FICTIVE SCHEINTOD ANDCHRISTIAN RESURRECTION

JtJDiTH PERKINS

ABSTRACT

In his chapter tided 'Resurrection' in Fiction as History, Glen Bowersoekexamines examples of 'apparent death' {Scheintod) in Graeco-Romannarrative fictions. He concludes his analysis by questioning 'whetherthe extraordinary growth in fictional writing, and its characteristicand concomitant fascination with resurrecdon' might be 'some kind ofreflection of the remarkable stories that were coming out of Palestinein the middle of the first century A,D,' In this essay I will offer thatrather than seeing a relation of influence between fictive prose narrativesand Ghristian discourse (especially Chrisdan bodily resurrection dis-course) of the early centuries C,E,, these sets of texts should be recog-nised as different manifestadons of an attempt to address the sameproblem, that of negotiating nodons of cultural identity in the matrixof early Roman imperialism. That these texts share similar modfs andthemes - gruesome and graphic descripdons of torture, dismember-ment, cannibalism and death - results not necessarily from influence,but that they converge around the same problem, drawing from acommon cultural environment in the same historical context.

In a chapter dded 'Resurrecdon,' Glen Bowersoek examines the numerousexamples of 'apparent death' {Scheintod) in Graeco-Roman narrative ficdons.He concludes his analysis by quesdoning 'whether the extraordinary growthin fictional wridng, and its characteristic and concomitant fascination withresurrection' might be 'some kind of reflection of the remarkable storiesthat were coming out of Palestine in the middle of the first century A,D,''Rather than seeing a relation of influence between Christian discourse(especially Christian resurrection discourse) and the fictive prose narrativesof the early centuries C,E,, I suggest these texts should be recognised as

' Clen W, Bowersoek, Fiction as History: Nero to Julian (Berkeley, Calif: Universityof California Press, 1994), 119,

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden RELIGION & THEOLOGY 13/3-4 (2006)Unisa Press Also available online - www,brill,nl

Fictive Scheintod and Christian Resurrection 397

attempts by different eonsdtuencies to address the same issue: negotiat-ing notions of cultural and social identity in the matrix of early Romanimperialism. That these sets of texts share similar motifs and themes resultsnot from influence, but that they both converge around the same prob-lem, drawing from a common cultural environment, in the same histor-ical context,^

Bowersoek's recognition of the overlapping chronology of the rise ofChristianity and of the prose fiction genre is pertinent, AH extant exam-ples of the fictive prose narrative as well as those testified to by papyrifragments and synopses appear to cluster in the late first and second cen-turies C,E,, with the exception of Heliodorus's Aethiopica, dated to eitherthe third or fourth century,' Christian discourse in this period also showedan intensified focus on resurrection, a focus more concerned with thenature of the human resurrected body than with Jesus's resurrection,CaroUne Bynum characterises the shift in resurrection discourse, '[b]y theend of the second century, "Resurrection" was no longer simply a minortheme of discussion and apologetics; it became a major element in dis-putes among Chrisdans and in Christian defenses against pagan attacks.Entire treatises were devoted to the topic. Resurrection not of "the dead"or "the body" {soma or corpus) but of "the flesh" {sarx or caro) became akey element, , ,"* Many Christians were beginning to insist that the risen

^ Recall Tertullian's point that Christians share a social world with their neigh-hors. He rehuts the charge that Christians were had at business, 'How can thisbe true of men living with you, who enjoy the same food, the same manner oflife, and clothes, the requiring the same necessities for life? We are neitherBrahmins nor Indian gymnosophists, nor forest-dwellers, or exiles from normallife. We live with you in this world - not without the forum, or the meat mar-ket, or baths, shops, factories, inns, or market days and the rest of your buyingand selling. We sail with you, and serve in the army, and farm and engage intrade as you do' {Apol. 42,1-3, trans. Glover),

' Bowersoek, Fiction as History, 149; A,R, Ldghtfoot, Tacts and Fiction - TheThird Siege at Nisibis (A,D, 350),' Historia 38 (1977): 105-25, Simon Swain, OxfordReadings in the Greek Novel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 25, contends,'that the age of the novel is the High Roman Empire' [first - third century C,E,],

•* Caroline Walker Bynum, The Resurrection of the Body in Westem Christianity,

200-1336 (Nev/ York, N,Y,: Columbia University Press, 1995), 26, Bynum's quo-tation continues and connects this change of emphasis to the struggle with Doeedeand Gnostic tendencies. For the lack of interest in the life of Jesus in the secondcentury, see, Judith Lieu, Christian Identity in the Jewish and Graeco-Roman world

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 89, For recent discussions of the resur-rection, see Claudia Setzer, Resurrection of the Body in Early Judaism and Early Christianity:

398 Judith Perkins

human body was nothing less than a fully material body, replicating thenatural body of human existence. Bynum interprets this insistence as areaction to the necessities of martyrdom; the promise of a restored mate-rial resurrected body reassured Christians threatened by 'pain and muti-lation but also from scattering, dishonor, even cannibalism after death.'^

Bynum' s point that a belief in the resurrection of a fully material bodywould help to assuage concerns about martyrs' bodies is surely correct.What she does not probe, however, is why Christian martyr texts placeso much emphasis on pain, mutilation, and dismemberment and whatrole this representation plays in the wider cultural dialogue of the period.For Christian texts were not the only texts to feature bodily pain, andmutilation; mutilated bodies permeate the cultural terrain of the period.Indeed a focus on graphic and gruesome tortures, bodily mutilation andcannibalism surfaces as a major preoccupation across a range of diversecultural productions in the early empire.

Even the briefest look at this preoccupation may serve to suggest itsextent. Numerous recent studies, for example, have examined the increas-ing public violence enacted in the arenas during the period.^ They agreein situating this new savagery 'within the logic of imperial interests."Kathleen Coleman, for example, examines how civic spectacles began tostage particularly horrific ways of dying." To add to the spectators' plea-sure, condemned prisoners were coerced into taking parts in feigned his-torical or mythological tableaux enacted at the civic games. Coleman'sfindings support TertuUian's description of criminals being castrated tore-enact the castration of Attis or burnt alive to replicate Hercules' immo-lation on Mt. Oeta (4/)o/. 15.4-5).' Coleman notes that these 'fatal charades'

Doctrine, Community, and Self-Definition (Leiden: Brill, 2004); Alan F. Segal, Life after

Death: A History of the Afterlife in the Religions of the West (New York, N.Y.: Doubleday,2004); N.T. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God (London: SPCK, 2003).

^ Bynum, Resurrection of the Body, 58.^ See, for example, Richard C. Beacham, Spectacle Entertainments of Early Imperial

Rome (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1999); Alison Futrell, Bhod in

the Arena: The Spectacle of Roman Power (Austin, Tex,: University of Texas Press,1997); Donald G. Kyle, Spectacles of Death in Ancient Rome (London: Routledge,1998); Paul Plass, The Game of Death in Ancient Rome: Arena Sport and Political Suicide

(Madison, Wis.: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995).' Elizabeth A. Castelli, Martyrdom and Memory: Early Christian Culture Making (New

York, N.Y.: Columbia University Press, 2004), 111.' Katherine M. Coleman, 'Fatal Charades: Roman Executions Staged as

Mythological Enactments,' JRS 80 (1990): 44-73.^ Coleman, 'Charades,' 60-61.

