Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 55, No. 339, January, 1844

Choereas, himself a native of the city, who had been called upon to take service in the late expedition against the buccaniers, does the honours of the locale to his new friends:—but he is not proof against the fatal charms of Leucippe, and resorts to the old expedient of procuring her abduction by a crew of pirates while on an excursion to the Pharos. The vessel of the captors is, however, chased by a guard-boat, and on the point of being taken, when Leucippe is brought on deck and decapitated by the pirates, who throw the headless body into the sea, and make their escape; while Clitophon stays the pursuit, to recover the remains of his mistress for sepulture. Clitophon now returns to Alexandria to mourn for his lost love, and is still inconsolable at the end of six months, when he is surprised by the appearance of Clinias, whom he had supposed to have perished when the vessel foundered at sea. Clinias relates that having, like the others, floated on a piece of the wreck, he had been picked up by a ship, which brought him back to Sidon; and as his absence from home had been so short as not to have been generally noticed, he had thought it best not to mention it, especially as he had no good account to give of his fellow-fugitives. In the mean time, as Calligone is given up for lost, Sostratus, who has heard of his daughter's attachment to Clitophon, but not of the elopement, writes from Byzantium to give his consent to their union; and diligent enquiries are made in every direction for the runaway couple, till information is at length obtained that Clitophon has been seen in Egypt. His father, Hippias, is therefore preparing to set sail for Alexandria to bring back the truant, when Clinias, thinking it would be as well to forewarn Clitophon of what had occurred in his absence, starts without delay, unknown to Hippias, and reaches Alexandria before him.

The intelligence thus received throws Clitophon into fresh agonies of grief and remorse: he curses his own impatience in carrying off Leucippe, when a short delay would have crowned his happiness; accuses himself anew as the cause of her death; and declares his determination not to remain in Egypt and encounter his father. His friends, Menelaus and Clinias, in vain endeavour to combat this resolve; till the over-ready Satyrus finds an expedient for evading the difficulty. A young "Ephesian widow," named Melissa, fair and susceptible, who has lately lost her husband at sea, and become the heiress of his immense wealth, has recently (in obedience to the above-mentioned invariable law of Greek romance) fixed an eye of ardent affection on Clitophon; and it is suggested by his friends that, by marrying this new inamorata, and sailing with her forthwith on her return to Ephesus, his departure would at once be satisfactorily explained to his father on his arrival, and he might return to his friends at Tyre after their emotions at the tragical catastrophe of Leucippe had in some measure subsided. After much persuasion, Clitophon accedes to this arrangement, with the sole proviso that nothing but the fiançailles, or betrothal, shall take place in Egypt, and that the completion of the marriage shall be deferred till their arrival in Ephesus—on the plea that he cannot pledge his faith to another in the land where his beloved Leucippe met with her fate. This proposal, after vehement opposition on the part of the amorous Ephesian, is at last agreed to; and Clitophon, with his half-married bride, sets sail for Ephesus, accompanied by Clinias; while Menelaus, who remains in Egypt, undertakes the task of explaining matters to Hippias. The voyage is prosperously accomplished; and Melissa becomes urgent for the formal solemnization of the nuptials; while Clitophon continues to oppose frivolous delays which might have roused the anger of a lady even of a less ardent temperament. Her affection, however, continues undiminished; but Clitophon, while visiting, in her company, her country residence in the neighbourhood of the city, is thunderstruck by fancying that he recognizes, in the disfigured lineaments of a female slave, said to be a Thessalian of the name of Lacoena, who approaches Melissa to complain of the ill-treatment she has received from the steward, Sosthenes, the features of his lost Leucippe. His suspicions are confirmed by a billet which Leucippe conveys to him through Satyrus; and his situation becomes doubly perplexing, as Melissa, more than ever at a loss to comprehend the cause of his indifference, applies to Leucippe, (whom she supposes to possess the skill of the Thessalians in magic,) for a love-charm to compel his affections, promising her liberty as a reward. Leucippe is delighted by the proof which this request affords of the constancy of her lover; but the preparations for his marriage with Melissa still proceed, and evasion appears impossible; when at the preliminary banquet, the return of her husband, Thersander, is announced, who had been falsely reported to have perished by shipwreck. A terrible scene of confusion ensues, in which Thersander,

 
—— "proceeding at a very high rate,
Shows the imperial penchant of a pirate."
 

