Yet another in the long list of candidates for The First Novel, which also includes such notables as Don Quixote, The Tale Of Genji, Lazarillo de Tormes, and a partridge in a pear tree. "Callirhoe" (also known as "Kallirhoe" and "Chaireas And Kallirhoe" - you know those ancient Greeks) has the advantage of age, being 1000 to 1400 years older than the next oldest candidate. So is it The First Novel? Who cares?
The tale does, on the other hand, provoke some interest in that it's a very early example of the star-crossed lovers plotline, later seen to greater popularity in such minor works as "Romeo And Juliet," for instance. Here we encounter the couple in question in the city of Syracuse on the eastern coast of Sicily. Callirhoe, the daughter of a leading Syracusian general who went so far as to defeat the Athenians, has every boy in town after her on account of her beauty, so extraordinary that people keep mistaking her for Aphrodite herself. A day comes when she sees a young man named Chaereas, the son of another leading Syracusian citizen and the hated rival of Callirhoe's father, on his way to the gymnasium. She falls in love with him on the spot.
One might expect the story to follow the machinations of the two families to keep these two apart, but that doesn't happen until Shakespeare. These families have objections, to be sure, but these don't last very long, and the two are quickly married. The trouble comes not from the families, but from Callirhoe's former suitors. These men find it unsupportable that, after they've spent years tagging after her, Callirhoe married a man who had never seen her before and didn't have to work at all to win her hand. So they pull a number of stunts to convince Chaereas that his bride is cheating on him. The dope buys into this - not excessively surprising, I suppose, considering how gorgeous she is - and one night, in a rage, kicks her so hard in the solar plexus that she completely loses her breath and collapses as if dead.
You can probably guess the immediate aftermath, more or less. Callirhoe receives a magnificent funeral, observed by a famous grave robber and his crew. When this bunch goes in to rob the tomb, they discover Callirhoe alive. (So much for the real-life consequences of domestic abuse, it seems.) Realizing her value, they sell her to Dionysos, a wealthy landowner in Miletus, on the west coast of what is now Turkey. He falls in love with his purchase, and Callirhoe, believing Chaereas to be dead, goes ahead and marries him. Shortly thereafter, Chaereas learns that Callirhoe is alive and goes to rescue her, at which point the parties call in the Persian King to adjudicate who shall be her husband. The king takes one look at Callirhoe, and guess what? Yep - hijincks ensue.
As is often the case with ancient literature, I have to be careful not to apply modern standards. If someone turned this piece in to a college creative writing class, for instance, I suspect it would get a "C" at best. What, for instance, are we to make of the constant authorial interruptions, such as the description of Callirhoe's wedding headdress, which for some reason we learn consists of a glorious silken topknot and the rest of purple wool? That kind of thing crops up in the Iliad and other ancient Greek works all the time, but what's it doing there or here?
You got me. Of more interest is that, unlike in more contemporary love stories, "Callirhoe" shows us the political consequences of these characters' actions. Few contemporary tales that I can think of show a character changing sides in a war, and leading the other side to victory, because he's upset at losing his wife, but that's what we get here. If these characters were commoners rather than leading citizens, I don't suppose the political ramifications would weigh so heavily in the story - but then again, I assume that if these characters were commoners, the ancient Greeks might not have been all that interested in a novel about them anyway.
In addition to all this, there's the interesting fact that Callirhoe, a woman and for a time a slave, takes a surprising amount of control over her own story. I wasn't expecting that from a tale of the ancient world. She's no women's liberationist - all she really wants is to live peacefully at home, with her husband in charge of things - but within the structure of that kind of life, she insists upon her own way and frequently gets it. She even goes so far as to scold the gods for making her suffer, and doesn't even get a bolt of lightning in the spleen for her pains. What's more, although her primary weapon consists of threatening to kill herself, and that only works because her various suitors want her to live and give herself to them willingly, that's still more agency than I expected to find in a society that thought of women as property. Go, Callirhoe.
Very little seems to be known about the author of this work. To the best of my knowledge, he wrote nothing else that can be identified as his. He identifies himself in the first paragraph as Chariton, secretary to a rhetor named Athenagoras, who I think has not been further identified either. I'm not even sure what a rhetor is, although judging by the title's relationship to the word "rhetoric" I assume it has something to do with public speaking. Darned ancient Greeks - all they left us was a candidate for The First Novel. Oh well, it's a good story and influenced other good stories. That will do for now.
Benshlomo says, Analyze ancient literature to death if you insist, but it's better if you just relax and enjoy it.
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