Robert Cioffi’s book focuses on the representation and role of Egypt and Ethiopia in four ancient Greek novels by Chariton, Xenophon of Ephesus, Achilles Tatius (Egypt) and Heliodorus (Egypt and Ethiopia). (Longus’ Daphnis and Chloe is absent from the corpus since the protagonists do not leave the island of Lesbos.)
Before paying attention to the steps of Cioffi’s careful demonstration, we first note his interesting approach to the subject, described in the introduction, “In the Month of Hathor.” Following Daniel Selden’s theory of syllepsis, and the work of Ian Rutherford and others about the cultural interactions between Egypt and Greece, Cioffi relies on Egyptian documentation—literature, iconography, administrative records—which he relates to the Greek novels. Cioffi aims not only to extend the list of the novelists’ cultural inspirations, but also to show that the readers of the novels, copies of which have been found in Egypt, could interpret these differently from both the Greek elites of the Roman empire and modern scholars of Classical Antiquity. There lies the explanation of the book’s subtitle, “Between Representation and Resistance”: using recent work about the imperial gaze and various modes of resistance to it, the author shows that Greek novels incorporated not only the Greco-Roman literary traditions, as Massimo Fusillo has shown[1], but also elements from a peripheric culture, such as Egypt’s during the imperial era.
Cioffi briefly traces the prior bibliography on identity and Hellenism in the Greek novel, and enumerates the Egyptian sources he employs. Next, he distinguishes his own approach from theories of Karl Kerényi and Reinhold Merkelbach about the relationship between Egyptian religion and the Greek novels and offers an up-to-date presentation of the novelistic corpus. This book follows the novels’ chronological order through six chapters. Chariton and Xenophon receive less attention than Achilles Tatius and Heliodorus, reflecting the differences in each novelist’s treatment of Egypt and Ethiopia.
The first chapter, “Religion, Revolt, and Rome in Chariton, Xenophon of Ephesus and Apuleius”, is dedicated to the two pre-sophistic Greek novels, Callirhoe and An Ephesian Tale. Even if Callirhoe’s protagonists do not move to Egypt itself, it is famously present through the Egyptian revolt that Chaereas joins, and thanks to which he proves to be a great leader and regains his beloved. Cioffi emphasizes the relationship between Chaereas and two historical figures of the Classical period, namely Chabrias and Alexander the Great. According to the author, this shows not only that Egypt is central to the Greek novel from its beginnings, but also that Egypt is seen as “a site of rebellion against and resistance to empire” (33). This characterization is supported by the well-known parallels between the Persian empire in the novel and the Roman empire, and by Egyptian narrative traditions, namely the Inaros-Petubastis cycle, focused on Egyptian resistance against Assyrians during the Third Intermediate period. However, Chariton may have known these narratives through their echoes in Greek historians’ works (Herodotus, Thucydides, Diodorus).
Cioffi then moves on to An Ephesian Tale, which “engages in a more discursive mode of resistance that emphasizes Egypt’s place as a cultural and religious alternative to the Roman empire” (40). This phenomenon is mostly illustrated by the “pivotal” role played by the goddess Isis within the novel itself, discussed in the penultimate section called “Isis Saves: Greek Novels, Egyptian Religion.” This contrasts with the role she plays in The Golden Ass by Apuleius in the last section of the chapter. As a savior for desperate people, Isis in Xenophon’s novel is depicted the same way as in Greco-Roman literature and in Egyptian narratives; nevertheless, whereas Apuleius ended his novel in Rome, characterised as the center of the cosmos, the Ephesian Tale focuses on the worship of the goddess in Egypt and the Eastern Mediterranean.
In the two following chapters (2, “Where the Wild Things Are: Achilles Tatius and Egyptian Animals”, and 3, “The Lives of the Others: The Boukoloi, the Nile Delta, and the Frontiers of knowledge in Achilles Tatius”), Cioffi focuses on Leucippe and Clitophon in a convincing way thanks to careful analyses of Achilles Tatius’ text and of its relationship both with Greco-Roman ethnographic traditions and strictly Egyptian materials. These chapters best illustrate the sylleptic reading of the novel initiated by Daniel Selden[2]. First, the animals described by Clitophon are selected to embody the Egyptian land itself, according to the then-widespread theory of geographic determinism. The hippopotamus, the crocodile and the phoenix are associated with Egypt in Greek ethnography and in Roman imperial ideology, but also in iconographic, political and religious Egyptian traditions. In the novel, the descriptions of the first two signal the imperial gaze which wants to control the Egyptian space, an attitude which corresponds both to Roman power and Egyptian kingship ideology. The very careful attention given to the case of the phoenix allows Cioffi to assert: “As the phoenix so artfully shows, the world of Egypt and Ethiopia is ultimately a curated landscape, a combination of nature and literary tradition, of physical attributes and performance, lying somewhere between fiction and history.” (90) The Boukoloi also cultivate connections to imperial power, because they spend their time, space and lives contesting it, both in the Greek novel, in Cassius Dio and in Egyptian papyrological documentation, such as Papyrus Thmouis 1, and in narrative fiction, like Contest for the Benefice of Amun, which is part of the Inaros cycle.
