Text, Access
Swain, Simon. "The Greek Novel and Greek Identity." Hellenism and Empire: Language, Classicism, and Power in the Greek World, AD 50–250. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. 100–131. (Please read the whole chapter.)
Access PDF via Brightspace course site > Content.
SWA Prompt
For this SWA, we're looking for a critical-thinking (CT) assessment of Swain's chapter. True, 200 words aren't nearly enough for the job, but let's make that a feature, not a bug — a chance for us to practice focus and concision.
You really do need to study the Bingdev page on CT, but here are the main elements of CT as they relate to this assignment — consider the following to be the SWA prompt:
- Briefly summarize the chapter.*
* Please do not use AI for this! It's much better to figure it out for yourself than to get a robot to do it for you. Actually, I've looked at the AI summaries of the piece. They suck.
- What is Swain's overall point?
- How, according to Swain, does that relate to D&C?
- What light, in your view (your view, not a robot's), does Swain's chapter shed on D&C?
- Do you have any feedback for the author?
Study Guide Proper
Simon Swain, a professor at the University of Warwick (UK), is a leading light in, among other things, the study of Greek literature and culture under the Roman Empire. As for the book from which this chapter comes, it "explores" (to quote the publisher's blurb) "identity, politics, and culture in the Greek world of the first three centuries AD, the period known as the second sophistic." The assigned chapter approaches that topic through the lens of the Greek novel.
In that chapter, Swain mentions several examples of long-form prose fiction, some of which survive only in fragments, but he's mostly concerned with novels that, like Daphnis and Chloe, survive entire and feature boy-girl love stories with adventure, suspense, etc. Apart from D&C, they are:
- Chariton Chaereas and Callirhoë (very ca. 100 CE), about a newly-wed couple who, after a shocking episode of wife-abuse, are separated and then happily reunited
- Xenophon Anthia and Habrocomes (ca. 100-150 CE), about another couple separated and then reunited after various adventures
- Achilles Tatius Leucippe and Cleitophon (early-ish 200s CE), about an elopement, separation, pirates etc., reunion
- Heliodorus Ethiopian Tale (200s-300s CE), about yet another couple and their close brushes with death, but with some interesting treatments of race
As for the fragmentary novels, there are a lot of them; we're not too concerned with them.
I'll let you piece together Swain's argument for yourselves. Here, I'll confine myself to guidance and background that, I hope, will prove helpful to those who may be new to this stuff. So let's not be too concerned that some of the discussion is pitched for a scholarly audience. As critical thinkers, we should, however, make an effort to distinguish between views that Swain challenges and those that he argues for.
Getting back to helpful background, let's start with period and place. Swain focuses on the second sophistic, a cultural phenomenon closely associated with the Greek-speaking provinces of the Roman Empire, first through third centuries CE (or at least up to about 250 CE). That period saw prosperity return to the eastern Mediterranean after centuries of conquest by Rome. Recovery brought with it a cultural revival, one that scholars today often refer to as, precisely, the "second sophistic."
Why "second," and why "sophistic"? The word "sophistic" comes from "sophist," but what's a sophist? Some of us may be familiar with the word in the sense of an intellectually dishonest person, a teacher and/or practitioner of logical-rhetorical flim-flam. That idea comes to us mostly from the playwright Aristophanes (later 400s to early 300s BCE) and from philosophers like Plato and Aristotle (300s BCE). Under the Empire, "sophist" (sophistēs) could still be used to mean that, but the term was (confusingly) also applied to elite teachers and performers of Greek rhetoric, people whose skills earned them prestige, privilege, influence, and income. Some sophists held endowed chairs of rhetoric; some were movers and shakers in their cities. All of them saw themselves as care-takers of Greek culture and exemplars of Greek learning, paideia. As such, these Imperial-age sophists have become emblematic of cultural currents, collectively termed the "second sophistic," studied by scholars like Swain. (The "second" in "second sophistic" has a somewhat complicated backstory; let's leave that alone for now.)
