Ancient rhetoric and poetic

That the Æneid has a controlling idea implies that it is artistically shaped to stricter continuity than appears in the Homeric model. The Iliad and the Odyssey are everywhere freer. Homer writes a scene for itself; Vergil also for its significance in a progress.[12] Salience is sought by careful subordination. The Carthaginians, for instance, are not elaborated as are the Italian tribes.[13] The slaughter of the last night of Troy is confined to a few vivid scenes. Using Hellenistic versions and evidently studious of their art, Vergil deliberately rejects their decorative detail and sentimental dilation. He reduces the mating of Æneas with Dido to a grave summary,[14] in order to give salience to those other emotions which for the Æneid as a whole were leading. Æneas does, indeed, in the fourth book yield his position as protagonist to the queen who among Vergil’s personæ is the great individual; but even so strong an impulse of creative inspiration does not drive the poet from his main purpose. One of the few great love-stories, the fourth book is still held, as it were by force, to the larger story of mission.

The same art deals with the gods. They were for Vergil necessary to epic; they embodied at once the traditional sense of supernatural response in natural forces and Vergil’s own sense of divine guidance. But they rarely interpose, and never interrupt. They work through men; and the course of events is always amply explained by human motive. The foundations of Troy were shaken by divine wrath; but we see them dislocated by human agency. The revengefulness of Juno, the protection of Venus, seem the more plausible because they operate through the passion of Dido. The one yields in the end, and the other prevails, because Æneas realizes his mission. Olympus, now ordered within itself under a calm and absolute ruler, expresses and animates, not interrupts, the progress of human order. Thus Vergil’s gods are more than “epic machinery,” and more than personification. The thoughts of men are not merely expressed conventionally in archaic personal shapes; they are seen at once as determining each decisive action and as inspired by divine purpose. For not only has the Æneid a more consistent theology than the Iliad; it is also more religious.

The most frequent examples of Vergil’s subordination are in his fine art of description. Picturesque with brilliant color, as well as with the Homeric light and motion,[15] and as precise as they are vivid, his descriptions are rarely separable. Not only are they contributory to the action; they are also inwoven.[16] Vergil’s sensitiveness to the details of nature transpires in a sentence, even in single words,[17] which describe while they narrate. Here he discerned the artistic rightness by which Homer describes every thing movable as in motion,[18] and applied the principle with more careful attention to narrative continuity. He dispenses with Homer’s superfluous mechanism of transition.[19] Memorable as are the descriptions—and nothing in the Æneid is better remembered—very few can be detached from the context for separate admiration.[20] The detailing of architecture and decoration, though it unduly seized the fancy of the middle ages, is hardly an exception. The Carthaginian pictures of Troy, the palace of Latinus, are there not for scene-painting, but for historic suggestion. They serve the story. Thus Vergil’s descriptive art is at once less ample than Homer’s and more specifically subsidiary. The Hellenistic tableau—ἔκφρασις is its ominous name—appears in the glittering conventional pauses of Ovid. Vergil had put it aside. This is the more remarkable because the ancients seem generally to have regarded certain scenes—battle, for instance, conflagration, storm, thwarted love—as rather description than narration.[21] Vergil, while he works even more than Homer to make us realize a scene by sharing in it as actors,[22] works also to avoid interruption of the story.

Similar is the constant care to avoid interruption of time or place.[23] Vergil’s unremitting prevision and revision have obviated any time-lapse that is insignificant for the action. The Homeric device of bringing in antecedent action by retrospective narrative is used more artistically. While it covers ground, extending the time-lapse beyond the stage, the narrative of Æneas heightens the love of Dido before our eyes.

It is a larger achievement, one of the greatest,[24] to heighten epic by suggesting vast reaches of time, from tribal wanderings through wars of conquest to the reign of law. Here is the artistic significance of the visit in Book VI to the world of the dead and the unborn, which, as Mackail says, “slips in the keystone.” To compare the visit of Odysseus to the shades is to see Vergil’s higher art of composition. But the suggestion of the great loom of time (tot volvere casus) is not confined to a single artistic device; it is pervasive from the opening words through a hundred careful allusions; and it makes the Æneid wider than the Iliad or the Odyssey by making it constantly suggestive of the whole struggle of history. It reveals more explicitly the struggles of heroic men as the struggle of man.