Fietive Scheintod and Christian Resurrection 399

cluster in the first two centuries of the Empire and she connects these'increasingly harsh penalties under the Empire with the absolutist trendsin Roman government.''" She also points out the implicit message of suchviolence, 'the deposal of lives as a public performance presupposes a cat-egory of people society regards as dispensable.'" Violence similarly inflectsthe literature of the early imperial period.'^ Glenn Most describes whathe terms a 'Neronian obsession with the dismemberment of the humanbody.'" He traces the introduction of graphic and gruesome physicaldetails in the literature of the mid first-century and suggests this func-tions as a reflection upon the nature of human identity and upon theuneasy border between man and animal.'''

Maud Gleason interprets the graphic representation of mutilated bodiesin Josephus's texts as indicating their use as tokens in a cultural dialogueabout power. Josephus's descriptions include messengers wearing theirown severed arms around their necks, crucified bodies being tossed overcity walls to make a point, and a mother cooking and eating her ownchild so that the child might, in the words of his text, 'become a story -the only one needed to complete the miseries of the Jews' {BJ 1.200).'Gleason suggests human bodies make good 'semiotic instruments' becausethey may function cross-culturally to invoke the body politic. This imag-ined analogy between the body and the body politic, Gleason offers, elu-cidates certain types of the contemporary period's represented violence,since 'dramatizing one's ability to control individual bodies (both one'sown and those of others) was a vital point in making a claim to politi-cal power.'"'

This survey, cursory as it is, testifies to a circulating cultural discoursearound violent bodily treatment, dismemberment, and gruesome death in

'» Coleman, 'Charades,' 72." Coleman, 'Charades,' 54.' ' On Lucan's fascination with lacerated hodies, see Shadi Bartsch, Ideology in

Cold Blood: A Reading of Lucan's Civil War (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UniversityPress, 1997), 10-48.

" Clenn W. Most, 'Disiecti Membra Poetae: The Rhetoric of Dismemberment inNeroian Poetry,' in Innovations of Antiquity (ed. Ralph J. Hexter and Daniel L.Selden; New York, N.Y.: Routledge, 1992), 391-419; quotation p. 405.

'•* Most, 'Disiecti Membra,' 405.

' Maud W. Gleason, 'Mutilated Messengers: Body Language in Josephus,' inBeing Greek under Rome: Cultural Identity, the Second Sophistic, and the Development of Empire

(ed. Simon Goldhill; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 50-85 quo-tation 66.

' Gleason, 'Mutilated Messengers,' 74.

400 Judith Perkins

diverse but chronologically related cultural productions of the first cen-turies C.E. It is this discourse that provides the proper context for deci-phering the relation between the apparent deaths of the ancient fictionsand the contemporary Christian writings on resurrection. The relation isnot one of influence, as Bowersock suggests, but that both use a com-mon language of the body, mutilation and death to frame their particu-lar responses to the changed social and political landscape of the period.Understanding the relation and differences between these responses mayhelp to illumine the reception ultimately given to what Bowersock hasdescribed as those 'remarkable stories coming out of Palestine.'

Four of the five extant Greek fietive narratives, the so-called 'ideal'romances, are travel adventure narratives." These four, those of Chariton,Xenophon of Ephesus, Achilles Tatius and Heliodorus describe the dis-asters experienced by an elite couple, their separation, travels, hardships,tests of faithfulness, and near deaths before they are finally reunited. TheLatin prose fictions, Petronius's Satyrica and Apuleius's Metamorphoses, sharesome of these same motifs, sex, travels, hardships, but from a much less'ideal' perspective. These Latin narratives have been described as 'sala-cious, outrageous and teeming with low life."* Ancient summaries, epit-omes and papyri fragments substantiate the existence of non-ideal Greekprose fictions similar in theme and emphases to the Latin novels.'^

" See Virginia Burrus, 'Mimicking Virgins: Colonial Ambivalence and theAncient Romance,' Arethusa 38 (2005): 49-88, for a salutary reminder that com-mentators should resist essentialising their readings of either Greek or Christiantexts in the complex cultural and social interactions of the early Empire. I recog-nise that by discussing the prose romances as a group I neglect their individu-ally different perspectives (especially their constructed ethnicities); nevertheless theirrelated plot structures, themes and characterisation suggest they are involved ina joint intervention in the period's 'heat of competing hegemonic ambitions'(Burrus's phrase, 85).

'° Susan A. Stephens and John J. Winkler, Ancient Greek JVovels: The Eragments:Introduction, Text, Translation, and Commentary (Princeton, NJ . : Princeton UniversityPress, 1995), 5.

' For non-ideal Greek prose fictions, see Stephens and Winkler, Ancient GreekNovels; ]o\m ]. Winkler, 'Lollianus and the Desperados,'J//5' 100 (1980): 155-81:repr. in Innovations of Antiquity (ed. Ralph J. Hexter and Daniel L. Selden; NewYork, N.Y.: Routledge, 1992), 5-50; Christopher P.Jones, 'Apuleius' Metamorphosesand Lollianus' Phoinikika,' Phoenix 24 (1980): 243-54. For the relation betweenthe Onos of Pseudo-Lucius and the Metamorphoses of Apuleius, see Hugh J. Mason,'Greek and Latin Versions of the Ass Storey,' ANRW \\.U.2 (1994): 1665-707.

Fietive Scheintod and Christian Resurreetion 401

All the extant adventure narratives with the exception of the Satyriea(whose text is fragmentary) offer examples of apparent deaths.^" In theGreek ideal adventure romances, only heroines appear actually to die."Chariton's Callirhoe suffers one seheintod (1.4.12), as does Heliodorus'sChariclea (2.3.3). Xenophon's Anthia has one apparent, one near, andone threatened death (3.6.5; 2.13.3; 4.6.4). Achilles Tatius's Leueippeapparently dies three times in the narrative (3.15.5; 5.7.4; 7.3.8). InApuleius's Metamorphoses, a young boy, supposedly dead from poison, risesup from his grave to provide evidence against his stepmother (10.12). ^The ubiquity of these apparent deaths supports Bowersock's perceptionof their importance for the genre, 'the appearance of this motif [Seheintod\concurrently with the development of the genre itself is not likely to bevWthout significance.' ^

What is significant about these deaths in my reading is their unreal-ity. What may look like a sure disaster turns out not to be one. Bowersockrecognised that 'resurrection' was, in fact, a misnomer for most examplesof false deaths in the prose fictions. In the sense of a return to life fromdeath, few characters are actually resurrected. '* Rather, as is the case forall the heroines' false deaths in the ideal narratives, it turns out that theperson had never really died in the first place. What the motif in thesenarratives connotes is not resurrection, but the illusory nature of the death,its misinterpretation as a death. Bad things may seem to happen to good(that is well born) people in the world of the prose fictions, but they donot happen permanendy. The figure of apparent death encapsulates in

™ For Petronius's play with the false death convention in his representation ofthe 'resurrection' of Eucolpius's impotent member (140.12), see Bowersock, Eictionas History, 113.

