Love and the Quest for Beauty: The Romantic Hero and Heroine

Love and the Quest for Beauty: The Romantic Hero and Heroine in the Ancient Greek Novel by Rosa Turrisi Fuller
On the surface, the romances of ancient Greek novels can appear melodramatic, unrealistic, and the heroes and heroines obsessed with physical beauty in a way that has little to do with real love. Their love is not ordinary affection; it takes them over completely and they have no options other than to pursue the object of that love or to die. This paper seeks to displace the surface interpretation in favor of one that takes into account the mentality of the ancient Greeks and the nature of the love of beauty. The novels that will be examined are Xenophon of Ephesus’ An Ephesian Tale, Chariton’s Chaereas and Callirhoe, and Achilles Tatius’ Leukippe and Clitophon. The novel An Ephesian Tale begins with a description of the hero, Habrocomes, whom the citizens of Ephesus treated like a god for his astounding good looks, which increased daily, and for his many accomplishments.
Habrocomes was filled with self-love and "everything [else] that was regarded beautiful he despised as inferior" to the standard set by his own perfection and (Xenophon of Ephesus, 128). He "did not recognize Eros as a god" and said that "no one would ever fall in love or submit to the god except of his own accord" (Xenophon of Ephesus, 128). Habrocomes, at this stage of his development, resembles Plato’s description, in the Symposium, of an ignorant person, and unlike the gods and the lovers of beauty. In the Symposium, Socrates is said to have quoted a friend of his that, "no god is a lover of wisdom or desires to be wise, for he is wise already, and the same is true of other wise persons, if there be any such" (Plato, 203-204). By wisdom, Plato meant knowledge of what is good, and therefore beautiful. Because the gods are absolutely perfect, according to Plato, it does not make sense to suppose, as the stories about them would have us believe, that they ever love or desire anything. The quote continues, nor on the other hand do the ignorant love wisdom and desire to be wise, for the tiresome thing about wisdom is precisely this, that a man who possesses neither beauty nor goodness nor intelligence is perfectly well satisfied with himself, and no one who does not believe that he lacks a thing desires what he does not believe he lacks (Plato, 203-204). Habrocomes was not entirely lacking in beauty and goodness and intelligence, but at this point he is more similar to Plato’s ignorant person than to his description of a god, though in a sense he resembles both. The sentence "his mental qualities developed along with his physical ones" (Xenophon of Ephesus, 128) reveals the nature of his appreciation of beauty. His qualities "developed" within him; he did not have to develop them, to look outside of himself in order to acquire them. He saw beauty as part and parcel of himself and thus he was ignorant of its true nature. At a festival in honor of the goddess Artemis, Habrocomes first heard of and saw the beautiful young girl Anthia with whom he then fell in love against his will (Xenophon of Ephesus, 130). It is understandable that Habrocomes, a person of the greatest accomplishment, and the highest standards would be unimpressed by ordinary beauty, and ordinary accomplishments. He saw love as a matter of choice because he was capable of mastering any skill, any art which partakes of beauty, and he did so at his own will. When he saw Anthia, he was forced to recognize that love does not originate in oneself alone; he now desired what he did believe he lacked. At this point, Habrocomes had made a transition from an ignorant person to a person who is capable of being a lover of beauty. Socrates quoted the same friend, "wisdom is one of the most beautiful things, and Love is love of beauty, so it follows that Love must be a lover of wisdom, and consequently in a state half-way between wisdom and ignorance" (Plato, 203-204). Here, Plato is referring to Love, Eros, as a conscious being only metaphorically. He means the concepts of love and the lover. Habrocomes was forced into the recognition that he was this type of lover. The self that is most beautiful is most subject to falling in love with what is most beautiful outside of the self. It has an inborn appreciation of beauty that is higher than that attained by the lesser beings who see beauty in everything beautiful, but that are incapable of truly possessing that beauty.
