SOURCE: Heiserman, Arthur. “Divine Romance.” In The Novel before the Novel: Essays and Discussions about the Beginnings of Prose Fiction in the West, pp. 188-202. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1977.

[In the following excerpt, Heiserman analyzes Heliodorus's development of plot, focusing on the theme of destiny and its role in the lives of its main characters.]

… Like other romances, the Aethiopica is set in the misty period of Persian hegemony over the East, and it culminates in Ethiopia, the Land of the Sun outside the confines of the later empire, where naked black sages, the purest devotees of Helios, defy their priestly king.¹ The specific cults described in the story—those practiced at Delphi, Memphis, and in Ethiopia itself—are judged to be inferior to a cultless life devoted to the acquisition of wisdom (sophia). On the other hand, allusions to Helios and to “the god” abound; and important episodes, especially the final ones, are contrived to direct our thoughts to the idea of destiny and to the pure religion that Helios seems to represent. Still, exactly what Heliodorus means by “Helios” remains vague, and he certainly does not celebrate any specific cult.² He wholeheartedly adopts the conventions of romance, refines and disposes them as they had not been before, and artfully enriches the familiar serious emotions with genuine sentiments concerning Providence and the moral life.

Heliodorus is the first novelist to devise a plot compounded of several lines of action and is the first to begin in medias res. Epitomizers therefore do him no justice when they straighten out his story by beginning with the birth of the white-skinned heroine to the black-skinned queen of Ethiopia and by then going on to relate how she gives the infant with tokens to a young Ethiopian sage, who in turn gives it to a Greek priest of Delphian Apollo named Charicles, who names the girl Chariclea; how at Delphi Chariclea falls in love with Theagenes and how their elopement is engineered by a witty, self-exiled priest of Isis named Calasiris, who sails with them to Egypt, where the lovers are captured by bandits headed by Calasiris' elder son. In fact the plot begins with this captivity; neither Chariclea nor the reader learns the circumstances of her birth until book 4 (there are ten books in all), and over a third of the whole is narrated as a flashback by the fatherly sage, Calasiris, to a young Greek named Cnemon, whose story is interwoven with those of Calasiris and the lovers. We must conform our discussion to Heliodorus' narrative because his method may in itself stimulate inferences about destiny and knowledge: though we suffer our lives in serial time, we can discover, like Heliodorus' characters, that what has happened in the past and is happening now is the product of a future that has always existed. And even if we make no such inferences, our emotional response to the story is in large part shaped by its narrative art.

The plot moves through five phases. In the first phase (bks. 1-2. 21) Chariclea and Theagenes are captured by brigands in the Delta, meet Cnemon, and escape. In the second (2. 22-5. 32) their lives up to the moment of their capture are described to Cnemon by Calasiris, whose intrigues, guided by his sophia, have brought them to Egypt. We are thus precisely halfway through the whole novel when we fully understand the circumstances that lead up to the initial scene of the book. The third phase (6. 1-7. 11) resolves the stories of Cnemon (who has been pursuing a villainous slave girl named Thisbe) and of Calasiris (who dies after seeing his brigand son reestablished in the priesthood of Isis). In the fourth phase (7. 12-8. 14) the betrothed lovers are embroiled in the intrigues of Arsace, lustful wife of the Persian satrap. And in the last phase (8. 15 ff.) the lovers are captured by the Ethiopians, who take them as human sacrifices to the Land of the Sun, where an elaborate sequence of recognitions and reversals fulfills the destiny enunciated by an oracle at the end of book 2.

