BMCR 2009.03.47, Tim Whitmarsh, The Cambridge Companion to the Greek and Roman Novel

Tim Whitmarsh (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Greek and Roman
Novel.  Cambridge/New York:  Cambridge University Press, 2008.  Pp. xv,
392.  ISBN 9780521684880.  $36.99 (pb).

Reviewed by Yun Lee Too ([email protected])
Word count:  1644 words
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The Cambridge Companion to the Greek and Roman Novel contains nineteen
essays (including the introduction) on the ancient novel by well-known
and established scholars in Europe and America. They have been arranged
according to four different themes: Contexts, The World of the Novel,
Form and Reception.

Whitmarsh's introduction takes on a whirlwind tour of issues to be
identified with the novel. He identifies the novel canon, seven works
from the imperial period, along with other texts associated either with
or as the novel. He looks at what the ideal novel was, and then he
treats love and paideia in the genre. The final part of the chapter
considers the relationship between the novel and Christianity:
novelists becoming bishops and Christian writers reading the novels.

'Contexts' comprises four essays, beginning with Ewen Bowie's 'Literary
Milieux'. Bowie proceeds by dividing his discussion of the novel
according to four specific time periods,  31 BCE -50 CE, 50-160 CE,
160-220 CE, 220-270 CE. In the first of these periods the author
considers the various relationships of Greeks and Romans in the novels,
for example, in Chariton. The second period comprises Dio and Plutarch
of Chaeronea with their erotic themes, Musonius Rufus and Arrian with
their moral concerns and a host of other authors with different
concerns. The third period concerns Iamblichus' Babylonian Affairs,
Lucian, Pausanias, and Athenaeus. Bowie goes on to look at the work of
Heliodorus, which may or may not be as late as 270 CE and he
acknowledges the rise of Latin as the language of choice for novelists
in this final period. The author of this chapter finally considers the
Latin novels as much more influenced by Greek literature than
influencing it. Overall, he provides the volume with its historical
context. 'The History of Sexuality' by Helen Morales begins by looking
at how different readers have responded to sexually explicit scenes in
the novel, whether it is excision or a misdirected focus on the male,
as in the case of Foucault. Petronius' Satyricon is the gay male novel
for Morales and she considers what is normal and not so normal in the
depiction of pederasty. Women desiring women is the next concern as is
the threat of rape to women. Susan Stephens' 'Cultural Identity'
examines the construction of 'Greek' identity as a central concern in
the writing of the novel. Only Petronius and Apuleius foreground Roman
identity, playing down Greekness as associated with sexual immorality.
Tim Whitmarsh gives us 'Class', initially observing that the Roman
authors were socially prominent while the Greek writers are less easy
to place.  He observes importantly and perceptively that education,
which can have the role of constructing social hierarchies, plays an
important role in ancient novels, educating the otherwise naive reader.
Novels may be 'literary-elitist', they may play with this status, or
they may be populist as in the case of the Alexander Romance. Overall,
novels are polyphonic, that is to say, they depict individuals of all
classes.

Whitmarsh's essay provides a nice link into the next section of the
book, 'The World of the Novel'. Froma Zeitlin's 'Religion' notes that
the novels are populated by gods and the rites and rituals associated
with them. Beauty is generally cast as divine in this genre and Eros
plays a significant role in the working of a number of different plots.
Zeitlin observes that she has not given attention to Jewish and
Christian works, where the one God significantly forms the focus of
religious identity.  In 'Travel' James Romm examines the genre of novel
as slices taken from the banquet of Herodotus. He proceeds to take us
on a tour of Persia, the Achaemenid empire, Ethiopia, Egypt and the Far
East, noting an orientalising impulse in the novel. We even end up on
the moon in Lucian's True Histories.  Jason Konig perceptively writes
'Body and Text', noting that one's social status left marks on one's
body, although there was no direct correlation between physical form
and personal identity: any correlation is often undermined.  Beyond
this, there is often a parallelism between body and the novel's plot
and this is most apparent in Apuleius' Metamorphosis where Lucius'
bodily transformations match the transformations of the Ass-tale at the
hands of the author. Lawrence Kim's interesting chapter 'Time' begins
with Bakhtin's observation that time in the ancient novel is poorly
articulated. The novels tend to encompass rather limited time
periods--say, two years -- but they also tend to be vague. This
vagueness points towards other impulses, for instance, the lack of
concern to mark change. One difference from this vague time structure
is Apuleius' Metamorphosis, where time is especially definite and
precise in book 11. 'Politics and Spectacles' by Catherine Connors
looks at the depiction of large-scale scenes which are suited to the
theatre and arena. She sees interaction between Roman spectacle and
Greek society in Apuleius, since he offers his readers a Greece that
looks very much like Rome. Connors concludes her chapter with the
observation that all the ancient novels are Roman so that the audience
may explore what it is to live and die in an imperial world.

