When I prepared my lecture on the early Greek novel Callirhoe by Chariton for our undergraduate students in Comparative Literature a couple of years ago, I was wondering how to bring this text, probably about two thousand years old, to my students. While re-reading the novel it struck me that Chariton actually provided a feasible framework in the text itself. He introduces himself at the beginning of the novel and signs off at the end with “That is my story about Callirhoe” (Char. 8.8.16: τοσάδϵ πϵρὶ Καλλιρόης συνέγραψα/tosade peri Kalliroēs synegrapsa; transl. Reardon 2019, 124). Indeed, he marks the endings and beginnings of each book with a short summary and foreshadowing of the narrative events. The structure of the plot is highlighted in the narratorial comments and in the plans and premonitions of characters that cluster around the endings and beginnings of the books. It thereby enables readers grasp the double nature of plot as “global structure” and the ongoing “structuration” while reading.
Book 2, for example, ends with the servant Plangon going to speak to Dionysius in order to convince him to marry Callirhoe, who finds herself pregnant, abducted by pirates, and sold into slavery on the other end of the Mediterranean from her home town of Syracuse (a common affliction for heroines of the Greek novel). Callirhoe and Plangon know that the only way to ensure the welfare of the child is to have Dionysius marry Callirhoe, a woman so beautiful he immediately fell in love with her (another common affliction of novel heroines), and to have him believe that the child is his. Will the plan work out? Throughout Book 2, Chariton has established that for Callirhoe everything depends on the outcome of Plangon’s conversation with Dionysius. Readers understand that the stakes are high, and when Plangon says “I am going to carry out my mission” at the end of the book, they are invited to assess the probability of the desired plot event. The break between books gives them the necessary space to do so. The materiality of the book hereby supports readers’ tracking the probability design of the plot (see Kukkonen 2020 for the notion of “probability design”).
Approaches to cognition that foreground the body and its embeddedness in the material world can shed some further theoretical light on these processes. The extended-mind hypothesis holds that cognitive processes can involve the material environment, for example, when we write down a phone number, and thereby supplement our memory (see Clark and Chalmers 1998; Clark 2008). Writing enables not only communication and memory, but also the structuring of an argument: elements can be identified and marked in paragraphs, and then ordered and reordered in a particular sequence (Menary 2007). The structuring of an argument depends on the skill in writing, but also on the size of the paper and, perhaps, scissors and glue, which would further underline the embodied dimension of thinking in the extended mind. Literary narratives arguably build on these material qualities when they play with the material shape of the book readers hold in their hands (Caracciolo and Kukkonen 2021).
We do not know what exactly an original copy of Callirhoe would have looked like, since the earliest manuscripts we have of the full text are from the Middle Ages. Papyrus fragments from the Hellenistic period, however, were found for Callirhoe, and it is clear that the text was originally copied, circulated, and read on a certain number of papyrus rolls (see the introduction to Morales 2020 for a textual history). “Books” were divisions made in ancient texts and often corresponded to the length of the papyrus scroll onto which they were copied. These copies were made in the Hellenistic libraries, such as the library of Alexandria, which also had workshops preparing papyrus rolls of different sizes. Rolls could be adjusted in length by glueing on more sheets or cutting off empty sheets, but it appears that they came at a standard length of about twenty sheets (see Johnson 2012, 257). When a scribe set out to copy a book, they would make an estimate of how the text needed to be distributed across rolls before they set to work (see Schubart 1907, 64-65; Kenyon 1951, 40). We may well imagine Chariton making similar estimates when he started writing his novel, especially, since he introduces himself as a secretary at the beginning of the narrative, which suggests that he was well-versed in copying. The scroll, with its particular length and size, becomes an affordance for the novelist to pace the development of his plot.
Callirhoe can be divided in multiple ways if we use the book as a basic unit. A major cesura exists between Books 4 and 5, where the action moves from the Mediterranean into Babylon. The movement of the figures in the fictional world corresponds to the movement of the overall plot (von Contzen and Kukkonen 2024), and it is supported by the division between the books. Tim Whitmarsh (2009, 42) highlights especially the beginning of books in Callirhoe as preliminary “cognitive maps”, drawing readers’ attention to narrative structure and providing a momentary sketch of the developing structuration of the plot. I have looked at a corresponding cliffhanger at the end of Book 2, which serves a similar effect. The premonitions of characters, and also the commentary of the narrator, cluster around these breaks between books, which enables us to trace these structurations even when reading Callirhoe in the material guise of a codex book. Such an approach to Callirhoe through the materiality of the scrolls does not preclude that many “readers” in antiquity probably encountered the narrative when it was read aloud to them, as Tomas Hägg (2004) suggests. The narratorial comments summarise what has come before and project what will come afterwards, as Whitmarsh, Hägg, and others have observed, thereby providing moments of orientation and metacommentary to readers, rooting plot profoundly in the material and embodied dimension of the text. It arguably also makes an ancient text more relatable to present-day students, or at least that was the bet I took in my lecture.
Karin Kukkonen
Cited Works
Caracciolo, Marco, and Karin Kukkonen. 2021. With Bodies: Narrative Theory and Embodied Cognition. Columbus: Ohio State University Press.
Chariton. 2019. ‘Chaereas and Callirhoe’. In Collected Ancient Greek Novels, translated by B.P. Reardon, 17–124. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Clark, Andy. 2008. Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension. Oxford: University Press.
Clark, Andy, and David Chalmers. 1998. ‘The Extended Mind’. Analysis (Oxford) 58 (1): 7–19.
Contzen, Eva von, and Karin Kukkonen. 2024. ‘Camilla’s traces: Movement as an analytical key to literary history’. Orbis Litterarum.
Hägg, Tomas. 2004. ‘Orality, Literacy and the “Readership” of the Early Greek Novel’. In Parthenope: Selected Studies in Ancient Greek Fiction, 109–40. Copenhagen: Tusculanum Press.
Johnson, William A. 2012. “The Ancient Book”. In The Oxford Handbook of Papyrology, edited by Roger S. Bagnall, 256-281. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Kenyon, Frederic G. 1951. Books and readers in ancient Greece and Rome. 2. ed. Oxford: Clarendon.
Kukkonen, Karin. 2020. Probability Designs: Literature and Predictive Processing. Cognition and Poetics. New York: Oxford University Press.
Menary, Richard. 2007. ‘Writing as Thinking’. Language Sciences (Oxford) 29 (5): 621–32.
Morales, Manuel Sanz, ed. 2020. Chariton of Aphrodisias’ « Callirhoe »: A Critical Edition / Ed. by Manuel Sanz Morales. Vol. 2. Antike Texte. Heidelberg: Winter.
Schubart, Wilhelm. 1907. Das Buch bei den Griechen und Römern: eine Studie aus der Berliner Papyrussammlung. Handbücher der königlichen Museen zu Berlin. Berlin: Georg Reimer.
Whitmarsh, Tim. 2009. ‘Divide and Rule: Segmenting Callirhoe and Related Works’. In Readers and Writers in the Ancient Novel, edited by Michael Paschalis, Stelios Panayotakis, and Gareth Schmeling, 12:36–50. Barkhuis.