Achilles Tatius and Longus had begun with charming paintings. Heliodorus begins with a ghastly tableau vivant. On a Delta beach littered with food and corpses sits a magnificent girl holding the wounded body of a magnificent boy. What has happened? Who are they? The girl is dressed as Artemis, so we know that she must be taken seriously, though we recall that it was Isis, Cybele, Astarte, and Aphrodite, not Artemis, who were associated with wounded lovers. But don't we already know that we are reading a scene typical of stories of erotic suffering, somehow displaced from the middle to the beginning of the book, and that in such stories theological precision is not customary? Moreover, we are gazing down on the scene along with the conventional bandits, who do not by convention provide a point of view; and if we expect an authorial ekphrasis of the scene, we are disappointed, because here is a poet who dramatizes everything. For example, it is the brigands' shadows falling across her vision that rouse the girl from a reverie which goes unreported. It is through direct discourse—after the awesome pair have been secured in the bandits' island fortress and put under the care of another captive, Cnemon—that we learn that their names are Chariclea (Glorious Grace) and Theagenes (Goddess-begotten), that they are affianced, that their patron is Helios Apollo, and that Chariclea now hopes only to die, “taking with me my chastity as a noble winding-sheet.” A predictable development of this stale sentiment and predicament is prevented by the unfolding of Cnemon's story (a version of the Hippolytus-Phaedra tale), which is itself developed in a complex way: part of it Cnemon tells himself, part he reports as it was told to him, part he reserves for a later climax. This thrice-boxed novella is also dramatized with many scenes, dialogue, allusions to Hesiod and Homer, and so on, and it causes events in the main action. Already Heliodorus has shown himself to be a masterful innovator, and his plot is as technically complicated as any hitherto designed by a Western writer, if not more so.

He squeezes critiques of the cults from the old conventions. For example, he converts the stock amorous bandit chief, Thyamis, into an exiled priest of Isis who dreams that the goddess, in a temple strewn with the bleeding carcasses of sacrificed animals, offers him a maiden; and ruled by the “promptings of his passion,” Thyamis imagines that she is Chariclea. Next morning he hypocritically tells his followers that, “since we of the family of prophets disdain the popular Aphrodite, it is not for purposes of enjoyment, but to provide offspring for the succession [to the priesthood of Isis at Memphis] that I have resolved to have this woman for myself.” What are we to think of a cult whose rites are barbaric and whose chief priest is a brigand, driven from his office by his younger brother? Heliodorus does not say; he makes the conventions lead us to the proper inferences. But our attention is always focused on the story; opinions about religion may emerge from a situation, but they do not seem to determine it.

Heliodorus often seems bemused by his conventions. Note how he handles the episode of death and resurrection, accompanied by the wonderfully paradoxical reversal of fortune. Maddened by his defeat by other brigands, and cursing Isis, Thyamis rushes into the prison cave and kills his fair captive, Chariclea. Theagenes and Cnemon stumble on the female corpse in the darkness, and Theagenes, throwing himself upon it, wails, “O God-sent disaster!” But when Chariclea appears, ghostlike, from the depths of the grotto, and the corpse is discovered to be that of the Greek slave girl whom Cnemon has been pursuing for months, joyous Theagenes, like the reader, complains, “How was it likely, Cnemon, that a woman from the middle of Greece should be transported into a remote corner of Egypt, as though by a stage-machine?” Cnemon's answer is in fact quite plausible, given what we already know of his story; but the question exemplifies the writer's detachment from the improbabilities inherent in such conventions, signals to us that we too may be self-conscious while enjoying the story, and suggests that the improbabilities of drama exceed those to be found in this narrative. Still, Heliodorus' use of stage drama will become more complicated than this, and he will lead us to infer that the paradoxes of a serious plot are not unlike those of destiny itself. But for now—and as usual—we are interested in the story. Cnemon contrives an escape plan; the lovers disguise themselves as beggars (Chariclea's Artemis regalia being concealed in a wallet slung round her loins) and disappear from view as the present-tense action is suspended.

The second phase of the plot is dominated by an old man whom Cnemon meets “roaming along the bank” of the Nile near Naucratis.

He was continually running up and down … and seemed to be imparting to the river some matters preying upon his mind. His hair hung down in the priestly fashion, and was perfectly white … and his gown and other attire tended somewhat to the Grecian style.

