Greek Literature in the Roman Period and in Late Antiquity
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any real doubt about the ending. Heliodoros redirected curiosity from outcome to explanation. The second problem is lack of direc tion and unity: romance was prone to fall apart into a series of exciting but only loosely connected adventures, at the end of which the protagonists recovered their lost happiness and simply lived out the rest of their lives as if nothing had happened. By leaving central questions unanswered Heliodoros is able to hold large spans of text together, and the most important answers, when they do arrive, involve decisive change for the protagonists. Both these strategies imply an interpretatively active reader. The opening of the novel is deservedly famous.11 A gang of bandits come across a beached ship, surrounded by twitching corpses and the wreckage of a banquet. Through their eyes, and with their ignorance of what has taken place, the reader is made to assimilate the scene in obsessive but unexplained visual detail. In the midst of the carnage sits a fabulously beautiful young woman, nursing a fabulously handsome young man. It does not take long to identify them as the hero and heroine of the novel, and learn that their names are Theagenes and Charikleia, but Heliodoros tantalizes us over further details. Thus at the very beginning of the novel two riddles are established: what has hap pened on the beach? and who exactly are the hero and heroine? Heliodoros prolongs the reader’s ignorance by his characteristic use of partial viewpoint. Sometimes, as with the bandits, there is a fictional audience whose specific perceptions act as a channel of partial information to the reader, but elsewhere Heliodoros as narrator simply relates what an uninformed witness of the events would have seen or heard. For example, we are only allowed to find out about the hero and heroine as they speak to others r are spoken about: Heliodoros as author knows all about them but keeps quiet in favour of his recording but not explaining narrative voice. The opening scene is eventually disambiguated by Kalasiris, an Egyptian priest. He regales Knemon, a surrogate reader within the text who shares the real reader’s curiosity about the protagonists, with a long story, beginning in Book 2, of how he met Charikleia at Delphi, witnessed the birth of her love for Theagenes and helped the lovers to elope. He chronicles their subsequent experiences, until at the end of Book 5, half-way through the novel, the story circles back to its own beginning and at last resolves the mystery of the scene on the beach.
which challenges him into interpretative activity, into being a solver and realizer of the text rather than just a passive consumer of it. I have subjected the giraffe to such prolonged analysis because it is an emblematic beast. The point I want to stress in this paper is that Heliodoros’ whole novel demands an active interpretative response from his reader. The Aithioptka is a much more challen ging read than any of the other Greek novels, precisely because it is pervaded at every level by the kind of self-conscious game-playing typified by the riddle of the giraffe. Here, for instance, is the Egyptian priest, Kalasiris, who acts as narrator for about a third of the whole novel, describing a dream he had on the island of Zakynthos: as I slept, a vision of an old man appeared to me. Age had withered him almost to a skeleton, except that his cloak was hitched up to reveal a thigh that retained some vestige of the strength of his youth. He wore a leather helmet on his head, and his expression was one of cunning and many wiles; he was lame in one leg, as if from a wound of some kind. (5.22.1) The vision reproaches Kalasiris for failing even to pay him a visit while in the vicinity, prophesies punishment for the omission, but conveys greetings from his wife to Kalasiris’ charge, the heroine Charikleja, ‘since she esteems chastity above all things’ (5.22.3). Again a riddle is set up by not immediately identifying the old man, and again the description is presented from the point of view of a character within the story. Here, however, the situation is rather more complicated, since Kalasiris himself has two aspects, as narrator and character within his own narration. As narrator he knows the identity of the dream figure, but in his presentation of his own experience he omits any explanatory gloss, and re-enacts the perplexity of his initial reaction. He describes the dream as he saw it, rather than as he subsequently understood it. Again the reader is challenged to disambiguate the riddle by matching the points of the description with knowledge acquired elsewhere. Every detail corresponds to something in the Homeric poems.4 This time Heliodoros has succeeded in keeping the easiest clues to the end, particularly the formulaic epithet polytropos (‘of many wiles’), proverbially associated with one epic individual, and the reference to a wound in the leg which also clinches its owner’s recognition in the original. Further clues are offered by the fact
