Brian McPhee (Indiana University, Bloomington)
The Repentant Rapist: A Menandrian Strategy of Characterization in Callimachus’ Acontius and Cydippe (frr. 67–75 Pf.)
This paper sheds new light on Callimachus’ Acontius and Cydippe by comparing its plot of coerced marriage to the portrayal of rape in Menander’s Epitrepontes. Callimachus’ elegy has often been compared with “the plots of thwarted love and a happy ending in New Comedy” (Harder), but I argue that such sanguine formulations miss deeper correspondences in the strategies these works use to preserve audience sympathy for the adulescens amans despite his sexual aggression. This analogy illuminates the disturbing undercurrent of compulsion that animates Callimachus’ “Liebesgeschichte” (Rohde, Fusillo) and reveals the complex attitudes toward consent driving its protagonist’s characterization.
Menander’s Epitrepontes is our most detailed exemplar of a veritable genre feature of Greek New Comedy, the rape plot (Rosivach). Briefly, the young Charisius seeks to divorce Pamphile after learning that she has had a child out of wedlock, but the couple is reconciled when it emerges that the father is Charisius himself, who had raped Pamphile prior to their wedding. This development is hailed as the greatest good fortune (οὐ γέγο]νε[ν] εὐτύχημα μεῖζον, 1130), but Menander evidently foresaw that some audience members might feel misgivings about the revelation of Pamphile’s husband as a violent (488–490, 526–529) rapist. To preempt such objections, Menander takes several measures to redeem Charisius’ character. The rape itself is conventionally excused by drunkenness and the heady atmosphere of a nighttime festival (Lape). Other exculpatory strategies include an insistence on the sincerity of Charisius’ love for Pamphile (ibid.), and Charisius’ long soliloquy (878–931), in which his self-reproach serves to rehabilitate his character (James).
That Acontius’ method of courtship is fundamentally coercive emerges most clearly in Ovid’s Heroides 20–21 (Schmitzer), but Ovid simply clarifies the implicit violence of his Callimachean model (Kuhlmann). Acontius’ ruse of the inscribed apple extracts an involuntary oath from Cydippe, who is thus “forced to hand over her whole self, body and soul” (Rosenmeyer). Cydippe’s unwillingness results in real physical harm as Artemis ravages her body with intense illness (fr. 75.12–19). I argue that Callimachus’ text anticipates and tries to head off the narratee’s disturbance at these facts much like Menander in the Epitrepontes. The worthiness of the match is repeatedly stressed (67.5–8, 75.30–37); Acontius’ love is true, his intentions, honorable (67.4; 72; 75.27, 42–50, 75); and, what is most Menandrian, Acontius delivers a dramatic monologue that includes guilty self-remonstrations for causing Cydippe such distress (74, Aristaenet. 1.10.62–73) (Hajdarević).
The parallels in characterization between Acontius and Charisius, a literal rapist, illuminate the apologetic purpose of much of Acontius’ characterization. I conclude by observing what this new reading reveals about ancient Greek attitudes toward rape. The primary problem in Menander’s Epitrepontes is often regarded not as Charisius’ rape itself, but the resultant engendering of a νόθος (Konstan, Pierce). Callimachus’ effort to ameliorate Acontius’ behavior, however, betrays discomfort with sexual coercion per se, without the complicating factor of illegitimate offspring, and thus suggests that consent could likewise have been in itself important for Menander and his audience (Gardner).