Four Byzantine Novels by Elizabeth Jeffreys (review)

For the Greekless reader, this long-awaited anthology provides an important link between the ancient Greek novel and the novels we read today. The Greeks created what we now call novels at the beginning of the Common Era, peaking in the fourth century with the greatest of them, Heliodorus’s Ethiopian Story. Eight complete novels survive, along with fragments from a dozen or so others, all conveniently gathered in B. P. Reardon’s Collected Ancient Greek Novels (University of California Press, 1989). When the best of them were rediscovered and translated during the Renaissance, they provided the template for the European novel of the early-modern period, as Margret Doody has demonstrated in The True Story of the Novel (Rutgers University Press, 1996). However, few readers are aware that in twelfth-century Byzantium, a handful of writers revived the ancient Greek novel and put their own spin on the genre. What is most striking is how modern, even postmodern, these medieval novels sound. Like Barth and Pynchon imitating the eighteenth-century novel in The Sot-Weed Factor and Mason & Dixon, respectively, the Byzantines set their novels in the past and artificially imitated the Greek of antiquity rather than their own vernacular, all while having some metafictional fun with older forms of fiction and diction.

Jeffreys translates and annotates the four that have survived (as in the case with ancient Greek novels, more were undoubtedly written but have disappeared.) The earliest, a novel in verse entitled Rhodanthe and Dosikles, was composed probably in the early 1130s by Theodore Prodromos. Like Nabokov in Laughter in the Dark, he tells us upfront what his novel will be about, a rehash of the standard topoi of earlier Greek novels:

These [are the adventures] of the silvery girl Rhodanthe with the lovely garland and of the valiant and comely youth Dosikles, the flights and wanderings and tempests and billows, brigands, grievous eddies, sorrows that give rise to love, chains and indissoluble fetters and imprisonments in gloomy dungeons, grim sacrifices, bitter grief, poisoned cups and paralysis of joints, and then marriage and the marriage bed and passionate love.

(20)

Structurally and thematically similar to Heliodorus’s Ethiopian Story, Rhodanthe and Dosikles is essentially a vehicle for various rhetorical set pieces, an opportunity for Prodromos to show off his skill and knowledge and occasionally to make fun of the conventions of the genre. (These novels were read aloud at the imperial court and in the literary salons of Constantinople; they were literally performance pieces. Like ballets, they do not so much tell a story as perform one.) Although nowhere near as complex and ingenious as Heliodorus, Prodromos manages to say some interesting things about dream psychology, military theory, and statecraft while performing elegant variations on the ancient theme of ideal lovers who elope, are separated and suffer various setbacks, and are eventually reunited and married.

Narrower in scope but much sexier, Hysmine and Hysminias was written in prose during the 1140s or ’50s and is attributed to Eumathios Makrembolites. Modeled on the second-best of the ancient Greek novels, Achilles Tatius’ Leucippe and Clitophon (late second century), this one is the first-person account of how a young herald named Hysminias met and fell in love with a remarkably forward young woman named Hysmine. Struck by the similarity between their names, and delegated to the ceremony of washing his feet, Hysmine goes for it:

The maiden Hysmine, crouching down by my feet and talking hold of them, washes them in the water (this is an honour accorded to heralds); she holds them, she clasps them, she embraces them, she presses them, she kisses them silently and sneaks a kiss; eventually she scratches me with her fingernails and tickles me.

(183)

Not surprisingly, Hysminias has an erotic dream that night about her, the first of many in this R-rated novel. Though they engage in some heavy petting, both agree to save...