02 - The passio of Galaction and Episteme: converting erotic fiction

The proposed 20-minute paper focuses on the Passio prior of Galaction and Episteme (BHG 665), a Christian work from late antiquity or Byzantium (Braginskaya; Alwis). This text presents itself as a sequel to Achilles Tatius's novel, Leucippe and Clitophon, and narrates the marriage and conversion of (G)leucippe and Clitophon as well as the life and martyrdom of their son and his wife.

Previous studies, which tend to assume a primitive author who knows Leucippe and Clitophon only superficially, come to contrasting conclusions about the nature of this unique instance of novelistic reception. Some argue that the connection between the two texts is loose and irrelevant (Delehaye; Alwis; Kanavou); others suggest that the sequel's aim is to promote a specific perspective on Achilles Tatius (Dörrie; Robiano; Bossu). While agreeing that the Passio's relationship to the novel is crucial to our understanding of this narrative, I aim to show that the involved processes of novelistic reception as well as their ideological implications are far more intricate and momentous than suggested by existing scholarship.

First, I shall argue that the author of the Passio is a remarkably sophisticated, ‘modern' reader of Leucippe and Clitophon, demonstrating familiarity with features of the novel that have only started receiving attention in recent decades. For example, by portraying Clitophon as an egoistic, violent husband, the Christian writer ‘decodes' and exposes the sexist, self-obsessed internal focalisation dominating Achilles Tatius's ego-narrative (Morales; Morgan; Whitmarsh); moreover, the choice of writing a sequel to this particular novel and of relocating its protagonists to Emesa implies that this author grappled with the remarkable open ending of Leucippe and Clitophon (Fusillo; Repath; Nakatani). Thus, this supposedly primitive writer displays a deeper understanding of the novel's narratological intricacies than any other extant early interpretation. In addition, I shall argue that by infusing the story of Achilles Tatius with elements of the Aethiopica of Heliodorus, Galaction and Episteme positions itself between a novel considered scandalous by early readers and one that was regarded as elevating (Photius, Michael Psellus, ‘Philip the Philosopher').

Building on this analysis, the second part of my paper explores the ideological implications of Christian sequel-writing. Against the communis opinio, which sees this as a relatively simple attempt at ‘legitimising' the novels - necessitated by the combination of their erotic (and thus from a Christian perspective problematic) content and culturally influential status - I suggest that the Passio represents a much more ambitious cultural intervention. Reading this text in dialogue with late antique discourses of pagan literature and its usefulness in a Christian context (esp. Basil of Caesarea's Address to the young, ) as well as early Christian attempts to grapple with erotic material found in the Old Testament (e.g., commentaries on the Song of Songs), my paper argues that the sequel is best understood as a provocative, playful act of ideological appropriation: By showcasing that even the ‘most pagan' of Greek novels can be absorbed by Christianity, the Passio turns an act of literary reception into a performative celebration of cultural hegemony.

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Presenters

Benedek Kruchio, University of Cambridge

  SCS-47