Month: January 2017

In the mid-thirteenth-century Byzantine romance Livistros and Rhodamne, Rhodamne learns that her long-lost husband, the Latin knight Livistros, is alive. She exclaims:

My doubts are many and my disbelief great. A dead man come back to life — who will believe it? If he is really alive, which I doubt, how has he come to me? [1]

Byzantine writers could hardly express such doubts openly with respect to Christ in thoroughly Christian Byzantine society. That’s also true with respect to the legitimacy of gynocentrism. In Livistros and Rhodamne, Love (Eros) is God. He rules heaven and earth despotically. Men’s position of abjection within that despotism ineluctably inspires doubts.

Livistros and Rhodamne begins with the story of a MGTOW nightmare. Livistros recounted his original bliss as a single man:

Joy was my companion, serenity my friend. Never was there any happiness or pleasure which I lacked. And amid so much joy, amid so many pleasures, amid all my wealth and prosperity, amid the many luxuries and delights which I possessed and had at my command and in which I took pleasure, no concern for love ever came to me. My mind was completely free of passion. The thought of love did not enter my mind. I lived unsubdued, in freedom, without Love’s tortures, and beyond desire. [2]

One night, Livistros dreamed that a squadron of winged, armed men arrested him. They took him before the three-faced God Love, who sat on a throne flanked by two women. Love set before Livistros the choice of servitude or death: he could either become enslaved to Love, or have his head cut off.[3] Livistros begged Love for mercy. Forgiving Livistros for his prior life of bliss, Love gave Livistros passion for the beautiful princess Rhodamne, daughter of the Emperor Chrysos. Livistros did obeisance to Love and swore an oath of servitude. He thus was enthralled with love for Rhodamne.

Livistros went in search of Rhodamne just like a man would in today’s Dark Age of ignorance, bigotry, and superstition. He spent two years searching for her. After he finally found the Silver Castle where she lived, he didn’t just knock on the door and introduce himself. He camped outside her castle and wrote to her daily. He would tie his letters to arrows and shoot them over the castle wall. For six months she didn’t reply.

Modern master-teachers of love would probably grade Livistros’s love letters as meriting an omega grade for seductive savvy. Consider his first love letter to Rhodamne:

If your soul had learnt of me, if you knew who I am and for whom I suffer, if there were anywhere a person to tell you how much time I have spent for you, how many dangers I have run and woes I have endured, what manner of things have happened to me because of you — I think that if you had feelings of stone and a heart of iron you would take pity on me when you learnt what I suffer. I have no-one who could tell you of me. I have only Love and I have confidence in him. I hope that he puts concern for me into your heart. He is slow to act. He is sluggish in what he promised me. I have no-one to whom I can tell my sufferings. Believe me, my heart is being torn by my troubles. Here now is my letter, read what I suffer. Know whose message it is. Have mercy on him. Pity him. For two years now he has been wandering because of desire for you.

Is there any question about what would be most women’s reaction to this? Pathetic. Cringe-worthy. Ridicule him to your girlfriends. Livistros wrote like this daily for six months without a reply.[4] That shows as little empirical sense as believing that “violence against women is the most pressing human rights problem remaining in the world.” At least Rhodamne didn’t declare that she feared that Livistros was stalking her and have a restraining order imposed on him.

Rhodamne’s closest advisor, a eunuch, finally responded to Livistros’s letters. He represented the interest of scribes, but wrote with a frankness that few academics today would dare venture:

Know that the lady sighs with desire for you. She has fallen in love with you and suffers for your woes. But young women give themselves a haughty air. If she has not yet yielded to you, do not think that she does not desire you. This is through the haughtiness of the lady who was born of the sun. But write, write, Livistros, write. Do not be indolent. She has your earlier letters. She keeps them and reads them. She examines them word by word and her soul reflects on your misery of two years.

Livistros followed the eunuch’s advice and kept writing love letters to Rhodamne. Showing no understanding of biblical wisdom about the undesirability of a leaky roof, Livistros wrote:

They say that if a drop falls constantly on a rock, whatever the nature of the drop and the nature of the stone, the steady beating bores through the stone because the water’s dripping cannot be averted. I used to find this extraordinary. I was always amazed how a drop can pierce stone.

