Greek and Roman Novel

In one of the most famous scenes in Apuleius’ Metamorphoses, Mithras, a priest of Isis, addresses the recently rehumanized Lucius before a crowd of Isis worshippers. Describing the events of Books 1-10 as the malevolent acts of the blindness of Fortune (11.15: Fortunae caecitas), Mithras assures Lucius that he has now found himself in the safety of Isis, described as Fortuna videns (11.15).

In this paper I offer a new reading of the Ship of Lichas episode in the Satyricon (100–115), emphasizing (1) the role of enclosed space in the narrative and (2) significant similarities to the earlier Cena Trimalchionis episode. At Sat. 100 Encolpius, Eumolpus, and Giton board a ship and set sail, only to find out that the ship’s master is Lichas, their enemy from an earlier section now lost, the very person they are trying to avoid.

Many scholars have recognized that Longus’ novel Daphnis and Chloe constructs a pastoral landscape isolated from the ordinary social hierarchies of the ancient world, for example the violence of unequal sexual relationships (Winkler 1989), or the structures of formal priesthoods (Bowie 2015). Furthermore, these social hierarchies are imposed on the pastoral landscape by the incursions of characters from the city.

This paper examines a dialogue of the titular characters in Longus’ Daphnis & Chloe as a case study in intertextuality within the genre of the Greek novel. In Book 3, Daphnis, unable to endure the separation from his beloved imposed by winter, journeys to visit Chloe and the two have a short conversation. This exchange, I argue, reworks a scene from Chariton’s novel Callirhoe in which the hero Chaereas first bemoans the difficulties he has endured for the heroine Callirhoe and then sends her a letter detailing his sufferings.