As I wrote about previously in this post from January 2020, the literary form of the novel (by which I mean a long work of narrative prose fiction) is vastly older than a lot of people believe. In fact, a significant number of novels written in the Ancient Greek and Latin languages by various authors from the first century BCE onward have survived to the present day. In fact, as of the time I am writing this, I have just completed a graduate-level course on the ancient Greek novel.
The central theme of many of the ancient Greek-language novels that have survived is ἔρως (érōs), which refers to sexual and romantic desire. (The ancient Greeks did not distinguish between the two.) The novels in which ἔρως is a central theme center around a pair of protagonists—invariably a young man and a young woman—who deeply and passionately erotically desire each other.
Many of the surviving novels, however, feature side characters who also have experiences with ἔρως, including some who either currently have or have previously had a partner of the same gender as themself. For instance, in the novel Leukippe and Kleitophon, written by Achilleus Tatios, a Greek-language writer from Alexandria in around the late second century CE, the male protagonist Kleitophon initially learns about ἔρως from his older male cousin Kleinias, who has a boyfriend. Fascinatingly, one ancient novel that has not survived—the Babyloniaka or Babylonian Tale, which a Syrian writer named Iamblichos wrote in the Greek language sometime between c. 165 and c. 180 CE—is known to have included a subplot involving two women characters who erotically desire one another and possibly end up marrying each other.
Sources for the Babylonian Tale
Unfortunately, Iambichos’s Babylonian Tale, like so many other literary works that existed in the ancient Mediterranean world, has not survived to the present day complete. Thankfully, though, the medieval scholar and archbishop Photios I of Constantinople (lived c. 810 – 893 CE) happened to write a book review of it, which is included in his Myriobiblos 94. In addition, three substantial extracts of the novel itself, each one between the length of one and two pages, have survived.
Compared to most of other lost works of ancient Greek literature, the Babylonian Tale seems to have been lost quite late. Most works of ancient literature that have not survived became lost during late antiquity and the Early Middle Ages. As I discuss in this post from June 2021, it was most likely during late antiquity and the Early Middle Ages that the majority of works of ancient Greek drama became lost and, as I discuss in this post I made in January 2023, it was also during this period that the last complete manuscripts of the Alexandrian edition of Sappho’s poems are known to have existed.
At least one complete copy of Iamblichos’s Babylonian Tale, by sharp contrast, seems to have existed as late as the seventeenth century. The last definitively attested complete manuscript was apparently held in the Escorial Library in San Lorenzo de El Escorial, Spain. Tragically, in 1671, a fire struck the library and destroyed its entire manuscript collection of around 5,280 handwritten codices, including the manuscript of Iamblichos’s Babylonian Tale.
ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a lead seal of Photios I of Constantinople, dating to the ninth century CE
There is, however, a slim possibility that a complete manuscript may still survive somewhere, since the Dutch humanist scholar and manuscript collector Isaac Vossius (lived 1618 – 1689) records that, sometime around 1652, Queen Christina of Sweden paid an enormous sum of money to purchase a manuscript copy of a work that he calls the “Chronicon Babyloniaca” of Iamblichos through him. Christina was keenly interested in Neoplatonic philosophy and may have purchased the manuscript believing that it was a work of the Syrian Neoplatonic philosopher Iamblichos (lived c. 245 – c. 325 CE), a later writer who happened to have the same name as the second-century CE novelist.
Nothing is known about what happened to the manuscript Queen Christina reportedly purchased after this point. A very faint hope remains that it may still be buried in a collection or archive somewhere. It is not, however, entirely clear whether the manuscript Vossius mentions was actually a complete copy of the Babylonian Tale, since it is possible that it may have just been a copy of the extracts from the novel that are already well known and studied.