But when I examine the matter I do not believe what men say. I do not think that a drop can bore through stone. My passion, as it beat on the rock of your heart, should have worn it away. For drops my passion has these many letters, my messages, my words of love. I think that if my letters’ words had fallen on stone, even though it were rooted in Hades, the stone would have been wrenched up and would have come to understand my letter; however lifeless it was, it would have been transformed into intelligence.

So a drop is powerless against stone. It does not have the quality they say and their words are lies. A virtuous women’s heart surpasses a rock in hardness. The dew of my soul is now powerless and the spring of my heart cannot drip. It remains for me to beseech you, for me to confide my heart’s woes to you. It has submitted to the judgment of your love, my lady, and the courtesy of your mind. [5]

The lady finally wrote a reply letter to Livistros. He was overjoyed. He responded with a request for a token from the lady: “I shall regard it as I would you.”

Rhodamne, who lived long before the time of the Apocalypse Opener, was furious at Livistros’s effrontery. She responded:

It is enough that you have the letter which I wrote and that you have now bent an inflexible mind to desire. As for your eagerness to obtain a token as well from me and receive in your hands a pledge of my love, I am amazed that you feel no shame when you say so. In writing this to me the violence of your passion had led you too far. You will not see another letter from me. As long as you try to make me give you a token, you will die waiting as far as a letter goes. You will certainly not see one.

Livistros replied that, when he read her letter, “I saw death incarnate leap out and imperiously strike down my entire heart.” He complained that she was killing him. Perhaps with some awareness of men’s lifespan deprivation relative to women, Rhodamne in turn felt sorry for Livistros. She subsequently declared that in another letter from her.

In an uncharacteristic display of gender leadership, Livistros sent Rhodamne a ring. The ring had a ruby stone and layers of iron, gold, and lodestone forming the ring. Rhodamne was delighted with that token. She in turn sent Livistros a token of her. It was a ring of intertwined iron and lodestone “clasping each other so tightly as to be never wrenched apart.”

Livistros then wrote the lady with a request to meet with her. College sex-tribunal inquisitors today might classify such a letter as attempted rape. Rather than calling down authoritative punishment upon Livistros, Rhodamne merely replied and harshly dismissed his request as not worthy of a reply:

It did not befit my heart, it did not become my mind for me to write a reply to this last letter of yours. My hands should have cut it up and banished it from the world. You would have learnt from this that, even if you do love, you should not be so brazen in showing it. You should have counted the time, you should have watched the days and attended to what was happening. This alone would have sufficed. You must now realize that your letter made my heart angry with you, fearsomely angry, that your soul was impatient to receive another message or token of my love.

In his reply letter to her, Livistros described Rhodamne’s letter as an executioner. He exclaimed: “you have killed the man who is dying for you.” The lady didn’t reply. After three days, Livistros wrote another groveling letter. Again Rhodamne didn’t reply. After another four days, Livistros wrote another pathetic, self-abasing letter to her.

Rhodamne ultimately agreed to meet with Livistros. They met at dawn on a wooded hill with countless trees blooming with various flowers. The hill was across from a meadow. Livistros saw Rhodamne riding across the meadow to their appointed meeting-place in the woods:

The horse she rode was as white as snow and its forelock and mane were plaited with tassels of red silk which blazed like fire. Her dress was in the Latin fashion. Over a red and gold garment she wore a brightly coloured cloak which trailed far back over the ground. In one hand she held a tame parrot, which sat there without constraint and said in a human voice, “This lady makes slaves of souls not yet possessed by passion, and she shackles hearts still free; she subdues the senses of those reared in the mountains and desolate places.” And I paused from gazing at that wondrous lady with her rare beauty and indescribable appearance, and marveled at how the bird had been enslaved and was able to tell of its servitude with a human voice.

The bird of course was talking about Livistros. But at least the lady wasn’t satisfied with the company of cats. Rhodamne and Livistros united in love:

Ask not how we embraced and with what love, how long we talked and on how many subjects, nor is it fit for me to tell you.

As Ovid understood, explicitly telling isn’t necessary. Who doesn’t know the rest of what happened?

Rhodamne arranged to have Livistros engage in men-on-men violence and also incited him to murder an old woman. Verderichos, the king of Egypt, loved Rhodamne. Her father preferred Verderichos to Livistros for her husband. She proposed that the men fight for her. She told her father:

I prefer Livistros; you Verderichos. Tell them to mount their horses and joust. I shall take the one who conquers with his arms. Combat will decide what is best.

