This book offers the first comprehensive evaluation of ethics in the ancient Greek novel, demonstrating how their representation of the cardinal virtue sophrosune positions these texts in their literary, philosophical and cultural contexts. Sophrosune encompasses the dispositions and psychological states of temperance, self-control, chastity, sanity and moderation. The Greek novels are the first examples of lengthy prose fiction in the Greek world, composed between the first century BCE and the fourth century CE. Each novel is concerned with a pair of beautiful, aristocratic lovers who undergo trials and tribulations, before a successful resolution is reached. Bird focuses on the extant examples of the genre (Chariton's Callirhoe, Xenophon of Ephesus' Ephesiaca, Longus' Daphnis and Chloe, Achilles Tatius' Leucippe and Clitophon and Heliodorus' Aethiopica), which all have the virtue of sophrosune at their heart. As each pair of lovers strives to retain their chastity in the face of adversity, and under extreme pressure from eros, it is essential to understand how this virtue is represented in the characters within each novel. Invited modes of reading also involve sophrosune, and the author provides an important exploration of how sophrosune in the reader is both encouraged and undermined by these works of fiction.

This book offers the first comprehensive evaluation of ethics in the ancient Greek novel, demonstrating how their representation of the cardinal virtue sophrosune positions these texts in their literary, philosophical and cultural contexts. Sophrosune encompasses the dispositions and psychological states of temperance, self-control, chastity, sanity and moderation. The Greek novels are the first examples of lengthy prose fiction in the Greek world, composed between the first century BCE and the fourth century CE. Each novel is concerned with a pair of beautiful, aristocratic lovers who undergo trials and tribulations, before a successful resolution is reached. Bird focuses on the extant examples of the genre (Chariton's Callirhoe, Xenophon of Ephesus' Ephesiaca, Longus' Daphnis and Chloe, Achilles Tatius' Leucippe and Clitophon and Heliodorus' Aethiopica), which all have the virtue of sophrosune at their heart. As each pair of lovers strives to retain their chastity in the face of adversity, and under extreme pressure from eros, it is essential to understand how this virtue is represented in the characters within each novel. Invited modes of reading also involve sophrosune, and the author provides an important exploration of how sophrosune in the reader is both encouraged and undermined by these works of fiction.

Latin Poetry in the Ancient Greek Novels establishes and explores connections between Greek imperial literature and Latin poetry. This work challenges conventional thinking about literary and cultural interaction of the period, which assumes that imperial Greeks were not much interested in Roman cultural products (especially literature). Instead, it argues that Latin poetry is a crucially important frame of reference for Greek imperial literature. This has significant ramifications, bearing on the question of bilingual allusion and intertextuality, as well as on that of cultural interaction during the imperial period more generally. Three of these novels in particular-Chariton's Chaereas and Callirhoe, Achilles Tatius' Clitophon and Leucippe, and Longus' Daphnis and Chloe-are analysed for the extent to which they allude to Latin poetry, and for the effects (literary and ideological) of such allusion. After establishing the cultural context and parameters of the study, each chapter pursues the strategies of an individual novelist in connection with Latin poetry. The work offers the first book-length study of the role of Latin literature in Greek literary culture under the empire, and thus provides fresh perspectives and new approaches to the literature and culture of this period.

A family crosses a river on a ferryboat and observes how the ferry operates.

The papers in this volume discuss, from various perspectives, the engagement of the ancient novels with their predecessors and aim to identify and interpret the resonances, of different degrees of closeness, of those texts (Homeric epics, traditional and nuptial poetry, the historiographical tradition, Greek theatre, Latin love elegy and pantomime) as elements of an intertextual and metadiscursive play.

This study provides a new description of the semantics of sophrosyne, and investigates the use of the term as an instrument of persuasion in the main texts from the Archaic and Classical era.

"Among the cardinal virtues of classical Greece - wisdom, courage, justice, piety, and sôphrosunê - sôphrosunê is the least understood or valued. But, as this book shows - studying the vigorous and wide-ranging debates about the virtue, across fifth- and fourth-century poetry, prose, and philosophy - many Greeks in fact judged it the preeminent virtue. They understood it to be the capacity to choose between one's conflicting desires and to act only on those aiming at what one judges one's authoritative or properly life-defining ends. This is the capacity to be a mature human: facing down one's bodily and social promptings with discipline, identifying with one's long-term goals or acknowledged norms over one's evanescent impulses. This is what makes one count as an "agent": someone who acts on her own principles, rather than simply reacts to external or internal proddings. Thus sôphrosunê is the virtue of agency. The clearest evidence for the nature of and significance granted to sôphrosunê is the disagreement found across ancient Greek literature over the term's application and scope. This book starts by appraising remarks about sôphrosunê from the archaic and early-Classical period in Homer, Theognis, Pindar, Aeschlyus, Heraclitus, and funerary inscriptions. Then it turns to later fifth-century exchanges in Euripides especially but also Herodotus, Thucydides, Aristophanes, Critias, Antiphon, and Democritus. Socrates is a crucial figure for the study, as we see in the works of his associates Antisthenes, Xenophon, and particularly Plato. After several chapters on Plato, we turn to the radical innovations of Aristotle and the less familiar Pythagorean assessments"--