Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Abduction marriage in Heliodorus' Aethiopica Lateiner, Donald Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies; Winter 1997; 38, 4; ProQuest pg. 409 Abduction Marriage In Heliodorus' Aethiopica Donald Lateiner fll. IN MYTI-I, sexual violence played a major role in ancient Greek and Roman social life and literature.1 Interaction in rituals and informal settings both restricted and enabled mingling between the sexes; family conclaves and is­ sues of social standing gave rise to protracted property negotiations with other families concerning a valuable human commodity: daughters. An "alternative strategy" to the norm of father-approved betrothal and (parentally) arranged mar­ riages was found in marriage by abduction, a quasi-legal correc­ tion of a structural conflict within Mediterranean trafficking in women. Judith Evans-Grubbs' survey of abduction marriage in antiqui­ ty and the Byzantine East2 omits one palmary example of an­ cient co-operative bride-capture as a device to foil paternal wishes: this is found in the elaborately wrought plot of Helio­ dorus' Aethiopica. 3 The first section of this paper will explore this element of Mediterranean social and literary history before and during the the epoch of Heliodorus. The second section will consider the bride-theft in Heliodorus' novel as a source (hitherto unexploited) of information on the mechanics and aesthetics of abduction. The third section examines the signifi­ cance of the abduction for the values implicit in Heliodoran narrative. It briefly probes Heliodorus' characterization and erotic themes, the heroine's personality and sexuality, the psy­ chology and sociology of obsessive 1tPOKEtIlEV(Ov), in the institutions of betrothal and marriage, legal contracts, and social rituals that are designed to unite two houses. Heliodorus' Chariclea-an unwanted white female infant-is handed off in Egypt, with a shawl, jewels, and other tokens of identity, to Charicles by the Ethiopian Queen Persinna's agent Sisimithres. The sworn pledge then demanded of him is to marry her to a free and equal husband and to transmit the attached dowry. The world, and also its privileges, is divided by gender. These details enrich the aura of verisimilitude with historical coloration, however exotic the immediate locale. Exposure and adoption of a baby and the conspiracy to abduct a bride all have internal and external warrant; they correspond to the audience's experience and cohere in the narrative. Female social existence is institutionalized as a carrier or conduit for male networking. Women's legal and social «subordination is construed culturally as benign. "23 The father, with his legal right to preserve his daughter's chastity and to arrange his child's future, becomes one of literature's amusing blocking figures, but the always beautiful young woman consequently has little room to make her own selection or to engineer the union that she prefers. She has access to no legitimate way of asserting her selfhood, no open method of manipulating patriarchal imperatives within the law, religion, and the community. Attic New Comedy and the ancient romances show us that women nevertheless could and did make use of gestures, glances, beauty, and rhetoric to influence 23 D. Konstan, Sexual Symmetry (Princeton 1994) 40; M. Katz, ·Patriarchy, Ideology and the Epikleros," StIt 10 (1992) 692-708, at 702f comments on Aspis, Dyscolos, Epitrepontes, and P.Didot 1, with an analysis of woman as token in Attic law, the ·with-the-estate" or "heiress-in-trust" epikleros, a topic of many comedies (cf Fantham 48). Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 418 ABDUCTION MARRIAGE IN HELIODORUS' AETHIOPICA parental expectations and demands.24 Male relatives expect to "speak the bride" (Herzfeld's evocative phrase [43J from the Greek regarding current Cretan practice), to elicit consent, and to conduct the formalities for house, agnates, or even villages. The conduct and placement of women calibrate male standing. Betrothal and marriage procedures, however, may allow women to rearrange their male relatives' expectations and to shape their lived reality. II. Heliodorus' Bride-Theft in Context The Aethiopica was completed perhaps between A.D. 350 and 400, although a date fifty years earlier, in the age of Constantine, is also conceivable. 