The men tore into each other with no consciousness of the pervasiveness of violence against men in gynocentric society:

His tongue screeched out, “Swine, now you die! And I replied, “Now you die, dog!”

Livistros won the combat and thus Rhodamne for a wife. More importantly, neither man was killed. An old woman, disparaged as a witch,  was less fortunate. Drawing upon the diction of a witch, Rhodamne incited Livistros to kill the old woman:

I conjure you by the misfortunes you have suffered for me, I conjure you by my love and my passion — kill this foul and evil woman. Her magic art exiled me from you and rendered you lifeless.

Acting according to his wife’s wishes, Livistros drew his sword and decapitated the old woman. Fortunately Livistros was not arrested and did not become another man in the vastly disproportionate incarceration of men.

Like Chrétien de Troyes’s twelfth-century French romance Lancelot, Livistros and Rhodamne subtly critiques social devaluation of men’s lives. Eros in Livistros and Rhodamne has three faces for the boy, adult, and old man of men’s lives. Those faces all speak as one in an over-representation of eros.[6] Yet the rule of eros doesn’t exclude other faces of love. Livistros’s relationship with his friend Klitovon is an example of mutual friendship (philia). Christian understanding of a freely given gift of self (agape) appears as a shadow in relation to Livistros’s needy, pathetic expressions of eros. Livistros and Rhodamne raises doubts about the rule of eros. This romance calls for additional faces of love for men.

*  *  *  *  *

Read more:

• Byzantine bride-shows: mothers dominate sons in choosing wives
• poor Prodromos: an abused husband in 12th-century Byzantium
• Pamphilus: teaching men abasement, labor, and violence

Notes:

[1] Livistros and Rhodamne S2495f, from medieval vernacular Greek trans. Betts (1995) p. 170. Betts transliterates the heroine as Rodamni. The hero is also commonly transliterated as Libistros. Livistros and Rhodamne apparently was composed in the mid-thirteenth century (probably between 1248 and 1261) in the Laskarid court in Nicaea. Agapitos (1999) p. 112; Agapitos (2013) pp. 415-6.

Five manuscripts of Livistros and Rhodamne have survived. The manuscripts have corruptions and lacunae. In addition, they don’t seem to represent a common source text. Betts (1995) pp. 92-3 discusses the manuscripts. Agapitos (1999), Appendix, provides a preliminary critical edition of the dream sequence (N186 – N560). Bett’s translation represents the S manuscript, supplemented with other manuscripts where necessary.

For similar examples of provocative invocations of Christian concerns in twelfth-century Byzantine novels, Burton (1998).

[2] Livistros and Rhodamne N100ff, trans. Betts (1995) p. 96. Subsequent quotes, cited by approximate beginning text line and page in id., are: S160, p. 122 (If your soul has learnt…); S460, p. 128 (Know that the lady…); S520, p. 130 (They say that if a drop…); S660, p. 133 (It is enough…); S840, p. 136 (It did not befit my heart…); S1065, p. 141 (The horse she rode…); S1115, p. 142 (Ask not…); S1165, p. 143 (I prefer Livistros); E2312f, p. 144 (His tongue screeched…); S2760, p. 175 (I conjure you…).

[3] The two women personify Truth (socially constructed gynocentric truth) and Justice (men-criminalizing justice). On God providing a choice, cf. Deuteronomy 30:19.

[4] Men in love in Byzantium were astonishingly passive. In Belthandros and Chrysantza, the hero let two years and two months pass before he spoke to his beloved Chrysantza. He spoke to her only after she confessed aloud in a garden that she burned with love for him. Belthandros and Chrysantza l. 835ff, from medieval vernacular Greek trans. Betts (1995) p. 20.

[5] On biblical wisdom, cf. Proverbs 27:15.

[6] Livistros and Rhodamne N290, p. 104; P470, p. 105. In vernacular Byzantine romances, the God Eros is ideologically omnipotent like the Byzantine emperor. The God Eros is “lord emperor, master of all the earth, commander of the inanimate world, ruler of animate beings, examiner of every soul, judge of the law of desire, helper of love, friend of respect.” Livistros and Rhodamne N317-20, trans Agapitos (1999) p. 122. Betts (1995) p. 105 is similar. The depiction of Eros reflects contemporary imperial practice. Agapitos (2013) pp. 399-401.

