Achilles Tatius and the Destruction of Bodies

Chapter 6 argues that Achilles is attracted to the gallery of bodily carnage on offer in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Lucan’s Bellum Civile, and Seneca’s Phaedra, as part of his apparent obsession with the vulnerability of human bodies and their susceptibility to wounding. It makes four distinct arguments. Section 6.2 makes the case that the episode of Charicles’ death in Achilles manifests strong indications of interaction with the accounts of the gruesome death of Hippolytus in Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Seneca’s Phaedra. Section 6.3 demonstrates that Achilles (or rather Clitophon) exhibits a recurrent interest in bodily dismemberment and reconstitution analogous to that in Ovid and Neronian poetry (especially Lucan). Section 6.4 argues that the decapitation of ‘Leucippe’ in Book 5 not only is modelled on the similar fate of the historical Pompeius Magnus but also combines the accounts of this event found in Lucan and Plutarch. These sections suggest that Achilles is alive to developments in Neronian literature that privilege the aesthetics of gore and bodily destruction, and which reflect the Roman imperial taste for violence more generally (perhaps energized by the institution of the amphitheatre). Section 6.5 elaborates a number of ways in which Achilles is attracted to the arresting style and verbal wit of Ovid, especially in connection with his flood narrative.

Conclusion

The conclusion offers some final thoughts on the question pursued in this monograph, namely the Greek novelists’ engagement with Latin poetry, and what this means for how we model Graeco-Roman relations in the imperial period. It summarizes the findings of Chapters 1–7 and places them side by side in a way that clarifies how the different novelists approach the institution of Latin literature. At least for the three authors in question (Chariton, Achilles Tatius, Longus), the approach to Latin poetry is systematic rather than piecemeal. Allusion to Latin poetry is often playful, and occasionally ideological and potentially subversive (for example, Longus and the Aeneid). The conclusion also addresses the sociological problem of Greek imperial engagement with Latin literature: Greek literary men of the first two centuries CE were, it is suggested, habituated to practices that ensured the preservation of the Greek literary system as it stood. Failure to acknowledge the existence of a Latin poetic tradition in an overt manner served as one way of controlling the literary system.

Latin Poetry in the Ancient Greek Novels

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.

Achilles Tatius and Vergil’s Aeneid

Chapter 5 attends to Achilles Tatius’ engagement with Vergil’s Aeneid. The argument focuses on three main lines of enquiry (in all of which it is clear that Achilles is capitalizing on the erotic potential on offer in Vergil’s epic). Section 5.2 argues that Achilles models Melite’s plea for sex with Clitophon (articulated in two speeches) on Dido’s plea that Aeneas stay in Carthage (also articulated in two speeches), thus reducing Dido’s tragic hope for marital-political security to a wish for a single session of sex (Melite is successful in her wish). Section 5.3 takes as its subject the flushed cheeks of Leucippe in Book 1 (to which Clitophon responds erotically) and argues that it is modelled on the famous blush of Lavinia in Aeneid 12 (which fires Turnus with love). Section 5.4 ranges over a number of phraseological overlaps between Achilles and the Aeneid suggestive of a close engagement (especially in connection with the storm in Aeneid 1 and the character of Coroebus in Aeneid 2).

Achilles Tatius and Latin Elegy

Chapter 4 establishes the multiple connections between Achilles and Latin love elegy (especially Ovid), which he mobilizes as a principal weapon in his redefinition of the novelistic genre. This is especially in the first two books (during which time Clitophon attempts to seduce Leucippe), but also implicates the ‘antagonists’ Melite, Thersander, and Callisthenes. Section 4.2 demonstrates the importance of the contemptor amoris theme (as represented especially in Propertius 1.7 and 1.9). Sections 4.3, 4.3.1, and 4.4 establish the erotodidactic credentials of Clinias as they relate to elegy (4.4 focusing explicitly on the theme of consent), while Sections 4.5 and 4.6 do the same for Clitophon’s slave, Satyrus (with Section 4.6 focusing on the metaphor of servitium amoris). Section 4.7 homes in on the role of vision in the novel’s symposia and those in elegy (especially Heroides 16-17). Section 4.8 draws a connection between the way Achilles and Ovid aestheticize (and even eroticize) female distress (embodied in tears and fears). Section 4.9 focuses on the idea of love as a type of ‘theft’, and kisses as alienable possessions, in Achilles and elegy (Tibullus is prominent here). Section 4.10 is an extended reading of Clitophon’s refusal to have sex with Leucippe as modelled on Ovid’s description of a bout of impotence in Amores 3.7.

The Acts of John, the Acts of Andrew and the Greek Novel

Since the 1930s, it has been observed that the Greek novel and the Christian Apocryphal Acts of the Apostles (AAA) display a series of similarities. This is not surprising, as the earlier AAA all belong to about the same period of time as the latest novels, except for Heliodorus, and derive from Asia Minor, the same area in which most of the surviving novels seem to have originated. Consequently, some of the similarities may well have been determined by the fact that the authors of the novel and the AAA lived in the same world. Yet there are clearly also scenes and motifs, which the AAA derived from the novel. In this contribution, I note the impact of the novel on the Acts of John and the Acts of Andrew and identify an influence from Chariton, Xenophon’s Ephesiaca and Achilles Tatius despite the fact that the novel ends in the reunion of the couple, who will enter now a happily married life with plenty of sex, whereas the couples in the AAA ideally end up in a chaste Platonic relationship. The surprising influence of the novel on the AAA may well be explained from a similar intended readership, that is, well educated higher-class women.