Part 5

From most of these adventures the pair were saved by their piety. Never did they lose an opportunity of offering prayer, thanksgiving, vows and sacrifices to the gods. The story begins with the festival of Artemis at Ephesus at which Habrocomes and Anthia fell in love and ends with their return to her temple to offer thanksgiving for a happy ending out of all their misfortunes. At the festival Anthia appeared as the priestess of Artemis and led a procession of maidens in which she alone was garbed as Artemis. This may be a symbol of her resolute chastity. Many details of the worship of the goddess are given which seem based on reality.[72] Artemis appears not as the Ephesian goddess of fertility, but as the protectress of chastity and in this function joins with Isis in safeguarding the purity of the heroine.

Eros is the offended god who undoubtedly in vengeance caused the violent love of Habrocomes, the separation and the miseries of the unhappy pair. There are few references to Aphrodite: to her son rather than to herself is given the function of inspiring love. On the Babylonian baldequin over the marriage bed of Habrocomes and Anthia there had been woven a scene in which Aphrodite appeared attended by little Loves and Ares unarmed was coming towards her led by Eros bearing a lighted torch.[73] Habrocomes at Cyprus offered prayers to Aphrodite.[74]

The oracle of Apollo at Claros determined the plot by ordering the marriage of Habrocomes and Anthia and predicting their voyaging, their separation, their disasters, their reunion. But its clauses are not sufficiently explained: we are never told why the young bride and groom and their parents feel they must start out on their fateful journey. Some think the obscurity is due to Xenophon’s epitomizer. There are other possible explanations. The action may be an abandoning of themselves to the will of the gods; or a bold step towards their final promised safety; or a flight from the city where they had suffered so much. An oracle is the traditional prelude to a voyage of adventure. Xenophon uses it, says Dalmeyda, to pique curiosity, to render the misfortunes of the two more dramatic by the prophecy of them and to reassure his readers about a happy ending.[75]

In happiness or distress both the young lovers honored the god of the place in which they found themselves. In the first part of their journey together they offered sacrifice to Hera in her sanctuary at Samos.[76] At Rhodes, Habrocomes’ prayer to Helios saved him from crucifixion and burning through the miracles of the Nile.[77] Perhaps Helios was rewarding Habrocomes for the golden armor which he and Anthia had jointly dedicated to him at Rhodes in his temple.[78] This votive had another certain part in the plot because when Habrocomes returned there alone to pray near his votive, Leucon and Rhode, who had been reading the inscription set up near it by their masters, recognized him and revealed themselves.[79] At Memphis Anthia appealing to the pity of the god Apis received from his famous oracle a promise that she would find Habrocomes.[80]

Ares appears only in Xenophon. This is strange when war plays such a part in the other romances. In the _Ephesiaca_, Hippothoos and his bandits at the festival of Ares had the custom of suspending the victim to be sacrificed, human being or animal, from a tree and killing it by hurling their javelins at it. They were preparing to sacrifice Anthia in this way when she was rescued.[81]

The other cult which is as important as that of Artemis for the story is the cult of Isis. Anthia saved herself from Psammis’ advances by declaring that she was a consecrated priestess of Isis so the rajah respected her person.[82] At Memphis in her temple, Anthia appealed to Isis who had preserved her chastity in the past to grant her salvation and restore her to Habrocomes.[83] To escape Polyidos’ lust, Anthia took refuge at the sanctuary of Isis at Memphis and again besought the goddess for aid. Polyidos in fear of Isis and pity for Anthia promised to respect her.[84] Finally near that temple of Isis Habrocomes and Anthia found each other and in the same temple they offered prayers of thanksgiving.[85] Isis thus in the _Ephesiaca_ figures as the protectress of chastity.

The worship of Isis had been carried to the coast of Asia Minor by sailors and traders. In the empire both Artemis and Isis had statues in the Artemesion of Ephesus. The Egyptian cult, purified and penetrated with moral ideas, seems to belong to the second century A.D. From its very nature, the goddess Isis becomes as natural a protector of Anthia as is Artemis.[86] This synthesis of the two goddesses in one protectress of the heroine is a natural process of the philosophical thought of the time. In a modern novel or a cinema, better clarity would be attained for our non-philosophical minds if one goddess, Isis, was worshipped by Anthia and was the deity of her salvation. Apuleius achieved just this simplification in his novel by making Isis the one and only savior of his hero Lucius.

