The Most Twisted Scene in Any Ancient Greek Novel

It’s no secret that ancient Greek literature is full of all kinds of twisted and disturbing stories. I even previously wrote a post on this blog about some such stories in classical myth back in September 2019. There are, however, some truly messed-up incidents in ancient Greek literature that are not well known. In this post, I want to discuss an obscure episode of this nature that I think more people should hear.

Sometime around the second century CE or thereabouts, the Greek writer Xenophon of Ephesos (who is not to be confused with Xenophon of Athens, the much more famous Athenian writer of the fourth century BCE) wrote a novel known as the Ephesiaka or Ephesian Tale. The novel is, for the most part, not especially interesting. In fact, I think it’s probably the least interesting overall of all the surviving Greek novels; it mostly consists of a monotonous repetition of the same tropes that other ancient novelists do better. In book five, chapter one, however, Xenophon unexpectedly drops what is perhaps the freakiest moment in any surviving ancient Greek novel. It involves a man, a mummy, and some casual necrophilia.

Introduction to the Ephesian Tale

The Ephesian Tale begins in the city of Ephesos, which is located on the west coast of Asia Minor (i.e., the Asian part of what is now Turkey). The main characters of the story are Anthia, an extraordinarily beautiful and chaste fourteen-year-old girl from an aristocratic Ephesian family, and Habrokomes, an extraordinarily beautiful sixteen-year-old boy, also from an aristocratic Ephesian family.

Habrokomes is exceedingly arrogant and proud of his appearance. Anytime he sees a statue or temple of Eros, the divine personification of ἔρως (érōs), which refers to sexual and romantic desire or passion, he laughs and says that he is more handsome than the god. Because of this, Eros decides to punish Habrokomes for his arrogance by afflicting him with erotic longing.

Anthia and Habrokomes briefly encounter each other for the first time at a local festival of Artemis, the patron goddess of Ephesos. Upon seeing each other, the young girl and boy are both immediately overcome with eros for each other. They both fall terribly ill with lovesickness and both visibly appear to be wasting away.

Worried, their respective parents independently consult the oracle of the god Apollon at Kolophon. The oracle gives both families the same reply in the form of a poem, foretelling that their respective children will face “terrible sufferings and toils,” including a journey over the sea, capture by pirates, tombs, and fire, but, after they have endured these things, they will eventually find happiness.

In a vain attempt to placate the oracle, Anthia and Habrokomes’s parents arrange to have them married and sent across the sea to Egypt. Phoenician pirates, however, seize the ship they are on and capture them both. From this point onward, Anthia and Habrokomes experience all kinds of wild adventures, in the course of which they become separated.

ABOVE: Oil painting made by the Dutch painter Joseph Paelinck c. 1820 depicting the character Anthia dressed in the garb of a huntress leading the procession of girls for the festival of Artemis in the scene in which Anthia and Habrokomes meet for the first time in Xenophon of Ephesos’s Ephesiaka

The story of Aigialeus and Thelxinoë

I won’t try to summarize everything that happens throughout the rest of the novel because it’s far too long and convoluted. Instead, we’ll jump ahead to the specific story I want to discuss. At the beginning of Book Five, Habrokomes is on a ship headed for Italy, but a storm blows it off course and it ends up landing at the major Greek port city of Syracuse on the island of Sicily. An old, impoverished fisherman named Aigialeus shows him hospitality and allows him to live with him in his home.

Habrokomes tells Aigialeus all about his love for Anthia and about how desperate he is to see her again. In return, Aigialeus tells Habrokomes about his own experience with eros. He says to him, as translated by Graham Anderson with some minor edits of my own:

“Habrokomes, my child, I am neither a settler nor a native Sicilian, but a Spartan from Lakedaimon, from one of its leading families. I was very prosperous, and when I was a young man enrolled in the ephebes, I fell in love with a Spartan girl called Thelxinoë, and she with me. We met at an all-night festival in the city (a god guided both of us), and we found the fulfillment of the desire that had brought us together.”

