(Second Century A.D.)
BY HARRY THURSTON PECK
n the history of Greek prose fiction the possibilities of the epistolary form were first developed by the Athenian teacher of rhetoric, Alciphron, of whose life and personality nothing is known except that he lived in the second century A.D.,--a contemporary of the great satirical genius Lucian. Of his writings we now possess only a collection of imaginary letters, one hundred and eighteen in number, arranged in three books. Their value depends partly upon the curious and interesting pictures given in them of the life of the post-Alexandrine period, especially of the low life, and partly upon the fact that they are the first successful attempts at character-drawing to be found in the history of Greek prose fiction. They form a connecting link between the novel of pure incident and adventure, and the more fully developed novel which combines incident and adventure with the delineation of character and the study of motive. The use of the epistolary form in fictitious composition did not, to be sure, originate with Alciphron; for we find earlier instances in the imaginary love-letters composed in verse by the Roman poet, Ovid, under the names of famous women of early legend, such as those of Oenone to Paris (which suggested a beautiful poem of Tennyson's), Medea to Jason, and many others. In these one finds keen insight into character, especially feminine character, together with much that is exquisite in fancy and tender in expression. But it is to Alciphron that we owe the adaptation of this form of composition to prose fiction, and its employment in a far wider range of psychological and social observation.
The life whose details are given us by Alciphron is the life of contemporary Athens in the persons of its easy-going population. The writers whose letters we are supposed to read in reading Alciphron are peasants, fishermen, parasites, men-about-town, and courtesans. The language of the letters is neat, pointed, and appropriate to the person who in each case is supposed to be the writer; and the details are managed with considerable art. Alciphron effaces all impression of his own personality, and is lost in the characters who for the time being occupy his pages. One reads the letters as he would read a genuine correspondence. The illusion is perfect, and we feel that we are for the moment in the Athens of the third century before Christ; that we are strolling in its streets, visiting its shops, its courts, and its temples, and that we are getting a whiff of the Aegean, mingled with the less savory odors of the markets and of the wine-shops. We stroll about the city elbowing our way through the throng of boatmen, merchants, and hucksters. Here a barber stands outside his shop and solicits custom; there an old usurer with pimply face sits bending over his accounts in a dingy little office; at the corner of the street a crowd encircles some Cheap Jack who is showing off his juggling tricks at a small three-legged table, making sea-shells vanish out of sight and then taking them from his mouth. Drunken soldiers pass and repass, talking boisterously of their bouts and brawls, of their drills and punishments, and the latest news of their barracks, and forming a striking contrast to the philosopher, who, in coarse robes, moves with supercilious look and an affectation of deep thought, in silence amid the crowd that jostles him. The scene is vivid, striking, realistic.
Many of the letters are from women; and in these, especially, Alciphron reveals the daily life of the Athenians. We see the demimonde at their toilet, with their mirrors, their powders, their enamels and rouge-pots, their brushes and pincers, and all the thousand and one accessories. Acquaintances come in to make a morning call, and we hear their chatter,--Thaïs and Megara and Bacchis, Hermione and Myrrha. They nibble cakes, drink sweet wine, gossip about their respective lovers, hum the latest songs, and enjoy themselves with perfect abandon. Again we see them at their evening rendezvous, at the banquets where philosophers, poets, sophists, painters, artists of every sort,--in fact, the whole Bohemia of Athens,--gather round them. We get hints of all the stages of the revel, from the sparkling wit and the jolly good-fellowship of the early evening, to the sodden disgust that comes with daybreak when the lamps are poisoning the fetid air and the remnants of the feast are stale.
We are not to look upon the letters of Alciphron as embodying a literary unity. He did not attempt to write one single symmetrical epistolary romance; but the individual letters are usually slight sketches of character carelessly gathered together, and deriving their greatest charm from their apparent spontaneity and artlessness. Many of them are, to be sure, unpleasantly cynical, and depict the baser side of human nature; others, in their realism, are essentially commonplace; but some are very prettily expressed, and show a brighter side to the picture of contemporary life. Those especially which are supposed to pass between Menander, the famous comic poet, and his mistress Glycera, form a pleasing contrast to the greed and cynicism of much that one finds in the first book of the epistles; they are true love-letters, and are untainted by the slightest suggestion of the mercenary spirit or the veiled coarseness that makes so many of the others unpleasant reading. One letter (i. 6) is interesting as containing the first allusion found in literature to the familiar story of Phryne before the judges, which is more fully told in Athenaeus.
The imaginary letter was destined to play an important part in the subsequent history of literature. Alciphron was copied by Aristaenetus, who lived in the fifth century of our era, and whose letters have been often imitated in modern times, and by Theophylactus, who lived in the seventh century. In modern English fiction the epistolary form has been most successfully employed by Richardson, Fanny Burney, and, in another genre, by Wilkie Collins.
The standard editions of Alciphron are those of Seiler (Leipzig, 1856) and of Hercher (Paris, 1873), the latter containing the Greek text with a parallel version in Latin. The letters have not yet been translated into English. The reader may refer to the chapter on Alciphron in the recently published work of Salverte, 'Le Roman dans la Grèce Ancienne' (The Novel in Ancient Greece: Paris, 1893). The following selections are translated by the present writer.