Thus the oft-repeated objection that the Æneid breaks into halves is superficial. The break would not have been thought of if Vergil had not been seen to be working for a continuity stricter than Homer’s. Stated baldly by Tyrrell, the idea that the Æneid is an Odyssey plus an Iliad presupposes a sort of imitation to which Vergil shows himself everywhere superior. It would be as near the truth to reply that the Æneid is neither an Odyssey nor an Iliad. But prototypes aside, how and how far is the Æneid held together? Surely by the most careful articulation ever seen in epic, but surely not to the degree of drama. Among the evidences of revision are indications that the plan for the wanderings of Æneas was first achieved[25] when much of the poem was already written. The adjustment of this part to the whole course, a technic hardly explored by Homer, and the abbreviations of the wanderings by careful selection, are of a piece with the consistent connection by repetition of the theme, from the opening lines,

throughout the whole poem. True, the seventh book invokes Erato for scenes of battle.

The following scenes are different, but not the theme. The art that deliberately avoided Homer’s succession of battles by interposing such scenes as Evander’s achieved more than variety. It suggests again and again what the battles were for. The close upon the tragic death of Turnus becomes more than the personal victory of the hero; it is the triumph, over violentia, over such individual prowess as Homer glorified, over personal ambition thwarting the state, of fortitude bringing in religion and law.

But to ask therefore that the whole movement of the Æneid should be unified is at once to recognize Vergil’s art of continuity and to demand for epic the strictness of drama. That Vergil understood drama, that his art learned not only from Greek epic, but from Greek tragedy, was pointed out by Nettleship and is important to remember. But he is too great a master of his chosen form to sacrifice epic scope.

How, then, is the Æneid dramatic? In the composition of the whole only by such preparations and recurrences as add to the vividness of parts suggestions of their bearing. Having planned a progress of events, not merely a series, Vergil marks that progress by such articulation as had been used to this extent only in drama. In the composition of the parts singly his art is more dramatic. The Æneid as a whole is not dramatically unified, and could not be. What is unified is each book.[26] For purposes of recitation, epic had to be composed, whether as a whole or not, in distinct parts. Of this necessity Vergil made a virtue. He advanced the narrative art of situation by applying some of the technic of drama. This is conspicuous in his frequent use of peripety. Again, the memorable and well remembered Laokoön scene is interposed between the Sinon scenes. Each is made to heighten the other, and both to give first suspense and then compelling motive to the bringing in of the fatal horse. Again and again Vergil will be found thus to intensify his narrative by the technic of drama. The most obvious instance is the distinct group of scenes at Carthage. The entrance of Dido is in the dramatic sense and by dramatic methods prepared. First, Æneas hears of her from his goddess mother, and is kindled by her having achieved his own epic mission—dux femina facti. Follows his view of the city, big already in achievement, big also to every Roman listener with menace. Then the decorative pictures at once review the tragedy of Troy and reveal in this strong queen a propitious sympathy. Upon all this, as to a waiting stage and a waiting audience, enter Dido.[27] Moreover in the Dido scenes, instead of contenting himself with that mere strife of emotions which was familiar in Hellenistic poetry[28] and became a rhetorical commonplace with Ovid, Vergil advances and heightens the leading emotion steadily, as in a play, up to its tragic close. The close is the inevitable result of something more than thwarted passion because Dido has been presented dramatically, without concession to the Hellenistic narrative dilation, by what she said and did. Vergil’s Dido is a creation every way beyond the Medea of Apollonius. She must be placed beside the Medea of Euripides. In her consistent tragic nobility, in the higher morality of her appeal, perhaps she must be placed above. For the fourth book of the Æneid, as fully as the Antigone, is tragic in its purgation of pity and fear.

Thus to apply drama to narrative without sacrificing the typical epic opportunities of fulness and scope is among the greatest achievements of poetic. It is an art so far beyond any other ancient narrative as to remain solitary until Dante; and Dante’s guide was Vergil. It guided also the creative hand of Milton. And not for epic only, but for all imaginative story, the art of the Æneid remains a test and a guide. In this sense he who became for medieval Latinists the poet, as Cicero was the orator, remains Master Vergil.

(4). Characterization in the Æneid

To turn from the narrative movement to the persons is to descend. At once we feel that the achievement is less and that the method is less fruitful for narrative art because it is less distinctively poetic. Vergil’s narrative composition has universal validity; but his characterization, for the most part, is only Latin. It had none the less influence on the middle ages—perhaps all the more; but it had the less inspiration for later creations.