No one quite like this eccentric Hellenized Egyptian had yet appeared in fiction, though Achilles Tatius' Aristophanic priest, Petronius' dubious rhetorician, Agamemnon, and the stock figures of buffoon doctor and deflating ironist may all figure in his ancestry. He is a charlatan, a wit, a suffering father, an exemplary possessor of wisdom, and an intriguer for God. He refuses to agree with Cnemon that it is a good day, explaining that “calamities have put me in this brilliant change of costume”—alluding to his name, Calasiris, which denotes the linen robe worn by Egyptian priests, one of whom he was before resigning the bishopric of Isis at Memphis because (as he explains) he could not escape passion for a woman. Now he is seeking his lost children, “born to him motherless” (they will of course turn out to be Chariclea and Theagenes), whom he had adopted at Delphi, where he had gone to seek wisdom. And so the action begins again.

If the clergy of Isis is bloody and lustful, that of Delphian Apollo is superstitious and obtuse. We may infer this from the foolish Charicles, dean of the academy at Delphi, who believes in magic and cannot understand love.³ He asks Calasiris' help with his beauteous daughter, Chariclea, whom he had acquired ten years earlier from a black Ethiopian, along with a silken scarf figured with inscrutable hieroglyphics. She refuses to marry Charicles' kinsman, has declared that she intends to remain a virgin of Artemis, and is now the victim of a mysterious malady. Won't Calasiris cast on her one of the famous Egyptian spells so that she may “know her own nature and be conscious of her womanhood”? Calasiris promises to do what he can. Only he understands the oracle (the professional Greeks do not), which volunteers that “Glorious Grace” and “Goddess-begotten” will one day, in the “black-faced country of the Sun,” win, as prizes for their virtue, white crowns from black brows. Chariclea and Theagenes (the young Thessalonian paragon who has arrived at Delphi) are of course destined for each other. Calasiris will now become an ally of that destiny, working not through magic, which he despises, but through wisdom; and this wisdom will generate intrigues appropriate to a romantic plot—perhaps because destiny is itself like such a plot.

He works six intrigues. In the first (2. 35-4. 15) he brings Chariclea and Theagenes to recognize that their “malady” is love. Calasiris' definition of their love makes it appropriate to the emerging themes of the romance. When, during a rite, Chariclea handed Theagenes a torch (symbolic of Eros), “the soul of each … recognized its fellow and leapt toward that which deserved to belong to it”; and this conventional recognition illustrates “the divinity of the soul and its kinship with the powers on high.” The godlike protagonists, who at first fell into undefined but erotic love, here become souls recognizing a nature which is love. All the same, the flattering Egyptian sage agrees with the stupid Greek priest that the couple must be afflicted by the evil eye. And he dupes the lovers themselves. To make Theagenes confess his love, he decides “to play the mountebank … and appear to divine what I already know … tossing out my hair and imitating some person possessed by a spirit.” For Chariclea, “I burnt incense, and, after muttering some pretended prayers with my lips, I shook the laurel over Chariclea … ; then, yawning at her in a drowsy, or rather, an old-womanish fashion, at long last I ended my performance, having besmattered both myself and the girl with a fine lot of twaddle.”

Destiny is assisted by comic intrigue. Put another way, Heliodorus first wants us to enjoy his story and then draw from it our inferences about destiny. Calasiris translates the message on Chariclea's silken scarf, which announces that she is the daughter of the king and queen of Ethiopia, the “black-faced land of the Sun”; and she is white because at the moment of her conception her mother was gazing at a picture of nude white Andromeda (a princess of Ethiopia) “just as Perseus was taking her down from the rock,” and the black queen, fearful of being accused of adultery, had given her infant to a young sage.⁴ Moved by Calasiris' ludicrous Egyptian marvels and instructed by his knowledge, Chariclea decides to “convert her malady into marriage,” seek her birthplace, and flee with Theagenes and Calasiris.