Courtiers and patrons in the French court at Champagne and at the Laskarid court in Niceaea may have enjoyed and supported romances of men’s abjection in eros. Modern medieval scholars have celebrated men-abasing courtly love. Yet the abjection of men would have been significantly damaging to the lives of Byzantine men and women, just as it is today.

Christoforatou has recognized a critical perspective on eros:

we must allow for the possibility that the ongoing struggle between sovereign power {Eros} and human subject in the surviving {Byzantine} novels was seen for what it truly was: a shameless act of sovereign tyranny. … the authors of the Komnenian and Palaiologan novels manage to both condemn and justify the violent acts of their rulers through a dubious sovereign model that deprives the imperial figure of the most significant attributes of imperial governance: prudence (sophrosyne), temperance (phronesis), justice (dikaiosyne) and civility (eunomia). In so doing, they bring to the fore a sovereign figure that conflates the boundaries between the just and the violent, the private and the public, operating as a legitimate tyrant and basileus.

Christoforatou (2011) pp. 334, 337. That critical perspective becomes more focused when understood in terms of gynocentrism and men’s abjection in love.

[image] Eros and Psyche. Etching and aquatint. By Jean-Claude-Richard, Abbé de Saint-Non after François Bouche, 1766. National Gallery of Art (Washington, DC), Accession No. 1984.57.3, Gift of Regina Slatkin.

References:

Agapitos, Panagiotis A. 1999. “Dreams and the Spatial Aesthetics of Narrative Presentation in Livistros and Rhodamne.” Dumbarton Oaks Papers. 53: 111-147.

Agapitos, Panagiotis A. 2013. “The ‘Court of Amorous Dominion’ and the ‘Gate of Love’: Rituals of Empire in a Byzantine Romance of the Thirteenth Century.” Ch. 14 (pp. 389-416) in Beihammer, Alexander Daniel, Stavroula Constantinou, and Maria G. Parani, eds. Court ceremonies and rituals of power in Byzantium and the medieval Mediterranean: comparative perspectives. Leiden: Brill.

Betts, Gavin. 1995. Three medieval Greek romances. Garland Library of Medieval Literature, vol. 98. New York: Garland Pub. (review)

Burton, Joan B. 1998. “Reviving the Pagan Greek Novel in a Christian World.” Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies. 39 (2): 179.

Christoforatou, Christina. 2011. “Figuring Eros in Byzantine Fiction: Iconographic Transformation and Political Evolution.” Medieval Encounters. 17 (3): 321-359.

The extent of criminalization of men and violence against men easily prompts despair among the warm-hearted. In twelfth-century Byzantium, the eminent writer Theodore Prodromos apparently turned to macabre comedy as a remedy for despair. In his novel Rhodanthe and Dosikles, Prodromos described bizarrely reverberating violence and vindication through fierce inquisitorial fire.

Kratandros fell in love with his neighbor, the maiden Chrysochroe. He revealed his flame for her through a messenger. She agreed to marry him. They arranged secretly for him to come to her room on an appointed evening. Then they would give and receive pledges of love in person.

The lovers’ attempt to meet generated macabre comedy. With images used in figuring the seduction of a virgin, Kratandros reported moving forward:

when I approached the gate at the entrance,
I opened the doors that were shut,
drawing back their wooden bolt,
and putting forward a quiet foot
I hastened to make my way to Chrysochroe. [1]

Unfortunately the door-keeper noticed him. She called Chrysochroe’s father from bed and summoned fellow servants to violence against Kratandros. He was guilty of nothing more than loving Chrysochroe and acting to fulfill mutual arrangements for a meeting. Facts matter little in criminalizing men for loving women:

they all immediately rushed off to catch
the escaping intruder and kill him with clubs and stones.
One clasped in his hands a club
or rather one or other of the doorposts,
another dug up the house or tore it apart
and seized a hand-sized stone in both his hands,
all — armed with whatever they chanced on —
threatened noisy violence to this disturber of the night. [2]

Tearing down one’s house to attack, without questioning or immediate danger, a fleeing man represents a ridiculous over-reaction. It’s as ridiculous as claiming that nearly a quarter of men admit to being rapists. Yet many today respond to such literature only in the crudest of ways. A more humane response is laughter within a sense of despair and absurdity.[3]

Subsequent events heighten a comic sense of despair and absurdity. What happened, according to Kratandros’s telling, is inconceivable:

And nowhere chancing on Kratandros
(would that they had; what point is there in my continuing to live?)
their good aim was a mis-hit at the maiden.
For Lestias’ ill-judged fist,
hoping for Kratandros,
miserably slew — alas, alas — the miserable Chrysochroe,
shattering her head with a huge stone.