To estimate Vergil’s characterization fairly, it is necessary first to remove certain misconceptions. He has been reproached for leaving in our minds few outstanding figures: Turnus, Evander, Mezentius, Pallas, Nisus and Euryalus. Some of these, like the Camilla whom Dante remembers, are only sketched; and most of them are secondary. Now though this is paucity beside the populous pages of Homer, we must remember that Vergil’s whole roster of heroes is smaller deliberately because, much more than Homer’s, they are dramatis personæ. He makes the dramatic innovation of focusing on a few and of subordinating the development even of these to the development of the theme.

A more frequent objection is that throughout the latter part of the poem the hero is no longer Æneas, but Turnus. This is to use the word hero in a sense that Vergil would hardly have understood. Seeing Turnus through centuries of romance, we are so occupied with his bravoure as readily to forget that Vergil’s Æneas is not meant to have the interest or the significance of King Arthur. Nor, we should add, is he meant to have the interest of Achilles. His individual prowess is only incidental to his dominant fortitude. The achievement of personal glory is behind him. “He has outlived his personal life.”[29] His work is to found the Roman people. The characterization of Æneas, moreover, shows a certain development.[30] He shows more growth than “much-enduring Odysseus.” The battle frenzy of the return to the doomed city (arma amens capio), the vacillation at Carthage, are put forever behind. He becomes progressively more steadfast. Always pius, he enlarges his pietas into calm assurance of mission. As for the story, so for the characterization of the hero, the sixth book is the critical stage of a progress.

The creative power of Vergil is amply vindicated by Dido. One may feel that she is too vivid for her function, that she takes the stage, as actors say, away from Æneas, that through her the nice planning of the whole is quite warped. We shall doubtless never be able to judge this as Romans. Perhaps even they were more absorbed than Vergil intended in his tragic queen.[31] Perhaps Vergil himself was swerved by his own creation. But all this only reinforces the testimony to a compelling characterization. There may be difference of opinion as to Dido’s part in the story; there can be none as to Dido herself.

But our estimates thus duly corrected, we cannot but feel that Dido stands out among the figures of the Æneid because she is exceptional. We feel her to be drawn not only better, but often differently. And this should lead to scrutiny of Vergil’s habitual method. To begin with, it is everywhere apparent that he cares less than Homer for individuality. A certain expansiveness in Homeric dialogue often keeps the story waiting to give the individual his say. Vergil shifts the proportions. He rejects long dialogues because he is more interested in narrative economy than in personal expressiveness. Further, the speeches are often more reasoned than Homer’s, more orderly, less like conversation and more like oratory.[32] Sinon’s are very naturally elaborate pieces of special pleading, and the rhetoric of Drances against Turnus is appropriate in a deliberative assembly; but the making of successive points, and the careful adaptation of style not only to the speaker, but to the hearer, are habitual, as even in the speech of Allecto to Turnus. In this reasoned order, rather than in any mere elaboration, Heinze finds Vergil to be rhetorical. Instead of following the pace of emotional utterance, abrupt and disjointed, he sometimes holds even violent emotion to a steady course. By thus composing emotional expression he sometimes sacrifices directness of characterization.[33]

Indeed, Vergil is generally less concerned than Homer with creating individuals, and more concerned with showing his persons as types. Whether the loss in individual distinctness is compensated by a gain in common consent opens a long debate. Modern taste inclines rather to Homer than to Vergil; but between stretch centuries of Latin habit, and that habit, best exemplified in Vergil, is to characterize typically. This method of idealization may in Vergil’s case have Stoic preoccupations;[34] but more generally it is rhetorical. To characterize by age, sex, race, occupation, etc., is a prescription of rhetoric[35] fixed in recipes and school exercises. It was dilated into ingenious fictions by the declamatores. Ovid’s characterization hardly rises above the schools. Vergil was too great to move on that level; but even he is preoccupied with that ideal and generally content with that method. He carried the method as far, perhaps, as it will go. That except in subordinate sketches he departed from it only in one surpassing instance is doubtless the fundamental reason for our finding his characterization inferior to his composition.

