The times are characterized too by an eager search for the new, the unfamiliar, by scientific curiosity, by an interest in art. So descriptions of strange countries and peoples, accounts of strange adventures and sights are part of the novelist’s stock in trade. He describes vividly the island city in the Nile’s delta, its water-ways through the reeds, its cave refuge with its secret entrance; or he gives a technical account of the engineering processes by which a city is besieged by threat of inundation; or he pictures such a curiosity in the animal world as a giraffe. Works of art are featured with admiring care: Theagenes’ embroidered robe and its clasp, Chariclea’s robe and its girdle, the amethyst ring with its carved scene, the painting of Perseus and Andromeda, nude, shining, chained to the rock.
And part of the picture of the times centers in man’s quest for new values for life itself. Ethical standards for conduct are weighed and emphasized in contrasts between Greeks and barbarians. Aspiration towards the higher life is portrayed in the worship of the gods and its ceremonials and in the philosophical discussions in which the priests take part. The Gymnosophists and Calasiris share a large humanity.
The primary interests of the romance, however, far outweighing its philosophy and its adventures, is love. Once more two enchanting young people meet at a festival of a god, fall in love at first sight, plight their troth, accompany each other through world-wide adventures, preserve their faith and their chastity and for their piety are at last united in perfect happiness. Theagenes and Chariclea join Chaereas and Callirhoe, Habrocomes and Anthia, Clitophon and Leucippe, Daphnis and Chloe in the undying annals of true love. And the reader closes Heliodorus’ novel with Cnemon’s comment:
“I am at feud with Homer, father, for saying that love, as well as everything else, brings satiety in the end; for my part I am never tired either of feeling it myself, or hearing of its influence on others; and lives there the man of so iron and adamantine an heart, as not to be enchanted with listening to the loves of Theagenes and Chariclea, though the story were to last a year?”[134]
“Every romance,” says Aristide Calderini in writing of the Greek novels, “represents successively a new advance or a new type in its genre. Now the closest affiliation is with history, now with pastoral poetry, now with philosophy. While certain common elements persist, the general pattern of the whole changes; often the content is varied; often the limits.”[135]
The variation within this new form of literature is richly illustrated by the novel we are now to study, the one which was probably written last of the extant Greek Romances as Chariton’s was the first. This is The Adventures of Leucippe and Clitophon of Achilles Tatius.
We know little of the author. Suidas, the lexicographer of the tenth century, wrote his brief biography:
“Achilles Statius” (note the incorrect form of the name ‘Tatius’) “of Alexandria: the writer of the story of Leucippe and Clitophon, as well as other episodes of love, in eight books. He finally became a Christian and a bishop. He also wrote a treatise on the sphere, and works on etymology, and a mixed narration telling of many great and marvellous men. His novel is in all respects like that of the other writers of love-romances.”[136]
Now though Suidas used earlier material and essayed accuracy, two statements in this biography are manifestly incorrect. There is nothing whatever in the romance to indicate that Tatius was ever a Christian and the story about his conversion and bishopric probably duplicates the similar tradition about his predecessor, Heliodorus, who was identified with a bishop of Tricca who bore his name. Moreover Tatius’ novel is very different in many particulars from all the romances which are now known. And it is these contrasts rather than the similarities which make him in our studies so excellent a foil for Chariton.
The date of about A.D. 300 is probably right for the novel because the author seems to imitate the style of certain romancers of the third century and because a recently discovered papyrus fragment[137] shows that for palaeographical reasons this earliest manuscript could not have been written later than the first half of the fourth century. This evidence about the lateness of Achilles Tatius we shall find borne out by a deterioration in style from Chariton’s simplicity to an over-elaboration and exaggeration and a change in spirit from sincerity to ironic parody.[138]
One important reason for knowing Achilles Tatius is “his contributions to Elizabethan prose fiction and, through this, to the making of the modern novel.”[139] The first Greek text was not published until 1601 but before this he was made known to the sixteenth century by translations in Latin, Italian and French. And in 1597 the first English translation, that of William Burton, appeared. Todd succinctly states his resulting influence:
“With Heliodorus, though in less measure, he furnished structure and material for Sidney’s Arcadia, and thus was among the influences that formed the novels of Richardson and Walter Scott; of Greene, as Dr. S. L. Wolff puts it, he was the ‘first and latest love’; in Lyly himself, and not only in him, we recognize Tatius as one of the sources of English Euphuism.”[140]
My plan in taking up Achilles Tatius is first to analyze briefly his plot and then summarize its similarities to Chaereas and Callirhoe and the other Greek novels. Then I shall discuss more in detail the unique features in Tatius and his special characteristics.
