Essays on the Greek Romances

by Elizabeth Hazelton Haight

In the Toxaris the coloring is only quasi-historical through the mention of names of kings and their lineage: the story is not history, but an historical novel. And the connection of the Scythians with the Sarmatians, the Alans, the Maeotians and the Bosporans corresponds only in part with their actual relations at the time. The Sauromatians are a relic of the past; the Alans represent actual conditions in the time of the author. The geographical coloring is likewise only partly historical. The picture of the Scythians even with its tendency to idealization represents the people fairly. They are nomadic, poor, with a free democratic political organization without kings, and they are warriors. Their gods are the sword and the wind. Their customs are primitive. They make war on their neighbors and have special relations with the Greek states on the Bosporus and Olbia and visit those on the south side of the Black Sea.

Lucian in composing his Toxaris probably had in hand a Greek romance with a Scythian background, containing certain historical and ethnographical material. This he worked over making his story represent what his public then knew or could know of the Scythians and their neighbors. The discovery of the papyrus fragments of the Calligone novel confirms this thesis.[362] The type of the Toxaris story and the papyrus story is the same. Both were love romances, though in each the erotic motif is subordinated to adventure. The interest of the age in the unfamiliar, the strange is manifested in the selection of Scythia for the background.

Lucian’s narrative is intensely exciting as well as picturesque and although it is only a miniature story it gives us an idea of another love romance of a wild type with a king’s head cut off for vengeance, a bride kidnapped on horseback and an army raised on the ox-hide. The whole Toxaris indeed, as Croiset remarked,[363] with its ten anecdotes furnishes rich examples of Lucian’s art of narration.

VIII
A COMPARISON OF THE GREEK ROMANCES AND APULEIUS’ METAMORPHOSES

Apuleius, the author of the greatest ancient novel extant, might, if he had chosen, written his book in Greek instead of Latin. Though he was born in North Africa (at Madaura) he was educated in Athens as well as Roman Carthage and Rome, indeed was completely bi-lingual. The letter from his wife produced as evidence in his trial for having won her affections by magic was in Greek. And private correspondence demonstrates fluency in the language even more than does the fact of his translation of a work by Plato and his Latin style richly colored by Greek syntax and vocabulary.

Some reader may now ask as Apuleius anticipated: “Who is this man?”[364] So I must refer all to my other writings about him and briefly characterize him here for the uninformed.[365] Apuleius was born about A.D. 125 in the Roman colony of Madaura where his father was a leading citizen and official. He was educated at Carthage, Athens and Rome, was certainly bi-lingual and probably tri-lingual as he must have known Punic as well as Latin and Greek. Returning to Africa, he practiced successfully the art of a sophist, giving public discourses, many of them impromptu. Specimens of these are extant in a collection of extracts from his speeches called the Florida. He married a wealthy widow, mother of a university friend at Athens, and was promptly sued by his in-laws for having gained her hand by magic practices. The brilliant speech in which he defended himself at Sabrata against their charges, the Apologia, is extant and constitutes his autobiography. St. Augustine called him a Platonist and he did indeed try to convey Plato’s ideas to his contemporaries in works on The God of Socrates, Plato and his Doctrine and other lost writings. His fame when he was alive rested on his oratory and it was so great that he was honored by statues and made priest of Aesculapius at Carthage. But his undying glory comes from his novel, the Metamorphoses. The date of its composition is uncertain as indeed are most of the dates of his life. He lived from about A.D. 125 to A.D. 171, that is, in the time of Antoninus Pius and Marcus Aurelius. He was therefore a contemporary of Lucian and may have met him as Walter Pater imagines in Marius the Epicurean. What concerns us here is his novel and its relation to the Greek Romances.

The Metamorphoses of Apuleius is a long story written in eleven books. It is an ego-romance with Lucius a Greek acting as narrator and hero.

“The plot is simple. The hero Lucius who is greatly interested in magic is enabled by the aid of the maid-servant of a witch to achieve transformation. But a mistake in the use of the unguents changes him not into a bird as he had planned, but into an ass. Although he knows that the antidote is a meal of roses, he is kept by Fortune from securing release through long months and meets various adventures until at last through the aid of the goddess Isis Lucius the Ass becomes again Lucius the Man.”[366]

The similarity of this plot to that of the Greek Lucius or Ass is apparent at once. But its unique differences caused by diversification of anecdotes and long additions become clear as we read the narrative.

Lucius in the beginning was travelling in Thessaly riding his white horse over the high mountains when he fell in with two other travellers. One of these as they rode on together related a horrible story of how his friend Socrates saw a companion murdered by a witch. The scene of the story was set in Hypata, the very city to which Lucius was going. And the narrative of it by its effect on Lucius reveals all his credulity and curiosity about witchcraft.