Notes on the Ephesian Tale and the
Acts of Paul and Thecla

Gwen Jones

About A.D. 200 Xenophon of Ephesus wrote a romance in which an Ephesian boy and girl fall in love and marry; in accordance with an oracle of Apollo they are sent abroad to suffer various adventures, together or separately, including capture by pirates, scourging, imprisonment, shipwreck, capture by brigands, self-poisoning, entombment, theft by grave robbers, slavery, crucifixion, near death at the stake by fire, near destruction by savage animals in a pit, and countless attempts upon their virtue--through all of which they endeavor to remain chaste to each other, regain each other, and return home.[1] They succeed. Also about A.D. 200, a legend arose which came to be included among the apocryphal Acts of the saints (and for which a third-century text survives), in which a woman named Thecla is converted to Christianity by St. Paul, and accordingly suffers trial, imprisonment, fire at the stake, the beasts of the arena, attempts upon her chastity, and finally engulfment by stone, all for he sake of preserving; her Christian chastity. Despite the large differences of purpose and length between the long and entertaining romance and the brief and inspirational Acts, the similarities are obvious, and illustrate the reasons that have led certain scholars to term the various Acts of the apostles, including the Acts of Paul and Thecla, "Christian romances."

Ben Perry, in his book The Ancient Romances, disputes the classification of the lives of the saints, such as the Acts of Paul and Thecla, the Acts of Andreas, the Acts of Thomas, etc., as romances, and contests the right of such narrative to the title "Christian romance." Her argues that the only legitimate criterion for classification among genres is that of purpose, and adds,

In the case of the apocrypha Acts, which are all alike in their tendency, it ought to be clear to anyone that the principal purpose of the writers was to propagate the ideal of Christian asceticism, and not, as in the secular romances properly so called, simply to entertain the reader by a series of adventures of whatever kind.[2]

Yet the indisputable similarities in these two kinds of writing lead one to conjecture on the relationship between them, regardless of their classification.

In his discussion of general literary relationships, Perry takes great pains to point out that literature is not in itself generative; therefore it does not develop from one form to another, nor does it have genealogies in which its development can be traced (Perry, p. 25). Rather it is men who change and develop, and whose ideas may or may not be related, although these relationships may consequently be reflected in the literary compositions which are projections of these ideas (Perry, p. 18). Thus in his argument Perry directs attention away from Aristotelian forms and elements of content, to what lies behind the compositions and can be glimpsed through them, the authors, audiences, and their world.

Little is known about the authors of the Greek romances, beyond their conjectured dates, yet it is clear to anyone reading their works that they were not possessed of the learned style or the polished elegance usually associated with the great classical authors, nor were they writing for a particularly erudite audience. It is interesting that the ecclesiastical historian Socrates asserted that the authors of two of the Greek romances, Heliodorus and Achilles Tatius, were bishops. It has been speculated that Byzantine monks gave them the episcopal titles in order to make their books, of which the monks were exceedingly fond, "respectable" reading.[3] Tertullian reports that the account of Paul and Thecla was forged by a presbyter of Asia who, when convicted, confessed that he did so out of respect to Paul.[4] Nevertheless both the romances and the Acts were very popular, and in the case of the Acts believed genuine to such an extent that the emperor Zeno is said to have been visited by a vision of Thecla, who promised to restore his empire to him when once he had lost it, and when he did regain it, he built her a sumptuous temple at Seleucia (Wake and Lardner, p. 113.)

About the age in which these authors lived, Peter Brown states, "the third century A. D. must lie at the center of any account of the making of Late Antiquity. The changes associated with that century have been held to mark no less than the 'watershed between the Ancient World and the European Middle Ages.'"[5] It was during this century that Christianity developed from a small and disreputable cult to the official state religion of the Roman Empire. Thus these authors stood at the beginning of a century which was critical for the western world. Their works, one Christian, the other presumably pagan, reflect the concerns and interests of men whose wold was to change radically, and the romances perhaps illuminate the reasons for the change.