To develop and sustain these three main interests of the story, love, adventure and religion, the usual devices of a plot are employed. The setting is cinematic in its many changes: Ephesus, the ocean, Samos, Rhodes, Tyre, Syria, Cilicia, Cappadocia, Egypt, Sicily, Italy, Rhodes again, back to Ephesus, and thrown in with the setting are many geographical details which are often wrong.[87] The characters are familiar types: the ravishingly beautiful hero and heroine, their perturbed parents, high officials (Perilaos and Psammis) who take the place of historical characters, faithful slaves, a wily procurer, a doctor, pirates, bandits.

Dalmeyda has written a discriminating paragraph on the morality of the characters.[88] He says that of course all the characters of the romance do not attain the perfection of virtue of the two protagonists, but altogether the author shows us a gallery of persons without wickedness who are sympathetic and who have an air of honesty even in the exercise of the worst occupations. Manto, who falsely accuses Habrocomes of having wished to violate her and who has him cruelly tortured, is motivated by an overwhelming passion. Apsyrtos, her father, chief of the pirates, shows himself just and generous to the hero when he has discovered his daughter’s calumny. The slaves are devoted and faithful. Lampon to whom Manto gives Anthia as his wife is a rustic full of civility and goodness. The man who traffics in young girls to whom Anthia is sold shows a noble sympathy when she pretends to be afflicted with seizures. Hippothoos, a brigand chief, exercises his trade ruthlessly putting villages to fire and sword; he has a weakness too for handsome lads; but to Habrocomes he is a faithful and devoted friend. He renounces his passion for Anthia when he finds she is the wife of his friend and aids her in every way in her search for Habrocomes. It is this recognition of some good in every human being that gives Xenophon his large humanity.

Oracles are given by Apollo at Claros and by Apis in Memphis. Dreams and visions disturb both hero and heroine. A letter (Manto’s) is important for the plot. Some conversation is used. A court-room scene is sketched in, Habrocomes’ trial for murder before the prefect of Egypt. Soliloquies are frequent since woeful lovers parted must bewail their lot. Attempted suicides testify to their despair.[89] Résumés of adventures are helpfully presented by important characters at different stages in the narrative. And after a hundred hair-breadth escapes, journeys end in lovers’ meetings as the oracle of Apollo had reassuringly predicted at the beginning of the romance.

In spite of the use of these conventions, the story has a lively and compelling interest. We are led to share the admiration and marvel of the characters themselves. We are moved by the pity which they often feel. Their piety induces in us reverence. We agree with their preference for Greeks rather than barbarians. And we admire the romantic love which maintains faithfulness in the face of death, or outlives death itself.[90]

The style of this gem of a novel is finely cut, clear and beautiful in its pure Atticism. Dalmeyda, who follows Rohde and Bürger in believing the present form of the romance is due to an epitomizer, yet has to admit that all the “naked simplicity” of the style is not due to the redactor.[91] This characteristic is so distinctive of the author that it seems to differentiate him from other writers of romance by giving his story the air of a popular tale. Sometimes, Dalmeyda continues, the expression is double, as if in a sort of naive elegance. Words are repeated awkwardly. Stereotyped formulae are used. The author gives every person a name even if he appears only once. Love is generally expressed in conventional terms, which are however intended to suggest its violent or tragic character. There is even a ready-made formula for ecstasy (οὐκέτι καρτερῶν or οὐκέτι φέρειν δυνάµενος). But the passion of Habrocomes and Anthia is expressed differently. At their final reunion Xenophon describes with force and delicacy their joy which is both tender and passionate.[92]

Whether “the naked simplicity” of the _Ephesiaca_ is to be attributed to an epitomizer, to its approach to the genre of a popular tale, or to the author’s own taste, the romance is certainly characterized throughout by brevity, restraint and sparcity of decoration. There are so few descriptions that those of the festival of Artemis and of the canopy over the marriage bed of Habrocomes and Anthia are notable.[93] The action is too rapid and varied to allow time for decorative passages. Instead of being set amid purple patches, it is advanced by a kind of documentary evidence: two oracles, two letters, one memorial and two votive inscriptions, all directly quoted,[94] and a reference to an inscription finally offered as a votive in the Artemesion by Habrocomes and Anthia giving an account of all their adventures.

