 Good evening, everyone. Welcome to another episode of We Are Being Transformed. This is contrary to popular opinion and rumor, not a Transformers podcast. This is a podcast where we discuss the myriad of ways in which people, both in antiquity and in the everyday world, are transformed and mold their culture into new and exciting things. And that includes literature, it includes ritual, it includes cult, magic, all that stuff. And joining us today, I have the great honor of welcoming Dr. Timothy Whitmarsh, who is someone who knows a thing or two about the topic we're discussing tonight, which is the Greek novel. So Dr. Whitmarsh, how are you doing? Very well. Thanks, Jason. Thanks for having me on. Thank you. The honor is all ours. So tonight we're going to talk about this phenomena that's kind of ubiquitous for a few centuries and the antique Greco-Roman world, which is the Greek novel. Now I want to preface this by saying that novel, like any other kind of label, whether it be like Neoplatonism, Second Sophistic, Gnostic, etc., these are terms that they didn't use at the time. They weren't self-deignations, but for the sake of brevity and simplicity, we will call it a novel. So Dr. Whitmarsh, can you give us a brief rundown of what the Greek novel is, what drove its popularity? Well, there are two different questions, obviously. What the Greek novel is, what we conventionally mean by the Greek novel is one of five texts that are extended fictional narratives dealing with young love, essentially girl and boy, heterosexual young love, girl and boy fall in love at the beginning. They either get married at the beginning or get married at the end, but marriage is important to the dynamics of the narrative. And then they have some sort of separation and they have to, if you like, prove the enduring quality of their love through that separation with all the trials that come with that separation, including love rivals, shipwrecks, that kind of thing. But at the end they get back together again and there is a sort of implicit happily ever after to them. That's the basic structure of the Greek novel, but as you could imagine, it's a literary form and there are all sorts of ways of twisting it and playing with it. So whilst that description of it sounds a little bit sort of boring and earnest and as if it's socially programmatic and focused on the heterosexualization of the young and the normative role of marriage and all that sort of thing, there are all sorts of subversive undercurrent in it that test out the limits of that ideology, if you like. Absolutely. Thank you for that answer. So I guess getting back to the second part of that question I was asking, what exactly drove its popularity at that time? What was it about them that made them so appealing? This is a really interesting question. The novel seems to be new to the Roman Empire. We have maybe a few traces of things that might be called, if you squint at them, might be called novels in the period before the so-called Hellenistic period. But really, our first Greek novel, as I defined Greek novels then, appears in the mid-1st century AD and it seems to be a big hit. It seems to be that it spawned many imitators. It influences many other genres other than the Greek novel itself. So that first text is Caratone's Caleroi, which is an absolutely amazing text. And for a number of reasons, one of them is that it's female centered. The figure Caleroi, the figure of the title, is endures domestic violence, is left for dead, is kidnapped by slavers, is sold into slavery, contemplates the termination of her pregnancy. And by the end of the novel, she's had such an extraordinary array of really damaging life experiences. But she's reunited with her husband, the former domestic abuser at the end, and brought back to Sicily, which is her home island. And at the end of it, you get this very weird mismatch between her experience and his experience because he's asked to tell the story of what happens, what's happened so far. And he stands up in the assembly in front of all of the citizens of Syracuse, the city on Sicily, where they've reunited. And he tells the story as he understands it, but of course he doesn't know the full story. He doesn't know Caleroi's side of it. There are things that she's kept from him, including what happened to their child, for example, which is palmed off as someone else's child. So it's a really strange novel that centers female experience. It really gives all of the narrative energy and the emotional sympathy to the woman and leaves the male figure as a rather sort of useless and also morally problematic side figure. So why is a text like that so fascinating in the Roman Empire? I mean, at one level, it's got to do with the Roman Empire's space. These are, as I mentioned earlier, the travel narratives, people move around space an awful lot. These are texts also that themselves circulate around space an awful lot. We know that we can see them traveling around the Roman Empire with papyri found here and there and the like. So they are about describing a bigger space, a bigger canvas of action, if you like. Even though Caleroi, the text I was just talking about then, is set 500 years earlier in the time of classical Athens. It really is a text that's about the experience of being within the Roman Empire. And all of that, that language of those scenes of enslavement and the like, they use Roman imperial language to describe the fact of enslavement and the legal status of the slave and the like. So they do seem to be about the mobility of the Roman Empire, the interconnectedness of the Roman Empire and