Chariton’s Syracuse and its histories of empire CATHERINE CONNORS Seattle The ancient Greek novels tell their stories of young love and high adventure in a realm apart from the everyday world inhabited by their authors and au- diences. In his marvellously bold project of constructing a history of novel- istic discourse that would embrace the novel’s earliest beginnings, Bakhtin describes the ‘chronotope’ or setting in time and space, of the Greek novels as an ‘alien world in adventure time’ in which largely passive and unchang- ing characters endure experiences brought upon them by chance. In Bak- htin’s insistent formulation the novels depict their characters in a time and space wholly divorced or abstracted from social, historical and geographical reality (Bakhtin 1981, 100): The world of these romances is large and diverse. But this size and di- versity is utterly abstract. For a shipwreck one must have a sea, but which particular sea (in the geographic and historical sense) makes no difference at all. For escape it is important to go to another country; for kidnappers it is important to transport their victim to another country – but which particular country again makes no difference at all....The na- ture of a given place does not figure as a component in the event; the place figures in solely as a naked, abstract expanse of space. Bakhtin’s larger point is that as a character moves unchanged through this ‘alien world in adventure time’ he ‘keeps on being the same person’; the novels thus function as a ‘test of the heroes’ integrity, their selfhood’ (Bak- htin 1981, 105, 106). The ‘abstract expanse of space’ of the Greek novels – so different from the historically contextualized topographies of Bakhtin’s beloved 19th century realistic novels – serve as the background against which an individual, private identity is constructed and affirmed: we could