' Suzanne MacAlister, Dreams and Suicides: The Greek Novel from Antiquity to the

Byzantine Empire (London: Routledge, 1996), 196 n. 20, points out there are falsereports of heroes' deaths, and many threats to their lives, but no hero is repre-sented as dying.

^ For a perceptive analysis of this scene, see Maud W. Gleason, 'Truth Contestsand Talking Corpses' in Constructions of the Classical Body (ed. James I. Porter; AnnArbor, Mich.: University of Michigan Press, 1999), 287-313. Stephens and Winkler,Ancient Novels, 186, note that the summary of Iamblichus's Babyloniaca suggests itsfirst six episodes offer 'variations on near-death or apparent death experiences.'

^' Bowersock, Eiction as History, 100.

* Bowersock, Eiction as History, 100, notes that Photius's summary of AntoniusDiogenes's Incredible Things Beyond Thule {Bibl. 166,109 a-b) suggests this narrativedisplays actual returns from death to life.

402 Judith Perkins

miniature the plot of all of the adventure novels, and it asserts and rein-forces its message about the resiliency of its elite protagonists and theirability to survive and play a role in the new Roman regime. ^

The premise driving all the adventure narratives is that their heroesand heroines have suffered a 'social death,' a loss of social identity. Theybecome separated from the protection of their city, their social status andtheir wealth; they fall into the hands of society's others, the have-nots,hostile pirates and bandits. The life of privilege they knew, suddenly ends.By the narratives' conclusion, however, the protagonists have all safelybeen socially resurrected and restored to their rightful social position andelite identities. The social death providing the plot of the novels also turnsout to be a Scheintod.

Within the paradigm of an assured happy ending, the motif of apparentdeath along with the many near and threatened deaths in the narrativesallows the provincial elite, the likely readers and writers of the romances,an entrance into the contemporary cultural discourse around issues ofidentity and power that was being figured through mutilated and deadbodies. This cultural wide meditation on violence offers the context forunderstanding the Scheintoten. They (some of them) ^ provide occasions forthe provincial elite to represent graphic and gruesomely detailed violence;Leucippe's first death provides an example. In Achilles Tatius's romance,the elite couple, Clitophon and Leueippe, shipwrecked off the coast of Egyptare seized by brigands and separated. The bandits take Leueippe awayto be a purificatory sacrifice for the robber band.

Clitophon is rescued by a detachment of soldiers. Barred by an impas-sible trench, they watch from a distance what they believe is Leucippe'ssacrifice. This involves an elaborate ritual. Leueippe is led around an altarto instrumental and vocal music, until finally she is tied to stakes in theground, and the bandits plunge a sword into her heart and down throughher stomach exposing her intestines. The narrative graphically recordsthe rite's finale, '[tjearing them [the intestines] out with his hands andhe placed them upon the altar. When they were roasted, each man cutoff a portion and ate it' (3.15.4-5, trans. Whitmarsh).

Helen Morales has described the gendered mechanics of this scene whereLeueippe having already been displayed in the narrative as the object of

^ For a meticulous examination of the mechanisms by which Rome achieved aconsensus on its right to rule, see Clifford Ando, Imperial ideology and Provincial Loyaltyin the Roman Empire (Berkeley, Calif.: University of Califomia Press, 2000), 131-205.

^ Anthia's poison-induced false death, for example, is not violent (3.6.5).

Fietive Scheintod and Christian Resurrection 403

the male 'consumptive gaze' is finally eaten while Clitophon looks on."Morales calls attention to the inherent misogyny in the scene's voyeuris-tic, sexually inflected attention to Leucippe's body. ^ She may miscon-strue, however, when she suggests that the episode's hyperbolic 'grotesquerie'defuses its horror for readers.^^ Seeing another human being eaten with-out some frisson of shock seems unlikely, however unrealistic or campthe depiction.'" Cannibalism, the ultimate social violation, taps into anatavistic fear of being destroyed, devoured and totally assimilated intoanother. Clitophon's lament for Leueippe recognises, even as it puns, thehorror of becoming food: 'O pitiable Leueippe, unluckiest person in thewhole world . . . your body is laid out here, but where are your innards?If fire had destroyed them, the disaster would be less. Now the burial(tacpri) of your innards has become the food (xpocpri) of bandits' (3.16.3—4). '

^' Helen Morales, Vision and Narrative in Achilles Tatius' Leueippe and Clitophon

(Cam-bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 165-168.° For discussion of the scene's voyeurism, see David Konstan, Sexual Symmetry:

Love in the Ancient Novel and Related Genres. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University

Press, 1993), 60-64. Morales, Vision and Narrative, 169 reacts to commentatorsdescription of the parody or 'kitsch' of the scene, 'Cultures where violence againstwomen is an amusement - in the arena, in mime and in the novel - are cul-tures that foster violence against women.' Morales offers a persuasive demon-stration in her study of how Achilles Tatius inscribes violence against women intohis narrative through his use of mythology, ecphrases and sententiae. Morales's pointis persuasive and coheres with my position that the passivity of the romance heroshows not the symmetry of the couple, but, framed as it is by the robust hier-archy and patriarchy of the narratives, works to 'market' the provincial male eliteas fitting partners for rule with Rome, non-combative, but sharing the same patri-archal values and perspectives.

^' Morales, Vision and Narrative, 168.

'" Shadi Bartsch, Ideologji in Cold Blood., 39, for the reader's double reaction,'distance' and 'embeddedness' to Lucan's grotesque passages. Hannibal Lecter'scharacterisation as a cultured gourmand in the film. Silence of the Lambs, offers acontemporary analogy. His sophisticated 'tastes' make him no less a monster andhis cannibalism no less horrifying.

" v\>v 8e fi TSV onXajfywN COM -caipr) XTIOXWV yeyove xpo(pT|. For translating thispun, see Stephan M. Trzaskoma, 'Review of Tim Whitmarsh, Leueippe and Clitophon,'BMCR (2002). He compares the versions of Tim Whitmarsh, Leueippe and Clitophon(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001) and John Winkler, 'Leukippe and Klitophon'in Collected Ancient Greek Novels (ed. Bryan P. Reardon, Berkeley, Calif.: Universityof California Press, 1989). Whitmarsh's version reads 'but, as it is, your innards'inhumation has become these robbers' alimentation,' and Winkler's 'your insidesare inside the outlaws, victuals in the vitals of bandits.'

404 Judith Perkins

The gruesome description, rather than defusing the scene's horror, max-imises it, and has as its goal 'to make the audience's blood run cold,''^Despite its melodrama, this vision of a young and beautiful human bodycut up and devoured seems to retain its horror. Indeed the productionof horror seems the whole point of the episode, for the reader soon dis-covers that nothing actually happened to Leucippe, The whole scene wasstage-managed by Clitophon's friends who joined the robber band afterthe shipwreck and needed to prove their boldness by performing thesacrifice. They had found a theatrical trunk washed up on the beach witha trick sword, and used the sword and a false stomach filled with ani-mal entrails to fool the bandits, Leucippe was never eviscerated; her appar-ent death is simply a device for exciting readers' suspense and horrorand then their relief and joy when she survives the gruesome death.