(5). Epic Diction

Generations have felt in the Æneid, first of all, high and constant beauty. No other great poem has seemed more infallibly beautiful. The beauty has sometimes, indeed, been acknowledged with a certain disparagement, as if it implied the less strength; but so perverse an antithesis cannot delay attention except to the fact that Vergil is beautiful even to his detractors. The worst that has been said of his style is that it is sometimes inappropriately elaborate.[36]

This, it must be admitted, seems comparatively remote and unreal beside similar meals in Homer, and absolutely too high a style for camp cookery. Nor is it safe to urge that Vergil is holding his style to the epic level; for that plea opens the way to such mere etiquette as centuries later quite deviated the discussion of epic from its main issues, and, besides, Vergil himself does not thus describe Dares and Entellus. No, the plea must be rather of confession and avoidance. Such passages are not beautiful, and their style is not epic; but they are so few that to call them characteristic is quite unfair. Nor are they to be ascribed to preoccupation with rhetoric. Vergil is, indeed, sometimes more oratorical[37] than we wish; but he is not, in our modern sense rhetorical, and his rhetoric, no less than his poetic, must have found such passages inferior. Rather we may think that these few “rubs and botches in the work” were what led him to wish it burned; for after all his revision he was acutely conscious that it was unfinished. Unfinished in form it certainly is not. Unfinished in style it is here and there. But what a sense of beauty had the artist who could not bear even so few blemishes!

Not elaborateness, then, is characteristic of Vergil’s style, but certainly elaboration. His tireless revision is testified by the tradition that he composed first in prose, and that he spent on the Æneid ten years.[38] No style is more highly charged. It is made to suggest at once vivid descriptive imagery and the sanctions of history and religion. Not only the story, but the diction, is full of Rome. His use of the language of Roman ritual[39] is characteristic of an expression piously preservative of cult. “By instinct and temper a ritualist,”[40] he is continually suggesting the significance of traditional forms. The Iliad and the Odyssey are in a special dialect. The Faery Queene has a language of its own. To achieve such suggestions in the Æneid with but the slightest resort to archaism is in itself a great achievement of language; but it is only part of a consistent allusiveness, an extraordinary connotation, ranging the whole gamut from sharp physical sensations to spiritual significance. A style eminently classic in precision and harmony is yet felt to be above all rich. No other poet seems more nearly infallible with the right word; no other so well to have charged classic restraint with romantic exuberance by the energy of his expressiveness. The influence of Vergil, immediate, wide, and long, is indubitably the influence of his style. Later ages, unappreciative of the poetic art of his composition, felt the spell of his imagery and rhythm almost as an incantation. “Virgil is that poet whose verse has had most power in the world.”[41]

(6). Originality in Imitation

The notion that imitation must be subversive of originality betrays a crude conception of both. Yet it lingers in such criticism as thinks the Æneid to be a Latin Iliad and Odyssey. To measure it so is to miss not only the art of a single great poem, but much of all poetic art. For since all art works in forms received and recognized, less by invention than by transformation, it is of cardinal significance to distinguish, in a poem conspicuously imitative and conspicuously original, just what artistic imitation is. Therefore what has been implied in the preceding sections may here be drawn together in summary.

Imitation is always of movement or style; it has nothing to do with material. To preface this should be superfluous; but many quests for “sources” have left some confusion. Vergil took much of the Trojan story from Homer. To be sure, he used other sources too. Nothing is more remarkable in the Æneid than the wealth and variety of its material. Its sources are beyond the dreams of Homer. But even if Vergil’s material were all Homeric, he would not on that account be the more imitative. Ancient literature, and mediæval too, generally make freer with preceding stories than modern. The material is not thought to be any one’s property. In this respect Vergil is singularly independent. He uses more sources; he is more selective; and what he adopts is often a composite. He works in the modern way rather than in the ancient; but he is not on that account either more or less imitative. Some of Shakspere’s plays derive their plots from single sources; some are in plot composite; but all are alike original. A modern French tragedy took the plot not only of an ancient story, but of the best known of all ancient plays. It is none the less original; and its imitation, as all artistic imitation, is of the ancient technic.

Imitation in art, then, means following certain artistic ways. To begin with, Vergil evidently set out to write an epic, and undoubtedly looked to Homeric epic as a type. This is important not only in his case, but throughout literary history. Though its importance may be exaggerated in Brunetière’s évolution des genres, evidently epic meant something controlling to Vergil because of Homer, and has meant something wider ever since because of Vergil. To any poet, to Tasso and Milton as to Vergil, epic necessarily implies a pattern. It directs and limits personæ and diction; but it does not hamper artistic progress, for it does not limit interpretation. Vergil remade not only the epic material, but the epic form, to a new end. His Sinon[42] is a typical instance of artistic rehandling. Drawn doubtless from several ancient sources, he has become through his new function and motivation creatively original. Battles there must be in epic, even battles of the Homeric sort; but Vergil does not rely on the general mêlée; he modifies it subtly in the direction of the more organized Roman fighting, and he changes the Homeric series into a progress. In short, even where he is perforce most dependent on Homer, his imitation is never repetition. Imitation is creative when it adapts the art of the past to the interpretation of the present. The Æneid is not a Latin Iliad; it is a Roman epic.