An epigram in the Palatine Anthology, attributed to Photius, patriarch of Constantinople, but by some to Leon the philosopher gives a bird’s eye view of the story.[141]
“The story of Clitophon reveals to the eyes, as it were, a bitter love but a virtuous life. The very virtuous life of Leucippe puts all in ecstasy, (for the story tells) how she was beaten and shorn of her hair and clothed pitiably, and—the greatest point—having died three times she endured to the end. And if you too wish to be virtuous, friend, do not consider the side issues of the plot, but learn first the outcome of the story, for it joins in marriage those who love sanely.”
For the expansion of this epitome it is necessary to have before us a list of the many characters in the romance.
Chief characters:
Minor characters:
For the plot I condense Phillimore’s well-written summary.[142] The author begins with a description of Sidon. He has reached Sidon in his travels and is touring the city, looking at the temples. He describes a painting of Zeus and Europa, also a statue of Eros. He was reflecting on the Eros: “Think of such a brat being lord of earth and sea!” When a young man near testifies to Eros’ power which he has felt, the author invites him to tell his story. In a Platonic scene under a plane-tree near a stream they sit down.
The stranger, Clitophon, a Greek of Tyre, tells his story in the first person. Clitophon has been unwillingly betrothed at nineteen to his half-sister, Calligone. Now his uncle, Sostratus, writes that he is sending his daughter Leucippe and her mother from their home in Byzantium to Tyre for safety during a war. Clitophon at once falls in love with Leucippe. He makes his cousin, Clinias, his confidant. Clinias is sympathetic because he had a tragic love affair with a youth who was killed by a fall from a horse which Clinias gave him. (Here is introduced a purple patch on the driving accident.)
Encouraged by Clinias, Clitophon makes love constantly. Various scenes of his wooing, for example a garden, are described in detail. Finally the lovers elope, find a ship at Berytus, embark and start to Alexandria. They meet an Egyptian fellow-passenger, Menelaus. There comes a great storm. Hero and heroine are cast on shore at Pelusium near the temple of Zeus Casius. Enter black brigands. Soldiers rescue Clitophon, but Leucippe is kidnapped. Clitophon joins in an attempt to save her, but it is baulked by a deep, impassable canal between the rescuing party and the ten thousand brigands. Across it Clitophon watches the bandits perform a human sacrifice by disembowelling the victim before an altar. It is Leucippe. The body is put in a coffin.
The next day the canal is diked and crossed. Clitophon resolves to die on Leucippe’s body, but suddenly he meets his slave Satyrus and Menelaus, both saved from the wreck, who assure him that Leucippe is alive. On the coffin being opened, she comes out—“Gashed open and minus all viscera.” But the murderers had been deceived by a sheepskin full of animal entrails attached to her and by a stage sword which never penetrated her body. Clinias too was saved from the wreck. Now a punitive expedition under Charmides, the Egyptian, starts, but unfortunately he falls in love with Leucippe and has a philtre given her which drives her insane. On her recovery they go to Alexandria. There a new rival, Chaereas, abducts Leucippe. Clitophon pursues on a ship of war, but has to endure seeing Leucippe beheaded on the deck of the enemy’s vessel. Clitophon recovers the head from the sea and gives it burial.
Six months later Clitophon meets Clinias again. Clinias who had been home in Sidon reports that “the cruel parent had actually betrothed the loving cousins” so Clitophon and Leucippe might have married in peace. Clitophon who naturally believes Leucippe dead is pursued by Melitte, a lovely, wealthy and amorous widow of Ephesus. He finally yields to her; they are betrothed in the temple of Isis and are to be married when they reach Ephesus. On their arrival, Melitte drives Clitophon around her great estates. There he has the overwhelming surprise of encountering Leucippe who is working in the garden as a miserable slave. This difficult situation is made more complicated by the sudden reappearance of Melitte’s husband, Thersander, who had been falsely reported drowned at sea. Thersander beats up Clitophon as an adulterer with his wife and has him imprisoned.