25 The date of composition is thus as un­ certain as the dramatic date of the novel. But although Heliodorus is not an accurate reporter of a historical moment, his posture of historical authenticity nevertheless requires constant reference to authentic toponyms, learned onomastics, credible-if bookish-ethnography, civic customs, and social protocols, along with the rhetoric of historiography: mannered claims of scrupulous research, of claimed limitations on pre­ cision, and other "credential ploys."26 In scenes set in Egypt and Ethiopia, at Athens and at Delphi, Heliodorus takes pains to represent genuine rituals and priestly regalia, accurate topog­ raphy and customs, actual names, monuments, and institutions known to earlier ages or to his own age-that is, to himself and to his educated audience. "Cette fidelite meme etait la condition premiere de sa credibilite. "27 Thus while Heliodorus demonstrably takes artistic licence, historical reality furnishes the backdrop to his love-story, and every element and minute detail corresponds to some element 24 Cf Achilles Tatius' Leucippe at 1.19.1; 2.24.2, 25.3, 27.3,30.1. 25 G. N. Sandy, Heliodorus (Boston 1982) 1-5, and T. Hagg, The N07Jel in Antiquity (Berkeley 1983) 59f and 240 summarize the indications; G. W. Bowersock, Fiction as History (Berkeley 1994) 149-60 reviews the evidence for a terminus post quem, which he finds in what he takes to be Heliodorus' reference to the third battle for the frontier town of Nisibis (350 C.E.); B. P. Reardon, Petronian Society Newsletter 24 (1994) 12 concurs. 26 Morgan 1982: 223, 228, 234, 246. 27 J. Pouilloux, -Delphes dans les Ethiopiques d'HeIiodore: la ft!alite dans la fiction," ]Sa'V 1983,259-86: 261 f, 266,276,285. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. DONALD LATEINER 419 in concrete or literary reality, even if they are jumbled in time and space (Morgan 1982: 247f). Similar ceremonies, typical events, or comparable institutions can be found, if not in Delphi, then elsewhere. Heliodorus certainly takes pains, when the plot permits, to locate these minutiae where they belong. Like Lucian in an earlier century, gaps exist between the buch­ gelehrte author's epoch and the dramatic date, and between that imaginary date and those of various empires and institutions -themselves seldom contemporaneous. 28 Nevertheless, and paradoxical! y, the "anachronism reinforces the realism '" (Morgan 1982: 242). At best the putative dramatic date of the novel can be placed between 525 and 331 B.C.E.: that is, after the Persian conquest of Egypt but before Alexander's conquest of Egypt. This capa­ cious slot is neither precise nor satisfactory. Morgan (1982: 236 n.46) reasonably points out that this "history'" must occur in a period devoid of any Greek-Persian conflict or Hellenic internal tension: a moment hard to locate within these temporal parameters. For all the impression of real places, manners, and times founded on 'realistic' details, Heliodorus offers few chronological specifics that would enable one to define his dramatic date, much as in the chronologically free-floating Daphnis and Chloe. A dramatic date at the later end of the scale -ca 360 B.C.E., an epoch similar to the late classical, if historically unspecific, Athenian society of Heliodorus' Attic model Me­ nander-will nevertheless affirm that the abundant, if largely superficial, Realien corroborate the novel's historical posture. Anachronisms and anatopisms remain, to be sure, in a historically erratic narration that is neither naturalistic nor realistic in the modern sense. For the topic of marriage by capture, however, the con­ taminations by historical errors are relatively unimportant, because such social customs do not have a history comparable to that of the Second Delian League, with one-time foun­ dations, battles, constitution, organization, and elected officials. Aethiopica 4.16-21 is a legitimate, if fictitious, source for the phenomenon of abduction because the custom-as a safety­ valve for the wishes of the young and lusty-did exist: before, during, and after both the dramatic date of the text and its date of composition, perhaps as much as 800 years later. This 28 Cf Rohde 484 on the realms of Axum and Meroe. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 420 ABDUCTION MARRIAGE IN HELIODORUS' AETHIOPICA nar:ative ploy, like many in the novel, is grounded in social ex­ perIence. In the case of the Delphic assembly and posse, Heliodorus' melange of historical and literary 'events' has antecedents in Demosthenes' accounts of Amphictyonic activities (19.150f) and in a similar abduction reported for the year 355/54 (Diod. 16.26.6, in an account of the founding of the Delphic oracle), when Echecrates, a Thessalian of "recent times" seized and raped a beautiful young prophetess: EV l>E 'tOl~ V£OO'tEpOt~ XpOVOt~ ... S£aaull£vov 'tllv XPTlallOA,oyouaav 1tapSEVOv EpaaS~Vat l>ta 'to KUA,A,O~ au't~~ Kat auvap1tuaav'ta (the terminus technicus for abduction) J3tuaaaSat. 29 As a result of this outrage, the Delphians changed their procedures: hence­ forth, only women fifty years and over would declare the oracles, in virgin dress (1tapS£VtKTI aK£uft) symbolic of the earlier custom. A version of this very incident, a cultic aetiology, a sordid and/or romantic "history," might therefore stand somewhere behind the Delphic element in Heliodorus' own complex plot. As for Charicles, Heliodorus' t£pollvl1ll00V, or "remembrancer," the term is specifically Delphic, with Classical precedents, as is the Amphictyonic levy (2.26.3; cf Aesch. In Ctes. 115; Dem., De Cor. 147-51; cf Rougemont 95). Attic details are largely accurate, either borrowed from books or derived from a visit, or both. Further, collections of tales of remarkable women existed long before Plutarch mentions them (1tOA,A.a Kat KOlVTI Kat il>i~ YUVat~tV a.~la A,oyou 1tE1tpaK­ 'tat),30 at a time well before Heliodorus shaped his story. In the narrative itself, Charicles, the respected priest and local man of property, consorts with Delphi's first citizens. He wants a socially and economically suitable match for his beloved adopted daughter Chariclea. His choice for her husband is his nephew Alcamenes (4.7.9, 11.1f), and he desires this connection "more than all the money in the world," as he puts it. His own wife and daughter have died, the latter on her wedding night in a fire, the former shortly thereafter of a broken heart (2.29). The replacement daughter bears his name and keeps him alive (aaA,£uoo yap E1t' au'tTl 'tOY J3iov, 2.33.3, 4.19.9). Although 29 Heliodorus seems to have conflated with this passage mention of virginal Artemis and virgin priestesses in the preceding sentence in order to introduce a priestess of Artemis at Delphi, where there was none (supra n.21). 30 Pluto Mar. 243D; cf Photo Bibl. 161 on such collections by Artemon and Apollonius the Stoic. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. DONALD LA TEINER 421 Charicles had betrothed his foster-daughter to Alcamenes many years ago, Chariclea herself says that she would prefer the grave to this marriage, despite her dutiful nature as an adopted daughter. Calasiris, the match-maker from Egypt with his own hidden agenda, reasonably fears that Charicles may compel his daughter to marry his intended (4.13.2). Thus he justifies his protege's sham abduction of the maid. Theagenes would have preferred to obtain Charicles' consent, if it were possible (4.6.6). Fathers fuss about money and status in the Greek novels as in Attic New Comedy (e.g. Epitrep. 645). The guardians of family status share a common, understandable obsession with the effect of the marriage on the household: a literary and social tradition that Heliodorus follows. At 4.17ff the young, aristocratic Theagenes leads out an armed band of his countrymen to steal his beloved. At midnight, these high-class athletes-loyal friends of the groom-'rapist'­ approach Chariclea's house disguised as drunken revelers (K(OJlOe;, 4.17.3; U~pte;, 4.19.2,7) and begin to shout and bang on their shields and on the doors. They easily break down the courtyard gate (for the heroine has already tampered with the bolts de; paoiav a.VOt~tv, an image fraught with sexual sym­ bolism) and abduct a willing, complicit, and cooperative woman (d)'tp£7tll Kat a7tav'ta 7tpo£tou'iav Kat '" EKoucrav). The use of weapons and forcible removal of a female might resonate in the minds of a fourth-century reading public, familiar with contem­ porary versions of the leges I uliae de adulteriis and de vi publica (later recorded in the Digest 48.5-6.5.2), concerning the use and abuse of unmarried and married women: for like the setting in time and space, legal procedures form a part of the background decor. Chariclea's guardian and foster-father is distraught. The whole town is disturbed by the outrageous iniuria to Charicles' house and deceived about Theagenes' intent and Chariclea's par­ ticipation. To the Delphians, the seizure is clearly a crime against public order and the dignity of a pillar of the com­ munity. It also represents sexual coercion (or, in Athenian law, hybris) against a local female resident and indeed the apparent defloration of a priestess dedicated to the virgin life. Mass hysteria and confusion ensue, then mass pursuit at Calasiris' instigation. This elderly Egyptian priest, mastermind of the entire hoax, encourages the formation of a posse but misin­ forms it about the flight of the miscreants (4.19-21), launching Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 422 ABDUCTION MARRIAGE IN HELIODORUS' AETHIOPICA the pursuit in the wrong direction in order to facilitate his own escape with the lovers. The precise moment of Chariclea's seizure, providentially just before her paternally arranged marriage to a family relative and local magnate (19.9, UK6-t£~), deeply spiritual long before the sexual consummation and, for most of the plot, barely physical. Chariclea's chastity is literally woven into the band with which 37 Post 423 regards the ·cult of chastity" in this novel as exceptional; further on this issue in S. GOLDHILL, Foucault's Virginity: Ancient Erotic Fiction and the History of Sexuality (Cambridge 1995: hereafter 'Goldhill'), esp. 118-21. It is worth emphasizing that male continence tends in the other novels to become essential after the mutual commitment has been made; virginity prior to it is not required, as for the female. 38 For earlier discussion, see E. R. Dodds, Pagan and Christian in an Age of Anxiety (New York 1965); more recently, P. Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (New York 1988). For the interaction between Pagan and Christian ideologies, see E. Cantarella, Bisexuality in the Ancient World (New Haven 1992) 187-210. 39 The phrase appears in M. Foucault, The History of Sexuality III: The Care of the Self (New York 1986) 228-32. 40 Konstan (supra n.23) 48-57,207. 41 See Goldhill 2, 35 on the ·obsession with virginity"; for the similar qualities of Ninus and Semiramis in the Ninus Romance, see S. Stephens and J. J. Winkler, edd., Ancient Greek N07Jels. The Fragments (Princeton 1995) 41--45. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 428 ABDUCTION MARRIAGE IN HELIODORUS' AETHIOPICA Persinna exposes her to the world; chastity is her watchword, as the pantarbe is her talisman (4.8.7); violation of her virginity would be a fate worse than death (ef 5.7.1: eo.vatou ltlK­ p6n:pov). Both Achilles Tatius (2.28, 8.11f, 8.6) and Heliodorus include ritual virginity tests that provide "mystical, theophanic endorse­ ments" (Goldhill 116-21) of hero and heroine. Thersander, a pirate ready and eager to rape Leucippe, decries and denounces her claims to virginity as an incredible sham for a victim of kidnaping, regardless of whether or not she cooperated with the males into whose hands she fell (Ach. Tat. 6.21; ef 8.5.6). As with Christian passion narratives of female saints, the novels emphasize their naked exposure to prying eyes, to public torture and degradation, and to sexual violence. 42 Yet sexual definitions are clearly being reformulated in these texts. Spirit and spirituality empower women and challenge male definitions of their institutional and inspirational roles. The martyr Perpetua troubled bishops Augustine and Quod­ vultdeus because her "virile Christianity" did not fit their paradigm of woman's lowly spritual capacities or their conviction of her bodily curse inherited from Eve (ef Shaw 36-43). Female asceticism (including celibacy) was unacceptable to both their biological fathers and the fathers of the church (e.g. Tertullian, De virgo vel. 7.9), who prohibited women­ even lifelong virgins-from performing the "male" offices of baptism and doctrinal teaching (Tert. De Bapt. 1.17). Like