FROM A MERCENARY GIRL
PETALA TO SIMALION
Well, if a girl could live on tears, what a wealthy girl I should be; for you are generous enough with them, any-how! Unfortunately, however, that isn't quite enough for me. I need money; I must have jewels, clothes, servants, and all that sort of thing. Nobody has left me a fortune, I should like you to know, or any mining stock; and so I am obliged to depend on the little presents that gentlemen happen to make me. Now that I've known you a year, how much better off am I for it, I should like to ask? My head looks like a fright because I haven't had anything to rig it out with, all that time; and as to clothes,--why, the only dress I've got in the world is in rags that make me ashamed to be seen with my friends: and yet you imagine that I can go on in this way without having any other means of living! Oh, yes, of course, you cry; but you'll stop presently. I'm really surprised at the number of your tears; but really, unless somebody gives me something pretty soon I shall die of starvation. Of course, you pretend you're just crazy for me, and that you can't live without me. Well, then, isn't there any family silver in your house? Hasn't your mother any jewelry that you can get hold of? Hasn't your father any valuables? Other girls are luckier than I am; for I have a mourner rather than a lover. He sends me crowns, and he sends me garlands and roses, as if I were dead and buried before my time, and he says that he cries all night. Now, if you can manage to scrape up something for me, you can come here without having to cry your eyes out; but if you can't, why, keep your tears to yourself, and don't bother me!
From the 'Epistolae,' i. 36.
THE PLEASURES OF ATHENS
EUTHYDICUS TO EPIPHANIO
By all the gods and demons, I beg you, dear mother, to leave your rocks and fields in the country, and before you die, discover what beautiful things there are in town. Just think what you are losing,--the Haloan Festival and the Apaturian Festival, and the Great Festival of Bacchus, and especially the Thesmophorian Festival, which is now going on. If you would only hurry up, and get here to-morrow morning before it is daylight, you would be able to take part in the affair with the other Athenian women. Do come, and don't put it off, if you have any regard for my happiness and my brothers'; for it's an awful thing to die without having any knowledge of the city. That's the life of an ox; and one that is altogether unreasonable. Please excuse me, mother, for speaking so freely for your own good. After all, one ought to speak plainly with everybody, and especially with those who are themselves plain speakers.
From the 'Epistolae,' iii. 39.
FROM AN ANXIOUS MOTHER
PHYLLIS TO THRASONIDES
If you only would put up with the country and be sensible, and do as the rest of us do, my dear Thrasonides, you would offer ivy and laurel and myrtle and flowers to the gods at the proper time; and to us, your parents, you would give wheat and wine and a milk-pail full of the new goat's-milk. But as things are, you despise the country and farming, and are fond only of the helmet-plumes and the shield, just as if you were an Acarnanian or a Malian soldier. Don't keep on in this way, my son; but come back to us and take up this peaceful life of ours again (for farming is perfectly safe and free from any danger, and doesn't require bands of soldiers and strategy and squadrons), and be the stay of our old age, preferring a safe life to a risky one.
From the 'Epistolae,' iii. 16.
FROM A CURIOUS YOUTH
PHILOCOMUS TO THESTYLUS
Since I have never yet been to town, and really don't know at all what the thing is that they call a city, I am awfully anxious to see this strange sight,--men living all in one place,--and to learn about the other points in which a city differs from the country. Consequently, if you have any reason for going to town, do come and take me with you. As a matter of fact, I am sure there are lots of things I ought to know, now that my beard is beginning to sprout; and who is so able to show me the city as yourself, who are all the time going back and forth to the town?
From the 'Epistolae' iii. 31.
FROM A PROFESSIONAL DINER-OUT
CAPNOSPHRANTES TO ARISTOMACHUS
I should like to ask my evil genius, who drew me by lot as his own particular charge, why he is so malignant and so cruel as to keep me in everlasting poverty; for if no one happens to invite me to dinner I have to live on greens, and to eat acorns and to fill my stomach with water from the hydrant. Now, as long as my body was able to put up with this sort of thing, and my time of life was such as made it proper for me to bear it, I could get along with them fairly well; but now that my hair is growing gray, and the only outlook I have is in the direction of old age, what on earth am I going to do? I shall really have to get a rope and hang myself unless my luck changes. However, even if fortune remains as it is, I shan't string myself up before I have at least one square meal; for before very long, the wedding of Charitus and Leocritis, which is going to be a famous affair, will come off, to which there isn't a doubt that I shall be invited,--either to the wedding itself or to the banquet afterward. It's lucky that weddings need the jokes of brisk fellows like myself, and that without us they would be as dull as gatherings of pigs rather than of human beings!
From the 'Epistolae,' iii. 49.
UNLUCKY LUCK
CHYTROLICTES TO PATELLOCHARON
Perhaps you would like to know why I am complaining so, and how I got my head broken, and why I'm going around with my clothes in tatters. The fact is I swept the board at gambling: but I wish I hadn't; for what's the sense in a feeble fellow like me running up against a lot of stout young men? You see, after I scooped in all the money they put up, and they hadn't a cent left, they all jumped on my neck, and some of them punched me, and some of them stoned me, and some of them tore my clothes off my back. All the same, I hung on to the money as hard as I could, because I would rather die than give up anything of theirs I had got hold of; and so I held out bravely for quite a while, not giving in when they struck me, or even when they bent my fingers back. In fact, I was like some Spartan who lets himself be whipped as a test of his endurance: but unfortunately it wasn't at Sparta that I was doing this thing, but at Athens, and with the toughest sort of an Athenian gambling crowd; and so at last, when actually fainting, I had to let the ruffians rob me. They went through my pockets, and after they had taken everything they could find, they skipped. After all, I've come to the conclusion that it's better to live without money than to die with a pocket full of it.
From the 'Epistolae,' iii. 54.