Michael
ANDERSON Chariton's Romantic Ideology
Classical literature repeatedly evaluates the joys
and dangers of erotic love by weighing it against martial prowess,
political power, and a range of ethical values and social goals.
Hector, for example, foremost of the Trojan warriors, condemns
"woman-crazy" Paris in Iliad 3. Plato
subordinates physical desire to philosophy in the
Symposium. Conversely, Sappho 16 elevates the objects of personal desire
above military pageantry. Among the Greek novelists Chariton employs this comparative method of
exploring and evaluating eros
to an unparalleled degree. Throughout the romance of Chaereas
and Callirhoe he repeatedly matches
love against other human concerns and activities, and love
consistently ranks first in the hierarchy. This paper surveys the
phenomenon in Chariton's novel and explores its
implications.
Chariton's opening chapters offer his readers a
programmatic declaration of love's preeminence. When "political
enmity" (1.1.3) between their fathers threatens to keep Chaereas
and Callirhoe apart, the Syracusan
assembly intervenes to secure their marriage. The city appoints
itself as a kind of marriage broker (1.1.11), and the god Eros
assumes an unusually political function as "demagogue" of the
assembly (1.1.12). As he recounts the mastery of Eros over the
political institutions of Syracuse, the novelist elevates
romantic love to an unusual and fantastic prominence above
traditional political and military concerns. Chariton offers several morally
disturbing demonstrations of love's supremacy during Callirhoe's
adventures in Ionia and Persia, by subordinating a series
of personal values and social ideals - friendship, self-control,
political power, and political responsibilityóto the
irrepressible desires of Callirhoe's
admirers. Chariton exhibits his romantic
ideology also in his adaptations of Homeric material, as
noticeable deviations from Homeric models firmly identify the
principal preoccupations of the romance novelist as distinct from
those of the epic poet.
I conclude that this erotic perspective is a
defining feature of Chariton's romance. Chariton composes not just erotic
fiction, but fiction driven by an erotic ideology, as he
consciously shapes his work according to a well-defined conception
of love's centrality within his chosen genre. In adopting this
erotic perspective, Chariton sharply distinguishes his
novel from epic, historiography, and historical fiction. These
observations counter recent scholarship which, while highlighting
the advocacy of socially sanctioned marriage and procreation
within the corpus of Greek novels, undervalues their glorification
of personal emotion.