‘Similar to Artemis or to the Golden Aphrodite’: Topoi of nuptial poetry and rhetoric in the Greek novel

This paper aims at analysing the intertextual connection between the Greek novels and the nuptial literature, from its earliest poetic forms (see Sappho’s epithalamia), to its rhetoric evolution in the imperial age. At this regard, a difference may be detected among the earlier novelists and the later ones. In Heliodorus, Achilles Tatius and Longus the intermediary role of the Sophistic and the rhetoric literature is clearly attested; on the other side, Xenophon of Ephesus and Chariton show a more direct relationship with their poetic sources and offer a plenty of nuptial topoi that seems more directly inspired by the literary memory of archaic wedding songs than by the sophistic progymnasmata. They thus exhibit an interesting case of ‘narrativisations’ of their lyric models.