Chariton and his Romance from a Literary-Historical Point of View

Chariton, who wrote in the second century after Christ, is the truest spokesman of the culture upon which the Greek erotic romance in its beginnings rests. In comparison with the other extant romances Chaereas and Kallirhoe is at once more genuine in its spirit and more classical in its form and method. The superiority of Chariton’s composition is manifested in the simplicity, plausibility and coherence of his plot;^* in the centering of interest upon the characters more than upon events; in the sincerity of tone throughout; in the comparative absence of the rhetorical point of view; in the mimetic style of presentation; in the use of real dramatic irony (instead of empty paradox); and in the abundance of subtle humor.^*

Owing partly to accident and partly to various misconceptions, Chariton’s story of Chaereas and Kallirhoe has received less attention in the past than it deserves, both in respect to its comparative literary value and to its significance in the history of the genre.^* In the first place, the text was not published until 1750, at a time when Heliodorus, Achilles Tatius, and Longus had already become for moderns the standard and best known representatives of the Greek romance; and in the second place, previous to 1900, Chariton was erroneously assumed by most critics to be the latest of the extant ancient romancers instead of belonging, as we now know, among the earliest.¹ The mis-[93|94]conception about the date^* led to an undue disparagement of Chariton’s literary merits;² and the fact that Heliodorus and Achilles Tatius, who were^* supposed to have preceded Chariton, had long been regarded as standard³ was largely responsible for what has turned out to be a perverted orientation of the whole problem of the Greek romance. For Rohde, influenced by the prevailing conceptions of his day,^* placed Heliodorus and the other “sophistic” romances in the center of his system, assuming that they were more or less typical of the romance in its pristine character and that consequently the peculiar features of Chariton’s work were merely so many aberrations from the original sophistic norm. Thus, for example, the simplicity of Chariton’s plot was a deficiency, due to lack of imagination, and the historical background was only a bit of arbitrary decoration added to an otherwise purely plasmatic story.^* In Rohde’s theory of develop-[94|95]ment the romance passes from Antonius Diogenes at one pole to Chariton at the opposite, from the complex, unreal and sophistic at the beginning of its career,^* to the simple, naïve, and quasi-historical at the end.^4*And although this theory, in the exact form in which it was propounded, has now been entirely abandoned even by Rohde’s most ardent followers, yet it will probably be a long time before the numerous misconceptions and errors of method to which it has given rise will have disappeared. It is one of the objects of this essay to disentangle Chariton from these obsolete conceptions and to present him in the light of our new knowledge about the Greek romance. If the present generation of critics is wiser than Rohde, it is largely owing to the discovery of new material among the papyri, material which has not only yielded new texts and dates but which has given a different meaning to much of the older data. From this source we have learned that the older a romance is the more likely it is to be historical or legendary in theory and setting, that the earlier romances were of a less sophistic character than the later ones, and that the environment in which the species flourished in its early stage was more popular and plebeian than had been supposed by Rohde and others who sought to interpret it entirely in terms of formal sophistic literature.⁵ Each of these points, [95|96] especially the last, is of prime importance for the understanding of the origin, nature, and development of the ancient romance; and each of them, as I shall attempt to show, is...