'Form' begins with a contribution by Simon Goldhill, who discusses
'Genre'. Genre creates expectations and it provides the novel with
limits. Novels help to express an educated Greek engagement with the
world because they presuppose a reading subject who is pepaideumenos.
As with Whitmarsh, education is seen to play an important role in the
novel and its experience. Goldhill quite rightly concludes that the
genre of the novel is porous, creating and playing with the reader's
expectations, and engaging with other forms of writing. Andrew Laird's
chapter 'Approaching Style and Rhetoric' considers narrative styles in
the novel, noting a distinction between 'free indirect discourse' in
the modern novel and the harder to categorize style of the ancient
novels. Laird considers the role of rhetoric in establishing the style
of the novel: which genre influenced which? Because first person
narrative is not so distinct from rhetoric, rhetoric is essential to
understanding the style of the novel. In 'Intertextuality' John Morgan
and Stephen Harrison deal with the novel in the context of all
Greco-Roman literature. John Morgan writes the first part of this
chapter, observing that intertextuality marks the sophistication of a
Greek novel. He argues that the novels are in some sense in a dialogue
with each other. Stephen Harrison then focuses on the Roman novels of
Petronius and Apuleius. He shows that especially Apuleius refers both
to Latin and Greek literature, involving both high and low culture so
that this genre is a polyphonic form. 'Narrative' by Tim Whitmarsh and
Shadi Bartsch considers the novel from the viewpoint of the formal
analysis of narrative structure. Whitmarsh begins the analysis with a
discussion of narrative focalisation and continues by showing that
Greek novels in particular enjoy multiplying perspectives upon the
central action. Shadi Bartsch takes up the discussion with focalisation
in the Roman novel, concentrating on the case of the narrator-author in
Apuleius. She concludes that the Roman novel engages in a transgressive
play with aspects of identity.

The fourth and final section of the book is 'Reception', one of the
major concerns of Classics in the United Kingdom.  Richard Hunter leads
off the section with 'Ancient Readers', asking 'who read the novel?'
The intended audience appears to be as varied and diverse as the texts
themselves, although he sheds light on the possibilities of a female
readership for the novel. Hunter's chapter, I suggest, forms an
interesting complement to Morales' paper as it looks more broadly at
the gendered gaze and the novel. Joan Burton's 'Byzantine Readers'
examines how after some eight hundred years the novels of Achilles
Tatius and Heliodorus were taken up and revived for the Christian world
and its morals. For Eugenianos the revived novel was a means of
reinforcing Hellenic identity among the audience. Overall moral content
and rhetorical style were dominating concerns of the Byzantine novels,
which were read by sophisticated audiences. Michael Reeve's 'The
re-emergence of ancient novels in western Europe, 1300-1810' treats the
novel's renaissance in early modern Europe. Reeve discusses the
different forms of the novel in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries
and the reworking of motifs from ancient novels in various works of
this period. Gerald Sandy and Stephen Harrison cooperate on the writing
of 'Novels Ancient and Modern'. Sandy is interested in the
(re)discovery of the ancient Greek novel, dealing with French- and
English-language adaptations. Harrison traces influences of the Roman
novels on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century fiction. Petronius and
Apuleius then make it into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries with
Edwin Shrake and Anthony Powell, amongst others. As for the current
century, Harrison observes, it remains to be seen whether ancient
novels will continue to influence writers. Massimo Fusillo concludes
the volume with a chapter entitled 'Modernity and Post-Modernity'. He
observes that Erwin Rohde devalued the Greek novel because of Victorian
attitudes towards sexuality whereas now, in the twenty-first century,
analysis of the novel has become increasingly complex and
sophisticated. Longus' Daphnis and Chloe has received treatment from
twentieth-century ballet to Yukio Mishima, while Petronius has been
taken up by such figures as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Bruno Maderna (in
music), and Fellini (in film).

The book concludes with 'References', an 'Index of Greek and Roman
Novelists', which provides very useful summaries of all the ancient
novels (many more than the seven which Whitmarsh initially identifies)
and a survey of their authors with texts and translations, and a
general 'Index'.

Whitmarsh has edited an extremely rich and stimulating volume that
demonstrates the sophistication of the literature it deals with and of
the criticism of contemporary classicists. The contributors engage with
the novel at an extremely high level and with impressive specialism,
bringing their perspectives to bear upon the genre. It will certainly
be of great use to scholars of the ancient novel.