The depiction of Leucippe's second death continues to allow the narrativeto tap into the culture's discursive fascination with violence and dis-memberment. In this case, pirates abduct Leucippe, and, again as CUtophonwatches helplessly, he sees his beloved decapitated and her body tossedinto the sea. The narrative emphasises the inherent assault of dismembermentto bodily integrity and identity. Rescuing the headless trunk, Clitophongrieves, 'I am holding the leftovers of your body, but you yourself I havelost (TO |xev yap A,ei\|/avov exco aou tou owixaio^, an'kokiikzKa 6e ae , , , Butsince Fortune denies me the chance to kiss your face, let me kiss yourbutchered neck' (acpayriv 5,7,8-9, trans, Whitmarsh), Clitophon's overwroughtrhetoric once more deflects readers from the tragic pathos of the maiden'sdeath, but nevertheless the image of the no longer intact, damaged bodyretains some of its latent horror. Again it will turn out that this is a falsedeath, Leucippe is uninjured, Clitophon actually embraces the body of awoman killed by the pirates in Leucippe's clothes and in her place,

Leucippe's sacrifice is one of a recurrent pattern in the prose narra-tives described by John Winkler as: 'victim facing a horrible death at thehands of villains,' ^ This pattern offers readers both thrills and fulfilled

32 Winkler, 'Desperados,' 19,3' Winkler, 'Desperados,' 19-20, Winkler's point in establishing the conventional

nature of such scenes is to dispute the contention made in Albert Henrichs, DiePhoinUdka des Loltianos: Fragmmte eines neum griechischen Romans (Papyrologische Texte undAbhandlungen, Bd, 14, Bonn: R, Habelt, 1972), n, 6 that the evisceration andconsumption of the victim in LoUianos's Phoinikika necessarily 'yields valuable infor-mation about the structure of ancient mystery rituals,' Winkler offers that the episodeprovides, rather, the melodramatic thrill of 'popular entertainment,' Cf, RogerBeck, 'Soteriology, the Mysteries, and the Ancient Novel: Iamblichus' Babyloniacaas a Test Case,' in La Soteriologia dei Culti Orientali nell'Impero Romano (ed, U, Bianchi

Fictive Scheintod and Christian Resurrection 405

desires when the victim inevitably survives the terrifying situation. Onesubset of this pattern, 'victim eaten by wild animals or wild humans,'seems particularly relevant to my reading of the narratives as proclamationsof the resilient identity of the Greek elite in the context of Roman hege-mony,'* Besides Leucippe's sacrifice, the fictive narratives represent onlyone other cannibalistic act, A pais (a boy or slave) is sacrificed in thefragmentary Phoinikika of Lollianos, The pais is described as first beingthrown on his back and cut up. Then his heart is torn out, cooked, sea-soned and served to a group of men who appear to swear an oath 'onthe blood of the heart' (B,l Recto 8-17),'^ The episode shares obvioussimilarities with Leucippe's sacrifice, but the text is too fragmentary todetermine whether this sacrifice is real or also a Scheintod.'^^ In the otherepisodes in the novels that focus on humans being eaten, the victims, allwomen, face being devoured by animals. As was the case in Leucippe'sfalse sacrifice, all the scenes project a subtext of voyeuristic violence,''

Both Apuleius' Metamorphoses and the related Greek Onos offer paralleldescriptions of the gruesome punishments proposed for a maiden threat-ened with being eaten alive. The bandits deliberate in sadistic detail overpossible torturous deaths for the girl. The proposed punishments are enu-merated in Apuleius's version, 'the first man proposed the girl be burntalive, the second recommended she be thrown to the beasts, the third urgedthat she be nailed to a gibbet, and the fourth recommended that her bodybe mangled by torture' (6,31, trans, Walsh), The bandits finally decideon a method combining all the proposals into the most hideous deathpossible. They will kill the ass, Lucius, and slit open his stomach and sew

and M, Vermaseren; Leiden: Brill, 1982) 527-540, My cultural reading aims atlocating this emphasis on evisceration and consumption within the wider con-temporary dialogue that includes both mystery religions and the prose fictions.See Gerhard van den Heever, 'Novel and Mystery: Discourse, Myth, and Society,'in Ancient Fiction: TTie Matrix of Early Christian and Jewish Narrative, (ed, Jo-Ann A,Brant, Charles H, Hedrick, and Chris Shea; Atlanta: Society of Bihlical literaturesSymposium Series, 2005), 89-114,

'* Winkler, 'Desperados,' 20, Examples of the motif occur at: Lollianos, B,lRecto; Achilles Tatius, 3,15; Xenophon of Ephesus, 4,5; Apuleius, 6,31; Onos, 25;Iamblichus, in Photius, Bibl. 94, na29. Bowersoek, Fiction As History, 132 notesthat cannibalism plays 'a conspicuous role in imperial fiction,'

' Stephens and Winkler, Ancient Creek Novels, 338,f* Winkler, 'Desperados' 27-29," Photius (Bibl 94,77a29) mentions a dog eating a male slave in Iamblichus's

Babyloniaca.

406 Judith Perkins

the girl in his belly with only her face exposed. The girl will experiencethe whole gamut of the proposed torments:

[she] will endure the teeth of wild animals as the worms mangle herlimbs, the scorching of fire when the sun heats the ass's helly with itsexcessive rays, and the agony of the gihbet when the dogs and vulturesdraw out her intestines, (6,32)

By devoting so much space and such graphic detail to the description ofthe girl eaten by worms, dogs and vultures, the narrative foregrounds thehorror and revulsion invoked by the consumed human body, A horrorthat never occurs, when the maiden is rescued in the nick of time (7,12),™

Xenophon's romance repeats this motif After Anthia kills one of thebandits for trying to rape her, her captors decide her death ought to cor-respond with the atrocity of her act. They too take the pleasure of con-sidering possible punishments, but finally decide to feed Anthia to twosavage dogs. The narrative describes the scene: the leader 'gave ordersto dig a large deep trench and throw Anthia in it with two dogs as atone-ment for her boldness , , , they shut the trench with large planks and piledearth on top' (4,6,4-5, trans, Anderson), The two 'large' and 'fearsomelooking' dogs, however, never do eat the heroine. Rather the banditappointed to guard her falls in love, feeds the dogs, and, eventually, freesand protects Anthia (5,2,4-5),

Iamblichus's Babytoniaca represents the actual devouring of a woman'sbody, ° Rhodanes, the protagonist of the narrative, discovers a half-eatenwoman's body and believes it is that of his beloved Sinonis, This is, how-ever, only another apparent death; a dog had eaten, not the body ofSinonis, but another maiden's. As the synopsis reports, the dog first ate'bit by bit' the top half of the maiden, explaining Rhodanes's confusionand misidentification (Photius, Bibl 94.77ii29). The revulsion associated withthe threat of being consumed, eaten, absorbed into another body under-lies all of these scenarios and adds to the effect of their horror for readers.