“For some time, our relationship was a secret, and we often made pacts to be faithful unto death. But one of the gods, I suppose, was envious. While I was still an ephebe, her parents arranged to marry her to a young Spartan by the name of Androkles, who was also now in love with her. At first, she kept making excuses and putting off the wedding, until finally she was able to meet me and agreed to elope with me by night.”

“So both of us dressed as young men, and I even cut Thelxinoë’s hair. We left Sparta the very night of the wedding for Argos and Corinth, where we took ship for Sicily. When the Spartans found out we had gone they condemned us to death. We spent our lives here in Sicily, poor but happy, since we thought we were rich because we had each other.”

The fact that Aigialeus says Thelxinoë dressed in men’s clothing and he cut her hair is significant because, as I discuss in this post I wrote back in June 2021, it was traditional during a Spartan wedding ceremony for the bride to be dressed in men’s clothing and for her head to be shaved. The Greek biographer and Middle Platonist philosopher Ploutarchos of Chaironeia (lived c. 46 – after c. 119 CE) records in his Life of Lykourgos 15.3–5, as translated by Richard J. A. Talbert:

“The custom was to capture women for marriage—not when they were slight or immature, but when they were in their prime and ripe for it. The so-called ‘bridesmaid’ took charge of the captured girl. She first shaved her head to the scalp, then dressed her in a man’s cloak and sandals, and laid her down along on a mattress in the dark. The bridegroom—who was not drunk and thus not impotent, but was sober as always—first had dinner in the messes, then would slip in, undo her belt, lift her and carry her to the bed.”

“After spending only a short time with her, he would depart discreetly so as to sleep wherever he usually did along with the other young men. And this continued to be his practice thereafter: while spending the days with his contemporaries, and going to sleep with them, he would warily visit his bride in secret, ashamed and apprehensive in case someone in the house might notice him.”

Thus, in the story, when Thelxinoë dresses as a man and Aigialeus cuts her hair, this functions not only as a disguise for her to escape unnoticed, but also as a marriage rite signifying their union in accordance with traditional Spartan customs.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a Roman marble bust from Delphoi that has been questionably identified as possibly a representation of the biographer Ploutarchos of Chaironeia

Up to the point in the story we have reached so far, the story of Aigialeus and Thelxinoë seems incredibly sweet. Nonetheless, the tale swiftly takes a disturbing turn as Aigialeus continues. Suddenly, out of the blue, he tells Habrokomes, in Anderson’s translation:

“Thelxinoë died here in Sicily not long ago; I didn’t bury her body but have it with me; I always have her company and adore her.”

At this point, the reader is filled with confusion and questions. What does Aigialeus mean when he says that he still has her body “with him”? He can’t possibly mean that he still has her literal corpse just sitting in his house, can he? Aigialeus, however, takes Habrokomes into the other room and shows him exactly what he means:

“At this he brought Habrokomes into the inner room and showed him Thelxinoë. She was now an old woman but still seemed beautiful to Aigialeus. Her body was embalmed in the Egyptian style, for the old fisherman had learnt embalming as well. ‘And so, Habrokomes, my child,’ he explained, ‘I still talk to her as if she were alive and lie down beside her and have my meals with her, and if I come home exhausted from fishing, the sight of her consoles me, for she looks different to me than she does to you; I think of her, child, as she was in Sparta and when we eloped; I think of the festival and the compact we made.’”

