20 - ‘Words Filled With Tears’: Amorous Discourse as Lamentation in the Palaiologan Romances

Summary

The combination of love and suffering is one of the oldest emotional conventions of erotic literature, since the ‘mental disturbance’ created by desire was viewed as a pathological sickness that acquired a personal as well as a social character. One might refer to such different examples as the portrayal of Deianeira in Sophocles’ Trachinian Women, the Bride in the Song of Songs or Dido in Vergil's Aeneid. This disturbance is often expressed through the form of a sorrowful discourse, be it the complaint of the lover at the closed door of the beloved (the Hellenistic and Roman paraklausithyron), or the gloomy visions of unrequited or betrayed love, as in the case of Phyllis and Phaedra in Ovid's Heroides (2 and 4). Assisted by school rhetoric, the Greek novels cunningly explored this sorrowful discourse. One telling example is the nocturnal monologue of Charikleia in Heliodorus’ Aethiopian Tale. The desperate heroine addresses to herself a ‘ritual lament’ (thrēnos) formed as a ‘character speech of an indefinite person’ (ēthopoiia) and placed in a theatrical setting – a discursive and generic mixture of great emotional power that explicitly impressed Michael Psellos in the eleventh century. For Charikleia's threnodic soliloquy Heliodorus employed images and vocabulary from the laments in the Iliad and from tragic modelspeeches of Attic drama, as they were taught in the schools of Roman imperial times and, thus, immediately recognisable to the readers of the novel.

An essential communicative element of erotic discourse is persuasion, since the lover needs to persuade the beloved to yield to his or her desire. For example, persuasion is a dominating feature of Ovid's rhetoric in the individual epistles of the Heroides. The emergence of book-length erotic narratives in which love is represented in action, such as the novel, led to the formation of a typology of discourses among which the speeches of amorous persuasion and resistance play an important part, as, for example, in Achilles Tatius’ Leukippe and Kleitophon, where the Ephesian ‘widow’ Melite tries to persuade Kleitophon to sleep with her and he resists. Here the speeches are formed as erotic parodies of judicial declamations confirming or refuting a legal case, a type of rhetorical exercise taught systematically in school, thus also recognisable to the readers of Tatius.