In his book The World of Late Antiquity, Brown discusses the causes for the rise of Christianity. He differentiates between the impact of the Empire on the upper and lower classes, noting that while the new peace gave stability and security to the dominant classes, it did precisely the opposite to the humbler people.[6] The increase in trade and emigration provided the humbler man with new opportunities for travel, and for meeting travelers; consequently the local differences which served to define the boundaries of his home, and indeed the individual himself, diminished. These humbler people, Brown says, "Found themselves no longer citizens of their accustomed town, but 'citizens of the world'; and many, it appears, were finding that world was a lonely and impersonal place" (Brown, 1971, p. 62). Such a person was a likely proselyte, for to him Christianity offered the support of a community and a new identity as a member of a clearly defined group with a firmly established moral code, free of geographic boundaries. If we assume that there was a Christian community in the area in which the person found himself, he could be assured of all the advantages and disadvantages which association with that group might entail.

Ironically, the disadvantages of Christianity may have brought about as many conversions as the advantages. Brown, in discussing the triumph of Christianity over the various rival oriental cults, notes that Christianity was the only cult that enjoyed the publicity of intermittent persecution (Brown, 1971, p. 62). The effect of this publicity is not to be underestimated. If the prospective proselyte was searching for some sort of identity, nothing could have distinguished the church more clearly than the persecutions.

However that may be, Christianity increased through the assimilation of the lonely, those without a sense of belonging, and those without a sense of identity. To the lonely it offered the perfect love of God.

For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. (John 3:16)

Or what man of you, if his son asks him for bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a serpent? If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask him! (Matthew 7:9-11)

For those men "uprooted and cast adrift" (Brown, 1971, p. 62), Christianity had a very different kind of answer. If men "found themselves no longer citizens of their accustomed town, but 'citizens of the world,'" Christianity instructed them that they were not even citizens of this world, but only of another, which was to come.

If the world hates you, know that it has hated me before it hated you. If you were of the world, the world would love its own; but because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, therefore the world hates you. (John 15:18-19)

Thus Christians felt, and indeed were encouraged to feel, that they were exiles in a world to which they did not belong.

The evidence of the pagan romances suggests that this feeling of displacement and exile was not restricted to Christians, but was also widespread among the audience of the popular "thrillers." In Xenophon's Ephesian Tale the young principals, Habrocomes and Anthia, are sent abroad in order to mitigate an oracle of Apollo. It is when they leave the security of their home, and thus become vulnerable, that they begin to suffer their many adventures. Throughout their experience they strive to return to Ephesus. Their exile may reflect a similar sensation of vulnerability in the semi-educated author and audience of the romance. In another romance, the Chereas and Callirhoe of Chariton, the heroine, who is in exactly the same situation of exile from home and separation from her husband, builds a cenotaph for her husband, whom she believes dead, and laments: "Cruel Fortune, thou has begrudged us even in our death a common burial ground, and hast made even our dead bodies to be exiles."[7]

If the romantic heroes and heroines reflect in their exiles the anxiety and longing of the readers for their homes, then the characters must vicariously satisfy that longing, for they do inevitably reach home, where they live happily ever after. Herein lies a difference between the romances and the Acts of Paul and Thecla. For Thecla, too, is exiled from her home, yet when she returns after her harrowing experiences, she finds that she remains unwelcome, so long as she is a Christian. The message is clear: a Christian's real home is in heaven, and his or her entire life is, in effect, a life of exile. The conversion to Christianity closes forever the door to one's former home. Thecla, soon after her rejection by her mother, symbolically acknowledges the realization of her exile on earth, by going to live in a cave, which is the semblance of a tomb, and the door to her heavenly home.

Since the oracle of Apollo which sends Habrocomes and Anthia abroad also commands that they first be married, it is possible to view ensuing exile as a honeymoon, not, of course, in the modern sense, but as a period of time spent removed from society in which they prepare to return home in their new status a married adults. The purpose of such an initiation rite is to allow the initiates to escape from the restricting environment of their community and temporarily enter a world in which they are free to experience the necessary change. A certain amount of danger is inherent in any place so free as to allow this kind of change, as the romantic hero and heroine soon discover.

