fully achieve their potential participation in Beauty.
Here too various cultures merge to create a superior society. Daphnis and Chloe, born aristocrats, suckled by animals, raised as slaves in the pastoral world and watched over by its divinities, and who regain their urban status without completely abandoning their pastoral lifestyle, thus synthesize the realms of city and country, of animals, humans and the gods. The wedding party (and often the apocalyptic world, as in the Gospels, is described as a feast or party) where city folk, rustics and even animals join in, shows that new world in microcosm.
Thyamis' rehabilitation was linked to a corrected social situation; note how Lykainion, Gnathon and even the potential rapist Lykourgos attend the wedding party, which presents a model for the ideal, undivided world, where even the villains are welcomed, since the social contradictions responsible for their actions are here dissolved. It is fitting that Dionysiophanes, Dionysios manifest, presides, since he is a god who breaks down the alienating boundaries between persons (as Cadmus and Tiresias point out in the Bacchae) as well as the borders between human and the natural world.
All three romances describe cycles and patterns of divine activity. Chariton presents the workings of Aphrodite and Eros and a history where the paradigmatic successes of the Greek past are reproduced but out of a different motivation; Heliodorus reveals a divine realm connected to the cycles of the sun and moon and shows the past as prologue to a better future. Further, the self-conscious cleverness of the Aithiopika's author is a model for a showman-god of near inscrutable manipulation; Longus' romance combines the primordial Eros of Orphism with the great cycles of physical nature and human biological development. All these presentations of the divine show gods that are ultimately beneficent, and a universe that is in its events a connected whole, a perspective largely shared by later monotheistic religions.
This overview hardly exhausts the topic. While the narrative of triumphant love was the most rewarding element for most readers of the Greek romance, this did not preclude other sources of engagement. The patterns our romances share with myths and religious formulations which posit a better world to a certain degree imported this perspective into them. The persistence of literary works, theologies and rites and other creative productions based on these perspectives testifies to the large numbers for whom such a possibility was able to enjoyed, if not faithfully believed. Certainly images of a freer, less alienated society would have had their delights alongside romantic Eros. And we need better appreciate the attractive power of these dreams to fully understand what the world of Greek romance meant for its readers.
And as I think of what this means to us, I realize that, for many, utopianism is foolish and naïve. And perhaps it is; yet by pointing out this dream’s persistence in our analysis of literary texts, and thereby giving further evidence of its durability in human history, we will aid those who still can imagine possible radical change, helping them know that there will be always a ground wherein the beginnings of a better world may take root. Thank you.
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