Inside the Wild World of Roman Romance Novels

People have been debating the invention of the novel forever. For some, the first novel was the 11th Century Japanese Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikabu, for others the novel truly began when Cervantes published Don Quixote while those one interested in English (language) literature cite Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, pushing the invention of the novel to 1740. Not enough people look back to the ancient world, which is more associated with epic poetry about gods and war than prose compositions.

It might come as a surprise to learn, then, that the Roman empire was awash with narrative fiction in prose form—novels, few of which are about heroic wars. Instead, most are romantic stories about young lovers separated by fate, and the rest are swashbuckling adventures full of bandits and pirates. Several contain both, almost all of them contain at least one scene of staggering violence.

The passivity of Roman protagonists reveals the difference between us and them: they believed in gods who interceded in the lives of the beautiful and the noble, at least in fiction.

The earliest of the Roman Romance novels dates from the first century CE, just as the first emperor Augustus ended the Republic once and for all and gathered the whole Roman empire into his own grubby little hands. Known as Callirhoe, it was written by a legal secretary named Chariton from Aphrodisias (in modern Turkey) and a romance, set in Syracuse in the aftermath of the Peloponnesian war in the 5th century BCE. The heroine of the title is a woman so beautiful that she is regularly mistaken for the goddess Aphrodite. She marries a local elite named Chariton and the suitors she rejected turn against her. They come together and convince Chariton that his new wife is unfaithful to him. In a jealous rage, Chariton assaults Callirhoe and kicks her until she falls into a death-like coma (somehow, despite this horrific event, Chariton remains the hero of this story and you are meant to root for him).

Believing his wife to be dead, Chariton inters Callirhoe in the family tomb where she rouses from her coma just in time to interrupt the pirates trying to rob the jewelery from her grave. Pirates being enterprising people, the captain immediately decides that “she too can be part of the funeral treasure”, and steals Callirhoe, taking her to Miletus where they sell her as a slave to a rich man who falls in love with her. At some point, Chariton finds out that his wife is still alive and sets out to rescue her, getting himself enslaved along the way. Many hijinks ensue, including a trip to Persia, a secret pregnancy, many threats to the life and chastity of the young couple, and a war in Egypt that unexpectedly solves everyone’s problems. At the end, Chariton and Callirhoe are reunited, Callirhoe having long forgiven her husband for trying to kick her to death, and they return to live happily ever after in Syracuse.

Just like the modern romance genre, ancient romances are dominated by tropes and predictable arcs: protagonists meet, protagonists fall in love, protagonists are separated, protagonists live happily ever after. Where modern novels might have opposites meeting at work, separated by a misunderstanding and reunited with a kiss and solid communication, ancient novels are quite different. The protagonists are invariably elite young people whose parents approve of their match, their separation is always a result of slavery, fake death, kidnap or a combination of all three and their reunion is usually facilitated by the gods. Where modern romance might have “opposites attract” as a genre trope, “sold to a brothel” is a very common trope of ancient romances.

The plots of Roman romance novels are full of heightened melodrama. Barely a page passes where our protagonists aren’t threatened with rape, death or enslavement or rescued by a preposterous set of coincidences. In another novel of the era, an exemplar of the romantic genre known as The Ephesian Tale of Anthia and Habrocomes, the hero Habrocomes is captured by Egyptians and crucified on the banks of the Nile, but a strong gust of wind knocks his cross into the water where he floats down the river until he is picked up by guards who arrest him as a fugitive and decide to burn him alive. Just as they light his pyre, the Nile floods and puts out the flames. All this happens in a single paragraph. His girlfriend, meanwhile, is being held captive by the third in a long line of pirates who have kidnapped her and fallen in love with her beauty. In another, called Leucippe and Clitophon, Leucippe is saved from being sacrificed as a virgin by the timely appearance of an actor who uses theatre tricks used to perform deaths on stage to fake her death and spirit her away. Eight pages later, Leucippe has to fake her own beheading to escape from pirates. In between these two deaths, a soldier accidentally sends Leucippe mad with a love potion and Clitophon punches him in the face until he produces the remedy.

The rise of the Roman empire across the Mediterranean widened the elite’s horizons for travel but narrowed their personal ambitions, and made romantic love a worthy subject for epic literature.

As should be obvious by now, the Roman Romance novels are hugely entertaining. The twists and turns are constantly surprising and usually violent. Their main flaw is that the protagonists rarely display a shred of agency or activity. They are remarkably, and often infuriatingly, passive and respond to their constant crises with nothing but tears and the occasional threat of suicide. Anthia, when she is trapped in a pirate cave, manages to kill a pirate trying to rape her and then, instead of fleeing, concludes that she’d get lost and “decided to wait in the cave and take whatever Fate had in store.”

The passivity of Roman protagonists reveals the difference between us and them: they believed in gods who interceded in the lives of the beautiful and the noble, at least in fiction. For a very long time after the publication of the first Roman romance novels in 1896, historians wrote them off as “low” literature for uncultured masses—mostly women and slaves—and therefore unworthy of serious study. It took until the 1970s for the academy to take another look and reveal that these “popular” (derogatory) novels are in fact full of subtle intertextual references to Homer and the great Greek tragedians, they are carefully constructed with paradox, antithesis and operatic artificiality. And they follow the themes and patterns of the “high” literature of epic poetry but transpose them from the pre-imperial setting of warfare between states into the imperial setting of individual love.

Our protagonists are still beautiful and noble, but no longer kings. Like a modern Odysseus, they are beset by fate to wander and suffer, but the gods will always intercede to help them out with a convenient flood or unlikely coincidence. The rise of the Roman empire across the Mediterranean widened the elite’s horizons for travel but narrowed their personal ambitions, and made romantic love a worthy subject for epic literature. Thus, the protagonists have exactly as much agency as an Odysseus or an Achilles: very little. Like the ancient heroes, they are but playthings of the gods but empire has limited their heroic horizons. The result is a genre of prose writing that continues to shock, titillate and entertain.

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Not Built in a Day: How Slavery Made the Roman Empire by Emma Southon is available from Simon & Schuster.