any good romantic heroine, coy Chariclea can have her cake and eat it too, as virgin priestess, princess, and even virgin wife of the hero. Chariclea and Leucippe are superhuman by pagan and Christian standards of behavior. Their sexual 42 Cf D. B. Shaw, "The passion of Perpetua," Past and Present 139 (1993) 3-45, esp. 9, on Leucippe's call for torture to test the truth of her statements (Ach. Tat. 6.20ff). Cf. G. Sissa, Greek Virginity (Cambridge [Mass.] 1990) 83-86, 119-21, on ritual virginity tests. Had Perpetua read pagan novels of women's bravery? She may well have derived some inspiration for the description of her vision from Apuleius: see P. Dronke, Women Writers of the Middle Ages (Cambridge 1984) 1-17, esp. 14 with n.58 for her knowledge of her countryman Apuleius and amphitheater scenes. Certainly the NT Aroc­ ryphal Acts celebrate the power of chastity, male and female: see Goldhil 118 and G. P. Corrington, "The 'Divine Woman'? Propaganda and the power of chastity in the New Testament Apocrypha," Helios 13 (1986) 151-62. For the evidence for torture and other physical abuse, see H. Leclercq, DA CL I (1907) S.v. "Ad bestias." Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. DONALD LA TEINER 429 aSCetiCIsm renders them nearly divine women, miracle­ workers who gain blessings for their exploits and lifestyle, rendering them voices of unimpeachable authority. 43 Chariclea originally plans never to marry.44 She changes her mind after glimpsing Theagenes, of course, or the romance would be lost. That previous plan was intended, we may guess, to enable her to escape male control and to discourse with the otherwise exclusively male sages of Delphi (2.33.4; 3.9, 19.4)-a freedom that she repeatedly achieves in the course of the story. Theagenes the Thessalian noble also wishes nothing to do with the "opposite sex," with fornication, or with marriage (3.17.4). He despises all women. For him also, celibacy has been a liberation from the usual route of young men of wealth and family. The claims of all three to virgin status are challenged by figures of authority or power, but the claims always prove true. The motif of sexual abnegation culminates in the unexpected Ethiopian denouement. The only extant novels that make the protagonists' chastity crucial for the plot's outcome are this one and Achilles Tatius'. Had Theagenes' abduction of his inamorata ever led to coitus, as feared by Chariclea-and as the public expected in 'real life' -her death-warrant would have been sealed. She would have died on Meroe's fiery magic grate that consumed non-virgins. But the grand Ethiopian victory over alien enemies demands some human blood (as first fruits, the first prisoners presented to King Hydaspes, 10.7.2), and the sexually pure victim is choice. Therefore Chariclea will evade service as victim, a human sacrifice for the Moon's sake, if and only if she be proven impure and tainted, not a virgin (10.7.7; cf the double chastity-test at Ach. Tat. 8.11-14). To prove this unsuitability for sacrifice, however, she must first survive a test that incinerates the flesh of sexually impure candidates on a grate of gold. As her anxious mother notes, many are the incidents that could have led a good girl, especially a ravishingly beautiful one, into sexual intercourse in captivity, war, and exile (l0.7.7f). The dilemma reflects late antiquity's common obsession with sexual abstinence, even for men and women 43 Corrington (supra n.42) 151. 44 Despite the fetishism of virginity (1.25.4, 2.33,4.8.7, 10.9.4), Chariclea once seemingly consents to a plan for Theagenes to have sex with Arsace-to preserve her own virgin status (7.25.6ff). He violently rejects the double standard, fortunately for him (10.9.1; cf Char. 2.11.lff; Ach. Tat. 5.7.11, 20.5, 26ff; 7.5.7; Xen. 3.12.4f). Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 430 ABDUCTION MARRIAGE IN HELIODORUS' AETHIOPICA who thought of themselves as married in spirit and in law. Passing this divinely enforced dual test gains Chariclea an ironic prize, the right of an alien to die as a sacrifice (10.9). The dramatic prelude qualifies her (and Theagenes) as virgins fit for sacrifice. The fully qualified candidates are to die under the ax (10.7.2, uv8pro1tOK'Wvia). The woman who once exalted virginity to the status of a god (2.33.5, EK8wx~0'\)cra 1tap8£viav), renounced all thought of marriage, and consecrated her life to Artemis remains in fact pure of sexual taint. The trial by fire, considered cross-culturally, can be probative, purifying, or punitive (see Callu 343). For Chariclea it serves the first purpose. The triple function well served Roman magistrates and witch-hunters, for whom mere penal decapitation was inadequately deterrent, and insufficiently amusing for the populace. 45 The romances provide exquisitely varied inter­ rogations, burning-tortures, and executions, reflecting the lawcodes and historical practices. 46 The threats to male and female honor, the tortures intimated and ensured, the tests of innocence, the repellent and barbaric human sacrifice that brings heroine and hero so close to death at the desolate end are only resolved by the peculiar circumstances of this abduction­ marriage-seizure of the willing maid and sexual consummation delayed. Like Shakespeare's Isabella in Measure for Measure, Chariclea's demand for judicial investigation (10.10-17, ()(K11Kai Kpicrt~;) provides a first better ending (el n.s3 infra). Similarly, Theagenes, demanding that Chariclea be the officiant to despatch him by knife from this life, asserts to the law-keepers that Chariclea combines two qualities thought impossible in one person: she is a married woman and a virgin (10.22, 33.1). The priest Sisimithres avers that the gods' miracles deserve notice and respect (10.39.3). III. The Abduction as a Focus for Characterization Self-controlled and uncontrollable, manic and depressive, Hellenic and Ethiopian, legal and illegal, candid and deceptive, brave and cowardly, physical and spritual, emotional and calcu- 45 On the entertainment value and functions of judicial murders and executions see K. M. Coleman, MFatal Charades: Roman Executions staged as Mythological Enactments, " JRS 80 (1990) 44-73. 46 An inventory in Callu 347 and n.129; cf Coleman (supra n.4S) 46ff. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. DONALD LATEINER 431 lating, virginal and debauched, vegetarian and meat-eating, ex­ pressive and dissimulating: these are a few of the polarities that Heliodorus' characters present to his reader. One character, oscillating like Chariclea in her moods, can embody both, or two conflicting characters may emblematize the opposition. No single hierarchy of values or ideal triumphs, other than the mutual spiritual devotion of Chariclea and Theagenes. They rise above their nature, and ours, in their ability to overcome their afflictions. This co-dependent dedication of masculine and fem­ inine gives rise to the peripeties of the plot. Having examined (I) abduction marriage as a 'fact' of [Mediterranean] life, and (II) its pivotal significance for Heliodorus' narrative, in this final section we focus on the personalities and values of the pro­ tagonists themselves: on how, that is, the abduction marriage, with its antecedents and consequences, fits in with the rest of these two strong characters' choices, thoughts, and actions. The young lovers' characterization depends largely on indica­ tions of their socio-sexual values. As destined future exemplars of Hellenic elites, both have been induced to feel a strong sense of honor and shame. The extra-legal 'bride-capture' is justified (for them, as for the reader) by lack of alternatives and their overwhelming mutual passion-though it is passion contained and controlled by the will and by oath (4.18) in order to escape Delphi and its paternalistic decrees. Chariclea wants no "acts of Aphrodite" without her full consent (4.18.4f), and consent will not precede proper marriage. Chivalrously, Theagenes swears to defend her chastity, though he protests that he would have behaved no differently even if Chariclea had not demanded an oath (4.18.4ff and 5.4, pace 1.25.4). Left alone in an Egyptian cave by their brigand captors and comrades, the grateful couple employ their long-delayed opportunity to embrace passionately and kiss without restraint (5.4.4ff). In a lovers' trance they "grow together.» Heliodorus slyly adds that their erotic transports were pure and virginal, their intercourse consummated only by chaste kissing (Kat Ka­ eapo'i~ JlOVOV IltYVUJl£VOt 'toi~ IJ.U