A Good Place to Talk: Discourse and Topos in Achilles Tatius and Philostratus

We might think more germane to architects, urban planners, restaurateurs and telephone companies the question: what makes a place good for talk? Yet the evidence of ancient Greek novels suggests that tellers of those tales were equally concerned with this issue and its implications. In this paper I would like to explore the place taken up in one such ancient tale, the story of Leukippe and Kleitophon attributed to Achilles Tatius. I shall propose that his attention to place is, in fact, a way of being attentive to the qualities of his own artistic creation. In other words, for Achilles Tatius, topos is more than just a topos. Furthermore, I shall argue that the rhetoric of place as it relates to narrative makes explicit a deeply felt link in Greek literature and culture between the ground on which one walks and the people of whom, as well as with whom, one speaks. This latter point will take us on short treks into other territory—Longus’ Daphnis and Chloe, Plato’s Phaedrus, and a possible contemporary of Achilles Tatius, the Philostratus who authored the Heroikos. If in the end we come to think of this Greek novel as being more like aboriginal Australian narratives and less like the “novel” so-called, I will have achieved part of my purpose. On this textual journey there are seven stops, best viewed as a series of transformations. As in the Ovidian model (itself perhaps a forerunner of the ancient novel), so with my chosen topos, people become trees, trees people,