Toward the
fey island
of the night
the sailing was smooth.
And he, groaning deeply
said:
"There might be something in store for me to suffer
but I,
I will yet live.
So I swear
to the God who drives us mad,
even for a short moment
I will live.
I will look upon the sun."
Now the island was beginning
to come into view.
“You are kicking a beehive," he had said,
“a beehive full of stories; my adventures
flow along,
their water cool and crystal-clear.
It is time,” he would say,
“to listen to my tales.”
Here are my hands, here is my back
here is my body
here is my neck, look
at everything
speak to me,
do not escape
my eyes
when you crown me with praise.
I do not keep
silent by nature
but
after holding in both my hands
your beautiful
face
for a long time I was speechless.
I ask to see you with my own eyes, up close and personal.
‘Pretend,’ they say,
‘To leave when it’s late in the evening.’
ἐπὶ πολὺ πρόσωπον The first step in composing a blackout poem is finding the right page to work with. Many won’t stand out to you, and the few that do might seem impossible to mold into something new. Pay close attention to pages where more than one voice is being used, as these might be full of potential. For example, to compose “Speechless,” I used page 46 of the Loeb Classical Library’s edition of Callirhoe:
The paragraphs labelled 5, 7, and 8 are in the normal voice of the narrator, but the indented lines in the center of the page are lines quoted from the Iliad so as to capture the feelings of one of the characters. Here, Chariton and Homer are in dialogue; if I could work with this page, I’d be adding my own voice to this conversation.
In context, Chaereas has married the beautiful Callirhoe suddenly out of true love (that is to say without competing for the many suitors seeking Callirhoe’s hand). One of the jealous suitors here convinces Chaereas that his new bride is being promiscuous. Then, the text invokes the three lines that describe Achilles’ state of mind when he hears of his beloved Patroclus’ death. Chaereas then asks the suitor to show him proof of the affair, and the suitor tells him to pretend to leave after dark, and he’ll see a man sneak into the house. In truth, Callirhoe has done nothing of the sort, and this claim is all a clever ruse by the snubbed suitors.
The second step is to find words and phrases that stick out to you on the page that you know you have to include in your poem. These words can be intense and dramatic or simple and concise, or interesting to you in some other way. I had two of these “anchor” words for this text. The first was ἀχανής (on the same line as the 7). It literally means “not-gaping” with reference to the mouth. When used of a person, it means that the person is silent, their mouth stunned shut. In English, we do not have a similar metaphor for expressing this feeling. I felt there was a lot of potential in the word because of how unusual it is to me and since it could have meta-textual implications for how I construct dialogue (or the lack of it) in the poem.
The second anchor was προσποιῆσαι. This is an imperative verb meaning “Pretend!” This word stood out to me because deceit is so important to the story. The suitor is pretending that Callirhoe is sleeping with another man. He tells Chaereas that Callirhoe is pretending to be faithful. The suitor tells Chaereas to pretend to leave so he can see “what’s really going on” (a pretend affair). In the passage, the protagonist uses deceit to try to get at the truth but instead he encounters only more deceit. I wondered if I could incorporate this conundrum into my poem using the word, and whether or not in it pretending would still lead into further confusion or into reality.
Many blackout poems ironically echo their source material (e.g. a poem celebrating gay sexuality made from an eviction letter from homophobic parents). I added an idea to these anchor words: that this poem would be a successful love story, unlike the tragedy that happens here at the start of the novel. From there, I picked out enough words and phrases to build my own little love story, and this is what I got:
[1] αἰτῶ σοῦ αὐτόπτης γενέσθαι more literally means “I ask to be an eyewitness of you.” The word αὐτόπτης etymologically describes an eyewitness as someone “who sees something with their own eyes.”
[2] The verb is singular with an ambiguous gender.
