A Structural View of the Ephesiaca

     The Ephesiaca by Xenophon of Ephesus [1] has been long considered inferior to other Hellenistic novels or romances. In fact, early editors speculated that the extant text is not a finished work but a summary of a superior longer version. One critic arguing that main characters display significant growth and maturation [2] stands apart from the majority who find the chief interest of the work to be its action. Even those who translate Xenophon are tempted to condescension. One characterizes the book as "a specimen of penny dreadful literature” and another calls it the ancient version of a "rip-roaring action film." [3] They at least make it sound entertaining.
     The fact is that ancient Greek prose fiction in general tends like folk tales to focus with single-minded concern on a narrative thread, with little description of settings and virtually no analysis or development of character. In the Ephesiaca the incidents are implausible and repetitive, the characters flat and unchanging, and the narration generally spare. The story does include an elaborate rhetorical show-piece: the wonderful ekphrasis on the canopy above the lovers’ marriage bed. The lush and luxurious texture of this passage, lit with an erotic glow, very like the art object it describes, only emphasizes the plainness of much of the story's prose.
     For the most part the narration is unadorned and simple, proceeding rapidly from one incident to the next. Like Lazarillo de Tormes or the Chinese Water Margin it is episodic and paratactic in structure. Very little builds on what comes before or prepares for what follows. The story could be lengthened or shortened without damaging its pattern or meaning.
     This is far, of course, from the qualities prized in modern novels. Yet these very attributes that underlie the book’s lack of appeal to many moderns may also be the basis for the pleasure its original audience felt when reading it. The primary motive for such a plot is aesthetic, the purely formal appeal of the pattern, similar to the pleasure the listener has in a Bach fugue or in certain works of abstract visual art. Even when viewing natural objects, such as the silhouettes of trees or the colors of a sunset, the human sensibility seeks satisfying unintentional structures. The author has set in motion a number of psychologically potent elements which then mutate and repeat in striking formal patterns. [4]
     The entire plot might be schematically represented, but perhaps it will be sufficient to describe the first two books to establish the structure which remains largely fixed throughout. The hero of the Ephesiaca is introduced less as an individual than as a paragon of masculine excellence, extraordinary in beauty and character, justified in his arrogance. He is Man writ large. Almost like Gilgamesh whose powers required the counterbalance of Enkidu, Anthia then appears as his female counterpart, exemplifying the qualities most prized in women. The single cell has divided in two.
     The two then lose their peace and happiness and fall into the hands of pirates upon which each receives an unwanted lover, their evil Doppelgängers in a sense, Corymbos for Habrocomes and Euxinos for Anthia. Ease has been replaced by its polar opposite suffering and the two leading protagonists has each attracted an antagonist.
     In Book II a secondary doubling occurs on the axis of social class. The hero and heroine each receive a counterpart on a lower social level in Leucon and Rhode whose adventures parallel and support those of the leading players. Apsyrtos, the leader of the pirate gang, then provides a synthesis that envelops the pattern by taking Habrocomes, Anthia, Leucon, and Rhode into his custody. A new threat then appears as Aspyrtos’ iniquitous male authority is matched by his daughter Manto. Infatuated with Habrocomes, she denounces him when he fails to return her affection. Not only is he then tortured; Anthia is given to the same Manto who has her married to a poor goatherd.
     Soon both escape their perils, but only temporarily, and so the story goes with further variations, playing with the author’s set of bipolar oppositions – male/female, pleasure/suffering, rich/poor – which proceed in a regular stylized pattern reminiscent of fractals until the happy conclusion. Yet since the incidents of the story do refer to recognizable human experience, they possess thematic resonance as well. In a work of art nothing is unintentional. The novel does present themes: in the most general way the culture’s male and female ideals, the instability of fortune, and the mysterious mixture of aggression and compassion that characterizes sexual relations. In Greek mythological terms, the story relays the chastening of arrogance by Eros, and the celebration of Isis, the embodiment of the Great Goddess.
     The play of transformation in the Ephesiaca collects around several foci of the sort that Freud might have called cathexes. The anxiety and desire that enwraps love and death, pleasure and suffering renders these topics endlessly interesting to our species. This narrative allows the reader to contemplate the mutations of fortune in wonder and amazement. Individualized psychological studies or social analyses are not the only functions of fiction, nor are they necessarily the most sublime. Perhaps modern critics no longer share the taste that allowed earlier readers to relish formal play in fiction as they did in poetic meter. It may be that the sense of an orderly world that underlies the pleasure of viewing human experience as a delightfully kaleidoscopic marvel is rare in this belated age.


