ABSTRACT
Probably the earliest of the fully extant ancient novels, Chariton’s Callirhoe survives as a complete text in only one single manuscript from the Middle Ages. Fragments from three papyri written between 150 and 250 and from a sixth-or seventh-century palimpsest indicate, however, that the text remained to a degree popular at least until late antiquity. We know nothing of the author except for the few facts he tells us himself. He writes that he is the secretary of a rhetor and that he hails from Aphrodisias, a city in southwestern Asia Minor. His Greek points to a date roughly in the first half of the first century, if not in fact even earlier-to the period immediately before the birth of Christ. The probable terminus ante quem seems to be provided by Persius in the last line of his first satire, written by the year 62 at the latest. There, readers for whom his own work is intellectually too demanding are recommended by the poet to try ‘an edict’ in the morning and ‘Callirhoe’ after lunch. This one name alone was in all likelihood the original title of the novel, as the author’s final words would at any rate seem to suggest: ‘This much I wrote about Callirhoe.’ The work is also cited as ‘Chaereas and Callirhoe’, but this title undoubtedly first came into use in the Byzantine period. Another possibility is that the novel had a pseudohistoriographical title-‘Sicelica’—because the story begins and ends in the Sicilian city of Syracuse in the fifth/fourth century BC.