ABOVE: Portrait of Queen Christina of Sweden, who may have purchased a manuscript copy of Iamblichos’s Babyloniaka through Isaac Vossius in 1652
Photios’s disapproving assessment of the Babyloniaka‘s sexual mores
Photios begins his review of the Babylonian Tale with a general disapproving comment on the novel’s sexual content, describing it as a sexually immoral in character. He compares it with other ancient novels he had read and concludes that it is not quite as sexually depraved than the novel Leukippe and Kleitophon by Achilleus Tatios, but still less moral than the Aithiopika by Heliodoros of Emesa. He writes (Myriobiblos 94.1):
“Ἀνεγνώσθη Ἰαμβλίχου δραματικόν, ἔρωτας ὑποκρινόμενον. Ἔστι δὲ τῇ αἰσχρολογίᾳ τοῦ μὲν Ἀχιλλέως τοῦ Τατίου ἧττον ἐκπομπεύων, ἀναιδέστερον δὲ μᾶλλον ἢ ὁ Φοῖνιξ Ἡλιόδωρος προσφερόμενος· οἱ γὰρ τρεῖς οὗτοι σχεδόν τι τὸν αὐτὸν σκοπὸν προθέμενοι ἐρωτικῶν δραμάτων ὑποθέσεις ὑπεκρίθησαν, ἀλλ´ ὁ μὲν Ἡλιόδωρος σεμνότερόν τε καὶ εὐφημότερον, ἧττον δὲ αὐτοῦ ὁ Ἰάμβλιχος, αἰσχρῶς δὲ καὶ ἀναιδῶς ὁ Ἀχιλλεὺς ἀποχρώμενος.”
This means, in my own translation:
“Read the dramatic work of Iamblichos, an acting out of erotic affairs. He parades the telling of disgraceful stories less than Achilleus Tatios, but he shows off more indecently than the Phoenician Heliodoros. For these three set out almost the same thing as their goal: the telling of erotic dramas, but Heliodoros suffices more reverently and decently, Iamblichos less so than he, and Achilleus most disgracefully and shamefully.”
Photios goes on to summarize the plot of the novel in considerable detail. The plot itself is extremely convoluted and confusing and, unfortunately, Photios’s summary frequently jumps around without following the narrative closely, which makes it even more difficult to follow. I will therefore leave out the vast majority of it and focus on the parts that pertain to the subplot involving sapphic love.
ABOVE: Image from the British Library website showing the beginning of Photios’s summary of Iamblichos’s Babyloniaka in Harley MS 5591, an early modern manuscript copied sometime between c. 1525 and c. 1575, on f.75v
Photios’s summary of the subplot of Mesopotamia and Berenike
Photios tells us that the main characters of the novel are an extraordinarily beautiful young man named Rhodanes and an extraordinarily beautiful young woman named Sinonis. At the beginning of the story, they are madly, passionately in love with each other and are happily married and living together in Babylon.
Unfortunately, this marital harmony comes to an abrupt end when Garmos, the king of Babylon, whose own wife has recently died, lusts after Sinonis and tries to force her to marry him, even though she is already married to Rhodanes. Sinonis adamantly refuses to marry him, so Garmos has her bound with golden chains and orders his eunuch henchmen Sakas and Damas to crucify Rhodanes.
Somehow, Sinonis manages to get herself free and Rhodanes taken down from the cross. The young lovers flee. The rest of the novel concerns their various misadventures while they are on the run from Garmos’s bumbling eunuch henchmen.
In the course of the novel, Iamblichos introduces as a secondary character a young woman named Mesopotamia, who is the daughter of a priest and priestess of Aphrodite who live on an island surrounded by the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. She was born ugly, but, somehow or another, she became extraordinarily beautiful. She looks similar enough to Sinonis that it is possible for someone to confuse the two.
According to her backstory, Mesopotamia previously had two older brothers named Tigris and Euphrates, who were both extraordinarily beautiful and looked similar enough to each other and to Rhodanes that all three of them could be confused. At some point, though, Tigris ate a rose that contained a poisonous beetle and died, leaving Euphrates as her only surviving brother.
Meanwhile, Mesopotamia herself was so beautiful that she attracted three male suitors. She gave one a cup that she herself had drunk from, gave one a garland of flowers that she had worn, and she kissed the third. All three suitors claimed that they were entitled to her hand in marriage on the basis of her gift to them.