1. In English sometimes called the An Ephesian Tale. The author is, of course, to be distinguished from Socrates’ student, Xenophon of Athens. The question of the text being an epitome remains controversial today.

2. See Aldo Tagliabue, “The Ephesiaca as a Bildungsroman,” in Ancient Narrative, Vol. 10, 17–462.

3. Graham Anderson and Stephen Trzaskoma.

4. I am not wholly original in this reading. Earlier critics who have made structural analyses of the Ephesiaca include R. W. Garson (“The Faces of Love in Ephesiaca or Anthia and Habrocomes,” Museum Africum, 7, 47-55), David Konstan (Sexual Symmetry: Love in the Ancient Novel and Related Genres, Princeton U.P., Princeton), and J. R. Morgan in several studies, but especially “Travel in the Greek Novel: Function and Interpretation” in C. Adams and J. Roy’s Travel, Geography, and Culture in Ancient Greece, Egypt, and the Near East, Leicester-Nottingham Studies in Ancient Society 10, Oxford, 139-160.

Ekphrasis in Apollonius: Jason's Cloak

     Jason, the hero of Apollonius of Rhodes’ Hellenistic epic the Argonautica, may surprise the first-time reader with his failures of resolve and fits of depression. He is repeatedly described as améchanos, which in his case means he simply does not know what to do. This apparently unheroic attribute is thrown into high relief by the fact that the same word was used of Achilles and Hector in the Iliad with a diametrically opposed meaning, something like “irresistible” or “undefeatable.” [1] Just as the Marvel comic superheroes of the sixties appealed to their audience by being more vulnerable than the old-style Superman and Batman, this new sort of compromised protagonist seemed appropriate in the belated Alexandrian world. Yet the poet never abandons the grand old encyclopedic reach of epic, and there are moments when Apollonius strives to present an orderly symbolic pattern that ambitiously aims at representing everything.
     Perhaps the most dramatic compressed example of such an image is Jason’s marvelous cloak. Jason pauses at Lemnos on his way to capture the Golden Fleece. Invited to an audience with the local queen Hypsipyle (and unaware that the island’s women have slaughtered all the males), Jason dons his grandest cloak, a magnificent garment covered with embroidered scenes described in an ekphrasis of nearly fifty lines. [2] The seven scenes ornamenting the garment, which outshone the rising sun (725) include a variety of mythological scenes. Such a work of art resembles the symbolic ambitions of a coat of arms or a Baroque title page and tends toward encyclopedic images like mandalas, magic diagrams, or a bank of stained-glass windows in a Gothic cathedral. Parallels include the Shield of Achilles in the Iliad (or the pseudo-Hesiodic “Shield of Heracles”), the similarly shining cloak the incognito Odysseus wore, or, in a different medium, the song of Orpheus that follows in Apollonius.
     Critics have read the cloak as an overture-like anticipation of the themes of the epic, but epic itself seeks to be all-inclusive, so its themes tend to epitomize all themes. The ekphrasis is neatly tied to the specifics of the poem in its end, but its center is surely an attempt to symbolically capture the most significant terms of human reality as though in a miraculously wide-angle lens.
     The first scene, of the Cyclopes forging Zeus thunderbolts, provides an image of technical expertise heightened by its setting in the divine realm. Just as the Argonautica itself is a work of art, the production of metal, clearly an astonishing transformation to early peoples witnessed by the role of gods like Hephaistos and Egyptian Ptah, the Germanic Wayland, the Yoruba Ogun, and others. [3] The poet thus associates his own art with this heavenly production.