The Greek Novel Across the Centuries: A Comparison of Chariton and Achilles Tatius
The Greek novel is not a monolithic genre. It can be divided into an Early and Later Period, each with its own authorial characteristics and audience composition. To explore the differences between the first and later novels I will cite Chariton’s Callirhoe (c. 50 CE) and Achilles Tatius’ Leucippe and Clitophon (c. 110 CE). This exploration will illuminate what the inspirations for the genre were and how broader cultural shifts fundamentally altered, co-opted, and expanded the original functions of the genre.
The early Greek novel (and to a point the genre as a whole) has the spirit of Greek tragedy in the form of historical narrative. With the Mediterranean united by Roman arms and the Greek tongue, this period experienced a heightened demand for the written word. As power grew more centralized in Rome, the educated literati of the empire’s leadership responsibilities diminished and their interest in leisure and entertainment rose. Prospective writers needed to be engaging, and there were several options to consider. First, there was the epic, Greece’s oldest literature. Epic verse was still culturally important, but its relevancy was on the decline: it was tried, old, and imperfect for communicating the zeitgeist of the Roman Age. Scattered lines of epic poetry do appear in Greek novels, but writers turned elsewhere for their inspiration. The theatre of the ancient playwrights still embodied a powerful force for drama, but plays required actors, audiences, and stadiums to live up to their potential; plays were performed in a specific space at a specific time, and the demand was for texts meant to be read, not scripts meant to be performed. The pioneers of the novel borrowed from Greek drama dramatic structure and tension (much as the earliest English novelists did) but considered their search for an appropriate form.
They found it in historical narrative. History was the genre defined by long prose narrative, a form Herodotus was among the first to pioneer. His use of prose narrative in part challenged epic poetry’s monopolization on Greek storytelling, and it provided an easily imitable form for future authors to use. Its adoption by writers of the coming generations, starting with Thucydides, cemented the prose narrative as one of Greece’s written forms, on par with the meter of epic and drama. Since what the new literati was fundamentally entertaining stories, it comes as no surprise that the novel’s pioneers turned to the form for storytelling for their new works.
It is equally unsurprising that Callirhoe, the earliest known Greek novel, prominently features and references historical events and figures (albeit in a heavily fictionalized manner). To briefly summarize the story: Callirhoe is the daughter of Hermocrates, ruler of Sicily, and is the most beautiful woman in the world. Chaereas is similarly handsome, and the two fall in love. Shenanigans ensure, and Callirhoe is captured by pirates and sold into slavery. Increasingly powerful men begin to fight for Callirhoe’s marriage: first Dionysius, an aristocrat of Miletus, then the Persian governor Mithridates, and then even the Persian king Artaxerxes. All the while, Chaereas attempts to get his wife back in increasingly spectacular fashion that culminates in fielding Egypt’s army against the Persian Empire. They are finally reunited, and the novel ends. Obviously, the novel is set in the real world, specifically around Sicily after the Peloponnesian War (so post 404 BCE). There was a famous Syracusan general named Hermocrates, whose anonymous daughter married a Dionysius of Syracuse before dying young. That’s all the history that is in the novel, though. From this fact we can see that the novel is not meant to be a creative (or bad) reading of history but a story of love and adventure grounded in a familiar world. From a temporal perspective what Callirhoe does is very similar to a novel written in the present day that uses Queen Elizabeth I’s court as a setting and uses certain historical personages but makes no claims about actual history.
Chariton plays his novel straight: the text is not trying to be anything other than a novel. In other words, it is primarily a vehicle for reader enjoyment. The final section of the novel begins: “I think this last chapter will be the most enjoyable for my readers. It acts as a catharsis for the sorry events in the previous chapters. No more piracy or slavery or trials or fighting or suicide or war or captivity in this one, but true love and lawful marriage!” Because reader satisfaction is the point, Callirhoe is, from a dramatic perspective, well-built. All the conflict within the work arises and recedes from forces within the text. There is no deus ex machina within the novel’s organic and self-sufficient plot.
