Emma Southon on the Emergence of Popular Fiction in the Ancient World
People have been debating the invention of the novel forever. For some, the first novel was the 11th Century Japanese Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikabu, for others the novel truly began when Cervantes published Don Quixote while those one interested in English (language) literature cite Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, pushing the invention of the novel to 1740. Not enough people look back to the ancient world, which is more associated with epic poetry about gods and war than prose compositions.Article continues after advertisement
It might come as a surprise to learn, then, that the Roman empire was awash with narrative fiction in prose form—novels, few of which are about heroic wars. Instead, most are romantic stories about young lovers separated by fate, and the rest are swashbuckling adventures full of bandits and pirates. Several contain both, almost all of them contain at least one scene of staggering violence.
The passivity of Roman protagonists reveals the difference between us and them: they believed in gods who interceded in the lives of the beautiful and the noble, at least in fiction.
The earliest of the Roman Romance novels dates from the first century CE, just as the first emperor Augustus ended the Republic once and for all and gathered the whole Roman empire into his own grubby little hands. Known as Callirhoe, it was written by a legal secretary named Chariton from Aphrodisias (in modern Turkey) and a romance, set in Syracuse in the aftermath of the Peloponnesian war in the 5th century BCE. The heroine of the title is a woman so beautiful that she is regularly mistaken for the goddess Aphrodite. She marries a local elite named Chariton and the suitors she rejected turn against her. They come together and convince Chariton that his new wife is unfaithful to him. In a jealous rage, Chariton assaults Callirhoe and kicks her until she falls into a death-like coma (somehow, despite this horrific event, Chariton remains the hero of this story and you are meant to root for him).
