“in stature, and fair eyes, and voice, and the raiment of his body was the same.”[47]
When Callirhoe came into the court-room in Babylon,
“she looked just as the divine poet says that Helen did, when she appeared to ‘them that were with Priam and Panthöos and Thymoëtes ... being elders of the people.’[48] At the sight of her, admiring silence fell, ‘and each one uttered a prayer that he might be her bedfellow.’”[49]
Besides this use of Homeric phrases in descriptions, quotations are frequently introduced in conversations as if Chariton found only Homer’s words expressive to convey the thought of one character to another.[50] But far more important than such uses of Homeric phraseology is the intensification of emotional coloring by a quotation from Homer at a crisis of poignant feeling. When Callirhoe’s nurse calls her to get up for it is her wedding day,
“her knees and heart were unstrung,”
because she did not know whom she was to marry.[51] When Chaereas is told that his wife is an adulteress,
“a black cloud of grief enwrapped him, and with both hands he took dark dust and poured it over his head and defiled his comely face.”[52]
When Chaereas is determined to set sail in winter in search of his kidnapped bride, his mother begged him to take her with him and cried in Homer’s words:
“My child, have regard unto this bosom and pity me if ever I gave thee consolation of my breast.”[53]
When Dionysius suddenly learned at a banquet that Chaereas was alive from reading his letter to Callirhoe,