The change which the lovers experience is a symbolic one, prophesied by the oracle of Apollo (Hadas, p. 76): "For both a bridal chamber will serve as a tome, and fire the destroyer." Habrocomes' symbolic change is a sort of baptism of fire and water. After he is falsely condemned for murder, he is crucified beside the river Nile, which subsequently overflows and rescues him. When he is recaptured and sentenced to be burned at the stake, the god of the Nile again causes the river to overflow and extinguishes the fire. It is impossible to miss the symbolism of death in the fire, and of rebirth in the water of the Nile. Anthia experiences a symbolic death and entombment after she takes a sleeping potion, which she believes to be poison, on her wedding night, in order to avoid the consummation of a second marriage and the breaking of her vow of chastity to Habrocomes.

Thecla undergoes a rite of initiation in her exile, that of holy baptism. She accomplishes this by throwing herself into a pit of water in the arena. A cloud of divine lightning and fire envelops her in the water, protecting her from rapacious fishes; her baptism is also one of fire and water. At this point the paths of the romance and the Acts diverge: after her baptism, Thecla, unlike the romantic lovers, is changed in character. She receives the power to confess her faith in speech, and no longer suffers her trials in silence. She also begins to instruct others in the faith, and soon becomes a worker of miracles. No change so radical can be discerned in the characters of Habocomes and Anthia, nor is that change part of the romance. While Thecla's transition has been from world to world and age to age, that is, from the worldly to the otherworldly, and from the ancient to the medieval, Habrocomes and Anthia have simply grown up. Their symbolic deaths represent the end of their childhoods and the commencement of their adult lives. This absence of fundamental change in the characters is in keeping with the outcome of the narrative, for when their trials are over, they return to their home in the past, while the Christian Thecla proceeds boldly on the road towards the future.

In the two works considered, when the exiled character are removed from their accustomed defining boundaries, geographical and otherwise, they retain a sense of identity and security through their personal and spiritual relationships. Romantic love is the defining characteristic of Habrocomes and Anthia, as spiritual love is the formative experience of Thecla's character, giving her the heroic courage necessary for her trials. Thus despite the great difference in the kind of love employed in the two works, these loves have much the same significance for the characters. Without their love the characters would be as utterly destroyed as they themselves assert. Anthia speaks for all of them when she vows to Habrocomes (Hadas, p. 80):

I solemnly invoke to witness our great ancestral goddess, great Diana of the Ephesians, and this sea upon which we sail, and that divinity who has so well implanted in us passionate love for one another, that if I am separated from you even for any short shift of time, I shall not live, shall no longer look upon the sun.

Habrocomes and Anthia are such perfect vehicles of love that it is tempting to grant them the tile of saint as well as Thecla. If one does so, nothing would seem to be a more important prerequisite for the sainthood of Love than physical beauty. Descriptions and affirmations of the lovers' beauty abound in the romance. Both are said to be worshipped as divinities because of their beauty, and when they fall in love, it is, naturally, at first sight. This concern with physical beauty is in accordance with the erotic nature of love in the romance. In Chariton's romance, Dionysius, a principal character, remarks, calling to mind a great literary tradition (Blake, p. 21): "Haven't you heard the poets say that beautiful persons are the children of gods?"

Beauty ought not to be necessary for one to be considered a child of the Christian God. Yet Thecla is also beautiful, in keeping with the literary tradition, although her beauty receives less attention from the author. Presumably, all things being equal, it is better to have a beautiful saint than an ugly one. If Thecla were ugly, there would be nothing remarkable or admirable about her continued chastity. More than beauty, however, the distinguishing characteristic of saints, both romantic and Christian, is the achievement of great feats, or in a more passive sense, the endurance of great trials, for the sake of love. All of them have the opportunity to marry respectably and live prosperously, if they will abandon their commitments to love. None of them does so, but each chooses to undergo great sufferings and trials instead.

