Town and Country

Since Greek fiction was at once a literary product for sophisticated entertainment and a textual channel for self-representation, the depiction of the city and the country might be expected to reveal something significant, if distorted, about the social world of the pepaideumenoi. It is not surprising that the cities of the eastern provinces are the bases for the main characters in the novels, because that was where the authors and their readers lived (see Said 1994). Most were urban centers that prospered under the empire, like Miletus, Ephesus, Tarsus, and Alexandria. The fictional people who inhabit these cities all conform to a basic profile of ideal characteristics that varies only slightly from work to work. These traits are wealth, nobility (eugeneia), beauty, education, erotic self-restraint (Gr. sophrosyne, Lat. pudicitia), and piety (eusebeia). Within the civic community, these traits distinguish the protagonists as members of the ruling class. In the novels, wealth is evident in the conspicuous display and consumption of precious metals and expensive materials, such as furniture, clothing, and food, in public venues, from banquets, weddings, and funerals to formal acts of largesse. It is also apparent in the ownership of palatial homes in the city and productive rural villas outside it, always prominently situated, extravagantly furnished, and well staffed (see Scarcella 2003). Aristocratic families educate their children by means of private tutors (paidagOgoi), and many of the protagonists are eloquent speakers. They excel in various gendered pursuits: men are athletic and prove to be sturdy combatants and successful leaders in war, while women know poetry and music. The novels idealize fidelity between lovers (though allowing men a degree of sexual freedom), virginity (particularly in women), and, above all, the reciprocal attachment of man and woman in marriage. The emphasis on conjugality and the well ordered household in part reflects the importance of intermarriage in securing the posterity of elite prestige and power. Piety is expressed by respect for divine providence, participation in public rituals and festivals, and sacred dedications. Since the characters are typically youths, they do not hold public office, but their parents or other adults sometimes do. The testimony of contemporary orators and the moralizing language of honorary inscriptions prove that this homogeneous profile of attributes was a current construction to which members of the bouleutic classes of the eastern cities commonly aspired. Lucian finds humor in the hypocrisy of aristocrats who claim personal virtue but fail to show it, such as proud hosts who try to speak eloquently but make grammatical slips, grandees who waste their fortunes on massive mausolea that are empty symbols of self worth, or charlatans who prey upon the gullibility of religious fanatics.

While the main characters in fiction embody or aspire to this aristocratic ideal, rarely does the reader meet the rest of the population. This simplification of the actual social structure is evident in the novels, where civic communities have essentially two tiers, a group of preeminent families and a univocal populace. This collective entity is a constant spectator to the public behaviors of the elite. Sometimes individuals of different professions or moral qualities appear: comic parasites, itinerant magicians, priests and lawyers, police and soldiers. These figures tend to be one-dimensional, fitting literary stereotypes or playing specific roles in the plot. The reader of the novels is seldom drawn to sympathize with secondary characters, and their activities and movements are strictly peripheral to the experience of the protagonists.

The social identity of the elite was charged with meaning most potently in the physical environs of the city. Greek orators like Dio and Aelius Aristides viewed their cities as dynamic arenas for the creation, operation, and maintenance of religious cults, cultural events, political bodies, and commercial and social interchange. They pictured them as architectural networks of harbors, circuit walls and gates, waterlines, tombs, temples, baths, gymnasia, hippodromes, theaters, stoas, streets, and houses. Even in his account of the fantastic voyage, Lucian imagines a miniature Greek settlement in similar terms. The farm of the old Cypriot marooned in the belly of the whale is represented as a grouping of functional spaces and buildings: a domicile, the adjacent field, a graveyard, a temple, and a mooring for a skiff (Yer. Hist. 1.32-4). The monumental program of the cities was a metaphor for the living community, so that the different physical structures were organs of a social structure. In both novels and orations, aristocrats frequent the gymnasium and the temple, their ancestors inhabit the graves, and the urban masses fill the theater and the agora. Thus while civic landscapes were an important venue for the action of fictional stories, they were also the topographical substrate for the definition of social classes. It makes sense that, once the protagonists of the novels leave their cities, they lose their identity and become unlikely outlaws, prisoners, slaves, or shepherds.