A commonplace theory of knowledge, expressed in other terms by Apuleius, underlies the comic hypocrisy of Calasiris' intrigues and his role as collaborator with destiny. He explains to Cnemon that there are two kinds of knowledge, one “moving, one might say, along the ground, ministrant to images, and wallowing among corpses, addicted to simples, and relying on incantations.” This does mankind no good because it is

merely the presentation of unrealities as realities, and the disappointment of hopes; a deviser of unlawful actions and the purveyor of licentious pleasures. But the other knowledge … the true wisdom … looks upward to the heavenly regions: companion of the gods, partaker of the nature of the higher powers, it traces the motions of the stars and gleans foreknowledge of the future. Standing aloof from all our earthly evils, it devotes itself to the pursuit of what is honorable and beneficial to mankind.

Calasiris is clearly not an embodiment of the true wisdom; Heliodorus is not writing allegory but romance; still, it is his sophia that enables him to be a successful pander for Providence and to manipulate the powers of old Hellas at its most famous shrine. Other bits of phoney magic mark his other intrigues, which cast him in the interesting roles of Chariclea's father (she adopts him as such) and her pimp (he offers her to various pirates, setting them at loggerheads). Through Calasiris' narrative of past events Heliodorus weaves those of the ongoing present, which end in a “recognition scene, enacted as in a drama,” when Chariclea and Calasiris are reunited at Naucratis with shouts of “Father!” “Daughter!”

It is now, halfway through the work, that we learn the causes of the initial tableau; and Heliodorus now adopts the “natural” order of narration. The syntax of the action thus far, which has unfolded like an enormous periodic sentence, with the present-tense action (elapsed time: two days and nights) incorporating long subordinate clauses of past action (elapsed time: eighteen years), has released information to the characters and to us in ways that may be said to imitate the involuted ways through which men discover and enact their destinies. Heliodorus' narrative technique may itself reflect acquisition of the higher wisdom. The lower wisdom is of course quite potent. On a battlefield littered with corpses, Chariclea and Calasiris observe a witch reviving her mutilated son, and, as the boy groans for a return to death, he remarks that Theagenes has been recaptured by Thyamis. Then the woman accidentally transfixes herself through the groin on an upright spear. Apuleius might have applauded the fate of this witch-mother; in Heliodorus the scene dramatizes the horrors of lower knowledge and at the same time shows how even magic can aid the wise, because the corpse's information leads the pair to Memphis, where they discover Thyamis chasing his usurping younger brother across a suburban field. It is not Isis but wise Calasiris that reconciles his warring sons. And his genius (or Heliodorus') for reconciling austere sophia with mundane wit and passion is rewarded by the happiness he feels when Thyamis is reestablished in Isis' priesthood. Then the delightful sage dies, his function as ally of destiny ended, leaving his “motherless children” to work out their own fates.

This they do through victories over lustful Eros and religious custom. Arsace, wife of the local Persian satrap, plays the role of Lustful Matron. Her declaration that “love recognizes but one prophecy—possession”—puts her in direct confrontation with the “prophecy” or effective knowledge of true wisdom. Smitten by Theagenes, she and her slave, Cybele (another old goddess), contrive intrigues to bring the boy to bed, raising jealous doubts in Chariclea, who at one point petulantly advises him to give in. But he passes chastely through bedroom to dungeon and out again. When Cybele accidentally poisons herself, Arsace falsely accuses Chariclea of murder; at her trial she stands mute, as though piqued, though earlier she had become vocally hysterical with envy when witnessing a happy marriage. Chariclea, like Calasiris, has too much character to be the emblem of anything, and the precise nature of the power shaping her destiny remains obscure. For example, the execution fire refuses to burn her: is the fire an agent of Helios? If so, we get no hint of it.

Theagenes attributed its cause to the benevolence of the gods,

but Chariclea seemed to be in some doubt. “The strange manner of my preservation,” she said, “points of course to some heavenly, some divine beneficence; but our being subject to so many trying misfortunes in close succession … may show that we are pursued by divine displeasure … unless perchance it was some miraculous act of a deity who means, while driving us into utter misery, to deliver us from a desperate plight.