The mores of the Second Sophistic (c. 60 - 200 CE) leave a significant impact on the nascent genre. During this period, writers turned to the icons of Old, Classical Greece not just for inspiration but style and diction. In Callirhoe Chariton had introduced the story as his own: “I, Chariton of Aphrodisias, secretary for the lawyer Athenagorus, will tell a love story set in Syracuse.” The original narrativists, Herodotus for example, rarely spoke of their own authority, instead leaning on the testimony of others. Writers of the Second Sophistic followed their example: no longer could novelists relate their stories as their own. Achilles Tatius was another novelist, writing well into this period. He diverges significantly from Chariton in the opening to his Leucippe and Clitophon. He relates that while in Sidon, he saw a beautiful painting of a love story, and a young man nearby begins to tell Achilles his own adventures with love. The bulk of the novel is therefore framed in this context and that is to say not directly from the narrator.
The Second Sophistic commandeered the novel, so to speak. The new generation of novelists were learned men who used the popular genre to voice their own interests and thoughts. The novel shifted from a love story for the sake of a love story to a love story for the sake of rhetoric. In this period the novel is a vehicle for showcasing its author’s talents. The text is likely to feature lengthy treatments of philosophical, geographical, etc. knowledge and it is likely to engage in meta-textual dialogue with other novels. In the above example from Achilles Tatius, the text invites comparison with a contemporary Second Sophistic novel, Daphnis and Chloe by Longus. The text claims to be a description of a painting found on the island of Lesbos (the technical term for a lengthy description of art is ekphrasis). In Achilles Tatius’ novel, though, the text begins with an ekphrasis, but it then subverts this expectation; the narrative comes from another onlooker and not the painting itself. This sort of maneuvering is unknown in the early novelists and is the most noticeable change ushered in from the Second Sophistic. Under its auspices, the novel becomes playful, often to the point of parodic, and often at the integrity of the plot’s expense. Unlike Chariton’s well-made plot, later texts hang on the deus ex machina and similar devices. In Achilles Tatius, Clitophon and Leucippe fall in love, but Clitophon is already engaged to his half-sister Calligone and is soon to be wed. The dramatic buildup is dropped suddenly: a young Byzantine has heard of Leucippe’s famous beauty and comes to kidnap her but carries off Calligone by mistake. This plot point is not continued through the rest of the text, except at the end where he and Calligone do end up falling in love. Easy resolutions like this are pervasive in the later novels. Though more artistic and educated, these texts did not challenge the form of the novel to grow; it was an easy skeleton for novelists to line with what they really cared about. These Second Sophistic works deal with the Hellenistic novel form casually and without much respect. The decline and extinction of the Greek novel is partially explained by its limited purview during the Second Sophistic - its arrested development by this sudden literary movement meant that the novel could not grow to meet the challenges of its age.
In English we sometimes differentiate between two similar types of long prose narratives, the novel and the romance, based on their content. Novels describe mundane events and encounters while romances relate the rare and spectacular. This is not a hard-and-fast rule, though, and the difference really is blurry. In this paradigm Wuthering Heights is a romance, but chances are you have exclusively heard it referred to as a novel. Other European languages, like French and Italian, do not attempt to separate these forms and call them by one name (roman, romanzo).
We think of the novel as a fairly recent and modern invention, but the form of the long prose narrative appears for the first time nearly 2000 years ago in Greek, but unlike English, French, or Italian, the Greeks had no name for it.
To explain the genre’s anonymity (and find out what these novels are about), it’s best to go into their literary and historical context. Five ancient novels survive antiquity: Callirhoe, Leucippe and Clitophon, Daphnis and Chloe, the Ephesian Tale, and the Aethiopica. Novel-writing flourished from the first century CE to the end of the fourth, a length of time quite similar to that between Don Quixote and Infinite Jest. Where do these novels come from, why did the genre end, and why didn’t they have a named genre, like epic, lyric, history, or tragedy?