Invariably, in all these cases, the wellborn characters avoid these horribledeaths. Just as the heroines never actually die, they are never actuallyeaten, never incorporated into another's body. They survive intact. Indeed

' In both Apuleius and the Onos, this maiden eventually dies, a death that reflectsa social vision that diverges somewhat from that in the Greek ideal romances, Cf.Judith Perkins, 'This World or Another? The Intertextuality of the Creek Romances,the Apocryphal Acts and Apuleius' Metamorphoses,' Semeia 80 (1997): 253-58,

' This example from Iamblichus deviates from Winkler's model for these shock-ing episodes; this death does not involve a bandit group. The scene does represent,however, a lower status male, a slave, killing the girl.

Fictive Scheintod and Christian Resurrection 407

the heroines' success in not being devoured, in maintaining their body'sintegrity, repeats in a related metaphor their success in repelling the manychallenges to their chastity that supplies so much of the plot of the 'ideal'narratives,**^ As Maggie Kilgour explains, sex and eating are related images.They both act as figures for incorporation, 'a less totalizing [than eating]but still bodily image for incorporation is that of sexual intercourse. InFrench, to consume and to consummate are the same word , , , like eating,intercourse makes two bodies one,"" The heroines of the prose narrativessuccessfully resist both sex and consumption and, through their resistance,proclaim their invulnerability to any forced incorporation into another's body.

Commentators have recognised the inherent social and political mes-sage in the romance heroines' defended chastity, Katherine Haynes notes,'The heroines resist violation, and so the borders of Greek cultural integrityremain uncontested,"*^ Catherine Connors explicitly links the motif toRoman imperialism.

But the ancient Greek novels too invite the reader to see connectionsbetween bodily integrity and the territorial and political integrity of aregion and culture. The heroines' process of preserving physical and psy-chological integrity in the Greek novels can be read as a metaphor forthe experience of continuing to be (or enact being) Greek in the Romanempire. That is to say, the ways the novels - and elite Greek culture ingeneral - position themselves as impervious to Rome find a metaphoricalequivalent in the way the heroines are impervious to the villains whothreaten them, (Gonnors 2005:

•"' Anthia supplies a list of all those who did not succeed in violating herchastity, 'Not Moeris in Syria, Perilaus in Gilicia, Psammis or Polyidus in Egypt,not Anchialus in Ethiopia, not my master in Tarentum' (5,14,2),

•" Maggie Kilgour, From Communion to Cannibalism: An Anatomy of Metaphors of

Incorporation (Princeton, NJ,: Princeton University Press, 1990), 7, The prose fictionsthemselves suggest an equivalency between being eaten and sex. Morales, Visionand Narrative, 165-177, examines the complex interconnections between the sceneshowing Leucippe cut open with a knife, disemboweled and eaten and her mother'sdream where a brigand 'carrying a naked blade' cuts Leucippe open, startingfrom 'her most intimate parts' (2,23,4-5), In its context, this dream clearly figuressexual violation and proleptically colours the scene of Leucippe's sacrifice withsexual implications. The bandits' judgment that being eaten alive is the most suit-able punishment for Anthia's killing a rapist may also indicate a relation betweenrape and consumption,

•' Katharine Haynes, Fashioning the Feminine in the Greek novel (London: Routledge,2003), 161,

•*' Gatherine Gonnors, 'Metaphor and Politics in John Barclay's Argentis (1612),'Ancient Narrative Supplementum 4 (2005): 264,

408 Judith Perkins

These insights may be extended. Through their image of their heroines'imperviousness to consumption, both sexual and ingestible, the narrativesfigure the invulnerability of their protagonists, representatives of the non-Roman elites. The narrative plot that displays rape, consumption, evendeath as always avoided, or 'really' happening to someone else, somesocial 'other' affirms the non-Roman elite's ability to avoid being swal-lowed up, and able to preserve their identity and position as partners inthe changed regime of Roman imperialism.

My analysis has attempted to demonstrate that the 'false deaths' of thenarratives are miniature enactments of the adventure romance plot thatdepicts an elite couple suffering but eventually prevailing over a socialdeath and the inherent social and political message conveyed by thesemotifs. Where does this leave Bowersoek's suggestion of a relation betweenthe false death motif and Christian resurrection discourse? It supports hisrecognition of the connection between the two themes, but questionswhether the relation can be as uncomplicated as one of infiuence. In hernuanced examination of the metaphoric language used in resurrectiondiscourse, Caroline Bynum points out that second century Christians writ-ing on material resurrection often expresses 'a rather crude material con-tinuity,' She explains.

Such continuity , , , is both a defense against and an articulation of thethreat of decay, which is understood as absorption or digestion. Nutrition(eating or being eaten - especially cannibalism) is the basic image of pos-itive change and the basic threat to identity,'"

Bynum offers as a context for the new Christian emphasis on the mate-rial continuity of the body and its inherent denial of decay and absorption,'persecution and an attendant concern for the cadavers of the martyred,''*^

** Bynum, Resurrection, 27,•*' Bynum, Resurrection, 27, Cf. Bynum, Resurrection, 26, for a review of other

causes for this shift in emphasis toward the resurrection of a 'palpable fleshybody,' She writes 'first the model of Jesus's own resurrection; second, the impactof millenarianism (which assumes reanimation, at least of the righteous); third,the conflict with Gnosticism (which saw flesh as evil and therefore Ghrist's bodyas in some sense unreal); fourth, Ghristian adoption of Hellenistic dualist anthro-pology (which assumes an opposition of soul and body and therefore forces thequestion 'what survives?'); fifth, the emerging governmental structure of the third-century church (which was enhanced by the stress on difference or hierarchyentailed in the stress on body). None of these arguments are wrong,' But Bynumcomments the first four are tautological.

Fietive Scheintod and Christian Resurrection 409

That the contemporary prose fictions also deploy a range of imagesfor resisting incorporation suggests that this Christian emphasis on mate-rial indestructibility also intervenes in a wider context and cultural dia-logue. Christian texts that resist the bodily threats of digestion, incorporation,and assimilation resonate with the same 'semiotic' potential that Gleasondescribes in the cultural discourse of the period: to dramatise one's abil-ity to control individual bodies (both one's own and those of others) wasto make a claim to political power.""" It deserves notice that the texts ofthe provincial elite represent being devoured, either by being eaten orthrough unwilling sex, as a terrible threat. One horrible to anticipate, butalways avoided. While Christian discourse, in contrast, written by peoplewho in realistic terms face such threats, treats being devoured, or assim-ilated into another body as no threat at all.

Ignatius of Antioch, in his letters, on his way to Rome to be martyredemploys an extraordinarily exultant rhetoric to proclaim his desire to beeaten. He writes to Christians in Rome to persuade them not to attemptto save him.

Allow me to be the bread for the wild beasts; through them I am ableto attain to God. I am the wheat of God and am ground by the teethof wild beasts, that I may be found to be the pure bread of Christ.Rather, coax the wild animals, that they may become a tomb forme. . . . (Rom. 4:1-2, trans. Ehrman)

Later, in this same letter, Ignatius prays that the beasts will devour himquickly, but if they do not, he asserts, he will force them (5.2). Ignatiusdisclaims the horror of being eaten alive, entombed and incorporated intoan animal's body, horror that the fietive prose narratives assume. Ratherhe focuses on his body after his sufferings 'I will rise up' (dvaatriaonaiRom. 4:3).*'

Ignatius's insouciance about being eaten repeats as a motif in the earlymartyr acts. The Martyrdom of Folycarp, dated to the mid-second century,describes a martyr, Germanicus, inspiring his companions as he fightswith the beasts. When the proconsul tries to persuade him to save him-self, Germanicus instead drags an animal on top of him (3.1). In theFassion. of Ferpetua, being attacked and bitten by one kind of animal ratherthan another is described as an answer to prayer (no one prays to avoidbeing eaten). The narrator explains.