the ugly side of things like people trafficking in the Roman Empire. At the same time, whilst they've got this sort of expansive imperial vision. I think what we see in the Roman Empire generally is the creation of a, if you like, a sort of Newtonian counter reaction to that desire to move outwards is a desire to move inwards into the self. So there's an awful lot of interior monologue in a text like Caleroi when she's contemplating what she will do in all these sort of crisis situations, awful situations where she doesn't know what to do. She's got an unborn baby on the way. She's got pressures from, you know, this guy who wants to marry her and she's still in love with her ex-husband for all that he's done to her. All of these pressures playing on her, but you get this sort of this calculation inside. She's having to weigh out all of these different feelings. So it's about interior space as well. It's about the desire in this era to have a more reflective approach to life, to have to understand what your options are better to analyze those options to give space to the emotions that conflicts play out in your mind. So yes, I would say that's what makes them popular at this time. They really speak to the Roman experience of space as simultaneously expanded and contracted. Well said. Well said. Thank you for that answer. Yeah, I think, I think not just back then, but I think even now, like, when I read Carrie Tom, like, back in college so many years ago, like a millennia ago, that's what struck me just like the interior pathos that was going on with clear away and just the gravity of her decisions that she had to make. And but despite all that, and knowing probably what we know about the woman and her place in the society at this point in time, she's very defiant in the face of like all these decisions that are thrust upon her. And that's what always constantly grabbed me about her story. I think another thing that you mentioned in there that I just wanted to touch upon before we get to the next question is, you mentioned how the male protagonists like Kyrius, and later we'll see, you know, they're basically useless. They're unreliable narratives. They're, they're, they're the ones telling this story. But I think even throughout all that you can see like who the real heroes and heroines are in a sense. And that's what I really love about these stories. And I think really with Carrie Tom, laying that foundation, that's probably he saw some Mr. Somebody like Achilles Taysias saw like missed opportunities that he would exploit in his later work. And I think he did that quite masterfully. We will get there. So, you know, I guess going along with the question of how why were these so well received I think is tied another question overall, which is highly polarized, but we have to touch upon it. And I know this is really highly debated in scholarship and always has been. But if we could just generally pause it and answer or just I'm asking maybe your responsible speculation on this. Who was the audience for the Greek novel. I would say that. I mean, alongside the Greek novels, we have a lot of other fictional narrative literature of this era, and the this clearly a widespread desire amongst all strata of society for fictional exciting fictional narratives. And even the illiterate presumably had ways of accessing this kind of material through. I mean, in the medieval period, we know of reading groups, for example, so you only need one literate person to be able to tell a story. I mean, the prime example of a popular novel is the so called Alexander romance, which is a fictionalized version of the life of Alexander, which we have. It's anonymous, which is a good sign of it being a popular text because elite texts tend to be linked to a particular author because they have ambition and the author is trying to get curious if you like by being remembered by posterity. The Alexander romance is anonymous. It circulates in multiple different forms in antiquity. It's translated into many different languages already in antiquity and increasingly into middle ages and beyond. It has all the hallmarks of a popular text that would be enjoyed by all sections of society. So I think we need to remember that there is, you know, in a world in which literacy is growing and in which the opportunities for access to texts is growing. And in which we've increasingly got a sort of cultural homogenization, I mean, within very large limits, but you do get a sense of a common Greco-Roman culture over a wide space. The texts, popular narrative texts do spread to a very large audience. And there are other examples of that. There's the so called ass narrative. The most famous version of this is Appaleos's golden ass or metamorphosis, which is a high status literary text, but it's a sort of translation into a high status elite text of a popular tale of which we have another version from antiquity. There's the so called life of Esop as well, which is a tale about the famous fabulous, the composer of fables, Esop, who is a slave in this version. He's enslaved and he runs rings around his master. He's much cleverer than his master, although his master is a philosopher. Esop is the real kind of narrative energy. So it's a comic tale of subversive energy from below, if you like. There's a lot of popular literature. The novels that I was talking about, the romance novels, one of them, the romance of Xenophon of Ephesus has strong popular elements to it. The other ones I think we can fairly safely say are heading towards the elite and most of them certainly in the elite sphere and you can map this out by things