Such speculation makes the miracle a little more plausible. And since the deity that is driving the lovers to misery in order to deliver them has no specific character or name, it makes us wonder whether he, or it, is not the conventional romantic plot itself. Of course, from plots replete with reversals and rescues inevitably emerge ideas about fortune and Providence. But how does Heliodorus in particular lead us to make analogies between plot and destiny, author and god? First, by downgrading the cults of old gods like Isis and Delphian Apollo, he leaves us only with an as yet nameless deity (“true wisdom,” “the god”) who vaguely governs character and event. But since, second, events and characters are quite familiar, we feel that it is the whole familiar plot that is, as usual, moving all things to a satisfying “destined” conclusion, and so we can identify the plot with the characterless god. Third, Heliodorus' complicated narrative technique draws attention to the mysterious workings of divine powers, as do, fourth, the many speeches about such matters delivered by the characters and by the author himself.

Earlier, in describing Calasiris' intervention between his dueling sons, Heliodorus had said:

At this point either some divine Power or Fortune in control of human affairs appended a new scene to this tragic performance by introducing, as a counter-interest, the opening of another drama. On that day, at that moment, it suddenly produced Calasiris, as it were, upon the stage.

And Chariclea has remarked that “the daimōn diverts himself with battling against us, as though he had made our fortunes the plot of a drama on the stage.” More frequently and explicitly than any other novelist, Heliodorus plays on the analogy between plot and Providence, between art—especially drama—and life. No wonder we infer that god is a romancer; Heliodorus tells us that he is. His allusions to drama also doubtless serve to palliate some of his improbabilities and to remind his readers of the thrilling paradoxes they have seen enacted on the stage.

The final phase of his plot begins with the capture of the lovers (they have escaped the clutches of Arsace) by the black Ethiopians, who by custom designate them, as the first captives in battle, to be human sacrifices in the capital, Meroë. “This incident was like the prologue and prelude to a drama,” says the author. “Strangers, captive in chains, … were being marched under guard by men who ere long were to be their subjects.” Destiny is paradoxical, and the future exists, as in a well-made play. But this does not mean that the actors are puppets. On the contrary, one must collaborate with destiny through wisdom, and the final phase of the action shows how Chariclea, “in her submission to the guidance of Destiny,” engineers the recognitions and reconciliations that will save her and Theagenes. When Theagenes wonders why she does not, after their arrival at Meroë, simply reveal her identity to her royal black parents, she suggests that we humans are coauthors with god. “Darling,” she says,

great affairs require great prearrangements. A plot, whose beginnings have been laid out by the deity with many complications, must needs be brought to its conclusion through detours of some length; and particularly where a great lapse of time has blurred the story, it is not clarified to advantage at one sharp stroke.

She has become, like her “father” Calasiris, an intriguer for Providence. In fact, she will, I believe, engineer a sequence of recognitions that reflect all those praised and damned by Aristotle, whose Poetics (especially chap. 16) she seems to have studied.

To appreciate her intrigues, we must understand her situation. She is captive in what was, with India, the most exotic of lands, on the southern rim of the world, its coasts washed by the equatorial Ocean Stream that separates the Northern Hemisphere from the unknowable antipodes. It is inhabited by barbaric black sunworshipers whose cult is supervised by the famous Gymnosophists—naked, puritanical black sages. Heliodorus satisfies our appetite to learn about this romantic land. He invents, or adapts, a terrain and a state religion. In Meroë, the sacred capital, are meadows consecrated to the Sun, the Moon, and Dionysus, though the Gymnosophists live in the Temple of Pan. The cults involve animal and human sacrifice. Theagenes and four white stallions are to be killed at the altar of the Sun, Chariclea and four oxen at the altar of the Moon. Only virgins are suitable for these holocausts, and only married persons may officiate at them.