Bochoros, the most esteemed judge of the time, was brought in to decide the case. He decided in favor of the suitor that Mesopotamia had kissed. The other suitors, however, were outraged at this and all three of them ended up killing each other in an ensuing brawl. As a result, none of them were able to marry her.
ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons taken in December 2015 showing a fishing boat on the Euphrates River, after which Mesopotamia’s older brother Euphrates takes his name
In the present of the novel, Sinonis and Rhodanes, both wounded from their most recent misadventure, come to the island where Mesopotamia lives with her parents and her living older brother Euphrates. Mesopotamia’s mother mistakes Rhodanes for her dead son Tigris, believing that he has come back from the dead, and Sinonis for Persephone.
The physician who treated Rhodanes’s wounds reveals the couple’s location to Damas, one of Garmos’s eunuch henchmen, and Damas orders the physician to cross the river to the island to deliver a message to Mesopotamia’s father the priest of Aphrodite ordering him to arrest Sinonis.
The physician tries to ford the river on the back of a camel after sticking the message he is supposed to deliver into the camel’s ear. He himself apparently falls off the camel’s back and drowns, but the camel reaches the island without its rider, with the message still stuck in its ear.
Rhodanes and Sinonis find the camel with the message tucked in its ear, which gives them warning to flee. Damas arrests Mesopotamia’s father, the priest of Aphrodite, for failing to act on the message he never received that would have told him to apprehend Sinonis and Rhodanes. The priest, seeing his own son Euphrates, mistakes him for Rhodanes and addresses him as such, leading Sakas to arrest and interrogate him. Euphrates calls his sister Mesopotamia, who was spotted fleeing, “Sinonis,” leading Sakas to believe she is her.
Then, in the midst of all this confusion, Iamblichos introduces a new character: Berenike, who is the daughter of the king of Egypt and Mesopotamia’s female lover. Photios summarizes (Myriobiblos 94.17):
“Διάληψις περὶ Βερενίκης, ἥ τις ἦν θυγάτηρ τοῦ βασιλέως Αἰγυπτίων, καὶ τῶν ἀγρίων αὐτῆς καὶ ἐκθέσμων ἐρώτων· καὶ ὅπως Μεσοποταμίᾳ τε συνεγίνετο, καὶ ὡς ὕστερον ὑπὸ Σάκα συνελήφθη Μεσοποταμία, καὶ πρὸς Γάρμον ἅμα τῷ ἀδελφῷ Εὐφράτῃ ἀπάγεται.”
This means, in my own translation:
“There is a digression concerning Berenike, who is a daughter of the king of the Egyptians, and her savage and lawless desires; and how she had intercourse with Mesopotamia and how, later, Mesopotamia is apprehended by Sakas and is led before Garmos along with her brother Euphrates.”
Photios leaves off the subplot of Mesopotamia here in order to summarize other events that happen involving Sinonis and Rhodanes, but he picks up with Mesopotamia later. He tersely summarizes what happens when she is brought before Garmos as follows (Myriobiblos 94.20):
“Ἄγεται πρὸς Γάρμον Εὐφράτης ὡς Ῥοδάνης, καὶ ὡς Σινωνὶς Μεσοποταμία· ἄγεται καὶ Σόραιχος καὶ ὁ ἀληθὴς Ῥοδάνης. Καὶ διαγνοὺς ὁ Γάρμος μὴ εἶναι Σινωνίδα τὴν Μεσοποταμίαν, δίδωσι Ζοβάρᾳ παρὰ ποταμὸν Εὐφράτην καρατομῆσαι ἵνα μή, φησί, καὶ ἑτέρα τις τοῦ τῆς Σινωνίδος ἐπιβατεύσῃ ὀνόματος.”