In Greek fiction, the countryside beyond the city and the extramural cemetery was a strange place where urban aristocrats never stayed very long. The countryside of the novels has two faces, one attractive and one horrific, both distorted pictures from an elite viewpoint (see Said 1999). It was a landscape full of possibilities both good and bad, where characters either realized their fear of anonymity and dispossession or fulfilled their desire for blissful repose and financial stability. The novels often show the productive estates that were the cornerstone of the urban economy, such as those near Miletus and Ephesus in the novels by Chariton and Achilles Tatius. These villae rusticae consisted of expansive fields with several buildings that could be reached by land or sea. Owners visited their properties to oversee affairs, but they largely entrusted the day-to-day management to servants. The landlord’s trip to his suburban properties was a veritable pageant, as he rode in his carriage decked out in finery and accompanied by family, friends, and personnel in a long retinue. In reality these agricultural units depended on the cultivation of vine, olive, and cereal grains and on raising livestock, but the novels almost never portray real labor. Villas in the novels exist chiefly as a symbol of inherited wealth. They were also getaways where the wealthy escaped the daily grind and enjoyed their favorite pastime, hunting. In sharp contrast to this image, the novelistic countryside could also be a bleak, trackless wilderness. Once the protagonists had advanced beyond the safety of the city walls, they were vulnerable to either predatory bandits who dwelled in caves or, if they were at sea, the twin perils of piracy and shipwreck. It is seldom clear who these outlaws are or where they come from, but their characterization is antithetical to that of the ideal aristocrat. Certain groups, such as the infamous ‘‘rangers’’ (boukoloi), a legendary population of insurgents who occupied the marshy expanse of the Nile delta, were portrayed by Achilles Tatius and Heliodorus as a race apart, with their own physiognomy and language.

Longus, author of the most influential of the novels, furnishes a singular view of the relationship between the city and the country. The countryside of Lesbos, where his story takes place, fuses the world of rural estates with the world of bucolic poetry (Effe 1999; Cresci 1999). In a unique twist, the novel is set almost exclusively among the farmers and herdsmen who occupy the estate of a wealthy landowner from the city of Mytilene. Daphnis and Chloe, their families, and other villagers enjoy a life of bucolic tranquility, sharing wine, cheese, and milk, singing and playing their pipes, communing with plants and animals, and worshipping Pan and the Nymphs. The characterization of the country folk as ignorant, poor, unrefined, and inexperienced hints at urban prejudice, but this is tempered by a sense of sentimental longing for their sweet simplicity. Longus cleverly grafts bucolic scenery onto the romantic stock. Since Daphnis and Chloe never leave the estate for long periods, temporality replaces the geographic vector of novelistic narrative, and they travel through the seasons, not overseas. Pirates and hostile foreigners must therefore be imported to the estate from abroad. As it turns out, the protagonists are outsiders to this seeming paradise: they are the children of urban aristocrats who exposed them at birth in the wild. The denouement comes when Daphnis and Chloe discover their true nobility and at last achieve full enculturation in marriage and sexual union. They decide not to move to the city but to remain in the country and partake of its simple pleasures and regenerative energy. Ultimately this urbanocentric view of the country is not so different from that of the other novelists, but Longus surpasses them by viewing the problematic relationship between his own world and the rural sphere through the lens of pastoral myth.

The fictional letters of Alciphron and Aelian also evoke an artificial rusticity, but their farmers and fishermen inhabit the fields and waters of classical Attica. Some of these letters, like Longus’ novel, celebrate the quaint country life. There a goatherd can recline in the shade at midday and play his pipes for his herd (Alciphr. 2.9), and a farmer can go to bed at night satisfied that he planted his vines, figs, and olives well (Ael. 4). But these folk are hardly rugged, and they complain too much about creature comforts, money and property, and personal safety. Bad weather, sore arms, failing crops, thin catches, crushing debt, hungry wolves, and noisy roosters are genuine concerns, but preoccupation with them is unnatural. This is because Alciphron and Aelian view the countryside from the city. Their fictional letters voice the worries of the urban aristocrat who tries with some difficulty to imagine himself farming and fishing for a living. If the Athenian working class had really been so soft, it would not have survived the routines of a pre-industrial subsistence economy, let alone the disastrous unpredictability of epidemic, famine, and drought.

