NOVELTIES IN THE ANCIENT NOVEL by Stephen Harrison, Corpus Christi College, Oxford.

As at tenders at CA conferences and other academic gatherings may have noticed, the ancient novel has in the last twenty years become a 'hot' topic in literary research and university teaching. These texts (Petronius' Satyrica (better than Satyricon; no-one talks about Virgil's Georgicon (Greek gen.pl.) libri, exactly parallel) and Apuleius' Metamorphoses (or Golden Ass) in Latin, Longus' Daphnis and Chloe, Heliodorus' Aethiopica, Chariton's Chaereas and Callirhoe, Achilles Tatius' Leucippe and Clitophon and others in Greek) had previously not received as much academic attention as more 'canonical' works. The perceived 'marginality' of the novels was partly chronological, since these texts are all 'late' in date: Petronius under Nero, Apuleius in 2C AD, and the Greek novelists ranging from ?lst C AD (Chariton) to ?3rd or ?4th (Heliodorus); not Augustan Rome or Periclean Athens (infandum!). It was also based on a prejudiced view of their literary quality, exemplified perhaps most influentially in B. E. Perry's The Ancient Romances, pub- lished 1967 but summarising the (important) work Perry had done on the ancient novels over the previous half-century. Both these barriers have been lowered in recent years. First, there has been a signal revival of interest in the literary texts of the Roman empire, particularly those written in Greek during the 'Second Sophistic', the revival of Greek culture in the stable conditions of the eastern Roman Empire in the period from Plutarch to Philostratus (lst-early 3rd C AD). Second, literary scholars and teachers have been more willing to roam outside the conventional genres in their appreciation of ancient texts, and have found that the application of close scholarly and critical scrutiny to non-traditional works and authors yields fruitful and stimulating results.

One development here which has been extremely welcome, and which is of particular interest to the broader classical community, is the publication of modern and reliable translations of the basic texts, often done by major scholars. The excellent Penguin translation of Petronius by J. P. Sullivan (1965) has now been joined by a fine World's Classic by P. G. Walsh (1996) and a splendidly lively version in Everyman by the U.S. scholars R. Bracht Branham and Daniel Kinney (1996). Likewise, Apuleius has been well translated, not only in J. A. Hanson's Loeb edition (1989), but also again in the World's Classics by P. G. Walsh (1994) and (most recently) in the Penguin Classics by E. J. Kenney (1998). All the Greek novels are now catered for in the excellent Collected Ancient Greek Novels (1989) by various novel scholars, edited by B. P. Reardon and available in a (hefty) paperback; Chariton has a good new Loeb by George Goold (1995), and Longus will shortly be available in Aris and Phillips. This means that these texts are now firmly available for the general reader and for Classical Civilization courses. And students like them; not only are the novels intrinsically attractive with their plots of boy-girl teenage love and adventure in the Greek novels, or colourful parodies of them in the Roman versions (gay scroungers in Petronius, bestiality and adultery in Apuleius), but they represent one of the few opportunities in Classics for students to read in a genre which is closely related to one of which they commonly have substantial experience in English. Not surprisingly, historians of comparative literature have picked up on the connection of ancient and modern novel, for example in Mary Ann Doody's lively and controversial The True History of the Novel (1996) or (for the more theoretically-minded) the Russian formalist critic Mikhail Bakhtin (1981).