Misandary and violence against men has enormous, seldom-counted harm. Here, with Kratandros hidden outside, those social injustices register as a huge stone crushing an innocent maiden’s head. Those social injustices further register as Lestias and his fellow servants then claiming that Kratandros murdered Chrysochroe.

No one engaged reason to understand and judge the events. Chrysochroe’s father believed the false accusation and condemned Kratandros:

O accursed Kratandros, all-daring insolence,
implacable robber, savage-souled being,
how could you destroy such a maiden
by stealth, craftily, wilfully, heartlessly?
I am amazed and astonished
that the rock did not turn back on itself
(having acquired natural understanding)
to kill the thrower with a just judgment,
but it wilfully struck Chrysochroe.
And you, despoiler and slayer of the girl,
may you undergo a deserved death in the future,
…
and having slain my daughter
with a dreadful blow from a most accursed stone,
you — unhappy one — will expire pitiably, crushed by stones.

Like men who believe in patriarchy, Kratandros blamed himself for the terrible injustices:

Alas, wretched father of a wretched daughter,
it is I who have deprived your offspring,
your maiden, of life and dear existence.
Accuse me of your daughter’s death,
summon me to the tribunal and seek judgment,
drawing me, dragging me to the lawgivers’ houses,
demanding the penalty deemed right by the laws.
It is generally decreed, as you have just said,
that he who strikes with stones should be struck with stones.
I myself would yearn for death by stoning
since Chrysochroe died from a stone.
Let the hand of Lestias alone slay me,
which accursedly killed the maiden.
Do not be slow to charge me with murder;
for I long to go to where Chrysochroe is. [4]

That response is sadly characteristic of men. While men have no reproductive rights whatsoever, many men worry deeply about perceived threats to women’s reproductive rights. While four times more men than women die from violence, many men believe that violence against women is the most pressing human rights issue in the world today. Men don’t value their own intrinsic human being.

A fierce inquisitorial flame fantastically delivered justice to Kratandros. Chrysochroe’s father, probably urged on by his wife, had Kratandros summoned before the tribunal on a charge of murder. Chrysochroe’s father appealed to the court for Kratandros to “at least suffer a rock-borne death.” With Kratandros moving forward to plead guilty, his father, perhaps acting according to his wife’s order, intervened. He rightly called the murder charge “fabricated.” Given pervasive judicial bias against men, Kratandros’s father turned to the fantastic option of trial by fire.[5] Attendants of a goddess’s temple lit a fire “seven times more fierce than usual.” Kratandros recounted:

So the temple attendants lit the fire
and requested the murderer to enter it.
When I went into the middle of the flame,
I trod on the fire and stayed within it, unburnt.

Kratandros was thus found innocent of murder. As Kratandros’s dear friend Dosikles said, what a “strange and wonderful matter.”

The innocent maiden Chrysochroe had her head crushed by a stone intended for the head of an innocent, loving man. Perhaps eventually the rock of misandry will turn back on its throwers. That may be humanity’s best hope for justice.

*  *  *  *  *

Read more:

• poor Prodromos: an abused husband in 12th-century Byzantium
• Kallimachos and Chrysorroi: damsel instructed hero on how to slay dragon
• Kassia redeemed classical culture with repentance of fallen woman

Notes:

[1] Theodore Prodromos, Rhodanthe and Dosikles ll. 1.173-77, from Atticizing Greek trans. Jeffreys (2012) p. 25. Prodromos was “perhaps the most versatile, inventive, and prolific” writer in Byzantium in the first half of the twelfth century. He probably wrote Rhodanthe and Dosikles in Constantinople in the 1130s under Byzantine Emperor John II Komnenos. This novel imitates settings and plot elements of ancient Greek novels, particularly Heliodoros’s Ethiopika and Achilles Tatius’s Leucippe and Clitophon. Rhodanthe and Dosikles is in nine books of twelve-syllable iambic verse. Prodromos probably presented parts of it in oral performance at the imperial court’s theatron. Id., introduction, pp. 3-14.