Clitophon gets a violent beating, to which he submits with the utmost tameness, and is thrown into fetters by the enraged husband; and though Melissa, on certain conditions, furnishes him with the means of escape from the house in the disguise of a female, he again unluckily encounters Thersander, and is lodged in the prison of Ephesus. Leucippe, meanwhile, of whose unrivalled charms Thersander has been informed by Sosthenes, is still detained in bondage, and suffers cruel persecution from her brutal master; who, at last, having learned from an overheard soliloquy her true parentage and history, as well as her attachment for Clitophon, (of her relations with whom he was not previously aware,) forms a scheme of ridding himself of this twofold rival, by sending one of his emissaries into the prison, who gives out that he has been arrested on suspicion of being concerned in the murder of Leucippe, who has been dispatched by assassins employed by the jealous Melissa. Clitophon at once gives full credence to this awkwardly devised tale, and determines not to survive his mistress, in spite of the remonstrances of Clinias, who argues with much reason, that one who had so often been miraculously preserved from death, might have escaped also on the present occasion. But Clitophon refuses to be comforted; and when brought before the assembly in the forum to stand his trial, on the charge, (apparently, for it is not very clearly specified,) of having married another man's wife, he openly declares himself guilty of Leucippe's murder, which he affirms to have been concerted between Melissa and himself, in order to remove the obstacle to their amours, and now revealed by him from remorse. He is, of course, condemned to death forthwith, and Thersander is triumphing in the unexpected success of his schemes, when the judicial proceedings are interrupted by the appearance of a religious procession, at the head of which Clitophon is astonished by recognizing his uncle Sostratus, the father of Leucippe, who had been deputed by the Byzantines to offer sacrifices of thanksgiving, at the Temple of Diana, for their victory over the Thracians. On hearing the state of affairs, he furiously denounces the murderer of his daughter; but at this moment it is announced that Leucippe, whom Thersander had believed to be in safe custody, has escaped, and taken refuge in the Temple of Diana!

The interest of the story is now at an end; but much yet remains before the conclusion. Thersander, maddened at the prospect of being thus doubly baulked of his prey, throws gross aspersions on the purity of Leucippe, and even demands that Clitophon, in spite of his now manifest innocence, shall be executed in pursuance of the previous sentence! but the high-priest of Diana takes the lovers under his protection, and the cause is adjourned to the morrow. Leucippe now relates the circumstances of her captivity:—the Alexandrian pirates, having deceived their pursuers by beheading another captive dressed in her garments, had next fallen out with and murdered their base employer Choereas, and finally sold her for two thousand drachmas to Sosthenes: while from Sostratus, on the other hand, Clitophon receives tidings that his long-lost sister Calligone is on the point of marriage to Callisthenes, who, it will be remembered, had carried her off from Tyre by mistake for Leucippe, (having become enamoured of the latter without ever having seen her,) and on the discovery of his error, had made her all the amends in his power by an instant transfer of his affections. Thus everything is on the point of ending happily; but the sentence passed against Clitophon still remains unreversed, and Thersander, in the assembly of the following day, vehemently calls for its ratification. But the cause of the defendant is espoused by the high-priest, who lavishes on the character and motives of Thersander a torrent of abuse, couched in language little fitting his sacred character; while Thersander shows himself in this respect fully a match for his reverend antagonist, and, moreover, reiterates with fresh violence his previous charge against Leucippe. The debates are protracted to an insufferably tedious length; but the character of Leucippe is at last vindicated by her descent into a cavern, whence sounds of more than human melody are heard on the entrance of a damsel of untainted fame. The result of this ordeal is, of course, triumphant; and Thersander, overwhelmed with confusion makes his escape from the popular indignation, and is condemned to exile by acclamation as a suborner of false evidence; while the lovers, freed at length from all their troubles, sail for Byzantium in company with Sostratus; and after there solemnizing their own nuptials, return to Tyre to assist at those of Callisthenes and Calligone.