There is much to be said for some parts of novelistic texts as A-Ievel set books, and they have occasionally appeared on syllabus lists. There are some good editions with commentary on novel episodes very suitable for such purposes. E. J. Kenney's excellent edition of the perenially popular Cupid and Psyche portion of Apuleius (1990), which also has a parallel translation (perhaps a pedagogic disadvantage), and M. S. Smith ' s slightly severe but useful edition of the Cena Trimalchionis part of Petronius (1975), are both currently available in paperback. Neither author is too demanding in syntax, though Apuleius' wonderfully archaising diction and Petronius' names for foodstuffs introduce a range of vocabulary somewhat more extensive than that of Hannibal attacking the Romans; selective school editions already exist of Cupid and Psyche by Balme and Morwood (1976) and of the Cena by Balme again (1973, The Millionaire's Dinner Party). Both episodes have great intrinsic attractions: the Cena gives the nearest thing to a literary description of a Roman orgy, combined with Jane-Austen-Iike barbed social comedy, while Cupid and Psyche tells an amusing and entertaining love-story with allegorical connections which has had due influence on the fairy-tale (though I would personally stoutly resist those who see the episode as very strongly influenced by either folk-tale or philosophical ideas). On the Greek side we hope that new editions of Longus due from both Aris and Phillips and the Cambridge Greek and Latin Classics will soon provide a similar aid for the school and university reader; there is already the very useful study by Richard Hunter (1983). Daphnis and Chloe's tale of sexual innocence eventually overcome, told with due decorum but a knowing attitude, added to the work's brilliant narrative architecture and elegant literary colour, again provides a text of obvious attraction.

When texts become popular in teaching at universities, handbooks for students will surely follow, and students of the novel now have a number to choose from. The two most convenient introductory volumes which cover both the Greek and Roman novels are Hagg (1983) and Holzberg (1995). The largest of them all, though as often with E. J. Brill Publisher at a price that not all will wish to pay, is the massive (875 page) The Novel in the Ancient World, edited by Gareth Schmeling (1996), which has a vast range of material by leading scholars on all the major texts and topics. Like Reardon's Collected Ancient Greek Novels, it also includes some fascinating novel-like works such as narrative and early Christian acts and biographies, showing that ancient fiction, far from being a self -contained and narrow genre, had broad influence in many unlikely aspects of later imperial literature. British publishers have also seen the opportunity, and there are two pairs of volumes here: Routledge's Greek Fiction, (1994), edited by John Morgan and Richard Stoneman, and Latin Fiction (1999), edited by Heinz Hofmann; like Schmeling, these volumes have newly-commissioned pieces by experts surveying the chief texts and topics, and laudably extend to cover many kinds of quasi-novelistic texts, but are more accessible in both format and price (the Greek volume is in paperback and it is to be hoped that the Latin volume will soon follow). OUP has now issued two volumes which reprint classic essays on the novels, with introductions which provide useful orientation and survey of the literature on the novels -Oxford Readings in the Greek Novel, edited by Simon Swain, and Oxford Readings in the Roman Novel, edited by Stephen Harrison (both 1999, both in paperback).

I end by mentioning a few of the more accessible books about the individual novels (though the essays in the collections mentioned in the previous paragraph might be the best place to start, and their bibliographies will yield much more material). On Petronius, the recent book by Conte (1996) attacks several of the key issues in a clear and comprehensible way, arguing that the narrator of the Satyrica is a student-type intellectual snob who obsessively focuses his account through his own limited literary and mythological learning; while Winkler (1985) in a bravura performance has moved the goalposts on Apuleius, arguing very influentially that the Metamorphoses is radically ambiguous between a novel of religious conversion and a satire on exploitative cults. On both these authors Walsh (1970) in its 1995 paperback reprint is still a solid and scholarly work, which when first published did much to counteract the generally low view of Petronius and Apuleius held by previous literary critics. On the Greek novels, Reardon (1991) presents in an accessible way a general view by one of the top scholars in the field, while Hunter (1983), as already mentioned, provides a fine scholarly background to Longus, and Goldhill (1995) gives the subject of love in th~ Greek novels a typically stimulating treatment.

So the ancient novel is out there and flourishing, and looks set to grow further as an object of study. The schedule of more than 100 papers for the third major international conference on the ancient novel at Groningen, The Netherlands, in July 2000 can be found at its website (http://come.to/ican), and the burgeoning bibliography on the novel is monitored by the regular Petronian Society Newsletter, edited by the indefatigable Gareth Schmeling (see its very useful website at http://chss.montclair.edu/ classics/petron/PSNNOVEL.html). Do have a look at one of the most exciting areas of modern literary classics.

CA News No. 22, June 2000.