'"' Gleason, 'Mutilated Messengers,' 74.•" For this Christian discourse, see Bynum Resurrection, 27-58.

410 Judith Ferkins

But he who said, 'Ask and you shall receive', answered their prayer bygiving each one the death, each desired. For whenever they would discussamong themselves their desire for martyrdom, Satuminus. . . insisted thathe wanted to be exposed to all the different beasts. . . and so at the out-set of the contest he and Revocatus were matched with a leopard, andthen on the platform they were attacked by a bear. Saturus, on the otherhand, hated nothing more than a bear, and he anticipated being killedby one bite of a leopard. Then he was matched with a wild boar . . . [but]only dragged around. Then when he was bound in the stocks awaitingthe bear, the bear refused to come out of the cages, so for a second timeSaturus was called back unhurt (19.2-6).''^

Later in the narrative a leopard does attack Saturus, and covered in bloodhe reassures the prison overseer, Pudens, who, according to the narrator,had come to recognise the Ghristians' worth {magnam virtutem 9.1), 'thesethings should not disturb you but rather strengthen you' (21.4).

This description of martyrs sitting in prison debating preferable methodsfor dying supports contemporary scholarship that posits that 'Ghristiansexpected it [martyrdom] and trained for it in the communities where itoccurred.'*' The discussion by martyrs of the hideous deaths facing themwould play a part in such training. The martyrs both steel themselvesand construct a sense of their own control by anticipating and choosingone death rather than another. They work to reframe their martyrdomfrom an exercise of power upon them to one highlighting their own voli-tion. In Saturus's instruction to the prison official, the narrative directsthe proper response by Ghristian readers to such deaths. Seeing the mar-tyrs, these Ghristian 'overachievers' mauled by beasts ought to strengthenfaith. They are living out their community's faith and hope. As Saturusproclaims to Pudens, 'It is exactly as I foretold and predicted. So far, notone animal has touched me. So now you may believe me with all yourheart. I shall be finished off with one bite of a leopard' (21.1). Martyrtexts offer consumption by beasts as of litde consequence, indeed a desiredconclusion.

Martyrs themselves locate their punishment within the spectrum of can-nibalism.^" In the report of the martyrs in Lyons in the late 170s, Attalus,

*" Quotations of the martyr acts are from Herbert Mumsillo, ed.. Acts of theChristian Martyrs. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1972) with adaptions.

••' Robin Darling Young, In Procession Before the World: Martyrdom as Public Liturgyin Early Christianity (Milwaukee, Wise: Marquette University Press, 2001), 11.

™ For a list of Christian charges of pagans' cannibalism, see Bynum, Resurrection,41 n. 83.

Fietive Scheintod and Christian Resurrection 411

identified as Latin speaker, admonishes the crowd that it is they who eathumans (dv6pwn:o\)(; EoGieiv) not the Ghristians whom they accuse of suchcrimes (Eus., Eccl. Hist. 5.1.52). The Acts, however, refigure this canni-balism and its horror through the martyrs' reaction to it. They refuse itseffects. They understand themselves as immune to consumption, assimi-lation and destruction. The Acts of Lyons explains why the Ghristians areable to advance 'cheerfully' to punishment, unlike others who had deniedtheir faith.^' The faithful were comforted by 'the joy of witnessing, theirhope of what was promised (e7criYyeA.|j.eva)v) and their love for Ghrist andthe spirit of the Father' (Eus., Eccl. Hist. 5.1.34). One promise in partic-ular - that of a material resurrection - likely supported the martyrs andallowed them to assuage fear of lasting consumption or destruction.

In the fietive narratives the elite protagonists escape threats of beingeaten alive or killed. In the Ghristian texts, where such threats are car-ried out, they have no lasting effect. Ghristian narratives, as the prosefictions did, fashion the threat of being destroyed or assimilated as a falsethreat. For their bodies will rise again intact. The treatment of the bod-ies of the martyrs of Lyons shows how Ghristians must have boasted ofthe inviolability of their bodies. The narrative describes how the bodiesof martyrs killed in prison were thrown to the dogs to eat, and then thedismembered bodies were left unburied and under guard; after six days,they were burned and thrown into the Rhone (Eus., Fxcl. Hist. 5.1.59).The narrative describes the reasons behind these actions to stop Ghristiansfrom 'being born again' and so 'that they might have no hope in theresurrection (dvaaTTiaovxai) in which they put their trust. . . walking read-ily and joyfully to their death' (5.1.63). The fietive prose narratives pro-claim that the bodies of their protagonists are immune from lasting harm.The Ghristian narratives assert an equivalent claim. For, although Ghristianbodies may appear wounded, mutilated, or even destroyed, they are nev-ertheless inviolable.

In her discussion of the language of the mutilated body, Maud Gleasondiscusses the 'role played in the negotiation of power by the spectacle ofthe body in pain. Sometimes this spectacle is self-dramatizing, enacted by

' Later in this document, the narrative comments on the martyrs' joy that manyof those who had at first recanted, returned to the faith and suffered martyrdom.The martyrs are said 'to rejoice that they had forced the "beast" to vomit forth(e enecTTi) alive all those he thought he had gulped down' (Eus. Hist. eccl. 5.2.6).In the usual inverted language of the Acts, those described as 'alive' are thosedying as martyrs. Note the language of consumption; the about-to-be martyrsavoid being consumed by the devil.

412 Judith Ferkins

the agent with his own body, at other times coercive, enacted by theagent upon the bodies of others.'^^ Ghristian martyr discourse changesthis dynamic of power by encoding other agents' coercive violence intotheir own self-dramatisations of power. Ghristians were promulgating apowerful social message in these texts. Not even the most egregious oper-ations of civic violence can have a lasting effect on their bodies. Martyrswere the star performers of the Ghristian message. ^ Relatively few Ghristiansexperienced martyrdom, but seeing martyrs perform their belief in a bodyimmune to consumption and destruction made this body and the senseof identity that went with it available for all adherents.^*

Bynum describes the Ghristian emphasis on material resurrection as areaction to martyrdom and the eaten, maimed and mutilated bodies ofmartyrs. From a different perspective, however, this emphasis may notbe a reaction but an impetus for the martyrs' willingness to face deathand dismemberment in the arena. Believing in their material body's immu-nity to destruction, martyrs enacted for all to see their faith in a mater-ial resurrection, their belief that death and destruction were only 'apparent'and offered no threat to their secure bodily identity.