Vergil’s adaptation of the epic movement involves a departure from Homer in the direction of drama.[43] How, and how far, imitation of drama can serve extended narrative we learn fully from him because he imitates selectively. He does not try to make his story a play, or merely a series of plays; he finds how far epic can be conducted dramatically without sacrificing its epic appeal. No less selectively he rejects the Hellenistic technic of Apollonius.[44] Epic diction, he discerns, in order to have the old communal appeal, must sound traditional; but echo of Homeric style would make it sound merely conventional. He gives it traditional connotation by means of his own. His diction, therefore, is far less imitative than his composition. In fact, it is rarely imitative at all. In the limits, no less than in the method, of his imitation his art runs true. Through that obedience which great artists yield to the art that they inherit he shows the way to imaginative freedom.

B. The Narrative Poetry of Ovid

Among the Latin poets Vergil has the siege perilous. He achieved that high poetic emprise beside which others must seem less. In comparison no one suffers more than Ovid.[45] Yet he who presented the gods without seeing their divinity, and retold the myths instead of recreating them, has literary qualities not only striking, but at once typical of his time and very widely influential. Vergil has been revered; but Ovid has been imitated and absorbed. Without attempting to measure his brilliancy, it is necessary to distinguish the characteristic habits of a poetic whose influence spread over western Europe.

That poetic is seen at once to be unfailingly expert in every artistic detail. Its metrical facility, proverbial[46] from the first and instructive of the verse of many centuries and many lands, is only the most obvious skill of a man who loved style. Though he does not make a habit of the elegiac tendency to rime, he plays variously upon alliteration and other consonance;[47] and his use of refrain suggests those stanza patterns set centuries later by French courtly makers in rondel[48] and ballade.[49] For though he knows the subtlest spells of sound, Ovid is never neglectful of such notes as must catch the ear. His verse is more than popular; but it is popular, and many a Spaniard, Gaul, and Briton has been grateful to feel its music running in his head.

Equally obvious is Ovid’s decorative description. Its bent is not toward epic suggestion of character by attitude, gesture, and action, but toward picturesqueness. Bright imagery garnishes the familiar. Groves and streams and their tutelary nymphs, men, women, and gods, are not individualized; they are merely realized. But what exuberance of suggestion! To open dull eyes and spur jaded feelings, to vivify a legendary scene, to dilate a conventional mood, to redecorate an old landscape, Ovid had an inexhaustible fund.

For he elevated poetic convention to a fine art. A storm at sea[50] lacks none of the properties; a fainting heroine or hero,[51] no appropriate gesture. The pallor of love can move once more,[52] and the golden age[53] make the over-civilized pensive. “Mortal art thou, or divine?” was said by Odysseus to Nausikaa when gods walked with men; but Ovid had the art to repeat it[54] when the gods were dead. Repeat? He himself became the pattern of these things for centuries. Not only is he forever the poet of “Gather ye roses while ye may,” but “Stay, dawn; why must thou haste?”[55] echoed across Europe,[56] was heard in the cry of Chaucer’s Troilus[57] and Shakspere’s Juliet,[58] and still reverberates.

The Alexandrian[59] dilation of such description[60] appears also in the long-drawn emotions of soliloquy.[61] The fixing of this as a literary type must have been promoted by the prevalence of the schools of declamatio,[62] where Ovid had studied. Practised in elementary form even by Roman schoolboys, developed by declamatores in exhibitions of virtuosity, the fiction of what so-and-so must have said on such-and-such an occasion is still a rhetorical exercise. As an exercise it has some value in promoting poetic appreciation; but it seems hardly the way toward poetic creation. Ovid, at any rate, hardly creates persons. The address of Sol, for instance, to Phaëthon,[63] is only a more extended and more professional school theme; and the mixture of allegorical personification with myth[64] shows him rather as a rhetorician[65] than as a poet. That he is not a myth-maker, only a myth-teller, may be seen by putting any of his demigods beside the Prometheus of Æschylus—or even the Prometheus of Shelley. For re-creation Ovid lacked what the Great Unknown[66] thought to be the primary source of expression, intellectual vigor of conception. Thus his mythical persons, though always appropriate and sometimes vivid, are not alive.