like literary illusion. The minute we start having complex allusions to works of classical literature, it doesn't rule out the possibility that a wide spectrum of people would have enjoyed them. But we know that amongst the readership, amongst the intended readership must have been people who were pretty educated. And education means money, obviously. Right, absolutely. I mean, if you're participating in any kind of idea, there's significant resources involved there. That's just no question that people think student loans and debt are bad today. Nothing on antique idea. But yes, thank you for that answer. That was amazing. I think another thing that just really strikes me about these texts is we were talking earlier about how they conceptualize space, inner and outer space, right? So you have the changing of a world. You have these people, pretty much, we tend to romanticize it. I know in the classics there's this sense of romanticizing what Hellenization and the Roman Empire did. This wasn't just like imbuing culture in a romantic sense. This was like subjugation. This was like, yeah. And so people are trying to make sense of that in a changing world. Also, like the interior is changing as well. And that's something that I just, like you said, Terry Tom kind of, he lays the blueprint. But you know, you see people like later, like you were saying with Achilles Tejas or somebody like Xenophon, they really, they play with that. I think he really touched upon that in your text, Narrative and Identity in the Greek Novel. I read that quite well ago. But that's probably another can of worms we can discuss another time. But yeah, I wanted to point out something to general audiences that they aren't exposed enough to. And it's not, the Greek Novel is in its ascendancy at this time. But there's also another genre. I don't know if you want to call it genre, but there's another kind of form of literature that's kind of growing. And that's the Gospel and Axe literature. And this is so much that P. Reardon has probably argued in his collected Ancient Greek Novels edition that the Axe literature even should be considered part of that kind of world. But you know, they're both growing at the same time, both share similar motifs. Maybe you can't prove genetic links, but this is more speaking to what people are enjoying in their literature and what they want to read and what they want to hear about. So both have these similar motifs. You have lots of shipwrecks, lots of empty tombs, crucifixions, lots of resurrections and epiphany, strangely enough. Especially in Kalero, it's all over the place. They're always like, oh, she looks just like, you know, the goddess. So I just, you know, and the trial is especially popular no matter what type of literature you're reading back then. Everybody seemed to love that, like go anywhere from Apollaeus' Apologia to, you know, any of the five canonical Greek Novel texts. Like the trial is the center of the text. And strangely enough, it's the center of the Gospels as well. So I was wondering if you could discuss these motifs, not maybe necessarily in regards to the Gospels, but maybe adjacently to what these motifs are found. What kind of motifs are found in the Greek novels and why are the striking similarities there creating such a stir in people? So there are two ways of explaining it, aren't there? One is that both early Christian literature and the novels respond independently to the same kind of forces. And the other is that there is some sort of connection between the two and that one form is influenced by the other. To think about the first first, I mean, I mentioned the role of sort of the Roman imperial conception of expanded space, simultaneously creating a space for interior space. And obviously one can map the emergence of Christianity into that kind of scheme if you want to. The Acts of the Apostles, but also the letters of Paul already detail, you know, the creation of a huge network of Christian communities, which is sort of translocal. It doesn't exist in one space. It actually exists in the network between these different communities. And at the same time, what these communities are being asked to do is to look after the lives, the interior lives of people in the communities. So it's about being interconnected in the space of the Roman Empire. And at the same time about focusing on the self and the management of the self and the appetite needs, desires, whatever individuals. So there are all sorts of ways in which structurally the Greek novel emerges in step in lockstep with early Christianity. But I think there are also strong indications that what we see in the Roman Empire is a very fluid sharing of ideas and resources and themes between large groups of people. We have to remember that we don't have the Christians over there and everyone else over there, even though a certain amount of Christian literature pretends that these two groups are sort of live in different places. But there's been great work done by Eric Rebiar at Cornell, amongst other people, just showing that that's a bit of a fiction, actually, that Christians are sort of the same people as pagans in the Greco-Roman world. And indeed often, you know, Christians are worshiping other gods as well simultaneously. So there's an awful lot of mingling between Christians and non-Christians and blurring of the edges as well. So when you get in Achilles-Tatius, for example, and he's writing in the, I think the 130s, some people say the 170s, but the 130s, so sort of quite early for the development of Christian literature. He has this scene where Dionysus invents wine and