The influence of Chariton is clearly seen in Xenophon both in direct imitation and in qualities of style. When the Phoenician pirates had kidnapped Habrocomes and Anthia on their trireme and fired their captives’ vessel leaving many to perish in the sea, an old slave, as he swam, pitifully called to Habrocomes to save his aged paedagogue or at least kill him and bury him.[97] In view of the situation this is a ridiculous appeal, but it is a clear imitation of a passage in Chariton where, when Chaereas resolves to go to sea to search for Callirhoe, his father Ariston begs his son not to desert him, but to take him on his trireme,[98] or to wait a few days for his father’s death and burial. Anthia, when Manto, the daughter of the brigand chief, demands Habrocomes’ submission to her passion, begs her husband to save his life in this way and swears that she will leave him free by killing herself, only asking from him burial, one last kiss, and a place in his memory. This is in direct imitation of Chariton and of Chaereas’ words when he finds Callirhoe married to Dionysius.[99] Here Xenophon is simpler than his model, for he does not transfer the effective lines from Homer which Chariton quotes.[100] The burial of Anthia with its rich funeral gifts resembles the burial of Callirhoe and also the lavish equipment of the cenotaph for Chaereas.[101] The language of Chariton is adapted for the lament of Habrocomes in Italy at the failure of his quest and his renewed pledge of faithfulness unto death.[102]
These clear indications of imitation of detail serve to corroborate the evidence of general imitation of style. Indeed Dalmeyda sees in the whole temperament of Xenophon a close affinity to Chariton. Xenophon introduces the most startling events without fanfare. Characteristic of his style are accumulated questions, pathetic résumés, oaths, invocations of the gods, apostrophes of men and of things particularly of that fatal beauty which the young hero and heroine deplore because of their misery. Xenophon’s relation to Chariton in all this is striking.[103]
The plot of the novel has seemed to some critics epic in its chronological narrative of successive adventures. Others find the structure a tragic plot with an angry god demanding satisfaction for the sin of arrogance and the guilty hero involving in his own nemesis the one most dear to him. It is true that this and other resemblances to tragedy exist. The story of Manto and her false denunciation of Habrocomes for an attempt to rape her after she has failed to win his love goes back to the Phaedra story of Euripides’ Hippolytus. The noble goatherd husband of Anthia finds his prototype in Electra’s peasant husband in Euripides’ play. The scene where Anthia on her wedding-night takes poison which proves to be a sleeping potion, to avoid a new marriage and keep her troth to her lost love seems to be the antecedent of the poison scene in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet.
To me, however, this novelette finds its closest affiliation in another successor. Both the structure and the devices used to arouse emotion anticipate the modern cinema. This contemporary form of amusement is such an accepted part of modern life that we hardly need to read the books about the cinema by Allerdyce Nicoll, Lewis Jacobs, Maurice Bardèche and others to understand “the Rise of the American Film.” Personally I go to the movies to escape from routine and from painful thoughts of our own times. Occasionally I allow myself to be educated about Steel or The River. I prefer to industrial films or films of social problems like lynching, prison conditions, housing, films with biographies of great historical characters: Pasteur, Zola, Rembrandt. I like films set in local history such as Maryland or Kentucky or Gone with the Wind or The Howards of Virginia or The North West Mounted Police. I have to shut my eyes during the fighting and the cruelties of Sea Hawk and All This and Heaven Too. But I like the cinematic rapidity of changes of scene, the control by the camera of space and magnitude, the extension of the time-limit, the fade-ins and fade-outs which can create fantastic visions, the value of the flash-back to recall what has been already seen, the concentration of interest achieved by close-ups.
Many of these devices I recognize in the Greek Romances and especially in Xenophon of Ephesus. His narrative is as condensed as that of a scenario with lacunae, abrupt transitions, failures in an adequate vocabulary of emotion. The local history of Ephesus is emphasized and depicted. Scenes shift with cinematic rapidity. Hair-raising adventures succeed each other at an exciting pace. Bandits and pirates achieve robbery and kidnapping. High police officials or officers like G-Men perform valiant rescues. Court-room scenes as in many films vie with shipwrecks in interest. Documents like letters are presented to the reader’s eye as on the screen. Visions and dreams are made to seem as real as in fade-ins and fade-outs.
There is a clear morality in the opposition of good and bad characters and in the final victory of the good. Hero and heroine captivate by their extraordinary beauty and maintain their chastity and fidelity against terrific odds. Hence their phenomenal virtue is rewarded by reunion in the end. Religion often plays a saving part (as on the screen for example in Brother Orchid). The Reader like the audience at the movie goes away with a sense of having been enlivened, entertained and vastly improved. For the function of the Greek romance in the second and third centuries A.D., when the universal rule of the Roman Empire gave scant scope for great oratory or tragedy under the blessings of an enforced peace, was to entertain and to edify. The Greek romance substituted for the adventures of the mind new themes: the excitements of passion, the interests of travel, and the consolations of religion. It was lifted out of the ranks of the trivial and the second-rate by its great central theme: that there is such a thing as true love; that weighed in the balance against it all the world is nothing; and that it outlives time and even death.
Our own age in America, bleeding internally from the agony of a war which it is powerless to end, fearful for its own menaced security, demands from the cinema not only temporary oblivion and excitement, but encouragement to believe that love lasts even unto death, that heroes ride again and are victorious, and that finally, by the help of God, the right will conquer.
IV
THE AETHIOPICA OF HELIODORUS
The life of Heliodorus is as obscure as that of each of the other writers of Greek romance, but in the tradition of his there is a special point of controversy. Was Heliodorus a pagan novelist or a Christian bishop? Or by some strange metamorphosis did the writer of the romantic Aethiopica become in later and staider years the Bishop of Tricca? The only certain facts are found in the autobiographical sentence which concludes the romance, that he was a Phoenician of Emesa, of a family descended from Helios, the son of Theodosius.
It was Socrates who, in the fifth century A.D., stated that the custom of celibacy for the clergy was introduced in Thessaly by Heliodorus when he became bishop of Tricca. He added that Heliodorus wrote in his youth a love-story, which he called Aethiopica.[104] Photius in the ninth century says that he received the bishopric later, that is after writing the romance. Nicephorus Callistus in the fourteenth century after quoting the remark of Socrates adds that the Aethiopica created such a scandal Heliodorus had to choose between his bishopric and the destruction of his romance so he abandoned his charge, but this is probably mere embellishment of the story. As Rattenbury points out,[105] neither Socrates, Photius nor Nicephorus declares that Heliodorus was a Christian when he wrote his romance, but they imply clearly that he became a bishop afterwards. And if the author of the romance was a devout pagan as he seems to have been, that state of mind could have made possible his conversion to Christianity. This seems a reasonable explanation of the strong tradition continuing from the fifth century that Heliodorus became bishop of Tricca.