More has been claimed for his story-telling. Cruttwell[67] says of the Metamorphoses: “The skill with which different legends are woven into the fabric of the composition is as marvellous as the frivolous dilettantism which could treat a long heroic poem in such a way.” The skill of the weaving is indisputable; but is it more than an art of transition? To call the Metamorphoses a long heroic poem suggests a cruel comparison with the Æneid, and partly begs the question. What Ovid seems to have intended, and what he achieved, is a deftly articulated collection. It is not a single poem in the sense of having emotional progress or totality, nor is any other of Ovid’s collections. His distinctively narrative art, therefore, is to be sought not in the connection between stories, but in the composition of each one. It is even probable that this art was the more popular because it offered, not a long sustained narrative, but many separable short tales.

The “vivid inventiveness” and “unflagging animation” urged by Owen[68] as characteristic of Ovidian narrative may be accepted without discussion, and should not be undervalued. Inventiveness was overvalued, indeed, in the melodramatic fictions of declamatio, and implies an art rather facile than creative; but it is none the less sure of popularity. As for animation, whatever else a story may be, it may not be dull. Here Ovid often wins by his very levity. He makes no demands. No one can be followed more easily; for he moves on the surface. Where he skates on thin ice, he does so quite simply for excitement. There is none of the modern pretense of exploration. His problems are purely artistic, problems not of motive, but of interesting mood and attitude, of appropriate and various utterance. His animation, partly rhythmical, partly descriptive, is more largely unflagging expressiveness. Always expressive, his people can always be understood without effort. He holds attention without provoking thought.

The “rapid movement” claimed by Owen is often mere succinctness, rarely the speed gained by modern narrative use of dramatic technic. For that he usually has too much separable description, too much soliloquy, too little motivation. He seeks intensity less often than expansiveness. Nevertheless, though he pauses deliberately for description or tirade, he does not lag. There is no clumsy prosing or deviation. He has the art, more valued in ancient and medieval times than in modern, of lucid, fluent narrative, the art of the tale. That he does not follow it oftener is due to his readers’ fondness, and his own, for dilation. The onward movement of poetic is thus sacrificed to rhetoric. The parts become more important than the whole. For Ovid was a rhetorician, not only bred in the schools, but habitually thinking of poetry less as composed movement than as lucid and brilliant, as ample and harmonious style.

C. The Metamorphoses of Apuleius

Sighting from the Metamorphoses of Ovid through the Metamorphoses of Apuleius,[69] one clearly discerns the coming of the Greek Romances. So runs the Alexandrian narrative line from decorative description and expansive emotion, through exciting incident and uncontrolled variety,[70] to sheer violence. Ovid’s stories are sometimes like dreams; the Greek Romances are nightmares. Apuleius, between the two, already seeks the violent and the bizarre. His metamorphoses are no longer mythical, nor in the least allegorical; they are mere sorcery. The appetite of his time for horrors and other excitement had been both fed and whetted by declamatio.[71] Ovid, too, knew declamatio; but Apuleius, himself a rhetor, was less restrained by earlier literary standards from giving rein to the sensational.

Though the bulk of his extant work is narrative, Apuleius devotes no attention to onward narrative movement. Superficially continuous, his Metamorphoses are nevertheless often quite separable, as is evident in the most famous of them, Cupid and Psyche. Such course of plot as there is eddies in harangues, tirades and decorative descriptions. The abundant dialogue is uncontrolled by dramatic concision. Everywhere Apuleius is orally expansive. A rhetor telling stories, he goes little beyond the poetic of the platform: work for excitement, relying on lust and witchcraft; expand what is showy, emphasizing each part without regard to sequence; use dialogue for variety, letting prosopopœia suffice for characterization; and if nevertheless the tale lags or becomes confused, make a fresh start by bringing on brigands. This habit of mind, and not the incidental satire, explains the narrative looseness. Apuleius is no Rabelais; he is only a facile second-century rhetor carrying the rhetorical fiction of his time to greater length. In style, though habitually diffuse, he is sometimes charming and often lively; but in composition he merely extends a meretricious convention.

During his lifetime Iamblichus wrote the Babylonica, or Rhodanes and Sinonis (166-180); and, soon after, Chariton of Aphrodisias the Chæreas and Calirrhoe (before 200).[72] Thus was established the mode followed later by Heliodorus and Achilles Tatius, the perverted narrative known as the Greek Romances. Any one who has the patience for these phantasmagoria of passion, horror, and adventure will see their likeness to the Metamorphoses of Apuleius, and will probably reproach him the more for ignoring that onward causal movement without which the art of narrative seems to lapse.