Novel Entanglements

The novel was the central Greek literary innovation of the Roman Empire and might be expected to have played the same culturally central role that (e.g.) drama did in classical Athens, Muromachi Japan, and Elizabethan England. The impact of this new genre is undeniable: for Achilles Tatius alone we now have eight papyrus fragments (more than for any other imperial author except Plutarch), and clear evidence for influence upon Lucian, Philostratus, Aristaenetus, and so forth.

Heliodorus’ Aethiopica is not only the latest Greek novel but also the one concerning which recent scholarship has been most divided. Winkler (1982) reads it as a text about metaliterary issues and hermeneutic uncertainty, which is not resolved by the novel’s end; Morgan (1989; 1998), instead, argues that the novel’s strong closure overrides earlier interpretative challenges and Heliodorus is primarily concerned with ethical questions. Since these pioneering treatises, much valuable work has been done on other aspects of the Aethiopica—see e.g.

Nonnus and Heliodorus are, in many ways, the most disruptive members of their literary worlds. Their sprawling works, the Dionysiaca (fifth century C.E.) and the Aethopica (c. third/fourth century C.E.) programmatically flaunt their disobedience of generic rules. Nonnus’ gargantuan romp through epic mythology, its forty-eight books deliberately matching the Iliad and Odyssey combined, announces with the slippery god Proteus a bendy, protean poetics (D.1.14) and mixes throughout pastoral settings, novelistic romance and lyric self-promotion.

This paper presents a new Petronian-Plautine entanglement as a key to help us understand Trimalchio’s obsessive attention to time in the Cena Trimalchionis, arguing specifically that this was related to his status as an ex-slave.