@phdthesis{8752623,
  abstract     = {{My dissertation examines the erōtodidactic scenes in two Greek love novels, Longus’ Pastorals and Achilles Tatius’ Leucippe and Clitophon. It makes two hypotheses: first, that these scenes are indebted to scenes of erotic tuition in Latin Augustan poetry; second, that they self-reflexively comment on the strategies of the text to control and manipulate the reader’s emotional state, thereby actualizing strategies from Latin erōtotidactic tradition. Since until recently the direction of exchange Latin>Greek is controversial, I dedicate my first two chapters to methodological discussions. In chapter 1, I explain my choice of a reader-based methodology and in chapter 2, I isolate one reader of Greek novels with knowledge of Latin poetry, Apuleius. In chapter 3, I discuss Clinias’ erōtodidaxis in connection with Ovid’s Ars Amatoria. I argue that just as the speaker in the Ars Amatoria, Clinias teaches Clitophon both how to love and how to write about love. Furthermore, Clitophon uses the rhetorical guidelines taught by Clinias in his speech to Leucippe and in his narration to the primary narrator/reader, thereby suggesting that he attempts to seduce the reader into the story. Again, this actualises a rhetorical strategy of Ovid’s Ars Amatoria. My chapter 4 consists in a systematic study of the reception of the Georgics in Longus’ novel. I argue that the beginning of the second book of the novel, and in particular the scene in which Philetas, the most important praeceptor amoris in the novel, recounts his pursuit of Eros, could be read as alluding to the Aristaeus epyllion in the fourth book of the Georgics. I then explore how this possible allusion to the Georgics is rewarding for our interpretation of the themes of education and myth, didactic authority and the possibility of speech to control powerful emotions such as love in this passage of Longus. Longus appears to play with his reader by apparently depriving language of pragmatic effect, while all the same celebrating his novel’s ability to change his readers’ emotional state. This is perhaps the sign of a polemical discussion about the relative efficiency of poetry and sophistic rhetoric.}},
  author       = {{Demerre, Olivier}},
  language     = {{eng}},
  pages        = {{XVI, 234}},
  publisher    = {{Ghent University. Faculty of Arts and Philosophy}},
  school       = {{Ghent University}},
  title        = {{Novel teachers, lovers, and readers : praeceptores amoris in Achilles Tatius and Longus amidst Greek and Latin literary traditions}},
  year         = {{2022}},
}