	In the Greek novels, love of physical beauty is set above love of the person. In Chaereas and Callirhoe, Callirhoe was sold as a slave to Dionysius, a "true aristocrat" who was known for his high morals. He fell in love with Callirhoe, and one of his slaves persuaded her to marry Dionysius in spite of the fact that she was still married to Chaereas. When Callirhoe was deeply upset at the news that Chaereas was apparently dead, Dionysius worried that she might, in her desperation, do some harm to herself, and thus mar her beauty. His love was for Callirhoe’s beauty, not for Callirhoe herself, but this is understandable because there was nothing remarkable
about Callirhoe’s character. She is portrayed as a victim of her own beauty; it is the cause of all her unhappiness, and she does not have the strength of character to defend herself. Just as Habrocomes was forced to recognize beauty as something greater than himself, insofar as it could exist outside of himself, Callirhoe was forced to recognize that her beauty was something greater than herself, and outside of her control. In the end Eros, the god (or, according to Plato, the being intermediate between god and human) of love, and Aphrodite, the goddess of beauty control the outcomes of human affairs. Once the hero and heroine fall in love, the complex adventures that invariably follow serve to test and to prove their devotion to one another. The lovers show great strength of character in the face of these tests. Outsiders fall in love with one or the other of the lovers at every step, and it is a great struggle for them to remain faithful to each other. It is here that the devotion to the beauty that is greater than themselves is proved. In the face of seemingly hopeless circumstances, they do not give up hope. David Konstan, author of the article "Xenophon of Ephesus: Eros and Narrative in the Novel," advances the view that the passivity of the lovers is a reflection of their equality in love, that the hero should not be more active than the heroine, and therefore is more likely to display emotion than to employ some course of action (Konstan 1994, 54). Another possible reason, more central to the unifying theme of the plot, is that the passivity of the characters serves to underscore their absolute devotion to each other, and to physical beauty. As it turns out, they are not always unable to pursue direct action. Chaereas, when he discovered that Callirhoe was missing from her grave, and consequently that she may not, in fact, have been dead, he and his friends set out in ships to search for her (Chariton, 54). Anthia, in An Ephesian Tale, who had been captured by a band of robbers, murdered one among them in order to prevent him from raping her (Xenophon of Ephesus, 157). Action, or alternatively inaction, both serve to preserve the chastity and faithfulness of the lovers toward one another and to accentuate their absolute subservience to love. Travel throughout the Mediterranean is almost invariably a central theme in the adventures of the heroes and heroines of the ancient novels. Thought these travels clearly serve to test the strength of their love, they also have symbolic significance. Joseph Campbell, author of The Hero with a Thousand Faces, wrote that the passage of the mythological hero may be over-ground, incidentally; fundamentally it is inward—into depths where obscure resistances are overcome, and long lost, forgotten powers are revivified, to be made available for the transfiguration of the world" (Campbell 1968, 29). In the Greek novels, the power is the love of beauty, and events, which would otherwise be impossible, are made possible by the strength of this love. Once the strength of the love between the hero and the heroine has been sufficiently tested, they are allowed to spend the rest of their lives in marital bliss. Chaereas and Callirhoe ends with the lovers returning to Sicily together on a huge ship filled with the spoils of war (Chariton, 120). An Ephesian Tale ends with the lovers’ return to Ephasis where they "lived happily ever after; the rest of their life together was one long festival." Leukippe and Clitophon ends less dramatically, but nonetheless happily for the lovers. This success in the quest for the beautiful is once again in concurrence with the ideas of Plato. The aim of love is the possession of the beautiful and the automatic consequence of this possession is happiness. The beauty sought by the hero and heroine is not finite in time; they seek beauty and the conditions for the continuance of physical perfection into the next generation, through a secure marriage. In the realm of physical beauty, the happiness does not end, because the lovers have attained what the gods possess. The apparent melodrama lies in the fact that the beauty sought and attained by the lovers is merely physical, not spiritual. Plato