A gate with shut doors poetically figures a virginal womb. In the Hebrew bible, a foot is a figure for a man’s penis. Byzantine novels include “clever genital innuendo.” Kaldellis (2007) p. 266.

[2] Rhodanthe and Dosikles ll. 1.182-9, trans. Jeffreys (2012) pp. 25-6. Subsequent quotes are (cited by line number in Book 1 and page in id.’s translation): ll. 190-6, p. 26 (And nowhere chancing…); ll. 252-62, 267-9, p. 28 (O accursed Kratandros…); ll. 293-306, p. 29 (Alas, wretched father…); ll. 386-9, p. 32 (So the temple attendants…). Short quotes within the text are from this range of line numbers and pages.

[3] Writing about Hellenism in Byzantium, Kaldellis observed:

In American public life, only comedians may hint at the truth. They are allowed this by the guardians of opinion because their apparent lack of seriousness places them outside the realm of consequential political discourse; it also transmutes our indignation into laughter, neutralizing it. So too with “Hellenic” satire in Byzantium. The fiction of rhetorical imitation and satire’s conciliatory foolishness diffused the implied challenge to Orthodoxy and the court.

Kaldellis (2007) p. 276. Prodromos was far more perceptive, daring, and sophisticated than popular comedians in American public life today. At the same time, orthodoxy today is more oppressive and more ridiculous than it was in Byzantium.

[4] In an astonishing analysis of these events, MacAlister declared:

Although technically innocent of Chrysochroe’s murder, Kratandros had expressed his responsibility for it and so, like certain characters in the ancient novel, had pleaded guilty at the subsequent murder trial in the expectation that the penalty would be death (1.347-49). But unlike the ancient novel situations where the pleading character provokes death and voluntarily pleaded guilty to a crime for which he or she is invariably totally innocent, the situation here is one in which the pleading character willingly pleaded guilty to a crime for which he does carry some guilt: had Kratandros not been secretly visiting the maiden, the uproar which had caused her death would not have taken place. Prodromos thus dispels any idea of voluntary provocation of death by the fact that, in the final analysis, Kratandros could be considered ultimately responsible for the murder.

MacAlister (1996) p. 122. With equally convincing reason, scholars such as MacAlister are ultimately responsible for vastly disproportionate violence against men and vastly disproportionate incarceration of men.

Dosikles latter echoes Kratandros’s unwarranted self-accusation of murder. After a storm in which the pirate ship carrying Rhodanthe captive vanished, Dosikles imagined that she was dead. He declared, “it is I who am your murderer, not the tempest.” Rhodanthe and Dosikles l. 6.350, trans. Jeffreys (2002) p. 107.

Prodromos may well be engaging in satire of Christian and imperial orthodoxy. Kaldellis (2007) pp. 270-6. But Prodromos’s satire of gynocentrism is more daring and more interesting. Prodromos’s novel “shows clearly with what artistry and subversive irony old topoi can be reinvented and presented.” Cupane (2014) p. 188.

[5] Trial by fire was not practiced in Byzantium. Jeffreys (2012) p. 31, notes 36-8, which cite Heliodoros 10.8-9 and Daniel 3.19-24 for comparison. Kratandros’s trial by fire differs significantly from the Heliodoros 10.8-9. The latter describes a trial of chastity by stepping on a burning gridiron. In Daniel 3.19-97, King Nebuchadnessar had Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego thrown into a fiery furnace for refusing to worship a golden statue. They walked around in the flames and remained unburned while joyfully praying to their god, the god of Jews and Christians. In context, Kratandros’s trial by fire functions within the twelfth-century Byzantine literary practice of “mixing the unmixable.” Roilos (2005) p. 237 (in Ch. 4, “Comic Modulations”), citing the late thirteenth or early fourteenth-century critique of Timarion by Konstantinos Akropolites.

[image] The Burning of Protopope Avvakum. Painting by Grigoriy Myasoyedov, 1897. Thanks to Wikimedia Commons.