The leading defects observable in this romance are obviously the glaring improbability of many of the incidents, and the want of connexion and necessary dependence between the several parts of the story. Of the former—the device of the false stomach and theatrical dagger, by means of which Menelaus and Satyrus (after gaining, moreover, in a moment the full confidence of the buccaniers,) save the life of Leucippe when doomed to sacrifice, is the most flagrant instance; though her second escape from supposed death, when Clitophon imagines that he sees her head struck off by the Alexandrian pirates, is almost equally liable to the same objection; while in either case the deliverance of the heroine might as well have been managed, without prejudice either to the advancement or interest of the narrative, by more rational and probable methods. The too frequent introduction of incidents and personages not in any way connected with, or conducive to the progress of the main plot, is also objectionable, and might almost induce the belief that the original plan was in some measure altered or departed from in the course of composition. It is difficult to conceive for what purpose the character of Calligone, the sister and fiancée of Clitophon, is introduced among the dramatic personae. She appears at the beginning only to be carried off by Callisthenes as soon as Clitophon's passion for Leucippe makes her presence inconvenient, and we incidentally hear of her as on the point of becoming his bride at the conclusion; but she is seen only for a moment, and never permitted to speak, like a walking gentlewoman on the stage, and exercises not the smallest influence on the fortunes of the others. Gorgias is still worse used: he is a mere nominis umbra, of whose bodily presence nothing is made visible; nor is so much as his name mentioned, except for the purpose of informing us that it was through his agency that the love-potion was administered to Leucippe, and that he has since been killed in the action against the buccaniers. The whole incident of the philtre, indeed, and the consequent madness of the heroine, is unnatural and revolting, and serves no end but to introduce Choereas to effect a cure. But even had it been indispensable to the plot, it might have been far more probably ascribed to the Egyptian commander Charmides, with whose passion for Leucippe we were already acquainted, and who had, moreover, learned from Menelaus that he had little chance of success by ordinary methods, from the pre-engagement of the lady to Clitophon.

Nor are these defects compensated by any high degree of merit in the delineation of the characters. With the exception of Leucippe herself, they are all almost wholly devoid of individual or distinguishing traits, and insipid and uninteresting to the last degree. Menelaus and Clinias, the confidants and trusted friends of the hero, are the dullest of all dull mortals—a qualification which perhaps fits them in some measure for the part they are to bear in the story, as affording some security against their falling in love with Leucippe, a fate which they, of all the masculine personages, alone escape. Their active intervention is confined to the preservation of Leucippe from the bucoli by Menelaus, and a great deal of useless declamation in behalf of Clitophon before the assembly of Ephesus from Clinias. Satyrus, also, from whose knavish ingenuity in the early part of the tale something better was to be expected, soon subsides into a well-behaved domestic, and hands his master the letter in which poor Leucippe makes herself known to him at Ephesus, when she imagines him married to Melissa, with all the nonchalance of a modern footman. Clitophon himself is hardly a shade superior to his companions. He is throughout a mere passive instrument, leaving to chance, or the exertions of others, his extrication from the various troubles in which he becomes involved: even of the qualities usually regarded as inseparable from a hero of romance, spirit and personal courage, he is so utterly destitute as to suffer himself to be beaten and ill treated, both by Thersander and Sostratus, without an attempt to defend himself; and his lamentations, whenever he finds himself in difficulties, or separated from his ladye-love, are absolutely puerile. As to the other characters, Thersander is a mere vulgar ruffian—"a rude and boisterous captain of the sea,"—whose brutal violence on his first appearance, and subsequent unprincipled machinations, deprive him of the sympathy which might otherwise have been excited in behalf of one who finds his wife and his property unceremoniously taken possession of during his absence; while, on the other hand, the language used by the high-priest of Diana, in his invectives against Thersander and his accomplices, gives but a low idea of the dignity or refinement of the Ephesian hierarchy. But the female characters, as is almost always the case in the Greek romances, are far better drawn, and infinitely more interesting, than the men. Even Melissa, though apparently intended only as a foil to the perfections of Leucippe, wins upon us by her amorous weakness, and the invincible kindness of heart which impels her, even when acquainted with the real state of affairs, to protect the lovers against her husband's malpractices. Leucippe herself goes far to make amends for the general insipidity of the other characters. Though not a heroine of so lofty a stamp as Chariclea, in whom the spirit of her royal birth is all along apparent, she is endowed with a mingled gentleness and firmness, which is strongly contrasted with the weakness and pusillanimity of her lover:—her uncomplaining tenderness, when she finds Clitophon at Ephesus (as she imagines) the husband of another, and the calm dignity with which she vindicates herself from the injurious aspersions of Thersander, are represented with great truth and feeling, and attach a degree of interest to her, which the other personages of the narrative are very far from inspiring.

