Abstract
<jats:p>The sea and its contexts in the ancient Greek novel: Genre and map The question of space has been present in studies on the ancient Greek novel almost from the very beginning, although it has usually played a secondary role. This paper is the first to treat a specific type of space as the organising key for reflections on all preserved ideal Greek novels (the so-called Greek romances). The discussion focuses on the space of the sea. The study is divided into two main parts. The first part, &ldquo;Navigare necesse est,&rdquo; is devoted to generic analyses, while the second part, &ldquo;Imago maris,&rdquo; adopts the perspective of imagined maps of the novelistic worlds. At the beginning of the first part, quantitative observations are presented concerning the frequency, distribution, and narrative function of selected maritime terminology in the novels of Chariton, Xenophon of Ephesus, Longus, Achilles Tatius, and Heliodorus. On this basis, it is hypothesised that the role of the sea space in the fictional world of the idealising Greek romance extends far beyond merely providing a backdrop for the protagonists&rsquo; adventures. It is proposed that the sea space should be regarded as one of the generic markers, alongside recurrent narrative motifs (the journey and the love uniting a heterosexual couple), the characteristic plot structure, and stable character types. It is also argued that the distribution patterns of maritime terminology in individual novels provide a basis for drawing conclusions about the evolution of the idealising Greek romance as a genre. To support this thesis, all sea voyages, both, those undertaken by the protagonists and by secondary characters, were identified and categorised according to the external circumstances and internal motivations of the characters. This analysis led to the conclusion that, with only a few exceptions, a sea voyage is always the result of some form of necessity or constraint. This type of compulsion experienced by the characters can be interpreted as a reflection of the constraint to which the author of the novel is subject when composing a work in accordance with the conventions of the genre, even if these conventions were never explicitly formulated. To further confirm the relationship between the space of the sea and the genre convention, a catalogue of recurring maritime narrative topoi was also reconstructed. It was demonstrated that these motifs are, on the one hand, consistently employed by the novelists, while on the other hand, the study also considers their creative adaptations and individual variations in specific works. It was found that the extent to which these narrative solutions are used is so substantial that it is difficult to find a comparable phenomenon in other literary genres.At the end of the first part, an attempt was made to relate the conclusions regarding the significance of the sea space to the works regarded as novels but preserved only in fragments or in the form of summaries. Although the proposed findings are therefore not conclusive, treating the sea space as a generic marker provides an additional criterion that may be applied in the attempts to classify these texts. agined geography and aims to reconstruct the narrative maps encoded in the texts of the novels, encompassing the sea and its surrounding coasts. By analysing each novel in subsequent chapters, the study reconstructs the geographical details of the sea routes and identifies references to the sea space that serve functions not directly related to the plot (erudite or aesthetic). The objective was to examine various types of relationships between the individual points on these maritime maps. Particular attention was paid to the directions of movement, the selection and interconnections of specific topographical points, the degree of detail or generalisation in the descriptions of sea routes, and possible discrepancies between the representation of the maritime area and its surroundings in the fictional world of the novel and the actual geographical realities. In this way, the features of the conventional image of the maritime space characteristic of works representing the early stage of the novel&rsquo;s development, Chariton&rsquo;s &ldquo;Callirhoe&rdquo; and Xenophon of Ephesus&rsquo;s &ldquo;An Ephesian Tale,&rdquo; were identified. The essential element of this convention is the positioning of the sea space at the centre of the protagonists&rsquo; world and the movement of the characters along a horizontal axis, between the coasts of Asia Minor and the Levant in the east and Sicily and southern Italy in the west. A close association between maritime connotations and Hellenic identity was also observed. A similar line of reflection applied to the two later novels made it possible to observe that the sea routes of the protagonists delineate a maritime territory of a different character. The characters travel along a vertical axis, within a space considerably more limited than in the novels of their predecessors. Their routes connect Ephesus with Alexandria (Achilles Tatius&rsquo;s &ldquo;Leucippe and Clitophon&rdquo;) and Athens and Delphi with Naucratis in Egypt (Heliodorus&rsquo;s &ldquo;An Aethiopian Story&rdquo;). The tendency to narrow the maritime space covered by the narrative corresponds with an increased frequency of maritime terminology, which appears as part of extensive erudite commentaries or performs rhetorical functions. In Heliodorus&rsquo;s &ldquo;An Aethiopian Story,&rdquo; a striking technique was also identified, namely, the deliberate elimination of maritime terminology from the text of the novel in its final four books. Other formal devices employed by Achilles Tatius, and especially by Heliodorus, provide grounds for drawing conclusions about the possible direction of the further evolution of the idealising Greek romance, which appears to consist in the gradual reduction of the presence of the sea space within the narrative. This transformation may be interpreted as reflecting parallel changes in the spatial imagination of the readership, influenced by the gradual eastward shift of the Roman Empire&rsquo;s political centre.</jats:p>