Sosthenes, the bailiff of Thersander, interests his master in Leucippe, so he tries to seduce her, but unsuccessfully. Clitophon in prison is told a false story that both Leucippe and Melitte are faithless to him. Clitophon resolves to denounce Melitte as an accomplice in a plot for the murder of Leucippe and then to die. He is tried for adultery and self-confessed murder, but Clinias foils his attempt by telling the whole truth in court. Sosthenes departs, leaving Leucippe free. Leucippe’s father, Sostratus, by good fortune arrives in Ephesus on a sacred embassy just in time to assist his daughter. The trial of Clitophon is resumed in a long court scene in which finally Thersander challenges Leucippe and Melitte to tests of chastity by the magic pipes of Pan and the magic spring of Rhodopis. Both pass the ordeals. Thersander, since everything is going against him, for his slave, Sosthenes, has been captured and will be forced to confess the truth, flees. Sosthenes confesses. Clitophon is acquitted. Leucippe tells her whole story: how the bandits beheaded another woman dressed in her clothes to prevent Clitophon from following; how a quarrel over her arose among them in which Chaereas was slain; then she was sold by the other pirates to Sosthenes, who bought her for Thersander. Sostratus then relates the secondary romance of Callisthenes and Calligone. The novel ends with a happy reunion of all at Tyre where prayers and sacrifices are offered in behalf of the lasting felicity of Clitophon and Leucippe, of Callisthenes and Calligone.
Such is the story which Phillimore characterizes as “a breathless succession of improbable incident.”[143] The settings move with the same cinematic rapidity which Chariton employed: from Sidon to Berytus, to the sea and shipwreck, to Pelusium and Alexandria, to Ephesus and the great court scene, to Byzantium and back again to Tyre.
In one point particularly the structure of the plot differs from Chariton’s and indeed from the plots of all the other Greek Romances. The author in the beginning hands over the story to a narrator, the hero, Clitophon, who then tells the events in the first person. Very soon, however, the reader has forgotten this device: so many other characters are given the floor to relate their own tales. And at the end the author too has forgotten this beginning, for Clitophon does not round up his narrative with a polite farewell. He does not even explain how he happened to be at Sidon where he started the tale. And the author does not express his appreciation of the entertainment Clitophon has given him.[144]
The chief interests of the romance are again love, adventure and religion. There are two love-stories of primary interest instead of one. Yet the bulk of the plot turns on adventure rather than on sex or worship. And delight in adventure adds to the typical travellers’ tales a flaming curiosity which demands description of many strange novelties.
In general the technical devices common to all the romances are used. There is much conversation. There are many soliloquies. Clitophon upbraids himself for swerving from Calligone to Leucippe.[145] Later he bemoans Leucippe’s fate when she has been kidnapped by the blacks.[146] Leucippe, sold as a slave, laments her whole sad love-story while lustful Thersander is eavesdropping outside the door.[147] Clitophon, on hearing in prison the false story that Leucippe has been murdered by Melitte, voices his horror over her death and over the fact that he had kissed her slayer.[148] These soliloquies are employed to reveal the intense feelings of hero and heroine at emotional crises.
Three letters are used. The first is a brief business letter which serves to develop the plot, for in it Sostratus writes to his brother Hippias that he is sending his daughter Leucippe and his wife Panthea to him for safe-keeping until the war between the Byzantines and the Thracians is over.[149] The other two are love-letters. One is Leucippe’s to Clitophon telling him that she has been sold as a slave, begging for ransom money, wishing him happiness in his coming nuptials with Melitte, and assuring him she is still a virgin. The other is Clitophon’s answer declaring that he has “imitated her virginity, if there be any virginity in men,” begging her not to judge him until he can explain all, but to pity him.[150] Leucippe’s letter is found by Melitte and helps motivate the plot in its emotional aspects, for it works Melitte up through jealousy and despair to such passionate ardor that she persuades Clitophon to sleep one night with her.[151]
Oaths are not important in the structure of the plot. Once Leucippe swears to her father by Artemis that she has told him a true story about being still a maid.[152] Dreams are frequent and are significant. Four are reported which are vital factors in the plot. Clitophon’s father dreams that while he is conducting the wedding ceremonies of his son and Calligone the torches are extinguished. This dream leads him to hasten the marriage so distasteful to Clitophon and it would have been consummated at once had not Calligone been kidnapped by Callisthenes under the impression that she was Leucippe.[153] Then Clitophon had persuaded Leucippe to let him spend the night with her and with the aid of Satyrus was already in her bedroom. Leucippe’s mother who had just had a dream that a robber with a naked sword was playing the part of Jack the Ripper with her daughter, rushed in and interrupted the amour.[154] Later on, Leucippe and Clitophon on the same night have similar dreams. A goddess appears and warns each that their love must not be consummated until the goddess decks the bride and opens her temple to the bridegroom. This apparition makes them postpone the rites of Aphrodite.[155] In Book VII Sostratus, Leucippe’s father, sees in a dream an apparition of Artemis who tells him that he will find Leucippe and Clitophon in Ephesus. He goes to Ephesus then on a sacred embassy and finds that Artemis does not lie.[156]
This tendency to a repeated use of the same device for forwarding the plot is seen in greater extravagance and exaggeration in the use of apparent deaths. Leucippe is supposed to meet violent death three times, twice before the eyes of her lover, once in vivid narrative told to him in prison. First she is sacrificed by brigands by being disembowelled before an altar. Second she is beheaded on the deck of a ship by black pirates and her head tossed into the ocean. Third she is murdered by an assassin hired by Melitte.[157] In the first two cases ghastly details make the executions seem real, but Leucippe always survives and reappears with a plausible but exotic story. Surely in this exaggeration Achilles Tatius is using thinly veiled satire of the device of improbable reappearances in the Greek romance.