Habrokomes’s unexpected reaction to Aigialeus’s twisted revelations

Most people, I think, would react to this situation with horror. I know that, if a man I was living with took me into the other room, showed me that he has kept his dead wife’s mummified corpse, and told me that he still talks to it, eats with it, and even sleeps with it every night, I would be out of the house and bolting down the street within seconds and I wouldn’t stop running until I was at least a thousand miles away from that place. I’m confident that I would be far from alone in having this reaction. Surprisingly, though, Habrokomes has a very different reaction:

“While Aigialeus was still speaking, Habrokomes broke into a lament. ‘Anthia,’ he exclaimed, ‘the unluckiest girl of all! When will I ever find you, even as a corpse? The body of Thelxinoë is a great comfort in the life of Aigialeus, and now I have truly learnt that true love knows no age limits; but I wander over every land and sea, and yet I have not been able to hear about you. How doom-laden were the prophecies! I pray you, Apollon, who gave us the harshest oracles of all, have pity on us now and bring your prophecies to their final fulfillment.’”

The scholar Edmund P. Cueva has published a book chapter which applies horror theory to the surviving ancient novels and tries to answer why Habrokomes has this unexpected reaction to Aigialeus’s necrophilic relationship with his wife’s corpse.

Cueva argues that the reaction of the major characters to a situation is meant to cue the reader about how they should feel and respond to the situation. He holds that, when Aigialeus reveals to Habrokomes that he has kept Thelxinoë’s corpse, the reader is not meant to feel horrified, because the story is not intended as horror (Cueva, “Why Doesn’t Habrocomes Run Away From Aegialeus and His Mummified Wife?” 366–367).

I’m not sure that I find this explanation entirely convincing. For me personally, the fact that Habrokomes reacts to Aigialeus’s twisted relationship with his wife’s corpse by seeing it as an admirable exemplum of how true love persists even after one partner dies, rather than the deeply abnormal and unhealthy refusal to accept the reality of his wife’s death that it is, honestly makes the whole incident even more bizarre and disturbing.

In his article, Cueva discusses other episodes in the surviving ancient novels in which characters react to horrifying circumstances in ways that make sense. In the Ephesian Tale 5.1, by contrast, at least for me, the absence of anyone in the story who reacts to this creepy situation in an expected manner results in an overwhelming feeling of alienation from the values of the narrative.

This isn’t a case of ancient audiences having different values from modern audiences. The story of Aigialeus and Thelxinoë would have been at least just as strange and disturbing for most ancient readers as it is for most modern readers. Indeed, if anything, for many ancient readers of literature in the Greek language, it might have seemed even more alarming and twisted.

Ancient Greek religion strongly emphasized the necessity of a person’s body receiving the proper funerary rites, which included burial. (The importance of burial rites, for instance, is central to the plot of the Athenian playwright Sophokles’s famous tragedy Antigone.) Greek religion also considered human corpses to be a potential source of μίασμα (míasma) or ritual pollution for the living. Lastly, Greeks living outside Egypt generally regarded mummification as a strange, exotic, Egyptian practice.

In light of this, I can think of two possible explanations for why Habrokomes reacts to Aigialeus’s behavior in the way he does. The first possibility is that Cueva is correct that Xenophon of Ephesos intends for the reader to identify with Habrokomes’s reaction. If this is the case, then Xenophon may be genuinely trying to present Aigialeus’s relationship with Thelxinoë’s corpse as a positive illustration of how eros can persist even beyond the grave.

The second possibility, however, is that Xenophon actually intends for the reader to find Habrokomes’s reaction strange and alienating. If this is the case, then this episode with Aigialeus may be meant to show the reader that eros can twist people’s values and make them behave in deeply pathological ways.

ABOVE: Illustration from The Book of the Dead of Hunefer, dating to c. 1275 BCE, depicting a priest and mourners performing the sacred opening of the mouth ritual on Hunefer’s embalmed body

Works cited

• Cueva, Edmund P. “Why Doesn’t Habrocomes Run Away From Aegialeus and His Mummified Wife?: Horror and the Ancient Novel.” In Cultural Crossroads and the Ancient Novel, edited by Marília P. Futre Pinheiro, David Konstan, and Bruce Duncan MacQueen, 361–375. Trends in Classics – Supplementary Volumes 40. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2018.