When we think of the defining works of Greek civilization, we think of the Iliad and the Odyssey, the dialogues of Plato, and tragedies like Oedipus Rex. The Greeks of the first century CE had a very similar canon - by that time, these works were already ancient. Plato’s works had been around for three hundred years, Sophocles’ plays for five hundred, and the Homeric poems for nearly seven hundred years. These older, definitive Greek texts were relics of an earlier age, when Greek social and political life was bound in the polis, or city-state, when the people were self-ruling and any man could be a hero, and when the outside world was far away. The literature of this period is loaded with cultural values meant to enrich and foster the coming generations. Plato’s student Aristotle was the last of this generation, and he was also the author who systematically laid out and evaluated Greek literature. During this closing chapter, Philip II of Macedon conquered and united most of Greece. The Macedonians, despite speaking Greek and sharing many of the same values as, say, the Athenians, were looked down upon as barbarians by the city-states they conquered. Plato and Aristotle wrote in this time, the death throes of Old Greece, when Greece was for the first time not free and when political life was moving from the polis to the court of a foreign ruler.
In his capacity as tutor to Philip II’s son Alexander, Aristotle was partly responsible for the final nail in the coffin. Alexander the Great expanded Macedon’s dominance over Greece to Asia and North Africa. Greece was now part of a global empire, ruled in succession by Alexander, his successor-generals, and finally by Rome in 146 BCE. At the same time, Alexander’s conquest brought the entire Mediterranean under the influence of Greek culture in a process known as Hellenization. Everyone was speaking Greek now, and the social elites (the small group of the ancient world who were literate) were reading and writing in Greek. Old Greece was gone, and there was a new culture. It was outward-looking and cosmopolitan, as far way from the old polis as possible. During this Hellenistic age, there could be no heroes; unlike their forebears, the Greeks of this age knew that individuals could no longer leave the same footprint as Hercules or Achilles. The Greeks and all the other peoples of the world were drops in Rome’s Mare Nostrum (”Our Sea,” a Roman term for the Mediterranean). New literature emerged, a literature based on pleasure, not instruction, much like the novel of today.
Unlike Greece’s previous literature, the Greek novel was fueled by popular demand for reading pleasure. Instead of teaching lessons and providing examples to be followed, these novels valued the very experience of reading. Love and adventures are the most common means by which these texts create pleasure, and some have more of the one than the other. Daphnis and Chloe has minimal adventure (except for a pirate attack) but pays close attention to the love and personalities of its title characters who want to physically show their love to each other but haven’t figured out how to yet. On the other hand, Callirhoe is a non-stop adventure across the Mediterranean and back again that rivals the Odyssey in the extent of the protagonists’ travels. In a world where individual actions did not determine the fates of peoples and cities and in a world increasingly globalized where disparate value-systems interacted every day, the ancient Greek novel prospered.
Academics (at least publicly) hated the novel. The literate Mediterranean had started going through a period known as the Second Sophistic from the second half of the first century CE through the middle of the third. This literary movement was characterized by nostalgia for the past, a return to older spelling, style, and diction, and disdain for the “vulgarization” of the Greek language that had occurred over the past few centuries. These writers were the caretakers of Greek canon, so it comes as no surprise that novels would not make an appearance in their literary schema.
The end of the novel came by the close of the fifth century. At this time, the political malaise and multicultural identity of the Mediterranean was giving way to the cultural homogenization that Christianity brought with it. The Christianization of the Mediterranean was cemented with the Edict of Milan in 313 CE which legalized practice of the religion throughout the empire. It soon became the official imperial religion, and through a policy of consolidation and religious imperialism, the Church-State sought an end to paganism and the beginning of a new Christian order. In this new world pleasure was suspect, and writing became above all didactic again. Whereas in Old Greece, literature was composed to instill Greek culture, here writing was meant to teach the new generation how to be good Christians. With the social conditions that had brought the novel to life eradicated, the genre withered away and disappeared.