The same exuberance appears in the use of the forensic speeches, of long, mythological narratives and of wordy descriptions. All these will be considered in the study of the style of the romance. Two more technical devices of the plot must be mentioned here: the use of résumés and the usual happy ending. Book VIII is crowded with résumés: Clitophon tells all his adventures to Sostratus and the priest of Artemis. Leucippe relates to Sostratus how the pirates decapitated another woman in her place. Finally Sostratus relates to his daughter and to Clitophon the romance of Callisthenes and Calligone.[158] The romances of both pairs of lovers, Clitophon and Leucippe, Callisthenes and Calligone, are concluded by happy weddings. And among the leading characters only Melitte suffers final disappointment. Achilles Tatius ironically grants her at least one memorable embrace on a prison floor!
The character drawing is much less elaborate than the plot. While plot and counterplot of the two romances interplay, the young hero Clitophon and the beautiful Leucippe are more or less conventional figures who move glamorously, weeping, fainting, dreaming, voyaging, through preposterous adventures. But Callisthenes, the secondary hero, is far more interesting than Clitophon because his character shows startling development. And Melitte, though she plays the part of temptress, is a great human creation.
In Book II Callisthenes first appears as a wealthy orphan, who is notoriously dissipated and extravagant. Wishing to marry beauty and having a strange streak of romanticism he asked Sostratus for the hand of the beautiful Leucippe although he had never seen her. Rejected by Sostratus as a suitor because of his bad reputation he plotted vengeance in his willful and violent way. He journeyed to Tyre, saw Calligone at a festival, mistook her for Leucippe, fell in love at first sight, hired some gangsters to kidnap her and sailed off with his prize.[159] Callisthenes does not reappear until in the end of Book VIII Sostratus tells the story of his reform.[160] On the voyage Callisthenes found himself madly in love with Calligone, revealed to her that he was no pirate but a wealthy Byzantine noble, offered her honorable marriage and a large dowry, and promised to respect her chastity as long as she desired. At Byzantium, love transformed him so that he appeared courteous, virtuous, self-controlled. He showed great respect for his elders. He was no longer extravagant, but became philanthropic. He gave large contributions to the state. He trained for military service and won distinction in actual warfare. In this changed guise he secured Sostratus as an advocate to persuade Hippias to give him the hand of Calligone, whose chastity he had scrupulously respected. Eros thus salvaged Callisthenes and then rewarded him.
