After many decades of neglect, the last forty years have seen a renewed scholarly appreciation of the literary value of the Greek novel. Within this renaissance of interest, four monographs have been published to date which focus on individual novels; I refer to the specialist studies of Achilles Tatius by Morales and Laplace and those of Chariton of Aphrodisias by Smith and Tilg. This book adds to this short list and takes as its singular focus Xenophon’s Ephesiaca. Among the five fully extant Greek novels, the Ephesiaca occupies the position of being an anomaly, since scholars have conventionally considered it to be either a poorly written text or an epitome of a more sophisticated lost original. This monograph challenges this view by arguing that the author of the Ephesiaca is a competent writer in artistic control of his text, insofar as his work has a coherent and emplotted focus on the protagonists’ progression in love and also includes references to earlier texts of the classical canon, not least Homer’s Odyssey and the Platonic dialogues on Love.
At the same time, the Ephesiaca exhibits stylistically an overall simplicity, contains many repetitions and engages with other texts via a thematic rather than a pointed type of intertextuality; these and other features make this text different from the other extant Greek novels. This book explains this difference with the help of Couégnas’ view of ‘paraliterature’, a term that refers not to its status as ‘non-literature’ but rather to literature of a different kind, that is simple, action-oriented and entertaining.
By offering a definition of the Ephesiaca as a paraliterary narrative, this monograph sheds new light on this novel and its position within the Greek novelistic corpus, whilst also offering a more nuanced understanding of intertextuality and paraliterature.
Reviews
Patrick Robiano in L’Antiquité Classique 88 (2019), pp 221-223
Acknowledgements VII
Introduction 1
1 The Ephesiaca as a Novel Contrasting Two Nights of Love 21
2 Apollo’s Oracle: The Prophecy of the Protagonists’ Love-Story 53
3 Action and Growth in Personality in the Protagonists’ Journey 79
4 Spirituality and Mutuality in Anthia and Habrocomes’ Progression in Love 97
5 The Protagonists’ Love After Death in Egypt 123
6 The Protagonists’ Return to Ephesus: The Social Confirmation of Their Erotic Development 151
7 The Ephesiaca as a Narrative Leaning Towards Paraliterature 163
8 My Paraliterary Reading of the Ephesiaca in Light of the Epitome Theory 193
Appendix
The Identity of Xenophon of Ephesus and the Date of the Ephesiaca 211
Bibliography 217
Indices 235
Index Locorum 235
General Index 237