In the early part of the story, during the scenes in Tyre and Egypt, the action is carried on with considerable spirit and briskness; the author having apparently thus far kept before him, as a model, the narrative of Heliodorus. But towards the conclusion, and, indeed from the time of the arrival of Clitophon and Melissa at Ephesus, the interest flags wofully. The dénouement is inevitably foreseen from the moment Clitophon is made aware that Leucippe is still alive and in his neighbourhood, and the arrival of Thersander, almost immediately afterwards, disposes of the obstacle of his engagement to Melissa; but the reader is acquainted with all these circumstances before the end of the fifth book; the three remaining books being entirely occupied by the proceedings in the judicial assembly, the recriminations of the high-priest, and the absurd ordeal to which Leucippe is subjected—all apparently introduced for no other purpose than to show the author's skill in declamation. The display of his own acquirements in various branches of art and science, and of his rhetorical powers of language in describing them, is indeed an object of which Achilles Tatius never loses sight; and continual digressions from the thread of the story for this purpose occur, often extremely mal-à-propos, and sometimes entirely without reference to the preceding narrative. Thus, when Clitophon is relating the terms of an oracle addressed to the Byzantines, previous to their war with the Thracians, he breaks off at once into a dissertation on the wonderful qualities of the element of water, the inflammable springs of Sicily, the gold extracted from the lakes of Africa, &c.—all which is supposed to be introduced into a conversation on the oracle between Sostratus and his colleague in command, and could only have come to the knowledge of Clitophon by being repeated to him verbatim, after a considerable interval of time, by Sostratus. Again, in the midst of the hero's perplexities at his threatened marriage with Calligone, we are favoured with a minute enumeration of the gems set in an ornament which his father purchased as part of the trousseau; and this again leads to an account of the discovery and application of the purple dye. The description of objects of natural history is at all times a favourite topic; and the sojourn of the lovers in Egypt affords the author an opportunity of indulging in details relative to the habits and appearances of the various strange animals found in that country—the crocodile, the hippopotamus, and the elephant, are described with considerable spirit and fidelity; and even the form and colours of the fabulous phoenix, are delineated with all the confidence of an eyewitness.

Many of these episodical sketches, though out of place when thus awkwardly inserted in the midst of the narrative, are in themselves curious and well written; but the most valuable and interesting among them are the frequent descriptions of paintings, a specimen of which has already been given. On this subject especially, the author dwells con amore, and his remarks are generally characterised by a degree of good taste and correct feeling, which indicates a higher degree of appreciation of the pictorial art than is generally ascribed to the age in which Achilles Tatius wrote. Even in the latter part of the first century of our era, Pliny, when enumerating the glorious names of the ancient Greek painters, laments over the total decline, in his own days, of what he terms (Nat. Hist. xxxv. 11) "an aspiring art;" but the monarchs of the Macedonian dynasties in Asia, and, above all, the Egyptian Ptolemies, were both munificent patrons of the fine arts among their own subjects, and diligent collectors of the great works of past ages; and many of the chefs-d'oeuvres of the Grecian masters were thus transferred from their native country to adorn, the temples and palaces of Egypt and Syria. We find, from Plutarch, that when Aratus was exerting himself to gain for the Achæan league the powerful alliance of Ptolemy Euergetes, he found no means so effectual in conciliating the good-will of the monarch, as the procuring for him some of the master-pieces of Pamphilus⁷ and Melanthius, the most renowned of the famous school of Sicyon; and the knowledge of the high estimation in which the arts were held, under the Egyptian kings, gives an additional value to the accounts given by Tatius of these treasures of a past age, his notices of which are the latest, in point of time, which have come down to us from an eyewitness. We have already quoted the author's vivid description of the painting of Europa at Sidon—we shall now subjoin, as a pendant to the former notice, his remarks on a pair of pictures at Pelusium:—