Melitte the widow of Ephesus is the most elaborately drawn character in the romance. There is even a long personal description of her: she is as beautiful as a statue with skin like milk, cheeks roses, hair thick, long, golden, and about her the radiance of Aphrodite. Clitophon admits he saw her with pleasure. Indeed she is so magnetic that the kisses she was pleased to bestow on him stirred him.[161] She knew what she wanted and how to get it. During four months she had to woo Clitophon though she was rich and young and her husband has been lost at sea. Finally since Clitophon was convinced that Leucippe was really dead, he yielded and agreed to marry her, though on condition that they should not be united until they arrived at Ephesus. She was as passionate as Clitophon was cold. On the ship she made ardent love to him while he begged her to philosophize on love’s nature. After Clitophon secretly received Leucippe’s letter, he had to pretend illness to postpone the fulfillment of her desires. Then Melitte sent for her so-called Thessalian slave Lacaena (really Leucippe) and begged her to concoct a philtre that would arouse Clitophon’s feeling. She is very outspoken about the fact that Clitophon seems made of iron or wood; that indeed she seemed to love a statue.[162] And she had the ability to express to Clitophon every feeling she had without inhibition and in most picturesque language. At her wedding breakfast in Alexandria she punned merrily about the postponement of their union. “I’ve heard of a cenotaph but never before of a cenogam.”[163] The bellying sail on the ship she compared to a pregnant woman’s body; indeed she converted the whole ship into symbols of marriage.[164] She also compared herself to thirsty Tantalus standing by a river but not allowed to drink. She could match Clitophon’s arguments and his quibbles did not deceive her: “You are playing the sophist, dearest!” she commented. When from the discovery of Leucippe’s letter to Clitophon and her husband’s safe return she knew that she had lost Clitophon, she visited him secretly in prison and poured out on him all her wrath and all her passion. Her denunciation of him as eunuch, hermaphrodite, senile nonentity shifted to adoration; and passion finally concentrated into so ardent and well argued an appeal for one embrace that she was victorious. Clitophon admitted ironically that love had taught her rhetoric and that he was vanquished, so he gave the remedy to a sick soul and even on the prison floor enjoyed her![165]
Melitte was no less subtle and plausible in the speech in which she made her peace with her enraged husband Thersander: Clitophon was only one of many refugees whom she aided in memory of her husband lost at sea; indeed she had helped Clitophon to find his wife.[166] When Thersander challenged her by the ordeal of the water of the Styx, Melitte at once accepted the test on a quibble because her husband had demanded from her an oath that she had not fulfilled the rites of Aphrodite with the stranger during the time while he himself was abroad. And it was just that unfortunate stipulation which makes her last appearance in the romance unforgettable. She is led out of the water of the Styx by the judge, proved by indisputable ordeal a chaste woman! Achilles Tatius has won his readers by this time to rejoice in Melitte’s vindication. For besides charm and cleverness he has given her humanity and generosity. She was always merciful to her slaves and was kindness itself to Lacaena-Leucippe.[167] After she had won her desire, she contrived the escape of Clitophon from prison dressed in her clothes, and financed by her. She did not even forget the jailer, but gave him money to go away for a time to avoid punishment.[168] Clitophon omitted in his final narrative of his adventures his succumbing to Melitte[169] but he had the grace to admit to himself her charms.
It is clear that in the ethics of the romance there is a new point of view. Achilles Tatius is definitely less idealistic than Chariton in his treatment of the erotic theme. As Rattenbury has pointed out:
“Achilles Tatius seems to have felt that the fetish of chastity in the average romance was absurd, and tries to humanize romance by creating characters that are reasonably, not unreasonably, moral.... Leucippe comes through safe and sound, it is true, but it was by good luck rather than by good intention.” Clitophon is chaste as far as men can be and succumbs to Melitte only once. “Achilles Tatius,” continues Rattenbury, “did not exactly parody his predecessors, but it is suggested that by attempting to humanize romance he not only showed up the absurdities of the usual stories, but was also responsible for the overthrow of the literary form.... Achilles Tatius seems to have been to Greek Romance what Euripides was to Greek Tragedy. He broke down the conventions, and drove the essential and permanent elements to seek refuge elsewhere. The erotic element did not die, but found an outlet in ‘Love-Letters,’ a contemporary literary form of which Aristaenetus was an exponent in the fifth century, but the idealized love story of a superhumanly modest hero and heroine vanished, and Greek Romance hibernated until it was revived some centuries later by the Byzantine writers.”[170]
Not inconsistent with Tatius’ slightly ironic treatment of amours is his emphasis on the virtue of pity and his tendency to introduce long philosophical discussions of conduct or the nature of love. Clitophon’s story moves an Egyptian general to pity, tears and aid, for
“When a man hears of another’s misfortune, he is inclined towards pity, and pity is often the introduction to friendship; the heart is softened by grief for what it hears, and gradually feeling the same emotions at the mournful story converts its commiseration into friendship and the grief into pity.”[171]