Second century Ghristian theorists in their defense of the materialityof the resurrected human body acknowledged the body's liability to decay,dissolution and oozing away.^' They repeatedly figured these processes asa form of digestion. This analogy freighted with images of the body beingdevoured, absorbed, assimilated or eliminated as waste conveys a powerfulthreat to dignity and identity. A threat every human body faces, not onlythe bodies of martyrs. What material resurrection offered not only tomartyrs, but also to all who believed, was a nullification of the threat ofseeping away into nothingness, of becoming nothing. It promised a securebodily identity resistant to every sort of destruction or incorporation. Themartyrs at Lyons testify to the power in this promise. This promise ofnever being 'nothing' may have had considerable appeal to all those fash-

' Gleason, 'Mutilated Messengers', 52.^' Christopher A Frilingos, Spectacles of Empire: Monsters, Martyrs, and the Book of

Revelation (Philadelphia, Penn.: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004) in his argu-ment for Christians as 'viewing selves' makes the analogy that the martyrs wereto the majority of Christians as television stars are to their viewers.

^ Judith Perkins, The Suffering Self: Pain and Narrative Representation in the Early

Christian Era (London: Routledge, 1995), 15-40.^ For a detailed discussion of TertuUian's thinking on the flesh, see Jerome

Alexandre, Une Chair pour la Gloire: L'Anthropologie Realists et Mystique de Tertullien

(Theologie historique 115; Paris: Beauchesne, 2001).

Fietive Scheintod and Chnstian Resurrection 413

ioned as 'nothings,' in the contemporary society and forced to recognisetheir status in the treatment given their bodies.

The period seeing the emphasis on material resurrection overlaps withthat (138-235 G.E.) described by Geoffrey De Ste. Groix as when 'thelegal rights of the poorer classes were gradually whittled away, and bythe Severan period (A.D. 193—235) had been reduced to the vanishingpoint.' ^ The institution of the legal distinction between the humiliores (themore low) and the honestiores (the more honorable), that is between thehave-nots and those with 'power, style of life and wealth' wdth its dualpenalty system reflects this process.'' In this legal paradigm, the bodiesof have-nots became liable to harsher penalties than those of the elite.Physical punishments, formerly limited to slaves, were made applicableto more of the non-privileged. Lower status persons already looked downon for their need to work with their bodies or to support their bodieshad their lack of status even more deeply inscribed onto these bodiesthrough their liability to violent punishment. The body's liability to painbecame a status marker.

The apparent deaths in the prose fictions display the mechanics for assign-ing some bodies more value than others in a society. If their recoveryfrom apparent deaths and multiple threats trumpets the good fortune andendurance of the novel's elite protagonists, it also works to point up theinvisibility of others in this narrative world. For several of the so-calledapparent deaths in the romances are very real, just not for the peoplewho count. ^ People die, but they fall so far below the threshold of socialregard that they and their deaths hardly register with the protagonists.Social nobodies, they live dismissable lives.

Leucippe's second Scheintod provides a vivid example. When Glitophonreceives a letter from Leueippe in Ephesus, he is shocked to find his belovedis still alive. He thought he had witnessed her beheading. Overjoyed, hesdU pauses a moment to wonder 'whose body is it that we buried?' (5.20.1).A question not answered until the couple's reunion, when Leueippe explainshow the pirates had tricked an 'unfortunate' (KaKo5dt|iova) woman, a pros-titute, to board the ship with the hope of making some money (8.16.1).'^

^^ Geoffrey E.M. De Ste. Croix, The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World: From

the Archaic Age to the Arab Conquests (London: Duckworth 1981), 454.

" Peter Garnsey, Social Status and Legal Privilege in the Roman Empire (Oxford:Clarendon Press, 1970), 235-259.

^' Morales, Vision and Narrative, 216.

' Morales suggests that Leueippe with her reference to the prostitute as 'the poorwoman' (xaXawtcbpoD 8.16.2) reflects some sympathy for her. If so, it is fleeting.

414 Judith Ferkins

This was the woman Clitophon saw killed and thrown overboard. Leueippeis quite explicit about why this unlucky woman had to die instead of her-self, she was worthless, 'They thought they would make more by sellingme than her' (8.16.3). Leueippe is self-described as 'the daughter ofByzantine general and an important Tyrian' (6.16.5). Her backgroundand breeding make her more valuable than the woman who dies in herplace. Maud Gleason has noted how someone's 'social and occupationalstatus' operated in this period very like fate, determining a person's life.''"The prose fiction narratives inculcate this social message. They pronouncethat certain people, like Leueippe, even when faced with every kind ofthreat, always survive. But the opposite is true for others, like this poorprostitute, whose very death goes ungrieved.

Heliodorus's narrative offers another example where the joy at a hero-ine's return from an apparent death comes at the expense of anotherwoman's real death. When Theagenes searches for his beloved Charicleiain a dark cave, he suddenly stumbles over a woman's dead body and isdistraught, believing it to be Leueippe, '[he] sank sobbing to his knees,his hands clasped over his eyes. As if pushed from behind, Theagenessprawled over the body of the dead woman and lay pressing her to hisbosom in a long, clinging embrace . . . Theagenes cries out, "pain beyondenduring, disaster sent by a God."' (2.3.3-4.1, trans. Morgan). WhenCnemon, Theagenes's companion, turns over the body, he discovers itbelongs not to Charicleia, but to Thisbe, a slave woman and the causeof aJl his woes (1.9-2.18). Theagenes is overjoyed to discover that Charicleiais not dead, and experiences his own sort of rebirth, 'he came to life andfelt hopeful' (2.6.1). Thisbe's death, however, evokes little grief or empa-thy. Charicleia even callously calls the dead woman 'fortunate' (ei)5a{|i(Dv)because Theagenes kissed and grieved for her (2.8.2). '

™ Maud W. Gleason, 'Truth Contests and Talking Corpses,' in Constructions ofthe Classical Body (ed. James I. Porter; Ann Arbor, Mich.: University of MichiganPress, 1999), 299. Gleason refers specifically to the judicial system.

'•' Cnemon gloats at Thishe's death because of the harm she caused him, butit was her mistress, Gnemon's stepmother, who orchestrated the plot against him.The prose fictions represent slaves as guilty of crimes with no reference to howmuch actual moral volition they have. Gf John R. Morgan, 'The Story of Knemonin the Aethiopika of Heliodorus,' Journal of Hellenic Studies 109 (1989): 99-113;Richard L. Hunter, 'The Aithiopika of Heliodorus: Beyond Interpretation,' in Studiesin Heliodorus (ed. Richard L. Hunter; Cambridge: Gambridge Philologieal Society,1980), 43. Apuleius's Metamorphoses provides another example. Here a slave involvedin a plot with his mistress to poison her stepson is described as the most wickedof slaves {nequissimi 10.12). He is sentenced to crucifixion for his role, while hismistress is exiled. Status not the level of guilt, determines punishment.

Fietive Scheintod and Christian Resurrection 415

Thisbe's death, unlike Charicleia's, is not apparent, but very real. Thenarrative emphasizes its reality, pressing it home a second time. A littlelater, Cnemon comes to believe that Thisbe is still alive even though hehad buried her with his own hands (5.22-3). However, once again it isnot Thisbe, but Charicleia who lives. Charicleia had assumed Thisbe'sidentity to escape the Great Ring's troops (5.8). Thisbe is not back fromthe dead. Unlike the desires of the elite protagonists, the desires of a slavewoman are not realised in these narratives. The romance hero and hero-ine may never experience real deaths and lasting disasters in the narra-tive world of the prose fictions, but others do.

