Ancient Literacies

(Marvins-Underground-K-12) #1

the listener. Having a few good paradoxes up your sleeve can save your


love life.


Indeed, when the hero of the novel is trying first to seduce the heroine,


he wanders with his confidant, Satyrus, in a garden where he can have a


conversation about the erotics of nature and be overheard by Leucippe


and her slave. He has been told that he must approach her indirectly


(as young girls do not like direct dirty talk). So he speaks loudly about how


nature is full of examples of bizarre but touching erotic desires. His list of


surprising facts culminates with the story of the viper, a land snake, and


the moray eel, a sea snake. The viper, he says, goes down to the shore and


hisses a signal, and the moray climbs out of the water but waits until the


land snake has disgorged his poison before she comes to him for a kiss


(Ach. Tat. 1.18). The same fact of nature is told in Aelian (de nat. anim.



  1. 50): ‘‘the male viper, in his frenzy for copulation, goes to the sea, and


like a party-goer plays a pipe outside his lover’s door to get entrance, the


snake hisses a summons to his lover.’’ Although Aelian was writing after


Achilles Tatius, this gives us a good indication of how Aelian might have


been used: read, filleted for good examples, and reused to cut a figure
about town by thepepaideumenosin conversation. So, Achilles Tatius’s


slightly different version of the paradox, which highlights his character-


istic focus on kissing, shows also how such paradoxical paragraphs can


be reworked to fit a more precise set of circumstances.


The anecdote is not necessarily paradoxical, even in the weak sense of


the paradox seen in Aelian, and it usually involves humans rather than


animals or the natural world; but the use of the paradox in the novel and


collections ofparadoxalike Aelian’sOn the Nature of Animalsdo give us


an important insight into how the short paragraph can function as an


object of exchange in the conversation of the pepaideumenoiand as


an object of collection by authors—for reuse by thepepaideumenoi. The


characters in the so-called sophistic novels often seem to converse by


swapping neatly reworked extracts from such written collections. When


a character in Heliodorus delivers a brief paragraph on the evil eye, which


echoes extremely closely a paragraph in Plutarch, classical scholars have


traditionally argued whether Heliodorus is echoing Plutarch specifically,


or whether both had a source in common.
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What is obscured by such an


argument is the fact that Heliodorus shows us a sophisticated character


quoting from earlier written texts in conversation.


Now I have suggested that the quotation, thechreia, and the paradox


are particularly useful frames for understanding the anecdote within


Greek literary tradition, but we should not think of these forms as being


absolutely discrete genres, although they are often discussed as such. One



  1. SeeAeth. 3.7.4 5; PlutarchSympotic Questions680cff, with Dickie 1991. Plutarch’s
    work is, as discussed below, both a collection oflogoiand designed for reuse, so we should
    not be surprised to see similar material in a later author.


The Anecdote 103

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