"In this temple (of Jupiter Casius) were two famous works of Evanthes, illustrative of the legends of Andromeda and Prometheus, which the painter had probably selected as a pair, from the similarity of the Subjects—the principal figure in each being bound to a rock and exposed to the attack of a terrific animal; in one case a denizen of the air, in the other a monster of the sea; and the deliverers of both being Argives, and of kindred blood to each other, Hercules and Perseus—the former of whom encountered, on foot, the savage bird sent by Jove, while the latter mounted on borrowed wings into the air, to assail the monster which issued from the sea at the command of Neptune. In the picture of Andromeda, the virgin was laid in a hollow of the rock, not fashioned by art, but rough like a natural cavity; and which, if viewed only with regard to the beauty of that which it contained, looked like a niche holding an exquisite fresh from the chisel; but the sight of her bonds, and of the monster approaching to devour her, gave it rather the aspect of a sepulchre. On her features extreme loveliness was blended with deadly terror, which was seated on her pallid cheeks, while beauty beamed forth from her eyes; but, as even amid the pallor of her cheeks a faint tinge of colour was yet perceptible, so was the brightness of her eyes, on the other hand, in some measure dimmed, like the bloom of lately blighted violets. Her white arms were extended, and lashed to the rock; but their whiteness partook of a livid hue, and her fingers were like those of a corpse. Thus lay she, expecting death, but arrayed like a bride, in a long white robe, which seemed not as if woven from the fleece of the sheep, but from the web of the spider, or of those winged insects, the long threads spun by which are gathered by the Indian women from the trees of their own country. The monster was just rising out of the sea opposite to the damsel, his head alone being distinctly visible, while the unwieldy length of his body was still in a great measure concealed by the waves, yet so as partially to discover his formidable array of spines and scales, his swollen neck, and his long flexible tail, while the gape of his horrible jaws extended to his shoulder, and disclosed the abyss of his stomach. But between the monster and the damsel, Perseus was depicted descending to the encounter from the upper regions of the air—his body bare, except a mantle floating round his shoulders, and winged sandals on his feet—a cap resembling the helmet of Pluto was on his head, and in his left hand he held before him, like a buckler, the head of the Gorgon, which even in the pictured representation was terrible to look at, shaking its snaky hair, which seemed to erect itself and menace the beholder. His right hand grasped a weapon, in shape partaking of both a sickle and a sword; for it had a single hilt, and to the middle of the blade resembled a sword; but there it separated into two parts, one continuing straight and pointed, like a sword, while the other was curved backwards, so that with a single stroke, it might both inflict a wound, and fix itself in the part struck. Such was the picture of Andromeda; the design of the other was thus:—

 

"Prometheus was represented bound down to a rock, with fetters of iron, while Hercules, armed with a bow and arrow, was seen approaching. The vulture, supporting himself by fixing his talons in the thigh of Prometheus, was tearing open the stomach of his victim, and apparently searching with his beak for the liver, which it was his destiny daily to devour, and which the painter had shown through the aperture of the wound. The whole frame of the sufferer was convulsed, and his limbs contracted with torture, so that, by raising his thigh, he involuntarily presented his side to the bird—while the other limb was visibly quivering in its whole length, with agony—his teeth were clenched, his lips parted, and his brows winkled. Hercules had already fitted the arrow to the bow, and aimed it against his tormentor: his left arm was thrown forward grasping the stock, while the elbow of the right was bent in the attitude of drawing the arrow to his breast; while Prometheus, full of mingled hope and fear, was endeavouring to fix his undivided gaze on his deliverer, though his eyes, in spite of himself, were partially diverted by the anguish of his wound."