Despite Anthia's vow that she cannot live even for a brief time without Habrocomes, she does survive their separation, as does he. This separation can be viewed as another form of exile, in which the love the pair have for each other is symbolized and proved by the physical loyalty and chastity which they maintain. This physical proof, and all things physical, are of extreme importance to them, as if there were no aspect of their relationship other than the physical one. When Anthia dreams that Habrocomes has been forcibly dragged away by another beautiful woman, she laments bitterly and searches for the means to kill herself, as if this were the end of their love, and thus also of herself. Thecla also is exceedingly concerned for her chastity, the importance of which has been urgently pressed upon her by Saint Paul. While there is no indication in the Acts that involuntary loss of chastity would also deprive her of God's love, she certainly takes no chances. Thecla's Christian chastity is also a symbol of her spiritual loyalty to God while she is exiled on earth. Thus it is a physical proof of her rejection of things physical.

This preservation of their chastity proves to be an exceedingly difficult task for all of the characters under consideration. The virtue of Habrocomes and Anthia is under attack from the beginning to the end of the romance, as is Thecla's in the Acts. Beauty and chastity are the primary instigators of the action in the romance, because the characters' beauty attracts desire ad their insistence on chastity rejects it, and thus provokes violence. This tension between beauty and chastity foments the storm of adventures which the pair must weather, and it is the same storm which buffets Thecla. It is clear in the Acts that the most odious aspect of Christianity for the persecutors is chastity. When Paul and Thecla are brought to trial at Iconium, Paul is ordered merely to be whipped out of the city for corrupting the youth of the city, but Thecla is ordered to be burnt at the stake for the more serious crime of refusing to marry the man to whom she is betrothed.

Thecla's mother takes the lead in prosecuting Thecla and demanding that she be burned at the stake. While in the Acts it is sometimes difficult to understand why Thecla's refusal to satisfy a man's desires should bring such severe punishment upon her-when Alexander attempts to force Thecla in Antioch, he ought not be so outraged at her resistance-it is not so difficult at other times. The anger of Thecla's mother is understandable, since refusal to marry was considered a serious violation of one's familial responsibilities. When no descendant survived to carry on the family traditions, and the family died out completely, the ancestors lost every claim to immortality, as they conceived it, on earth. Thecla's betrothed bridegroom Thamyris and two false disciples of Paul speak of this earthly immortality when they scheme to free Thecla from her detestable new ideas (Wake and Lardner, p. 118): "[We] will teach him that the resurrection which he [Paul] speaks of, is already come, and consists in having children." Thus Thecla can be said to have disowned her mother, before her mother disowned her.

Through her Christian chastity, which signifies earthly death, Thecla strives to attain spiritual immortality. If she has no brothers or sisters, her spiritual immortality makes impossible her mother's earthly immortality. Habrocomes and Anthia would have been more acceptable children for Thecla's mother. The symbolic deaths which the lovers experience during their exile from home and separation from each other represent the end of their childhoods as individuals and mark the transition to an adulthood which will presumably be procreative. At the end of the romance, upon their return to Ephesus, the lovers erect large tombs for their parents, who have died during their absence. This action symbolizes their acceptance of adults roles in the family and illustrates their dedication to the traditional concept of earthly immortality. Thecla's tomb, on the other hand, in which she lives and dies, is a symbol of her rejection of earthly life.

The erection of the parents' tomb is the final occurrence of the death motif in the romance. This motif points up on interest in physical death on the part of the author and audience. Perhaps the most striking example of this motif occurs when Habrocomes meets the exiled Spartan Aigialeus, who has embalmed the corpse of his dead wife and says of it: "I keep it with me and always kiss it and consort with it" (Hadas, p. 111). The aged Aigialeus illustrates the tremendous emphasis on the physical aspect of love (and death) in his tragic attempt to prolong love even after death. Yet this physical aspect of love is clearly not the only one which Aigialeus feels. When he tells Habrocomes that his wife, Thelxinoe, still seems a young girl in his eyes, he is not saying that he is demented and blind, but that his love is as a young and fresh as it was on his wedding night. Like everyone else in the romance, he can speak only in physical terms, even when he attempts to communicate something essentially non-physical. In another age and place, another man would express Aigialeus' thought differently.