Christians likely came from many social strata, but few of the elite weremembers in the early centuries, as Christian writers note (Origen, Cels. 1.27;3.44, 55; Tertullian, Frax. 3).^^ The doctrine of the material resurrectioncould offer to these non-elite their own form of 'apparent' deaths. TheChristian message that bodies are immune to destruction, in particular toactions of decay, dissolution and total assimilation was a promise for all.Tertullian stresses this universality when he responds to his opponents'arguments that he must accept the liability of every body to the diges-tive processes of time. Opponents evidently were deriding the notion thatsuch an ignominious entity as the flesh would survive. They begin, hereports, by tracing its shameful origin, as 'being from its first beginning foulfrom the excrement of the earth' {De Res. Mort. 4.3).

The body's demise, however, is worse, as it oozes into a nameless noth-ingness, 'fated to fall back into the earth from whence it came and theninto the name of corpse {cadaver), and then to perish from that name toointo no name at all, and from there into the very death of any desig-nation' {De Res. Mort. 4.3). Heretics and pagans ridicule the notion thatafter death this ignoble flesh can recover 'to wholeness out of corruption,to eoncreteness out of vacuity... in short to somethingness out of noth-ingness {in aliquid omnino de nihilo), that even fire, or the sea, or the bel-lies of wild beasts, or the throats of birds, or the intestines of fishes, orthe special gullet of time itself will give it back again' {De Res. Mort. 4.3).That, however, is exactly what Christians hold, as Tertullian proclaimsat the end of his text, '[s]o then the flesh will rise again, all of it indeed.

"2 See Keith Hopkins, 'Ghristian Number and its Implications,'J^C^ 6 (1998):210-11, for the interesting suggestion that Ghristian emphasis on poverty con-tinued even as Ghristianity went 'socially up-market' hecause of the very steep-ness of the Roman social pyramid and 'its world of deference and condescension'that could make even a lower level senator 'imagine himself to be poor.'

416 Judith Ferkins

itself, entire. Wherever it is, it is on deposit with God through the faithfultrustee of God and men, Jesus Christ,' {De Res. Mort. 63.1).

Christians proclaim that the flesh will not permanently disappear intonothingingness. Christians will not lose their identity or their bodies. They,physically, will not be nothing. This is the message repeatedly inscribedby the Christian advocates of a material resurrection. Athenagoras simi-larly concludes his extended refutation against charges that resurrectionis impossible on the grounds that human bodies are eaten by fish, ani-mals, or even by other humans. Athenagoras insists that all the parts willcome together again, 'and will take the same place for the joining togetherand formation of the same body, and for the resurrection and life of thebody which was dead, or even entirely dissolved' {Res. 8.4).' ^ Athenagorasinsists that only an irrational person could not recognise the truth of hisargument.

What Christian proponents of a material resurrection did was to firmlyground their identity in its bodily reality and insist that they and theirbodies were immune to any lasting violence. Appearances to the contrary,their bodies could not be destroyed, consumed, or assimilated into nothing-ness. Gleason's suggestion that mutilated bodies function as part of thediscourse of power in the early centuries appears cogent. A mutilatedbody seems the consummate image to instantiate both the brutal possibilitiesinherent in power and the 'fragility of human personhood' and its vulner-ability. The provincial elite and Christians both use the language of muti-lated body to construct their particular responses to the Roman realityand to the essential question posed by power, who counts as fully human,'whose lives count as lives.' ^ Through the motifs of apparent deaths andhappy-endings, the provincial elite asserted their luck and resiliency andtheir ability to survive as Rome's partners in power. Each time a supposedlydead person reappears unscathed; it confirms the primary message ofthese narratives that no real harm can come to these privileged people.

^^ See Bernard Pouderon, 'La GhJane Alaimentaire chez Athenagore; Gonfrotadonde Theorie Digestive avec Scienee Medicale de son Temps,' Orpheus N.S. 9 (1988):219-37 for a refutation that Athenagoras's treatise shows his specialised medicalknowledge of the digestive system.

" Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso,2004), 20. Butler poses these questions and another, 'And, finally. What makes fora grieoabk life?' (Butler's emphasis). Goleman, Fatal Charades, 54, in her statement,that the 'deposal of lives as a public performance presupposes a category of peo-ple society regards as dispensable' points to such a category of ungrievable lives.

Fietive Scheintod and Christian Resurrection 417

This must have been a powerful message to the elites of the various citiesacross the empire as they jockeyed for position and power as Roman ruleevolved.

Christians trumped this message. They insist on their bodies' resiliencethrough the doctrine of material resurrection. Their bodies would endure.This also was a potent political statement as more and more bodies throughthe judicial process became susceptible to the new regime of power. Therelationship between false deaths and Christian resurrection is not one ofinfluence, but rather the responses of two difl erent social constituenciesusing a closely related register of themes (mutilation, consumption, deathand survival) to address the changing political and social landscape ofRoman rule.

This context challenges Bowersock's intriguing suggestion that the por-trayal in Petronius's Satyrica of the poet Eumolpus writing a will (in Greek,5ta6TiKTi, testament) stipulating that legacy hunters must first cut up andeat his body, if they wish to inherit his money references Jesus's call toeat his body in the New Testament {Sat. 141.3—4).'' Bowersock arguesthat even the wording of Eumolpus's will, 'eat my body {corpus) with thesame enthusiasm with which they cursed my spirit' {spiritum), echoes thefamiliar distinction made in the Gospels between flesh and spirit. Bowersockoffers a learned and ingenious argument, but underplays the constitutiverole that images of consuming, eating and cannibalism play in Petronius'snarrative. As one commentator notes, 'In the Satyricon, everything livesand breathes, and the entire text grows out of the mischievous Latin punof eating as being {est — he eats/he is).' ^ Eumolpus's charge to his lega-tees that they must eat his body is only the last in a series of cannibal-istic references that function to structure Petronius's text. Rimell demonstratesthat the very first scene of the narrative introduces this theme, 'in chap-ter one with the opening speeches outside the rhetorical school, wherethe environments of learning and the relationship between teacher andpupil, poet and patron/audience, were imagined in terms of eating andcannibalization . . . everyone is part of the food chain, unable ultimatelyto escape their corporeality.'^' Eumolpus's desire to be eaten, the last actin Petronius's incomplete text, grows too organically out of the narrative

^ Bowersock, Fiction as History., 134-138. For Bowersock's discussion for retain-ing the reading devoverint, see 135, n. 37.

^ Victoria Rimell, Petronius and the Anatomy of Fiction (Gambridge: GambridgeUniversity Press, 2002), 9.

^' Rimell, Petronius and Anatomy, 176.

418 Judith Perkins

plot to depend on Christianity. Rather, like the other works discussed inthis paper, both the Satyrica and the Gospels testify to ongoing culturaldeliberations on community and identity that were taking place in theearly empire using the imagery of consumption, incorporation, assimila-tion and annihilation.

Professor of Classics and Humanities JUDITH PERKINS

Saint Joseph College1678 Asylum AvenueWest Hartford, CT 06117-2791United States of AmericaE-mail: jperkins@sjc.edu