Inset narratives, those stories within stories which make pleasing digressions in other longer romances, are here very few. Hippothoos recounts his love for the beautiful Hyperanthes and the boy’s untimely drowning.[95] Aegialeus, the Spartan living with the mummy of his wife, tells how his love for her has outlasted death.[96] Both these narratives are colorful, dramatic and poignant from the very qualities which characterize all the romance. These are brevity, sincerity and restrained emotion.

The influence of Chariton is clearly seen in Xenophon both in direct imitation and in qualities of style. When the Phoenician pirates had kidnapped Habrocomes and Anthia on their trireme and fired their captives’ vessel leaving many to perish in the sea, an old slave, as he swam, pitifully called to Habrocomes to save his aged paedagogue or at least kill him and bury him.[97] In view of the situation this is a ridiculous appeal, but it is a clear imitation of a passage in Chariton where, when Chaereas resolves to go to sea to search for Callirhoe, his father Ariston begs his son not to desert him, but to take him on his trireme,[98] or to wait a few days for his father’s death and burial. Anthia, when Manto, the daughter of the brigand chief, demands Habrocomes’ submission to her passion, begs her husband to save his life in this way and swears that she will leave him free by killing herself, only asking from him burial, one last kiss, and a place in his memory. This is in direct imitation of Chariton and of Chaereas’ words when he finds Callirhoe married to Dionysius.[99] Here Xenophon is simpler than his model, for he does not transfer the effective lines from Homer which Chariton quotes.[100] The burial of Anthia with its rich funeral gifts resembles the burial of Callirhoe and also the lavish equipment of the cenotaph for Chaereas.[101] The language of Chariton is adapted for the lament of Habrocomes in Italy at the failure of his quest and his renewed pledge of faithfulness unto death.[102]

These clear indications of imitation of detail serve to corroborate the evidence of general imitation of style. Indeed Dalmeyda sees in the whole temperament of Xenophon a close affinity to Chariton. Xenophon introduces the most startling events without fanfare. Characteristic of his style are accumulated questions, pathetic résumés, oaths, invocations of the gods, apostrophes of men and of things particularly of that fatal beauty which the young hero and heroine deplore because of their misery. Xenophon’s relation to Chariton in all this is striking.[103]

The plot of the novel has seemed to some critics epic in its chronological narrative of successive adventures. Others find the structure a tragic plot with an angry god demanding satisfaction for the sin of arrogance and the guilty hero involving in his own nemesis the one most dear to him. It is true that this and other resemblances to tragedy exist. The story of Manto and her false denunciation of Habrocomes for an attempt to rape her after she has failed to win his love goes back to the Phaedra story of Euripides’ _Hippolytus_. The noble goatherd husband of Anthia finds his prototype in Electra’s peasant husband in Euripides’ play. The scene where Anthia on her wedding-night takes poison which proves to be a sleeping potion, to avoid a new marriage and keep her troth to her lost love seems to be the antecedent of the poison scene in Shakespeare’s _Romeo and Juliet_.

To me, however, this novelette finds its closest affiliation in another successor. Both the structure and the devices used to arouse emotion anticipate the modern cinema. This contemporary form of amusement is such an accepted part of modern life that we hardly need to read the books about the cinema by Allerdyce Nicoll, Lewis Jacobs, Maurice Bardèche and others to understand “the Rise of the American Film.” Personally I go to the movies to escape from routine and from painful thoughts of our own times. Occasionally I allow myself to be educated about _Steel_ or _The River_. I prefer to industrial films or films of social problems like lynching, prison conditions, housing, films with biographies of great historical characters: Pasteur, Zola, Rembrandt. I like films set in local history such as _Maryland_ or _Kentucky_ or _Gone with the Wind_ or _The Howards of Virginia_ or _The North West Mounted Police_. I have to shut my eyes during the fighting and the cruelties of _Sea Hawk_ and _All This and Heaven Too_. But I like the cinematic rapidity of changes of scene, the control by the camera of space and magnitude, the extension of the time-limit, the fade-ins and fade-outs which can create fantastic visions, the value of the flash-back to recall what has been already seen, the concentration of interest achieved by close-ups.

