Heliodo'rus
The author of the oldest and by far the best of the Greek romances, Heliodorus, the son of Theodosius, was a native of Syria, and was born, not, as Photius says, at Aminda, but at Emesa, as he himself tells us at the end of his romance :--
Τοιόνδε πέρας ἔσχε τὸ σύνταγμα τῶν περὶ Θεαγένην καὶ Χαρίκλείκλειαν Αἰθιοπικῶν ὁ συνέταξεν ἀνὴρ Φοίνιξ Ἐμεσηνὸς, τῶν ἀφ᾽ Ἡλίου, γένος, Θεοδοσίον παῖς Ἡλιόδωρος.
The words
τῶν ἀφ᾽ Ἡλίου γενος no doubt mean that he was of the family of priests of the Syrian god of the Sun (Elagabalus).
He lived about the end of the fourth century of our era, under Theodosius and his sons.
He wrote his romance in early life.
He afterwards became bishop of Tricca in Thessaly, where he introduced the regulation, that every priest who did not, upon his ordination, separate himself from his wife, should be deposed. (Socrat.
H. E. 5.22.) Nicephorus (
H. E. 12.34) adds that, on the ground of the alleged injury which had been done to the morals of young persons by the reading of the
Aethiopica, a provincial synod decreed that Heliodorus must either suffer his book to be burnt, or lay down his bishopric, and that Heliodorus chose the latter alternative.
The story has been wisely rejected by Valesius, Petavius, Huet, and other scholars ; and it is the more improbable from the fact that there is nothing of a corrupting tendency in the
Aethiopica. We have no further accounts of the life of Heliodorus. (
Phot. Bibl. 73.)
Works
His romance is in ten books, and is entitled
Aethiopica, because the scene of the beginning and the end of the story is laid in Aethiopia.
It relates the loves of Theagenes and Charicleia. Persine, the wife of Hydaspes, king of Aethiopia, bore a daugnter, whose complexion, through the effect of a Greek statue on the queen's mind, was white. Fearing that this circumstance might cause her husband to doubt her fidelity, she resolved to expose the child, and committed her, with tokens by which she might afterwards be known, to Sisimithras, a gymnosophist, who, being sent on an embassy into Egypt, took the child with him, and gave her to Charicles, the Pythian priest, who hapopened to be in Egypt. Charicles took the child to Delphi, where he brought her up as his own daughter, by the name of Charicleia, and made her priestess of Apollo.
In course of time there came to Delphi a noble Thessalian, descended from the Aeacidae, and named Theagenes, between whom and Charicleia a mutual love sprung up at first sight.
At the same time Calasiris, an Egyptian priest, whom the queen of Aethiopia had employed to seek for her daughter, happened to arrive at Delphi; and by his help Theagenes carried off Charicleia. Then follows a long and rapid series of perilous adventures, from pirates and other lawless men, till at last the chief persons of the story meet at Meroe, at the very moment when Charicleia, who has fallen as a captive into her father's hands, is about to be sacrificed to the gods : she is made known by the tokens and by the testimony of Sisimithras, and the lovers are happily married.
Though very deficient in those characteristics of modern fiction which appeal to the universal sympathies of our nature, the romance of Heliodorus is extremely interesting on account of the rapid succession of strange and not altogether improbable adventures, the many and various characters introduced, and the beautiful scenes described.
The opening scene is admirable, and the point of the story at which it occurs is very well chosen.
The language is simple and elegant, though it is sometimes too diffuse, and often deviates from the pure Attic standard.
The whole work, as compared with the best of later Greek romances, that of Achilles Tatius for example, has the superiority of greater nature, less artificial and rhetorical elaboration, with more real eloquence, less improbability in its incidents, and greater skill in the management of the episodes, and, in short, the superiority of a work of original talent over an imitation.
It formed the model for subsequent Greek romance writers.
It is often quoted by the title of
Χαρίκλεια, just as the work of Achilles is quoted by that of
Λευκίππη, from the names of the respective heroines.
Editions>
In modern times the
Aethiopica was scarcely known till, at the sacking of Ofen in 1526, a MS. of the work in the library of Matthias Corvinus, king of Hungary, attracted, by its rich binding, the attention of a soldier, who brought it into Germany, and at last it came into the hands of Vincentius (
Opsopoeus, who printed it at Basel, 1534, 4to. Several better MSS. were afterwards discovered, and
in 1596 a new edition was brought out in folio, at Heidelberg, by Commelinus, with the Latin version of Stanislaus Warsichewiczki, which had been printed in 1552 at Basel, and in 1556 at Antwerp. The edition of Commelinus was re printed at Lyon in 1611, 8vo., and at Frankfort in 1631, 8vo. This last edition, by Daniel Pareus, was the first divided into chapters. The edition of Bourdelot, Paris, 1619, 8vo., is full of errors, and the notes are of little value.
The edition of Peter Schmid, Lips. 1772, 8vo., only differs from that of Bourdelot by the introduction of new errors.
At length, in 1799, an excellent edition of the text and Latin version, with a few notes, chiefly critical, appeared in
Mitscherlich's Scriptores Graeci Erotici, of which it forms the 2d volume, in two parts, 8vo. Argentorat. anno VI. A still better edition was brought out in
1804, at Paris, by the learned Greek Coraes, at the expense of his friend, Alexander Basilius, in 2 vols. 8vo.
The first volume contains an introduction, in modern Greek, in the form of a letter to Alexander Basilius, and the text, with various readings.
The second volume contains notes in ancient Greek, and other illustra tive matter.
Translations
The
Aethiopica has been translated into nearly all modern languages. (Fabric.
Bibl. Graec. vol. viii. p. 111; the Prefaces of Mitscherlich and Coraes ; Jacobs, in Ersch and Gruber's
Encyclopädie, s. v.; Hoffmann,
Lex. Bibliog. Script. Graec. s. v.）
