PREFACE.
Nearly all the more recent romances and dramas, whose scene is laid in classic times, depict the period of the great rupture between Paganism and Christianity. This is true of “Hypatia,” “Fabiola,” “The Last Days of Pompeii,” “The Epicureans,” “The Emperor and The Galilean,” “The Last Athenian,” and many other works. The cause of this coincidence is not difficult to understand; for a period containing such strong contrasts invites æsthetic treatment.
The present tales derive their material from a different, but no less interesting epoch. They give pictures of the flowering of Hellas, the distant centuries whose marvellous culture rested solely on the purely human elements of character as developed beneath a mild and radiant sky.
Yet it required a certain degree of persistence to procure this material. When we examine the Greek writers to find descriptions of the men of those times or the special characteristics of the social life of the period, Greek literature, so rich in accounts of historical events, becomes strangely laconic, nay almost silent.
How entirely different is the situation of a person who desires to sketch a picture of the Frenchmen of the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries. The whole collection of memoirs is at his disposal. In these writings the author discourses familiarly with the reader, gives him lifelike portraits of the ladies and gentlemen of the court, and tells him the most minute anecdotes of the society of that day.
Greek literature has nothing of this kind. The description of common events and the history of daily existence are forms of writing of later origin, nothing was farther from the minds of ancient authors than the idea that private life could contain anything worth noting. Herodotus and Thucydides narrated little or nothing of what the novelists of the present day seek, nay, even among the orators only scattered details are found, and strangely enough there are more in the speeches of Lysias than of Demosthenes.
Among the poets Aristophanes produces a whole gallery of contemporary characters, but indistinctly and in vague outlines; they were what would now be called “originals from the street” who, during the performance of his comedies, sat among the spectators, and whom he only needed to mention to evoke the laughter of the crowd. Something more may be gathered from Lucian and Apuleius, together with the better “Milesian” tales, especially from Heliodorus and Achilles Tatius while, on the contrary, the great Alexandrian lumber-room, owed to Athenaeus, contains more gewgaws of learning and curiosa than really marked characteristics.
In the obscure recesses of Greek literature, where we are abandoned by all translators, and where—as everybody knows who has devoted himself to the interpretation of the classics—only short excursions can be made, we are sometimes surprised at finding, by pure accident, useful matter. Dion Chrysostomus (VII) gives extremely interesting descriptions of life in the Greek villages and commercial towns. But what is discovered is always so scattered that only a few notes can be obtained from numerous volumes.
When I decided to turn what I had read to account, I was fully aware that a presentation of ancient life in the form of a romance or novel was one of the most difficult æsthetic tasks which could be undertaken. If, nevertheless, I devoted myself to it, I naturally regarded the work only as an experiment.