In the midst of Thersander’s attempt to rape the weeping Leucippe, there is a long digression on tears and the pity they arouse.[172] Clinias appeals to the court not to put to death “a man who deserves pity rather than punishment.”[173] Leucippe, disguised as a slave, begs Melitte as a woman to pity a woman and to pity one once free, now through Fortune’s will a slave.[174]
Tatius has presented also in Callisthenes a picture of a noble young hero who was converted from the wildness of youth to self-control, respect, patriotism and service by chivalrous love.[175] And this portrait of Callisthenes becomes an embodiment of an ideal latent in the philosophical discussions of love which flavor the romance. “Love,” says Clitophon, “inspired by beauty enters the heart through the eyes.”[176] Later Clinias tells Clitophon that he is greatly fortunate in being able to see his lady, for when eyes of lovers meet, the emanations of their beauty wed in a spiritual union that transcends bodily embrace.[177] Clitophon, wooing Leucippe in a fair garden, discourses to her on the power of love over birds, creeping things, plants, even iron which responds to the magnet, over water (for Arethusa and Alpheus wed).[178] To cheer up Menelaus and Clinias on ship-board and divert them from their sorrows, Clitophon starts a philosophic discussion on love of women compared with love of men, untranslatable in its openness.[179] Menelaus takes up the cudgels for the love of men, probably much to Clinias’ satisfaction for he had previously denounced to his dear Charicles the love of women who, if they love, kill and had arraigned for his indictment Eriphyle, Philomela, Sthenoboea, Chryseis, Briseis, Candaules’ wife, Helen, Penelope, Phaedra, Clytemnestra![180]
The worship of the kiss is featured in an enchanting story of a magic charm breathed on the lover’s lips[181] and a fantastic assertion that if a maiden’s kiss is stolen, the maid is raped.[182] Moreover a code of love is presented, almost as detailed as Ovid’s Ars Amatoria, in instructions given by Clinias to Clitophon,[183] by the slave Satyrus to Clitophon,[184] by Clitophon in discussion with Menelaus.[185] A delightful part of this Art of Love is telling the Lady love-stories, for all womankind is fond of myths.[186] Magic too plays its part in the technique of love, for incantation works a charm for a lover;[187] philtres may bewitch the indifferent;[188] and ordeals test chastity.[189]
Closely akin to the philosophical discussions of love, its power, its art, its magic is the worship of Aphrodite, the mother of Eros. Yet there are few references to her cult. Her dominance is hinted: initiation into love makes Aphrodite the most powerful of gods.[190] Melitte wishes to have her nuptials on the sea, for Aphrodite is the sea’s daughter and she wishes to propitiate her as the goddess of marriage by thus honoring the sea, her mother.[191] Clitophon at the end of his separation from Leucippe prays to Lady Aphrodite to forgive the long delay in their union, for it was due to no insult to her and he begs her blessing on their marriage.[192] The story of the ordeal by the water of the Styx[193] is a merry tale of rivalry between Artemis and Aphrodite for a young girl’s worship in which Aphrodite made young Rhodopis break her oath of chastity but Artemis changed her into a spring in the very cave where she lost her virginity. Yet Achilles Tatius presents no such deep-seated reverence for the goddess of Love as that which permeates Chariton’s romance.
Artemis of Ephesus is rather the deity who dominates Tatius’ story. She appears in dreams to the heroine and to Leucippe’s father.[194] In her name Leucippe rebukes Thersander for insulting a virgin in the city of the Virgin Goddess.[195] Sostratus arrives at Ephesus as the head of a sacred embassy in honor of Artemis and so finds his daughter.[196] Leucippe has taken refuge in the temple of Artemis and in that temple at last she and Clitophon are reunited.[197] Here the villain of the piece Thersander brutally attacks Clitophon.[198] Thersander’s lawyer in court makes insulting slanders about the fact that Clitophon and Leucippe probably defiled the temple by an amour there.[199] But Artemis is proved to be no liar, and there is implicit recognition of her protection of Leucippe though Achilles Tatius does not end with thanksgiving to her. Her cult forms an objective background of religious tradition for the action. No deep religious feeling for her is manifested.
There is no more aspiration to god in the other cults which are mentioned incidentally: of Apollo, Hercules of Tyre, the god of the lower world, Pan. And the cruel goddess Fortune is berated only occasionally. Superstition recognizes omens in the world of nature: the eagle stealing the sacrifice, the hawk pursuing the swallow.[200] Oracles are respected.[201] And the ordeals of Pan’s pipes and the Styx’s water receive general credence. Festivals to the gods are celebrated.[202] But religion seems rather a matter of scrupulous regard for ritual than communion with god or relief to the soul.
As we compare the romances of Chariton and Achilles Tatius we find that not only has the main interest shifted from love and worship to incidents and adventures. An even greater change has come about in the style. Homeric simplicity has given way to rhetorical elaboration. Tatius may well have been a ῥήτωρ as the scholiast Thomas Magister states, for his whole style is dyed in the rhetoric of the schools and the speeches delivered in the various lawsuits in the plot are masterpieces of rhetoric.