The work of Achilles Tatius, with all its blemishes and defects, appears to have been highly popular among the Greeks of the lower empire. An epigram is still extant, attributed to the Emperor Leo, the philosopher,⁸ in which it is landed as an example of chaste and faithful love: and it was esteemed as a model of romantic composition from the elegance of its style and diction, in which Heretius ranks the author above Heliodorus, though he at the same time severely criticizes him for want of originality, accusing him of having borrowed all the interesting passages in his work from the Ethiopics. In common with Heliodorus, Tatius has found a host of followers among the later Greeks, some of whom (as the learned critic just quoted, observes) have transcribed, rather than imitated him. In the "Hysminias and Hysmine" of Eumathius, a wretched production of the twelfth century, not only many of the incidents, but even of the names, as Sostratus, Sosthenes, and Anthia*, are taken from Clitophon and Leucippe: and to so servile an extent is this plagiarism carried, that two books out of the nine, of which the romance consists, are filled with descriptions of paintings; while the plot, not very intelligible at the best, is still further perplexed by the extraordinary affectation of making nearly all the names alike; thus, the hero and heroine are Hysminias and Hysmine, the towns are Aulycomis, Eurycomis, Artycomis, &c. In all these works, the outline is the same; the lovers undergo endless buffetings by sea and land, imaginary deaths, and escapes from marauders; but not a spark of genius or fancy enlivens these dull productions, which, sometimes maudlin and bombastic, often indecent, would defy the patience of the most determined novel reader. One of these writers, Xenophon of Ephesus, the author of the "Ephesiacs, or Habrocomas and Anthia," is commended by Politian for the classical purity of his language, in which he considers him scarcely inferior to his namesake the historian: but the work has little else to recommend it. The two principal personages are represented as miracles of personal beauty; and the women fall in love with Habrocomas, as well as the men with Anthia, literally by dozens at a time: the plot, however differs from that of the others in marrying them at the commencement, and sending them through the ordinary routine of dangers afterwards. The Ephesiacs are, however, noticeable from its having been supposed by Mr Douce, (Illustrations of Shakspeare, ii. 198,) that the catastrophe in Romeo and Juliet was originally borrowed from one of the adventures of Anthia, who, when separated from her husband, is rescued from banditti by Perilaus, governor of Cilicia, and by him destined for his bride. Unable to evade his solicitations, she procures from the "poverty, not the will" of an aged physician named Eudoxus, what she supposes to be a draught of poison, but which is really an opiate. She is laid with great pomp, loaded with gems and costly ornaments, in a vault; and on awakening, finds herself in the hands of a crew of pirates, who have broken open her sepulchre in order to rifle the treasures which they knew to have been deposited there. "This work," (observes Mr Douce,) "was certainly not published nor translated in the time of Luigi da Porto, the original narrator of the story of Romeo and Juliet: but there is no reason why he might not have seen a copy of the original in MS. We might enumerate several more of these later productions of the same school; but a separate analysis of each would be both tedious and needless, as none present any marked features of distinction from those already noticed. They are all, more or less, indifferent copies either from Heliodorus or Achilles Tatius; the outline of the story being generally borrowed from one or the other of these sources, while in point of style, nearly all appear to have taken as their model the florid rhetorical display and artificial polish of language which characterize the latter. Their redeeming point is the high position uniformly assigned to the female characters, who are neither immured in the Oriental seclusion of the harem, nor degraded to household drudges, like the Athenian ladies in the polished age of Pericles:⁹ but mingle without restraint in society as the friends and companions of the other sex, and are addressed in the language of admiration and respect. But these pleasing traits are not sufficient to atone for the improbability of the incidents, relieved neither by the brilliant fancy of the East, nor the lofty deeds of the romances of chivalry: and the reader, wearied by the repetition of similar scenes and characters, thinly disguised by change of name and place, finds little reason to regret that "the children of the marriage of Theagenes and Chariclea," as these romances are termed by a writer quoted by d'Israeli in the "Curiosities of Literature"—have not continued to increase and multiply up to our own times.