Romantic Love in Rhetorical Guise : The Byzantine Revival of the Twelfth Century

In a pivotal scene of the 12th-century novelist Niketas Eugenianos’ Drosilla and Charikles, the female protagonist Drosilla is subject to unwelcome but rather pressing attentions from a certain Kallidemos, the brutish son of a local innkeeper. Drosilla’s beloved Charikles is in fact sleeping inside the house, but Kallidemos has fallen in love with Drosilla at first sight and has his mind set on winning her heart. The strategy he chooses in order to achieve this is storytelling: “I beseech you to call to your mind”, he says, “those who in the past were united by love into one soul”.1 Then follows a long list of literary lovers, presumably in order to inspire and convince the girl: we meet, among others, Theagenes and Charikleia (of Heliodorus’ Aethiopica), Daphnis and Chloe (of the novel by Longus), and Hero and Leander (of the hexameter poem by Musaeus). This is not an exceptional passage per se – storytelling is a central part of courtship in many traditions, from antiquity onwards, – but the narrative context of the episode is one that deserves our attention. The event takes place in one of the so-called Komnenian novels, works that were modelled on and often alluded to the ancient Greek novel. While all four extent novels follow such a pattern, Eugenianos is unique in explicitly mentioning the literary models of late antiquity. We shall therefore take the passage cited above as our point of departure for a consideration of an interesting phase in the long history of Greek novelistic writing: the Byzantine revival of the 12th century. We know of four novels written in the 12th century – the century of the Komnenian dynasty: Hysmine and Hysminias by Eumathios Makrembolites, Rhodanthe and Dosikles by Theodore Prodromos, Drosilla and Charikles by Niketas Eugenianos, and Aristandros and Kallithea by Constantine Manasses (preserved only in fragments).2 In spite of numerous similarities as to basic