Many of these devices I recognize in the Greek Romances and especially in Xenophon of Ephesus. His narrative is as condensed as that of a scenario with lacunae, abrupt transitions, failures in an adequate vocabulary of emotion. The local history of Ephesus is emphasized and depicted. Scenes shift with cinematic rapidity. Hair-raising adventures succeed each other at an exciting pace. Bandits and pirates achieve robbery and kidnapping. High police officials or officers like G-Men perform valiant rescues. Court-room scenes as in many films vie with shipwrecks in interest. Documents like letters are presented to the reader’s eye as on the screen. Visions and dreams are made to seem as real as in fade-ins and fade-outs.

There is a clear morality in the opposition of good and bad characters and in the final victory of the good. Hero and heroine captivate by their extraordinary beauty and maintain their chastity and fidelity against terrific odds. Hence their phenomenal virtue is rewarded by reunion in the end. Religion often plays a saving part (as on the screen for example in _Brother Orchid_). The Reader like the audience at the movie goes away with a sense of having been enlivened, entertained and vastly improved. For the function of the Greek romance in the second and third centuries A.D., when the universal rule of the Roman Empire gave scant scope for great oratory or tragedy under the blessings of an enforced peace, was to entertain and to edify. The Greek romance substituted for the adventures of the mind new themes: the excitements of passion, the interests of travel, and the consolations of religion. It was lifted out of the ranks of the trivial and the second-rate by its great central theme: that there is such a thing as true love; that weighed in the balance against it all the world is nothing; and that it outlives time and even death.

Our own age in America, bleeding internally from the agony of a war which it is powerless to end, fearful for its own menaced security, demands from the cinema not only temporary oblivion and excitement, but encouragement to believe that love lasts even unto death, that heroes ride again and are victorious, and that finally, by the help of God, the right will conquer.

IV _THE_ AETHIOPICA _OF HELIODORUS_

The life of Heliodorus is as obscure as that of each of the other writers of Greek romance, but in the tradition of his there is a special point of controversy. Was Heliodorus a pagan novelist or a Christian bishop? Or by some strange metamorphosis did the writer of the romantic _Aethiopica_ become in later and staider years the Bishop of Tricca? The only certain facts are found in the autobiographical sentence which concludes the romance, that he was a Phoenician of Emesa, of a family descended from Helios, the son of Theodosius.

It was Socrates who, in the fifth century A.D., stated that the custom of celibacy for the clergy was introduced in Thessaly by Heliodorus when he became bishop of Tricca. He added that Heliodorus wrote in his youth a love-story, which he called _Aethiopica_.[104] Photius in the ninth century says that he received the bishopric later, that is after writing the romance. Nicephorus Callistus in the fourteenth century after quoting the remark of Socrates adds that the _Aethiopica_ created such a scandal Heliodorus had to choose between his bishopric and the destruction of his romance so he abandoned his charge, but this is probably mere embellishment of the story. As Rattenbury points out,[105] neither Socrates, Photius nor Nicephorus declares that Heliodorus was a Christian when he wrote his romance, but they imply clearly that he became a bishop afterwards. And if the author of the romance was a devout pagan as he seems to have been, that state of mind could have made possible his conversion to Christianity. This seems a reasonable explanation of the strong tradition continuing from the fifth century that Heliodorus became bishop of Tricca.

As to his date, there are some certainties but no exactitude. The Bishop of Tricca must have lived before Socrates wrote his _Historia Ecclesiastica_ which covered the period 306-439. There is no external evidence on the time of the writer of the romance, but from the general conclusions about the dating of the Greek Romances, he probably wrote not later than the end of the third century. His native city Emesa was the birthplace of two Roman Emperors, Heliogabalus (218-222) and Alexander Severus (222-235). About the middle of the century Emesa was conquered by Zenobia of Palmyra, but was freed by Aurelian in 272. Heliodorus may have written in its most flourishing period, 220-240. It is generally agreed that Heliodorus is later than Chariton who could not have written after 150 and earlier than Achilles Tatius who wrote about the beginning of the fourth century.