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O, no! It is an ever-fixed mark,
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wand'ring bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.

Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom;--
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.[8]

The materiality of death and of love has its place in the Acts as well as in the romance. Thecla, as has been said, lives seventy-two years of her life in a tomb-like cave, and when she is finally miraculously entombed alive in it, at the end of the Acts, she leaves behind a piece of her veil as a relic. Yet this relic is a symbol not of the death, but of the immortality of the saint, and it is imbued with the power of love to work miracles and convey blessings. The body of Aigialeus' wife is the relic of a saint of romantic love, and as that, it has the power to fulfill the needs of the aged Spartan. Aigialeus provides an example of someone who has remained perpetually in his exiled state, and so will gain neither earthly immortality in the context of his ancestors and descendants, nor spiritual immortality through Christianity. In his exile, first his wife and then her body provides an object for his love, which is the only defining quality of his character. The pathetic vulnerability of an exiled person is amply illustrated by the fact that Aigialeus cannnot even bury his wife outside the boundaries of his former home. For to entrust his wife's body to foreign soil would commit her to eternal oblivion, and at the same time destroy himself.

Yet Aigialeus' love for his wife after her death reflects not only the awareness of a need for identity among such people, but also a longing for a love which can escape the corporeality of the tomb and live forever. Xenophon and his contemporaries were not able to conceive of romantic love in this manner, as later writers have.

All other things to their destruction draw,
Only our love hath no decay;
This, no tomorrow hath, not yesterday,
Running it never runs from us away,
But truly keeps his first, last, everlasting day.[9]

Rather than immortalize romantic love, the ancients replaced it with the divine love which the Acts propagate, presumably because Christianity best fulfilled the needs of the people at this time. With the widespread conversion to Christianity came the demise of the pagan Greek romance. Although other poems of Donne suggest that Eros, even in his reduced condition, has proved as immortal a god as the Christian God, nevertheless Neitzsche's famous pronouncement remains a fitting epitaph for the pagan Greek romance.

Christianity gave Eros poison to drink; he did not die of it, certainly, but degenerated to Vice.[10]

[1] This paper was written for Professor Elliot's class in Medieval Latin, and submitted to this journal on her recommendation. Professor Elliot's encouragement and interest in my fledgling ideas were invaluable, as were her suggestions for the better expression of those ideas.

[2] Ben Perry, The Ancient Romances (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1967), p. 31.

[3] Longus, Xenophon, and Dio Chrysostom, Three Greek Romances, trans. Moses Hadas (The Library of Liberal Arts; Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Educational Publishing, 1953), p. xiii.

[4] William Wake and Nathaniel Lardner (comp.), The Apocryphal New Testament (London: Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent, and Co., n.d., p. 113.

[5] Peter Brown, The Making of Late Antiquity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978), p. 2.

[6] Peter Brown, The World of Late Antiquity (London: Thames and Hudson, Ltd., 1971), p. 60.

[7] Chariton, Chaereas and Callirhoe, trans. Warren E. Blake (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1939), p. 56.

[8] Sonnet 116, Shakespeare's Sonnets, ed. Edward Bliss (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1956), p. 58.

[9] John Donne, "The Anniversarie," The Complete Poetry of John Donne, ed. John T. Shawcross (New York: Doubleday and Company, Inc., 1967), p. 109, lines 6-10.

[10] Frederich Wilhelm Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Helen Zimmern, (New York: Modern Library, n.d.), no. 168, p. 90, quoted in Ben Perry, The Ancient Romances, p. 105.