Among his acknowledged literary debts, however, he credits most to epic, for he quotes Homer once[203] and alludes to him five times[204] and he refers to Hesiod twice.[205] The messenger speeches in tragedy undoubtedly suggested the slave’s dramatic narrative of the death of Charicles in a riding accident.[206] Both the New and the Old Attic Comedy contributed much to his humor: the New in the comic literary contest of the slaves Conops and Satyrus who deride each other under cover of fables;[207] and the Old in the Aristophanic priest of Artemis who “was no poor hand at speaking, and as good at quip and gibe as the plays of Aristophanes.”[208] But the training of the rhetorical schools outweighs all other influences. About half of Books VII and VIII is devoted to the trial of Clitophon for adultery and self-confessed murder. The court sits in Ephesus with a jury and a presiding judge, but their functions are vague. The prosecution speaks first, Thersander and his ten lawyers, whose speeches fortunately are not reported. Clitophon answers them by a false narrative accusing himself of the murder of Leucippe and involving Melitte. Clinias gets the floor and tells the true story: that Clitophon desires only to die, that he deserves pity rather than condemnation and must be regarded as insane.
In the wild confusion that follows, Thersander’s counsel shouts for a sentence of murder, Melitte offers her slaves to be questioned on her innocence and demands that her husband produce Sosthenes who is probably the murderer. Thersander in a long speech answers Melitte’s challenge about Sosthenes with the result that the presiding officer pronounces sentence of death on Clitophon but postpones Melitte’s case. Clitophon is just on the point of being tortured for evidence when the arrival of a sacred embassy to Artemis postpones the case of Melitte and the execution of Clitophon.
Only after the work of the embassy is finished is the case resumed. Then Thersander speaks first, demanding the execution of the sentence. He condemns the priest who has released Clitophon and says he has usurped the function of giving refuge to criminals which belongs to Artemis. He adds foul personal abuse. He presents a second charge against Melitte for adultery and a third against his slave girl Leucippe and her father. The priest in his reply deserves the epithet “Aristophanic” which he has won, for he pays Thersander back in his own coin of abuse only clothing it in the wit of Aristophanes with all his double-meaning of words, his biting attack. And his own arguments point the irony of the situation: Thersander clapped Clitophon in jail before he was allowed to defend himself. He charged him with murdering Leucippe but the young lady is alive!
Sopater, counsel for Thersander, next hurls insulting invective at the priest and whitewashes his noble client who has been betrayed by a faithless wife. Thersander then presents a formal challenge to Melitte and Leucippe to prove their chastity and on their acceptance of it, the court adjourns. Next day all reassemble at the cave of Pan and the spring of the Styx. The ladies are proved innocent. Thersander flees and then is sentenced to banishment. Clitophon—and Melitte—are acquitted.
This summary of the procedure of the court in Ephesus shows what opportunity Achilles Tatius made for presenting the rhetorical speeches which he cherished. They are many. They are full of specious argument, personal attack, appeal to the emotions, attempted pathos which becomes bathos and genuine ἦθος. The speakers are true to type: the impassioned lover, the leal friend, the haughty, imperious, lustful noble, his sophistical lawyer, the Aristophanic priest. Such agonistic scenes must have entertained the reader of the time as much as they did the author. Actually this same favorite rhetorical style is also assigned to the characters in private life: Melitte in her impassioned speech to Clitophon in prison talks like a sophist, for Eros teaches even arguments![209]
Long mythological narratives are another feature of Tatius’ style. The sight of a painting makes it necessary for him to relate the whole story of Procne and Philomela to Leucippe.[210] The stories of the origins of the two ordeals to prove chastity are told with equal detail. The discovery of wine is elaborately related in the Tyrian version on the occasion of the festival of Dionysus.[211] These are a few out of many illustrations.
Descriptive writing is employed as much as, perhaps more than, forensic or narrative. Indeed the purple patches almost overbalance plot, conversation and oratory. Works of art, setting for scenes, natural phenomena, the wonders of the world are introduced in highly colored digressions which are clearly the ekphraseis which the students of rhetoric were taught to compose and deliver.