gives it to humanity in the beginning of book two. And it's said to be a sort of a charter myth for a Phoenician ritual around Dionysus. But he gives the grape to the farmer and says, take this, this is the blood of the vine. And it's so much like Jesus at the Last Supper. It's almost exactly the same language, Jesus giving the Last Supper to the disciples. Dionysus and Jesus are often interlinked. And, you know, people go both ways with that. Some people say that the gospel texts themselves have Dionysiac elements in them. But that's the idea that Jesus and Dionysus work in similar sorts of worlds. They're both gods of the afterlife. They're both gods of salvation. They're both gods of transforming water into wine, as in John's Gospel. So, you know, there were also those which... I didn't mean to interrupt. I was just going to say, yeah, I read an article by a scholar named Courtney Friesen. Yeah. Yeah. He's the one who went through book two of Leucopy and Clotophon and transposed it with Mark. I was very convinced by his arguments. So, yeah, it's definitely things going on there. Yeah. It works the other way as well. I mean, the Greek novels centre on these sort of stories of endurance over time and, you know, the lovers display their commitment to each other despite all the hurdles that go on. And these narrative motifs are sort of transported out of the Greek hole into Christian hagiography where, of course, it's not erotic devotion to the other that is being performed, but it's, you know, pious devotion to God. But it's the same set of motifs and the same language and the same sort of narrative pattern. So the Greek novel immediately with its, you know, success in one sphere bleeds out into the Christian sphere as well. Amazing. Thank you for that answer. Yeah. I think the only thing I have to add to that is just going back to the previous two questions about why these things were so compelling and who the audiences were. I was talking to a scholar named Edward Watts about Pidea and about, you know, just what, you know, when you're writing, when these cultural elites are writing, like somebody like Lucian is expecting you if you're in that same kind of cultural vein to understand these references. And it goes both ways like you were saying. Like Lucian's true story is lifting things wholesale from Book of Revelation, Apocalypse of Peter, all that stuff. And he's like mixing it all together. This isn't just like some insulated world where people are that hermetically sealed from each other. They're all borrowing and they're all interacting. And I think it's important to realize that. So yes. Thank you again for that answer, Dr. Dr. Wittmarsh. I think my final question is going to tie into, you know, we touched upon the gospel and acts literature. And oh, yeah, that actually Neil cut here. Okay. I want to add this because I was talking to Dennis McDonald last night and we were talking about Dennis is really big on parallels between the Gospels and Greek tragedy and poetry and things like that too. And, you know, as a result of that idea, and I think we were in the midst of talking, I mentioned that mark to me seems how Mark transforms his source material. It's kind of like, I just picture Mark is like the author of Mark is this guy who was really optimistic and then 70 AD happens and then he reads Karyton. He's really depressed. And he basically creates the empire strikes back of the synoptic Gospels. He read Mark in its original context. It's like subversive biography and all of these things and it's just very striking how earthy and weird it is. But yeah, I just wanted to add that. So my last question is going to deal with another aspect of the language and the motifs of the day. We talked about Christians and pagan literature borrowing from each other and interacting in this dynamic cultural exchange. When I read Lucapie and Clitophon and other of the romance novels, I find a lot of mystery cult terminology. Lovers or telete, seduction is a mystery on, you know, this, this in addition to the obvious death rebirth initiation motifs, you have Phoenix motifs in there as well. And your commentary on book one and two of Lucapie and Clitophon, an author I've never read, but I find his theory fascinating, Merkel Bach, he argued that the novels were rooted in the worship of deities and mystery cults. I was just wondering if you find any credence to this, if you have any further thoughts. Yeah, he's on the shelf up there somewhere. He's probably actually behind me somewhere, immediately behind me, but I won't find him now. Yeah. So I think most scholars would say that Merkel Bach's views are overstated. I mean, he really does think that the novels have a sort of two level structure that they have a, a superficial level for non-acolytes who can read them in the way that you and I read them as narrative adventure stories. And then there's a deeper level, which speaks to the experience of initiates into the mystery cults, which, which level all of these stories of, you know, challenge and, you know, adversity and descent into dark places or whatever, take on a more mystical meaning. The problem with it is that it's a sort of conspiracy theorist version of a, of a reading strategy. Essentially what you do is you start seeing patterns everywhere and then once you start seeing patterns, you have to join them up and then, you know, the, but the point is that, I mean, as you quite rightly say, there are pointers in this direction. There are bits in the novels that look like they are speaking with the language of mystery cults and allegory and the like. And we know that in this