These authors manipulated the ambiguities of epistolary fictionality for sophisticated entertainment. Alciphron and Aelian spoiled the pastoral quietude by dropping hints of harsh reality. In one exchange between a daughter and a mother, the girl rejects the husband whom her fisherman father has chosen, the son of a Methymnian helmsman, who seemed to be a perfect match. Instead she has fallen in love with an ephebe from a distinguished Athenian family, to judge from the fact that he led the procession at the Oschophoria. She describes his beauty in her own language, laced with charming similes of the sea and shellfish. But her mother scolds her harshly, seeing through the childish fantasies of marriage across class boundaries (Alciphr. 1.11-12). In another epistle, readers of the novels will be interested finally to learn the origin of that subculture of bandits who permanently stalk the hills and sail the seas. One desperate fisherman, down on his luck and out of money, writes a letter to his wife in which he ponders joining a band of Lycian corsairs (Alciphr. 1.8). In contrast, a lazy Athenian parasite, true to his city-grown depravity, voluntarily chooses to set up shop as a highway robber at the Scironian rocks over a life of farm labor (Alciphr. 3.34). Finally, a four-letter exchange inspired by the comic poet Menander portrays two opposing personalities in the country (Ael. 13-16). Callipides begins with a trite encomium on the gentle pace of rustic life. Then in friendly tones he tries to persuade his misanthropic neighbor, Cnemon, to stop throwing dirt and pears at passers-by and join in a local sacrifice to Pan and the banquet to follow. Cnemon, who refuses to tend his yard and insists on conversing through messengers, hates crowds and spurns the rural hospitality. Daphnis and Chloe would be horrified at such boorish behavior.

Dio’s Euboean Speech employs fictional invention to convey a moral message concerning the city-country dichotomy. The orator describes a pseudo-historical event in his own life when, shipwrecked on the treacherous southern coast of Euboea, he meets an amicable huntsman and accompanies him to his modest abode (7.1-10). There the narrator enjoys the kindness of the huntsman’s family, their rustic cuisine and pleasant conversation, and even the wedding of two teenage lovers. These people are by nature gentle and kindhearted, their home harmonious and happy (64-80). So far the romantic scene resembles the pastoral world of Daphnis and Chloe. But next the speech exposes a rift between city and country in a direct clash between humble rusticity and the urban sphere of Dio and his audience. The huntsman tells that his land had once belonged to a wealthy magnate, upon whose death it was confiscated. Thereafter, the huntsman and his family continued to live in a cluster of huts, surviving on only a few crops and whatever they could catch (10-21). In time the nearby city summons him to face the charge of squatting on public land (22-63). An ensuing debate in the assembly sharply articulates the contrary viewpoints of city-dwellers and country folk. To the huntsman, the town is a garish, unnatural creation, its people loud, threatening, and corrupt. To the oligarchic assemblymen, the country is untamed and perilous, its inhabitants violent and malicious. Later in his speech, Dio lauds the rural population as a bastion of traditional values in the face of moral and intellectual decay in urban society (80-152, with Desideri 2001: 99-101). Of course, Dio’s voice wins the fictional debate, and the citizens adjudicate in favor of the hapless huntsman, who is thoroughly baffled by their language and procedures. The city’s decisions regarding its territory are naturally expressed in terms of its own peculiar social system. By decree the huntsman is granted the disputed land, a meal, new clothing, and cash, all at public expense, in honor of his selfless acts of rural euergetism, namely, the recovery of the shipwrecked and the provision of warm porridge and venison by the fire (54-63). This miniature ecclesial drama recalls the democratic machine of classical Athens and the conventional rhetoric of the Attic orators (Ma 2001). Epigraphy also reveals that the operations and terminology in the oration are equally appropriate to the conservative political culture of Greece and Asia Minor during the Roman Empire. What is most significant is that Dio chose a fictional mode for his discursive critique of contemporary society.