“Ὁ δὲ Ζοβάρας ἀπὸ πηγῆς ἐρωτικῆς πιὼν καὶ τῷ Μεσοποταμίας ἔρωτι σχεθείς, σῴζει τε ταύτην καὶ πρὸς Βερενίκην Αἰγυπτίων ἤδη, ἅτε τοῦ πατρὸς τελευτήσαντος βασιλεύουσαν, ἐξ ἧς ἦν καὶ ἀφελόμενος, ἄγει· καὶ γάμους Μεσοποταμίας ἡ Βερενίκη ποιεῖται, καὶ πόλεμος δι´ αὐτὴν Γάρμῳ καὶ Βερενίκῃ διαπειλεῖται.”
This means:
“Euphrates is led before Garmos as Rhodanes and Mesopotamia as Sinonis. Soraichos and the true Rhodanes are also led. And Garmos, recognizing that Mesopotamia is not Sinonis, gives [an order] to Zobaras [i.e., one of his eunuch henchmen] to behead her next to the Euphrates River so that, he says, no other woman will usurp Sinonis’s name.”
“But Zobaras, drinking from the river of erotic desire and being held captive by erotic desire for Mesopotamia, spares her and leads her away to Berenike of the Egyptians, who, by this time, her father having died, is ruling as queen, from whom he was also taken away. And γάμους Μεσοποταμίας ἡ Βερενίκη ποιεῖται and war is threatened because of her between Garmos and Berenike.”
There is scholarly debate about what Photios means when he says “γάμους Μεσοποταμίας ἡ Βερενίκη ποιεῖται.” The scholar Bernadette J. Brooten interprets this phrase to mean that Berenike married Mesopotamia herself and claims that this passage is evidence that marriage between women existed in the ancient Mediterranean world (Love Between Women, 51). The scholar Alan Cameron, however, argues that Photios’s wording is more ambiguous than Brooten maintains (“Love (and Marriage) between Women,” 150–152).
Cameron argues that Photios conflates two different Greek phrases: “γάμους ποιεῖσθαι” (in the passive voice), meaning “to get married,” and “γάμους ποιεῖν” (in the active voice) plus a person’s name in the genitive case, meaning “to hold a wedding celebration” for someone else. He notes that a few other post-Classical Greek authors make this same conflation with various meanings, which are not always clear from the context.
He also points out that there are two different characters in the novel who could conceivably be marrying Mesopotamia: Berenike herself or the eunuch Zobaras. Thus, it is possible that Photios means to say that, in Iamblichos’s novel, Berenike marries Mesopotamia, but it is also possible that he means to say that she throws a wedding celebration for Berenike and Zobaras. Unless someone discovers the relevant section of the novel that Photios is summarizing or someone discovers a new source summarizing this section, it is impossible for anyone to know which interpretation is correct.
Cameron points out that, either way one chooses to interpret Photios’s confused wording, the wedding in question is a highly unconventional one. People in the ancient Mediterranean world generally conceived of marriage as a hierarchical relationship in which a man (the husband) had control and authority over a woman (his wife). Although, in some cultures of the ancient Mediterranean world, a man could have multiple wives or one wife and many concubines, a non-man could never have a wife, since having a wife was considered exclusively the role of a man.
As I myself discuss in this blog post I wrote in February 2022, people in the ancient Mediterranean world generally perceived eunuchs as questionably male at best; many people considered them to belong to a class of being not only inferior to men, but even inferior to women.
Cameron notes that, for many ancient readers, the idea of a eunuch marrying a woman would have been highly shocking. In fact, the Roman poet Iuvenalis or Juvenal, who wrote in around the late first or early second century CE, cites a eunuch marrying a woman in his Satires 1.22 as the very first in a long list of social horrors that compelled him to become a satirist.
ABOVE: Illustration made by S. H. Gimber in 1837 depicting what he imagined the Roman satirist Iuvenalis might have looked like. (No one knows what he really looked like.)
Fascinatingly, the Souda, a Greek encyclopedia compiled in the tenth century CE, contains a brief entry about Iamblichos the novelist (ι 26). Although the entry is only four sentences long, it specifically highlights the subplot of the eunuch Zobaras’s love for Mesopotamia over and above the rest of the novel. This seems to indicate that this particular subplot was especially well known or perhaps notorious among educated upper-class readers of Greek literature in the Roman Empire in the tenth century CE.
