Distinguish Between Idealism and Parody in Leucippe and Clitophon

In Leucippe and Clitophon, we find a novel, at face value at least, with a similar plot to the other ancient novels: the protagonists are two young lovers who go through numerous misadventures, while staying true to each other, and are rewarded with marriage. However, it could be argued that the novel parodies its predecessors and the idealised picture of love portrayed in them, and that Achilles Tatius makes a mockery of the ideas typical of the ancient novels – or, as Morgan puts it, ‘conducts a prolonged guerrilla war against the conventions of his own genre’1.

According to the genre, the ultimate aim of the two lovers at the start of the novel is to be united in a harmonious marriage, a convention idealised in the other ancient novels, but in Achilles Tatius’ novel the main aim seems to be sex. In Chaereas and Callirhoe we see Chaereas, after his first sighting of the young maiden, ‘tell his parents that he was in love and would die if he did not marry Callirhoe’2, which is in stark contrast to Clitophon’s numerous references to ‘desire’ at the beginning of Leucippe and Chariton: ‘The male desires the female…[the palm] declines in the direction of its desire’3. Furthermore, in the same sequence, we see love depicted in a vulgar, animalistic manner, at odds with the natural, unsullied love we find in the other authors: ‘The viper, a land snake, lusts for the eel’, described as Clitophon’s ‘erotic lesson’ to Leucippe. Thus we can clearly observe an early hint of, as Kathryn Chew comments in ‘Achilles Tatius and Parody’, Achilles‘ ‘parodic subversion of romantic standards’4. Moreover, the lovers do not fall in love both instantaneously and simultaneously, as is the case in the likes of Daphnis and Chloe and Chaereas and Callirhoe, since it takes time for Leucippe to fall for Clitophon’s youthful exuberance: ‘She discretely indicated that she had not been displeased by my discourse’5.

1. Morgan 1995: 142
2. Reardon 1989: 23
3. Reardon 1989: 188
4. Chew

Bibliography: Ewen Bowie, Oxford Classical Dictionary, Oxford 1996 William Burton, The Most Delectable and Pleasaunt History of Clitiphon and Leucippe (1597) Kathryn Chew, ‘Achilles Tatius and Parody’, The Classical Journal 96 (2000) pp. 57-70 Christopher Gill, Daphnis and Chloe (trans.), in B. P. Reardon (ed.), Collected Ancient Greek Novels, California (1989) Helen Morales, Vision and Narrative in Achilles Tatius’ Leucippe and Clitophon, Cambridge (2004) J. R. Morgan, ‘The Greek Novel: Towards a Sociology of Production and Reception’, in A.Powell (ed.), The Greek World, London (1995) pp. 142 J. R. Morgan, An Ethiopian Story (trans.), in B. P. Reardon (ed.), Collected Ancient Greek Novels, California (1989) Karl Plepelits, ‘Achilles Tatius’, in G. Schmeling (ed.), The Novel in the Ancient World, Brill. (1996) pp. 387-416 B. P. Reardon, Chaereas and Callirhoe (trans.), in B. P. Reardon (ed.), Collected Ancient Greek Novels, California (1989) John. J. Winkler, Leucippe and Clitophon (trans.), in B. P. Reardon (ed.), Collected Ancient Greek Novels, California (1989)