argued that the appreciation of the beauty of an individual beautiful person is the first step, for the student of beauty, towards appreciation of beauty itself. Once a young person has learned to appreciate beauty in the individual, he will observe that physical beauty in any person is closely akin to physical beauty in any other, and that, if he is to make beauty of outward form the object of his quest, it is great folly not to acknowledge that the beauty exhibited in all bodies is one and the same; when he has reached this conclusion he will become a lover of all physical beauty, and will relax the intensity of his passion for one particular person, because he will realize that such a passion is beneath him and of small account. Next he will ascend towards an appreciation of beauty in the soul, then beauty in activities and institutions and finally of the concept of beauty itself, of which all beautiful things are mere instances. That is, at this point "he may no longer be the slave of a base and mean-spirited devotion to an individual example of beauty" (Plato, 209-211). The lovers in the ancient novel do not follow this path of transcendence; they stop at the appreciation of the individual example. In this sense, the ancient Greek novel is limited: it places a particular kind of beauty, and that pertaining to a particular individual above beauty itself. Yet, it is possible to take metaphorically this supremacy of beauty manifested in the individual, in the novels. The attainment of such beauty can be taken as a metaphor for appreciation and attainment of beauty as a whole. Even if, perhaps, most ancient readers of the novels did not have a true appreciation of the ideas of Plato, their ideals were in a class above the ordinary. The realism of the novels had its basis in the reality of the concept of beauty. As such, the realism or lack of realism in the actions of the lovers is secondary. Whether anyone would ever truly be "too weak to stand," "waste away bodily" or faint and almost die after seeing his or her beloved only once (Chariton, 22-23) is of small account, as such narrative devises add to rather than detract from the impression on the reader that love of beauty has supremacy above all lesser, more selfish concerns. Writing in the 1960s, Joseph Campbell argued that sober, modern Occidental judgement is founded on a total misunderstanding of the realities depicted in the tale, the myth, and the divine comedies of redemption. These, in the ancient world, were regarded as of a higher rank than tragedy, of a deeper truth, of a more difficult realization, of a sounder structure, and of a revelation more complete. The happy ending of the fairy tale, the myth, and the divine comedy of the soul, is to be read, not as a contradiction, but as a transcendence of the universal tragedy of man (Campbell 1968, 28). In other words, the happy ending is not an implicit denial of the "death, disintegration, dismemberment, and the crucifixion of our heart with the passing of the forms we have loved," but transcendence over and above the inevitability of such tragedies (Campbell 1968, 26-28). The transcendence of individuals over personal tragedies, in such works, is symbolic of the universal transcendence of all humanity. Once again, the attainment of beauty in one of its particular manifestations is symbolic of attainment of beauty in each and in all of its manifestations, that is, the attainment or knowledge of the concept of beauty itself. The society that was capable of producing the minds of Plato and Socrates was a society with a deep appreciation for beauty. Perhaps the single-minded devotion to physical beauty, in the ancient Greek novel, is unrealistic, though if taken metaphorically, it is not. The point of greatest importance is that, whatever the particular manifestation of beauty, the ideals of the ancient Greeks were grounded in an appreciation of beauty itself, devotion to this beauty over and above the concerns of everyday life. Works Cited Campbell, Joseph. The Hero With a Thousand Faces. Bollingen Series XVII. 2^nd ed. Princeton UP: 1968 Konstan, David (1994). Xenophon of Ephesus: Eros and Narrative in the Novel. In J. R. Morgan, ed., Greek Fiction: The Greek Novel in Context. London: Routledge. Plato. The Symposium. Walter Hamilton, trans. New York: Penguin, 1951. Chariton, Chaereas and Callirhoe. B. P. Reardon, trans. Xenophon of Ephesus. An Ephesian Tale. Graham Anderson, trans. Achilles Tatius. Leukippe and Clitophon. John J. Winkler, trans. Reardon, B. P., ed. Collected Ancient Greek Novels. U of California P. Berkeley: 1989. The image of Hermes is from http://www.culture.gr/2/21/211/21107m/e211gm04.html . The image of Aphrodite from http://www.blue.icestorm.net/aphrodite/part5.html . See http://www.geocities.com/libertasetveritas for more papers that discuss Plato's Symposium.