The scholar Helen Morales argues that the subplot of Mesopotamia and Berenike is a political allegory, in which the character Mesopotamia represents the land of Mesopotamia and her capture, escape, and marriage represent the land of Mesopotamia’s conquest by, rebellion against, and eventual submission to the Roman Empire (“Marrying Mesopotamia,” 78–101).
I’m not sure that I find Morales’s argument totally convincing, but certainly the fact that the novel features a character who is named after a piece of territory and, at one point, two kingdoms threaten to go to war over her does lend some support to political allegorical interpretations.
Works cited
- Brooten, Bernadette J. Love Between Women: Early Christian Responses to Female Homoeroticism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996.
- Cameron, Alan. “Love (and Marriage) between Women.” Greek Roman and Byzantine Studies 39 (1998): 137–156.
- Morales, Helen. “Marrying Mesopotamia: Female Sexuality and Cultural Resistance in Iamblichus’ Babylonian Tales.” Ramus 35, no. 1 (2006): 78–101.
Another super interesting article! I knew about Iamblichos’s lost novel, but I had no idea that a complete copy survived in El Escorial until just 350 years ago. Fascinating!
Indeed! I was honestly really astonished to find out that there was apparently a manuscript of it in existence so recently. It’s such a shame to think that, if someone had just made a printed edition based on that manuscript before the fire, then we’d most likely still have the complete novel today. It’s also wild to think that there’s even a slim chance that there might still be a copy of it out there somewhere buried in an uncatalogued collection.
Damn, so that means we were so close to have the extant text of the Babylonian Tale. History can be a cruel mistress.
I know! It’s really tragic. To be fair, though, even if it did survive, I suspect that very few people would actually read it. Five “canonical” ancient Greek novels have survived to the present day complete (Chariton of Aphrodisias’s Chaireas and Kallirhoë, Xenophon of Ephesos’s Ephesiaka or Ephesian Tale, Achilleus Tatios’s Leukippe and Kleitophon, Longos of Lesbos’s Daphnis and Chloë, and Heliodoros of Emesa’s Aithiopika or Aithiopian Tale), but even many (perhaps even most) professional classicists have not read all of them, even in translation. In recent decades, scholars have been paying more attention to the Greek novels than they used to, but they still lie outside the traditional classics canon.
The course I took this semester on ancient Greek novels was taught by Dr. Rebecca Sausville, who is a specialist in the cultural history of Greece and Asia Minor during the Roman Period, and she commented during one of our class sessions that it was her first time ever reading Heliodoros’s Aithiopika all the way through, even in translation.
When I mentioned to Dr. Joel Christensen (my advisor for my master’s thesis, who is also a very eminent scholar of Archaic Greek poetry) that I was taking a class on ancient Greek novels and that we were reading Longos’s Daphnis and Chloë in the original Greek, he commented: “Have I read that one?” (Of course, Joel is generally not a fan of Hellenistic and Roman-era Greek literature, so his indifference to the Greek novels is not especially surprising.)
That’s curious. Maybe you can make a post about the influence of Greek novels in later literature (in case you haven’t yet). I know, e. g., that they were very influential in Cervantes, especially in his Persiles, and I also read that the plot in Verdi’s opera Aida (which coincidentally I’m going to see tomorrow) was loosely based on Heliodoros’s Aithiopika, but I haven’t read them myself yet.
The Greek novels were extremely widely read and influential during the Renaissance and the Early Modern Period, but they fell starkly out of favor among classicists in the nineteenth century and remained very much out of favor throughout most of the twentieth century. They slowly began to come back into academic favor over the course of the last few decades of the twentieth century as scholars began to show more interest in works of ancient literature that previous generations of scholars had devalued and marginalized. Now, over the course of the early twenty-first century, they have slowly begun to re-enter the canon of classical literature.
My personal assessment of them is as follows:
* Chaireas and Kallirhoë is the earliest of all the surviving novels and it seems to have established the model for the ones that came after it. The plot is a wildly implausible sequence of implausible events, but still entertaining.