Achilles Tatius apparently was enamored of wall-paintings. He describes with gusto five and alludes to another. The subjects of all are myths. Two are familiar types in the frescoes found at Pompeii: Perseus and Andromeda, Achilles in women’s clothes among the daughters of King Lycomedes. One description of a painting opens the romance, a votive painting of Europa in the temple of Astarte at Sidon.[212] Sidon is the first word of the novel and this story is introduced as a tribute to the city where the first scene was laid, for the stemma on the coins of Sidon is Europa on the bull, pictured almost as Tatius presents her. The picture is described in vivid detail even to the flowers in the meadow and the shifting colors of the sea. Posture and garb of Europa are vividly sketched in words for he sees her “seated on the bull like a vessel under way, using the veil as a sail.” The keynote of the picture and the point of its application for Tatius is the little flying Eros who leads the bull and laughs back at the transformed Zeus. “Look,” said Clitophon, “how that imp dominates over land and sea.” A young man standing by exclaims that he too has suffered much from love. These exclamations are the point of departure for the recounting of love adventures.
In Book III there is an equally long description of a painting by Evanthes in the temple of Zeus Casius.[213] The subjects are Andromeda and Prometheus and they seem to have been paired because both were chained to rocks, menaced by beasts and rescued by Argive heroes, Perseus and Hercules. Design, color, emotion are all described vividly and charmingly, but there is no point in the introduction of the paintings. The description of them is simply a purple patch of fine writing.
In Book V the description of a painting in a studio depicting the rape of Philomela had “a hidden significance.”[214] The whole story was represented: “the rape of Philomela, the violence employed by Tereus, and the cutting out of her tongue ... the tapestry, Tereus himself, and the fatal table.” Ugly realism, terror, insane laughter characterize the treatment. The hidden meaning is that the sudden sight of the picture is a bad omen threatening disaster which makes Clitophon postpone his journey to Pharos. The delay gives him a chance to tell the whole story of Philomela to Leucippe, for all women love myths.
Small works of art also are described lovingly and minutely: a rock-crystal goblet carved in a grape-vine,[215] a jewelled necklace.[216] These enrich the setting as scattered flowers enrich the backgrounds of Renaissance tapestries. It is as though Achilles Tatius like Corinthian potters or Renaissance artists had such an horror vacui that empty spaces in design were intolerable and interstices had to be crowded with beautiful small objects. This is due in part to an observant eye that saw and recorded detail. The specific and the graphic are his tools for clarity. The story of the attempted amour of Clitophon and Leucippe is vivified by a plan of the house as clear as the drawn plans in many modern detective stories.[217] The garden in which Clitophon’s love-making is once set is described elaborately with its porticoes, trees, vines, flowers, spring and birds.[218] The storm at sea in its violence and coloring is as lurid as a Turner, and its effects on the shipwrecked passengers are described with a true psychology of terror and panic.[219]
The long description of the storm is justified by the vital significance of the shipwreck for the plot, but what of the write-ups of the wonders of the world which are constantly introduced? The beautiful description of Alexandria with its pharos is brief and pardonable as this was the birthplace of the author. But only the love of novelty of the times and bad taste seem to explain the perpetrations of wordy descriptions of the Nile, the phoenix, the hippopotamus, the elephant and the crocodile![220] The romance at times tends to become a natural history. Wolff becomes so out of patience with “the damnable iteration” of irrelevancies in Clitophon and Leucippe that he can hardly calm himself to analyze them in suggestive groups: irrelevancies of plot, of characterization, of setting, of science and pseudo-science. The only justification for such irrelevancies Wolff finds in “a common basis with paradox. Both defeat expectation.... In both its phases,—irrelevancy and paradox—this element of the unexpected, prominent in the form as in the matter of the Greek Romances, deserves attention. To turn aside to the irrelevant; to strain suspense by retarding the expected outcome; to introduce by the way—all unlooked for—as many bizarre, ironical, paradoxical situations and dazzling phrases as possible; and finally to ‘spring’ an issue which is itself a surprising combination of opposites—all these would seem to be consistent results of adopting the unexpected as the principle of the genre.”[221]
After all this is said in criticism of Achilles Tatius’ exuberant style and unlimited digressions, we go back to his fundamentals: a clear plot, living human beings, vivid settings for them, and exciting adventures. Achilles Tatius knew his age and for its disillusions he wrote with ironic tolerance of human frailty and for its weariness he emphasized the excitement of adventure and the stimulus of the unexpected. To me his successes chalk up to a longer list than his failures and I end with Phillimore:
“What a strange thought—that an Alexandrian with the names of Achilles Tatius (what a pair!), atticizing con furore in the reign of Diocletian, should write a story which delighted the Byzantine Middle Ages and can still be read with interest and amusement!”[222]