In chapter 4, “Alexandria and Apocalypse: Representation, Resistance, and Time,” Cioffi looks at the Egyptian capital’s representation by Achilles Tatius, Xenophon of Ephesus and Heliodorus. The first author offers the image of a beautiful but motionless city which cannot be embraced all in a single glimpse and is a dangerous place for the female protagonist. In An Ephesian Tale, there is no description of Alexandria, but here Habrocomes becomes a figure of resistance to the unfair justice of his governor, as in some Jewish, Christian or Pagan Acta, and is saved due to divine protection. In contrast, the beginning of An Ethiopian Story is famously located near the site of Alexandria’s foundation, but at a time when the city did not yet exist. Cioffi links this with the end of an apocalyptic Egyptian narrative, the Potter’s Oracle, which announces the destruction of Alexandria and the return of an indigenous kingship. Heliodorus does not give substance to this prophecy, because Egypt is ruled by a Persian satrap in his story, but, in response to the Oracle, suggests that empires and their capital and fall, and that the future lies in Meroe.
The last two chapters are dedicated to the representation of Egypt (chapter 5) and Ethiopia (chapter 6) in An Ethiopian Story. The way these two countries are depicted is, according to Cioffi, emblematic of an “ethnography of displacement” that plays with the reader’s expectations, while connecting intertextually with epic, tragedy, historiography, and prior novels as well as with Egyptian narratives of rebellion. Here, Cioffi mentions again the demotic text Contest for the Benefice of Amun in order to explain the striking figure of Thyamis, both a priest of Isis and a warrior, “an unusual combination in Greek literature, but typical of the young priest of Buto” (165) who is one of Contest’s protagonists. He interprets An Ethiopian Story in the light of Isis’ quest to find her husband’s body parts, following Plutarch’s narrative in De Iside et Osiride—versions of which have recently been discovered in Greek and Demotic on papyri—in a stimulating self-reflexive reading: “The assemblage of An Ethiopian Story, then, is less in the reconstitution of a body than in the collection of the disiecta membra of a range of literary forms, from the epic tradition to Egyptian mythology” (176). Cioffi notices that the focuses on Egyptian ethnographic are more accessible to the reader as the protagonists’ journey progresses towards Ethiopia, exemplifying again the “ethnography of displacement”: expected Herodotean pieces are given at the end of the narrative, and performed by an Ethiopian king instead of a Greek investigator, after a similar displacement has taken place with Calasiris in Delphi. As in the beginning of the chapter 5, Cioffi stated that “In Heliodorus’ Egypt, then, landscape is marked less by monuments and inalienable properties of nature than by the experiences of An Ethiopian Story’s many and varied observers and actors” (157). He concludes by insisting that culture has a higher impact than geography on the characterisation “between insiders and outsiders in Egypt” (194).
In “The Ends of Ethiopia in Heliodorus’ An Ethiopian Story” (chapter 6), the author reads Heliodorus’ last book as structured upon the polysemy of the Greek word τέλος, both “ritual” and “end”: it is time for both the Meroitic ritual of human sacrifice and for the novel to end. After recalling that Heliodorus follows the Greco-Roman tradition that sees Ethiopia as a land of the world’s edges, Cioffi insists on “a triple set of transformations: of geographic connection and imperial reach, personal and ethnic identity, and cultural practice” (205). Indeed, Meroë is characterised as an imperial place through cultural performances typical of the Greco-Roman empire: the tribute ceremony, Theagenes’ sporting achievements, and Greek and Persian characters’ presence in Meroë. Charicleia manages to prove herself to be the daughter and the heir of the Ethiopian royals, while eventually the Ethiopians give up human sacrifice for the benefit of another ritual, the wedding of the princess to a Greek man. Here, Cioffi does not rely on Egyptian or Ethiopian documentation for a sylleptic reading, but replaces Heliodorus’ story in the time of its writing, that is in the 4th century CE when Meroë is not an imperial center but a tributary kingdom of Aksum. The same perspective is adopted to interpret the sphragis: “Ultimately, Heliodorus’ final sentences remind us that, despite Meroë’s promised future, it will, like Alexandria, also have an end. Furthermore, Heliodorus’ narrative is a reminder that, just as for Meroë, the reach of the Persian Empire and, indeed, of Rome, is bound in space and, also, in time.” (230)
In an interesting epilogue (“Egypt, Ethiopia, and the Americas – The Greek Novels’ Early Modern Readers”), Cioffi notices that the first modern readers of the Greek novel, and especially of Heliodorus, valued its ethnographic orientation. Thus he validates his own reading, which examines both the construction of the novels and their possible reception outside a strictly Greco-Roman tradition.
The clarity of the writing can be praised, for it carefully guides the reader from the first to the last Greek novel, from the Mediterranean shores to the Ethiopian inland, from the known Greco-Roman literary traditions to the exotic Egyptian narratives and papyrological documentation. The bibliography is abundant and up to date. This book, undeniably the fruit of serious research, illustrates the richness of the Greek novels.
Notes
[1] Massimo Fusillo, Il romanzo greco. Polifonia ed eros, Venezia, Marsilio, 1989.
[2] Daniel L. Selden, « The Genre of Genre », in J. Tatum, The Search for the novel in the Ancient World, Baltimore, 39-66.