* Most of the Ephesian Tale feels like an extremely repetitive and unoriginal rehashing of the same novelistic tropes over and over again, except for the episode with Aigialeus and the mummified Thelxinoë at the beginning of Book Five, which is one of the wildest, most truly bizarre scenes I’ve ever read in a work of Greek literature (which is saying a lot).
* Leukippe and Kleitophon is almost definitely partly a parody of earlier Greek novels. It is also spectacularly violent and has the most homoerotic stuff in it. In some places it feels like someone hired Quentin Tarantino to write a parody of all the others.
* I actually really enjoyed Daphnis and Chloë and I think it’s possibly my favorite of all the novels. It’s kind of kitschy and sentimental, but it’s also in many ways the most distinctive of all the novels, since it takes the premise of the other novels and applies it in a pastoral setting and creatively blends tropes from both the novel genre and pastoral poetry to create something that’s actually very original and distinct from both of the genres it draws upon. The adventure aspect of the story is greatly subdued compared to the other novels and it’s probably the closet of the five to a modern romance novel.
* The Aithiopika is a fantastic, highly baroque piece of fiction, if you’re into that sort of thing. Of the five novels, it’s by far the longest and it easily has the most iconic opening scene: a beach littered with human corpses, which really grabs the reader’s attention. Of the five “canonical” novels, it’s the only one that has a non-Greek protagonist (Charikleia) and the only one that is set almost entirely outside the Greek world. Its portrayal of the various cultures that the protagonists encounter is particularly interesting for the study of how the author and readers of literature in the Greek language thought about ethnicity in late antiquity.
Wow, you really sold me on the novels. Now I have to read them. Thank you very much!
Is that why some think The Tale of Genji is the earliest such example of novel?
Spencer, it would give us something to look forward to if you write a mere paragraph or two every weekend while you’re in Greece. Present one highlight from the previous week, with your own photo(s) and take on what you saw. You make small details meaningful, and I’m sure others would appreciate it!
I’ve actually been thinking for the past several months about what I’m going to do with this blog while I’m in Greece, since the program I’m in is going to be so intensive that I certainly won’t have time to research and write regular posts like I’ve been doing. I’ve been thinking that I will most likely try to write a short description of what I did and saw each day, with photos, at the end of each day, or maybe not quite that often. The difficulty is that I won’t have much time in the evenings to write and we’ll have to get up early each morning, so I won’t be able to stay up too late writing. Also, since a significant part of my time will be spent traveling outside of Athens, I’m not sure if I’ll have reliable internet every night while I am in Greece.
Whatever the case, my plan is to try to write something on this blog fairly regularly and share photos of things and places I’ve seen. Doing so, I think, will not just be a benefit to my regular subscribers, but also to me, since it will help me keep a permanent written record of the things I’ve seen that I will be able to go back and look at years from now, and to my family and friends, since I probably won’t have time to update all of them every single night about what I’ve been doing and seeing and it may be easiest to simply share those updates here on the blog, where they can all see them.
Please don’t give too much of yourself! You should strive to be well-rested and ready to go every day, so as not to miss anything. I’d be grateful for weekly scraps of information, or simply photos with descriptive captions. Nobody should hold you to more, or complain about what you’re able to post. Thank you in advance, and wishing you the best!
I agree with Cheryl; don’t set an unreasonable quota. Instead, how about digital postcards once or twice a week? Post a picture or two and tell us why they’re important to you-or just an anecdote about the wonderful weirdness you recently experienced. You warned us months ago not expect scholarly articles during your visit, and I think we all understand that. Glimpses of that visit and a quick paragraph or two about the fun you’re having or some detail that caught your eye or ear would be a good way for us to vicariously accompany you.
Not to mention even the different time zones which would make it harder to communicate with most in America. For example right now it’s 11 PM EST here in Michigan where I’m typing this, but in Greece it’s 6 AM EEST the next day. So you’d have to adjust when trying to keep in touch with relatives and close friends of yours, when you have the time to do so that is.