Chronology. Swain also refers to the classical period, very approximately, 5th-4th centuries BCE, and the Hellenistic period, 3rd-1st centuries BCE (again, super approximately). What makes the Hellenistic period matter for us is that it saw two key developments: (1) the spread of Greek culture well beyond Greece itself (especially in the East); and (2) the conquest by Rome of Greece, Anatolia, the Middle East, and Egypt, all them places that had already come under the influence of Greek culture. The "High Empire" (Roman Empire), 1st-3rd centuries CE, give or take, basically coincides with the period of the second sophistic. Late antiquity is 4th-6th centuries CE, some would say 235 (start of the Crisis of the Third Century)-641 (the end of Roman rule in Egypt and the death of the emperor Heraclius).
In the assigned chapter, Swain opens a window into certain social and economic features of the world that he studies. Key to Swain's discussion is the relation of city to country. To cut to the chase, cities exploited the countryside for their food supply, and the elite citizens of cities derived much or most of their wealth from the agricultural produce of their country estates. These last were worked by a mix of (free) tenant farmers and (unfree) slaves. The exact ratio is not something I know anything about, nor would I want to guess. Suffice it to say that the countryside was largely populated by poor peasants working for bosses living in the city. City-country was, then, an unequal relationship, with cities very much in the dominant position.
In Swain's account, this city/country opposition is related to the Us/Other binary, the main manifestation of which was, for the time and place we're studying, the Greek/barbarian contrast. Barbarians were, etymologically, people who didn't know Greek, who could only say "bar-bar," that is, unintelligible nonsense. They might be highly cultured, even morally superior, but their non-Greekness (not just linguistically, but ethnically-racially) inevitably counted as a deficiency. This Greek/barbarian binary wasn't always so very clear cut. Romans were non-Greeks, but educated Romans, most of whom knew Greek as well as Latin, seem mostly to have been given a pass during the Imperial period. Lucian of Samosata, one of our authors for this semester (ca. 120-ca. 200 CE), was a sophist, a consummate writer of Greek, and an exemplar of Greek paideia. He was also Syrian and quite conscious of that fact. Greek and non-Greek intersect in him.
- Swain addresses some blatant instances of — what else to call it? — racism in novels, for instance, one rather startling passage, discussed and quoted by Swain, from a novel that's not D&C: "In Achilles Tatius we do at least find the expected categorization of the notorious boukoloi ["cow herders" — in some novels, they're bad guys]: the shoreline [here, Swain starts quoting the ancient author] 'was full of frightening, wild men, all of them big and black in colour (not the absolute black of the Indians, but more like a bastard Ethiopian), their heads were shaven, their bodies gross, but they were quick on their feet, and all spoke a barbarous tongue' (Leucippe and Clitophon iii. 9 ff.)" (Swain p. 118).
Issues of sexuality and associated ideologies loom large in the chapter. Ever since the 1970s, scholars have devoted considerable energy to studying how sexual categories in ancient Greece and Rome didn't align always with ours. During the classical period, Greek men often (not always) sought sexual companionship from male teenagers and young adults. Insofar as that involved sex with under-age partners, we would call it pedophilia. The ancient Greeks called it paiderastia, from which we derive the term pederasty. Pederasty, the courtship of boys by older men, was treated as broadly acceptable in the pre-classical and classical Greek worlds, though philosophers like Plato could see same-sex sex as problematic. In works dating from the Imperial period, pederasty and extra-marital sex could be (weren't always) treated as problematic. Still, and at least partly under the influence of Stoic ethics, heteroerotic marriage becomes a highly valued relationship in a lot of our evidence. As Swain argues (forgive the spoiler!), this matters for Greek male self-definition during the Imperial period. It also matters (so Swain) for the Greek novel, Daphnis and Chloe included; read Swain to find out why.
(Footnote and clarification: On p. 124, Swain notes that a speaker in Athenaeus' Sophists at Dinner (a very lengthy dialogue, ca. 200 CE, consisting of chatter among learned diners) is referred to (in jest) as a "pornographer." pornographos, from pornos/pornē (male/female sex worker) and graphō ("to write/draw/paint"), in ancient Greek doesn't mean "pornographer," exactly. However much the output of (plural) pornographoi might have been salacious, the word itself, at least initially, referred to artists who painted portraits of sex workers, as in the passage noted just above.)