Rattenbury thinks that a possible reconstruction of Heliodorus’ life is this. He was born in Emesa in Phoenician Syria. His family was connected with the cult of the Sun. In his youth, perhaps between 220 and 240, he wrote a romance in which the influence of the cult of Helios appears, also the neo-Pythagoreanism of Apollonius of Tyana. It is not impossible that finally he was converted to Christianity, became bishop of Tricca and in that office introduced in his diocese celibacy for the clergy.[106] Calderini has shown with discrimination and perspicacity that the special characteristic of the _Aethiopica_ is the interest in philosophy which distinguishes it and its author from Chariton, the writer of historical romance, and from Achilles Tatius, the writer of romance tinged with science.[107] A study of the _Aethiopica_ itself will show how deeply infused the novel is with this religious philosophical coloring.

Before outlining the narrative, I will give as usual a list of the principal characters. These are:

_Theagenes_, the young Greek hero _Chariclea_, the young heroine, supposed to be a Greek _Hydaspes_, king of Ethiopia _Persinna_, queen of Ethiopia _Calasiris_, of Memphis, priest of Isis and his sons: _Thyamis_, in exile, a pirate captain _Petosiris_, priest of Isis _Charicles_, priest of Apollo at Delphi _Alcamenes_, nephew of Charicles _Trachinus_, a pirate _Pelorus_, a pirate and officer of Trachinus _Cnemon_, a young Athenian, son of _Aristippus_, an Athenian, a stupid husband _Demaeneta_, the amorous step-mother of Cnemon _Thisbe_, the scheming maid of Demaeneta _Arsinoe_, a slave-girl, a friend of Thisbe _Nausicles_, a merchant _Thermuthis_, an officer under Thyamis _Oroondates_, viceroy of the Great King of the Persians _Mithranes_, viceroy of Oroondates _Arsace_, wife of Oroondates _Cybele_, the maid of Arsace _Achaemenes_, son of Cybele _Euphrates_, the chief eunuch of Oroondates _Sisimithres_, an Ethiopian Gymnosophist _Meroebus_, nephew of Hydaspes

The opening scene of the romance is startling and mysterious. In Egypt, from a mountain near the mouth of the Nile a band of pirates get a view of the seashore. They behold a heavily laden ship without a crew, a plain strewn with dead bodies and the remains of an ill-fated banquet. A wounded youth is lying on the ground. He is being cared for by a beautiful young woman dressed in a religious garb which makes her seem a priestess or a goddess, Diana or Isis. Indeed a divine effulgence emanates from her. The pirates though at first overawed descend and collect rich booty. Their captain then courteously conveys the maiden and the youth to their pirate home. This was called “The Pasture” and was a sort of island in a delta of the Nile. Some of the pirates lived in huts made of reeds, some in boats. The water was their fortification. Their streets were winding water-ways cut through the reeds.

The pirate chief assigned the care of his two captives to a young Greek, Cnemon, who was his interpreter. The prisoners were overjoyed on finding their custodian a Greek. He promised to heal the wounds of Theagenes, who had now revealed his own name and that of Chariclea, and on their urgent request, he told him his own story.

“I,” he said, “am the son of Aristippus, an Athenian. After my brother’s death, my father married again a woman named Demaeneta, who was a mischief-maker. Like Phaedra she fell in love with me, her step-son, indeed called me her dear Hippolytus. When I repelled her advances she accused me to my father of attempted rape. He had me scourged. Worse than that, Thisbe, the maid of Demaeneta, on her mistress’ orders involved me in an amorous intrigue with herself and later promised to show me my step-mother with an adulterer. Sword in hand I followed her to the bed-room and just as I was about to murder her paramour, I found he was my father. Aristippus charged me in court with attempted parricide. Only a divided vote spared my life and sent me into exile. Lately I received news that my father through Thisbe had found out his wife’s corruption; she had killed herself; and now Aristippus is trying to obtain from the people his son’s pardon.”