with the giraffe is not a matter of coming to terms with a new experience, so much as an exercise in matching Heliodoros’ delib erately eccentric formulations with what is already known about giraffes.1 Knowledge about giraffes in late antiquity will have derived from autopsy in only a very few cases, although exotic animals were regularly exhibited in the arena. However, there exist a number of descriptions in classical authors which confirm that a literate reading public could be counted upon to have at least second-hand information about the animal.2 What all this means is that the description of the giraffe func tions on a second level as a riddle aimed at the reader. The infor mation it releases at such a measured pace serves as a series of clues from which the animal can be identified, although Heliodoros does not observe the modern protocol in such games of making the clues progressively easier.3 The answer to the riddle of course is the name of the creature: the rules of riddling entail both that the answer should be postponed until all the clues have been supplied and that it must be properly given, even when it has become perfectly obvious. So although the Greek word kamilopar-dalis is introduced in a way formally consistent with the dramatic frame of the narrative (i.e., it is supplied by people within the story rather than by authorial statement), it functions to confirm to the reader that this passage truly was a riddle, and that the riddle is now over. Heliodoros has taken some pains to observe the proprieties of realism here. The use of an ignorant audience within the fiction allows the riddle to be accommodated without damage to dramatic illusion. Nevertheless, once the riddle is recognized as such it becomes a game played directly between author and reader, bypassing the dramatic situation and even the narrative structure. Perhaps we can think of two Heliodoroi, first the author, a real man sitting in a room somewhere writing this text, and second the narrating voice in the text, which is just as much part of the fiction as the events it narrates. The narrator maintains the dramatic realism, but the author grimaces over his shoulder at the reader, playing with the etymology of the word kamelopardalis in a way which is not meaningful for the Ethiopian-speaking spectators. Similarly the reader operates on two planes: one addressed by the narrator, responding to events with the immediacy of real experi ence, the other bookishly responding to the author’s textual game,
spontaneously invented a name for the creature derived from the most prominent features of its anatomy: kamdopardalis [the normal Greek word for ‘giraffe*]. (10.27.1-4) It is worth spending a little time analysing what is going on in this passage. The first point to note is that an essential piece of information, the creature’s name, is not divulged until the last possible moment, after the description is completed. The information contained in the description itself is not imparted directly by the narrator to the reader. Instead it is chan nelled through the perceptions of the onlooking crowd. They have never seen a giraffe before, and the withholding of its name from the reader re-enacts their inability to put a word to what they see. From their point of view the creature is novel and alien: this is conveyed partly by the naive wonderment of the description, and partly by their attempts to control the new phenomenon by fitting it into familiar categories. Hence the comparisons with leopards, camels, lions, swans, ostriches, eyeliner and ships. Eventually they assert conceptual mastery over visual experience by coining a new word to name the animal, derived from the naively observed fea tures of its anatomy. However, their neologism is given in Greek (kamdopardalis), although elsewhere Heliodoros is scrupulously naturalistic in observing that Ethiopians speak Ethiopian. The reader is thus made to watch the giraffe from, as it were, inside the skull of a member of the Ethiopian crowd. The narration does not objectively describe what they saw but subjectively re enacts their ignorance, their perceptions and processes of thought. This mode of presentation, involving the suppression of an omniscient narrator in direct communication with the reader, has the effect that the reader is made to engage with the material with the same immediacy as the fictional audience within the frame of the story: it becomes, in imagination, as real for him as it is for them. But there is a double game going on, since the reader, as a real person in the real world, differs from the fictional audience inside the novel precisely in that he does know what a giraffe is. This assumption is implicit in the way the description is structured. If Heliodoros* primary aim had been to describe a giraffe for the benefit of an ignorant reader, he would surely have begun with the animal’s name, not withheld it. So for the reader the encounter