References:

Cupane, Carolina. 2014. “Other Worlds, Other Voices: Form and Function of the Marvelous in Late Byzantine Fiction.” Pp. 183-202 in Roilos, Panagiotis, ed. Medieval Greek storytelling: fictionality and narrative in Byzantium. Wiesbaden : Harrassowitz Verlag.

Jeffreys, Elizabeth, trans. and notes. 2012. Four Byzantine novels: Theodore Prodromos, Rhodanthe and Dosikles; Eumathios Makrembolites, Hysmine and Hysminias;  Constantine Manasses, Aristandros and Kallithea; Niketas Eugenianos, Drosilla and Charikles. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press.

Kaldellis, Anthony. 2007. Hellenism in Byzantium: the transformations of Greek identity and the reception of the classical tradition. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

MacAlister, Suzanne. 1996. Dreams and suicides: the Greek novel from antiquity to the Byzantine Empire. London: Routledge.

Roilos, Panagiotis. 2005. Amphoteroglossia: a poetics of the twelfth-century Medieval Greek novel. Hellenic Studies Series 10. Washington, DC: Center for Hellenic Studies.

The King was away on business, fighting enemies abroad. His eunuch counselors wrote to him:

The lamentations, the suffering, the agony, the bewilderment, the restless petulance, and the terrible anxiety which you saw in our queen and mistress are at an end. They have settled, receded and passed away. Now come days of joy and happiness. Tears have stopped, grief is banished, and in their place come ease and freedom.

What seemed to have cheered Queen Chrysorroi was solitude in a curtained pavilion in the royal garden. In fact, what cured her misery was trysts with a laborer, an assistant gardener:

There she found the laborer and she played with him. He alone had won the queen’s love and they embraced with frequent kisses. The garden became the bridal chamber of Aphrodite, the mirror of the Graces and the dwelling place of Love. They spent the day in much happiness. The night returned with all its sweetness. On its arrival, winged Love again took the laborer and with every joy of desire brought him to the queen.

The laborer, who spent much time “digging in the garden,” was actually Queen Chrysorroi’s former and never-forgotten boyfriend Kallimachos.

After rescuing Chrysorroi from a dragon, Kallimachos had managed, with considerable effort, to persuade her to have sex with him. Their affair didn’t begin with a drunken hook-up or a casual Tinder bang:

After some time, after many days, they formed the wish to unite their souls and they joined their hearts in indissoluble links, duly binding their love with most terrible oaths. Love, the king, was present at their words, received their oaths himself and wrote the contracts; contracts for which he stood between them as guarantor.

Christian marriage requires publicly witnessed vows. No one witnessed the pseudo-marriage of Chrysorroi and Kallimachos. Love the king in the above text is a personification and a moral rationalization. Many persons today engage in similar conceptual strategies, but with rather less literary sophistication.

Chrysorroi and Kallimachos found great pleasure from successful seduction. They went to a private pool and bathed together:

Only the tongue of Aphrodite could describe the pleasure and charms of their bathing. … He {Kallimachos} looked at her and, as he looked, he reaped the sweet fruits of pleasure. I mean something sweeter than everything sweetest. Time alone saw the remarkable sight, the pleasure beyond words, which they enjoyed in the pool.

After bathing together, they enjoyed delights together on a couch near the pool. They subsequently lived a life of amorous passion and bliss in Dragon Castle.

An inadvertent sighting and a witch’s spells destroyed the happiness of Kallimachos and Chrysorroi. One day a king saw Chrysorroi and Kallimachos leaning over the wall of Dragon Castle and enjoying the wonderful view. The King was immediately struck with love for the beautiful Chrysorroi. Beautiful women have incredible power over men. The King became desperately lovesick. He was willing to try anything to gain the love of Chrysorroi. A witch offered him her services. She conjured a scene of a damsel in distress. Kallimachos foolishly rushed to rescue the damsel in distress. Then, with a magic apple, the witch put Kallimachos into a death-like state. When Chrysorroi came to mourn over Kallimachos’s body, the King abducted her to be his queen.

