All these examples show how the characters of the novels make use of persuasive speech, and how the theme of rhetorical sophistication works within the novels. In the case of Achilles Tatius we see not just representations of speeches, with all their implications, but representations of the nuts and bolts of rhetorical training too. Several of the progymnasmata forms occur in this novel. There are mythical narratives of the type students learned to compose in the exercise of diOgOma.53 More unusually, there is a series of muthoi, fables with a hidden meaning, in the exchange between two characters.54 There is an example of synkrisis (comparison) in the explicit comparison of homosexual and heterosexual sex that contains enough graphic detail of both to raise a schoolmaster’s eyebrow (2.35-28). In addition to the frequent examples of ekphraseis of paintings, there are ekphraseis of several other subjects (if we take the term in the broad sense in which it was used in antiquity).55 There is a wonderfully hyperbolic ekphrasis of the storm that leaves Leucippe and Cleitophon stranded on the Egyptian coast (3.1-5), not to mention the ekphraseis of places (topoi) such as the garden (1.15), the Nile (4.12), Alexandria (5.1), of persons, like Leucippe herself (1.4), and animals, like the peacock (1.16), the hippopotamus (4.2), the crocodile (4.19), the phoenix (3.25) and the elephant (4.4), all recognised categories of subjects for ekphrasis in the rhetorical manuals.
This apparent ‘cutting and pasting’ of school exercises would seem to confirm some of the worst suspicions of the impact of rhetoric on the novel and to substantiate the caricature of sophistic writing as a stringing together of prepared passages with no regard for the whole. However, such blatant use of elements of composition was not the norm. The elementary exercises were above all a stage in rhetorical education, a thorough training in techniques that could be seamlessly employed in large-scale compositions.56 Of course there are exceptions, like the ekphraseis of peacocks that recur in different places in the sophistic corpus, but the norm is a far more subtle blend. The opening ekphrasis of Heliodorus’ Aethiopica, for example, with its riddling tableau of Charicleia and Theagenes seen through the eyes of Egyptian bandits, is a fine example of ekphrasis in practice, as is the account of the death of Charicles in Cleitophon and Leucippe (1.12).57
Is Achilles Tatius’ use of progymnasmatic forms simply the result of the author’s technical incompetence and the dead hand of rhetorical training? Or is there more to it? One reason may be the characterisation of the narrator: Cleitophon’s use of undigested exercises may be read as a sign of his youth and inexperience. But a further effect of the visible rhetorical nuts and bolts in Achilles Tatius’ text is to make us aware of the artifice underpinning the narration. Technical rhetoric thus serves a self-reflexive purpose, not allowing us to forget that we are reading a verbal representation. The ekphraseis of exotic animals in Cleitophon and Leucippe may be particularly significant from this perspective since they are ‘textbook’ examples. Herodotus’ descriptions of exotic beasts (2.67, 71, 73) are cited by Theon as models for the exercise of ekphrasis, with the result that Cleitophon’s Egypt is an overtly rhetorical creation that derives not just from the rhetorical tradition but ultimately from the ‘father of lies’ himself. The universe we are presented with, for all its beguiling details, is a universe made of words.
It is interesting to consider Cleitophon’s speech of self-accusation in this light. Such speeches were a special challenge in declamation. In one macabre example cited briefly by the fifth-century rhetorician, Sopater, a man mortally wounds a girl while attempting to rape her. She asks her father not to prosecute, but the attacker accuses himself, leading the father to argue against his conviction, in accordance with his daughter’s wishes.58 Sopater gives no comment on this example, but elsewhere he makes clear that such prosangeliai are a form of figured speech ( eschematismenos logos) whose real purpose is different from the apparent purpose.59 The speakers’ aim is not to die but to create sympathy for themselves, despite their crime or error.
So a reader steeped in the techniques and habits of declamation might well be tempted to question Cleitophon’s motivation in his first speech to the court at the end of Achilles Tatius’ novel. Being written from a first-person perspective, the novel does not give us another view point from which to evaluate his actions and intentions. But one possible outcome of the speech might be to win sympathy for himself while firmly implicating Melite in the supposed murder of Leucippe. We may note the discrepancy that one of the other characters, Cleinias, points out between Cleito-phon’s past and present behaviour (7.6). This is not the first time that Leucippe has ‘died’, but on the earlier occasions Cleitophon survived after a little lamentation and even recovered sufficiently after six months to begin his relationship with Melite (5.8). Cleitophon’s speech of self-accusation would probably have alerted the rhetorically literate reader at least to the possibility that our narrator may not be as reliable as he might have seemed.
The supreme irony of the trial scene is that, in the end, the declamatory arguments and counter-arguments establish nothing. Thersandrus breaks off the process he himself has initiated and proposes two semi-magical tests: a virginity test for Leucippe and the test of Melite’s fidelity that she passes by sleight of tongue (8.11). As he interrupts his own advocate he declares: ‘There is no need for words’. The ‘truth’ is to be established by perceptible signs, the music emanating from the virginity-testing cave of Pan (a fabulous, hybrid character who falls outside the world of ‘likeness to truth’). Words, in the end, cannot establish what really happened; they can only produce competing versions. But, while the characters within the novel have alternative means of establishing facts (or so they believe), we the readers have only words to rely on. Though it is technically inconclusive, Achilles’ trial scene with its references to declamation serves the vital thematic purpose of underlining the difficulty of establishing the truth and of interpreting events, as D. Maeder has argued for the references to declamation in the Latin novels.60
World History