     The marvel of the cloak is represented by its luminescence, a characteristic on prominent display in this representation of the spurting flames and shining lights of the god’s thunderbolts. The brilliance of the work parallels the dazzling images of poetry and reinforces the identity of humans as art-producing, symbol-making creatures. The human connection becomes more explicit with the following image, the construction of Thebes by the sons of Antiope, Amphion and Zethus, who lived as humans in spite of their divine parentage. [4] The garment, a tour de force of embroidery, serves as an example of the development of the technical skills, including art and poetry, that distinguish human beings. These initial scenes portray technical skill in the service of the divine, serving the ends of fate, one might say.
     The next panel of the cloak portrays Aphrodite with the shield of Ares, neatly combining the strongest instinctual passions of sex and violence, eros and aggression. In an ingeniously clever image, the lovely goddess’ tunic is said to have slipped below her breast and, the poet reports, her body was reflected in the shield. (746) Thus the primary psychic preoccupations of our species (and, to a large extent, the rest of the animal kingdom) are reflected in a single compressed code, adding these elemental drives to the construction of culture implied in the first two pictures.
     The violent portion of this complementary pair is then foregrounded in the picture of the defeat of the herdsmen sons of Elektryon by their relatives, the Taphian raiders. This incident, like most mythic episodes, only a single term in a lengthy and interwoven series of events extending backward and forward in time, emphasizes the role of brute force in the world. The scene is also linked to the present narrative through Elektryon’s descent from Perseus whose myth parallels that of Theseus in many details.
     The following image again emphasizes the complementarity of love and aggression in a representation of Pelops’ winning of Hippodamia through his victory in a chariot race with Oenomaus, her father, who had killed the eighteen earlier suitors who had proved slower. Without tracing the many links backward and forward to Tantalus, Perseus, Agamemnon, and others, it is sufficient here to note the preeminence of eros and Todestrieb.
     A new element enters with the sixth image, that of Apollo shooting at Tityos as he attempts to abduct Leto. Here is the inverse of the dutiful Titans of the first image, as the giant impiously seeks to dispossess Apollo of his love object. Once more, love and aggression are impossibly intertwined, the complementary dynamos that motivate action, yet here it is Tityos’ impiety, his deviation from the Olympian script, that causes Apollo to act.
     The final image refastens the chain of pictures to the current tale. Phrixos is yet another babe threatened by a hostile maternal figure. While his double falls to his death, Phrixos is protected by an established city on the margin of the known world. His sons in fact join the crew of the Argo after being rescued. His fleece is the object of the quest.
     The whole series, then, defines humanity as artists and technologists, motivated by powerful forces of love and death, suspended between divine and human realms, constantly threatened by untamable forces, making a way forward in life like the hero Jason who is undertaking an all-nut-impossible task. The generic images of human passions are clearly linked to the main plot line in a myriad of ways. Yet the plot of the Argonautica, the endlessly branching related myths, and the images, and the stories depicted on Jason’s cloak, all these do not provide conclusions as much as they suggest bipolar oppositions that organize the tensions and problems of human experience.



1. See Iliad, XIII, 726 and XVI, 29. The Homeric heroes do, of course, have their moments of confusion, hesitation and despondence. The difference is a matter of degree.

2. I, 721-767.

3. These include the the Vedic Tvastar, the pre-Islamic Qaynan, the Sumerian Gibil, the Hungarian Hadúr, the Finnish Ilmarinen, the Gallo-Roman Gobannos, the Slavic Svarog, and the Celtic Creidhne, Goibniu, and Gofannon.

4. Of these two, the first is associated with art, poetry, and music, and the second with hunting and livestock raising, though both are described as participating in the building of Thebes’ walls and both are sufficiently human to die.

5. See Daniel Odgen’s Perseus for a catalogue of similarities.