Servants and eunuchs conspired to expose Queen Chrysorroi and Kallimachos when they renewed their love affair. Kallimachos eventually regained life, found Chrysorroi, and took up a job working in the royal garden. Queen Chrysorroi’s many comforters and eunuchs wondered why the Queen seemed much happier. They instructed her maid to spy on her. The maid saw the Queen having sex in the garden with the laborer Kallimachos. The maid reported to the eunuchs:

I have seen her deceitful little game. The gardener’s laborer, the one who does the digging — she is embracing him, she is sleeping with him! I watched all this last night and I saw her playing  with him, kissing him, sleeping with him. O what a wicked and unnatural deed! But if you want to see the horror yourselves, spend this coming night in the garden. We shall sit together and wait. You will learn the tricks of this little whore.

The eunuchs hid themselves with the maid and saw Chrysorroi having sex with Kallimachos. They were horrified. The eunuchs reported their finding to the King. Chrysorroi and Kallimachos potentially faced severe punishment merely for resuming their passionate affair.

Beware of servants and eunuchs. Whether working in college administrations, human-resource departments, or departments of education or justice, servants and eunuchs lack appreciation for sexual pleasure. They destroy mutual joy.

*  *  *  *  *

Read more:

• Chrysorroi described Kallimachos as deserving her love because of his labors
• wisps of hair and imaginary arrow whip great warrior Alexander
• characterizing Mary at the cross in Byzantine competition for attention

Notes:

The above story is from the medieval Byzantine romance Kallimachos and Chrysorroi. It apparently was written in Constantinople between 1320 and 1340. The quotations above are from the translation of Betts (1995): l. 2125ff, pp. 78-9 (The lamentation…); l. 2155ff, p. 79 (There she found…); l.755ff, p. 52 (After some time…; Only the tongue of Aphrodite…); . 2210ff, p. 80 (I have seen…).

The text makes clear Chrysorroi’s wonderful beauty:

The lady was completely alluring. She inspired love. Her charms were beyond description, and her graces outdid those of the Graces themselves. Her hair flowed down in rivers of lovely curls and shone on her head with a gleam which surpassed the golden rays of the sun. Her body, which was whiter than crystal, beguiled the sight with its beauty as it seemed to blend the charms of roses with its color. Just the sight of her face alone shook your entire soul, your entire heart. Indeed, the lady seemed to be the image of Aphrodite and of every other beauty that the mind can conceive. But why prattle on? Why describe at length the beauty of her body? A few words would suffice to define it. All the women that the world has produced, whether before or after her — or her contemporaries — can only be compared to her charms as one might compare a monkey to Aphrodite.

Kallimachos and Chrysorroi l. 805ff, trans. Betts (1995) p. 53. That concluding comparison probably risked offending contemporary female auditors or readers. But Byzantium arguably had a more tolerant society than those in which the male gaze is disparaged, penalized, or criminalized.

Kallimachos’s bathing with Chrysorroi draws upon literary figures from the Greek Anthology. That bathing is not only pleasurable, but also therapeutic. Agapitos (1990).

Discovery of a queen’s trysts in a garden in Constantinople is an important element in Chrétien de Troyes’s twelfth-century French romance Cligès. Western European romances had considerable influence on later Byzantine romances. See Beaton (1996) Ch. 9. As Cligès suggests, Byzantine romances also influenced Western European romances. See also Jeffreys (1980) and Jeffreys (2013).

[image] Mosaic depicting Empress Theodora (reigned 527-548 GC). In the Basilica of San Vitale (built A.D. 547), Italy. Photo thanks to Petar Milošević and Wikimedia Commons.

References:

Agapitos, Panagiotis A. 1990. “The Erotic Bath in the Byzantine Vernacular Romance Kallimachos and Chrysorrhoe.” Classica et Mediaevalia 41: 257-73.

Beaton, Roderick. 1996. The Medieval Greek romance. 2nd ed., revised and expanded. London: Routledge.

Betts, Gavin. 1995. Three medieval Greek romances. Garland Library of Medieval Literature, vol. 98. New York: Garland Pub.

Jeffreys, Elizabeth. 1980. “The Comnenian Background to the romans d’antiquité.” Byzantion 50:455-86.

Jeffreys, Elizabeth. 2013. “Byzantine Romances: Eastern or Western?” Pp. 217-33 in Marina S. Brownlee and Dimitri H. Gondicas, eds. Renaissance encounters: Greek East and Latin West. Leiden: Brill.