This edition of Chariton's
Callirhoe (
c. 50 BCE-100 CE) provides readers with the essential lexical, grammatical, literary, historical, and cultural assistance to better engage with the world's first extant novel, a romance-adventure about an extraordinarily beautiful young bride named Callirhoe.
On one level, Chariton's text is simply a compelling story about how Callirhoe's fate becomes intertwined with those of four different men: Chaireas of Syracuse, her first husband; Theron the pirate, who abducts her and sells her to Dionysius of Miletus, who becomes her second husband; and Artaxerxes, the king of Persia, who becomes infatuated with Callirhoe while presiding over a trial that will determine which of her two Greek husbands holds the more legitimate claim to her.
Just below the surface of its melodramatic plot, however, the novel not only explores the standard themes of the Ancient Greek romance-adventure genre-love, jealousy, honor, duty, fidelity, and happiness-but also touches on the more unusual topics of spousal abuse, adultery, and slavery. What sets Chariton's work apart, especially in comparison to the other four surviving Ancient Greek novelists who allocate approximately equal narrative attention to both their male and female protagonists, is his greater emphasis on and characterization of his heroine. Modeled after both the loyal Penelope and the faithless Helen, Callirhoe emerges as a remarkably original and almost modern figure: a pregnant teenager, forced by separation and slavery into a painfully complex bigamy, with no easy solutions, who must navigate multiple physical, psychological, and emotional challenges imposed by the four men who dominate her life.