era, there are authors who are reading myths and other stories allegorically and trying to transpose them into more religious registers, but apparently secular stories, trying to read them in more religious ways. So I think probably the best way of understanding the religiosity of the novels is not to see them necessarily as sort of liturgical documents in the way that Merkel back saw them, but more to see them as, as, as using this as part of the, the, the texture of the narratives themselves. I mean, as we were saying earlier, they're terribly absorbent these texts. They take magpie like take all sorts of things from all sorts of areas of culture at the time, including from these philosophers who are beginning to read allegorically and trying to want sort of deeper meanings or whatever. Doesn't mean that there are deeper meanings in the text, that there are, they, they borrow, they're amongst the elements that they borrow. Amazing. Thank you for that. Yeah. I think, you know, ultimately we need to nuance any kind of view that we have, like there's just one intended reader for these. There are multiple readers for all of these and we can all enjoy them on different planes of their existence. And this is the final point I wanted to make. Just ask your quick opinion on this. But one thing my channel seeks to do is to take all of these texts and understand them all together on their own terms. We don't need to understand, like say the Gospels is something unique from say Plutarch or vice versa. We need to understand that these are all existing and the same kind of cultural matrix and enjoy them and respect them on those terms. And even including things like the Greek Magical Papyri. I was having a discussion with a scholar about the Greek Magical Papyri and I asked him, I go, well, what is so important about these texts ultimately? He's like, well, because when we read them, no matter how alien they are, we're looking at ourselves. And it's the same thing with these novels. We're looking at ourselves and we still get some kind of value out of them. So I was wondering if you could maybe succinctly sum up why somebody in 2023 should pick up a, pick up Karritan or pick up, you know, an Ephesian tale, something like that. Why in 2023 we should do that? Well, I mean, they are phenomenally sophisticated texts that give you a really, I mean, they give you an insight into just how lively and dynamic the conversation was in that era. But they also speak to us now. I mean, Luke Kipp and Clydefun, for example, that you mentioned there, the second century text, I think, is the earliest example in Greek of a text that's about resistance to arranged marriage, for example. I mean, it is really, so the lovers are within the same household, their cousins, they're both, well, the male is due to be married to someone else at his father's will. The girl is being chaperoned and kept off on her own as girls were at the time. And they fall in love and they elope scandalously against the parents' will. But by the end of the novel, when they've proved their love to each other, the parents kind of come around. The parents say, yeah, that's, you know, it's great to have you back. And so the young love wins out. So it's really quite extraordinarily, I mean, to use your word transformative moment in human culture when you go from basically a view of love, which is about sort of what adult males want to impose on others to a much more reciprocal, symmetrical version of love. Of course, it's not entirely symmetrical. And of course, these are elite people that we're talking about and not everyone has the same opportunities. But in a sense, you know, the celebration of youthful passion as sort of more valid than what the parents want to do is a really profound, subversive moment in human culture, which still speaks to us today. It's the language of pop songs and the language of, you know, teen movies of the 1950s and the like. And that is not an accident either because the novels themselves were rediscovered in the 16th century and fed into European culture via Shakespeare and Sydney and the like, and became sort of influential on stories like Romeo and Juliet or whatever that have exerted a longstanding influence on the way that we perceive erotics in the modern era. So I think they're hugely important cultural documents that remain vital, energetic and highly readable today. Well said. Thank you for that. So Dr. Whitmarsh, if there's anything you want to plug, please feel free. This has been an absolute honour for me. So any books, anything you're working on now, feel free to use this space to promote. Well, I'll just add one thing there, which is that since about 2014, a bunch of us in Cambridge have been trying to, so the Greek novel is now become a very established field and a lot of people are working in it. But that was the result of long labour, essentially, by people like Brian Reardon who mentioned that he produced that collection of translations of the Greek novels. We've been trying to do that with late Greek epic poetry as well, which I think is, I mean, there are people working in this field, really important scholars working in this field, but it hasn't really sort of hit the public in quite the same way. So we're trying to produce a new set of translations of the late Greek epic poems as well. And hopefully that will have some sort of transformative effect itself when that comes out. Love it, love it. I'll be on the lookout for that for sure. Thanks for joining us. You have an amazing evening. Yeah, great, great. Thanks very much, Jason, and thanks for having me on the show. Thank you.