These details establish Chariclea's thrilling problem and depict a religion that we can see cleansed by the higher knowledge. King Hydaspes piously submits to the customs of his nation and orders the usual tests (by fire) to establish the chastity of the intended victims, both of whom pass—Chariclea being once more dressed as Artemis, her regalia now curiously “bespangled with gold-embroidered rays,” as though Helios had found a place in a Greek moon goddess. The attendant Gymnosophists proclaim their hatred of all blood sacrifices. Prayer and incense, they say, conform with the spiritual nature of the god. And declaring that “the light that shines about these strangers” shows that they are “aided and protected by some higher power,” they withdraw, abandoning abominable cults to the king and populace. Chariclea, swearing an ancient and catholic oath of veracity—“O Sun, founder of my line of ancestors, and ye other gods and demi-gods who are the guiding powers of my family, I call you as witnesses that I shall say nothing that is not true!”—then converts barbaric ritual into a civil trial. A Hellenic Portia, she confounds her good priest-king father by leading him to assert that only foreigners can serve as sacrifices, then by casually remarking, “Enough now, father … of vilifying your daughter.” Daughter? Chariclea has initiated her scheme of recognitions.

For Aristotle an offhand remark may spark a satisfying recognition provided that it is probable. Chariclea's calculated remark is probable enough, but King Hydaspes only complains that it's bad theater: alluding to a recognition device that Aristotle condemned, he says that the girl has made “an appearance on the scene as by a stage device.” Chariclea then tries to work the recognition through a device that Aristotle deplored: she produces tokens from her wallet—the scarf, a necklace, rings. Like good Aristotelians, her parents seem only partly convinced by these, though another deplorable sort of token—the band of black skin on Chariclea's arm—does move the queen. She is finally convinced, however, only by a kind of recognition Aristotle approved of, one by inference: this girl looks like Andromeda, reasons the queen; only my daughter looks like Andromeda; therefore. …

Four of Aristotle's five sorts of recognition scenes having been demonstrated, mother and daughter fall, embracing, to the earth. Chariclea has explained that complicated plots are not satisfactorily resolved by a single stroke, and Heliodorus continues to prolong his resolutions to wring last drops of apprehension and wonder from us and to dramatize the cleansing of exotic ritual by true reason. Chariclea says that Theagenes is her beloved but refuses to say outright that he is her husband (he can't be because she's a proved virgin); but she insists that she is married and can therefore officiate at his death. This confuses the poor king, who is striving to maintain barbaric custom, and gives bewildered Theagenes time to prove his prowess by outwrestling a bull and a gigantic black champion. If these deeds symbolize something, we get no hints of it; and the question whether Theagenes gripped the frenzied bull because he was “impelled by the manly spirit that was born in him, or [was] acting on the instigation of some god” goes unanswered because Heliodorus is writing a romance, not an allegory or a treatise. Still, he does ask the question, perhaps to spark in us the higher pleasures of philosophical speculation. Then the fifth—and for Aristotle the best—recognition device occurs, an event that results from the plot itself: Charicles suddenly arrives on the scene.

It is not improbable that Charicles should be searching for his abducted “daughter” and should now be a captive of the victorious Ethiopians. And his dramatic accusation that Theagenes has raped Chariclea (that is, stolen her from Delphi) results, Aristotle might say, in a satisfactory reversal of fortune, because he is acting on information which he believes to be true but which turns out to be mistaken. And this mistaken but probable speech does work the final reversals: if Chariclea and Theagenes are “married,” neither is fit to be sacrificed; and Chariclea, the scheme of recognitions complete, falls with remorse at her Greek father's feet, saying that, “even though deeds in the past might be ascribed to the design or ordinance of the gods,” she herself deserves punishment.

The remaining speeches, however, confirm our feeling that she deserves nothing of the sort, because they insist that the plot has been designed by Providence. First, the choric populace, though it is ignorant of the Greek language in which all this has transpired, is able to “surmise the truth”—that the lovers' lives have been ordained “by the influence of the same divine power that had designed the whole of this dramatic scene, and by whose means extreme contraries were now composed into a harmony. Joy and grief were intertwined, tears were mingled with laughter.” Thus Heliodorus employs the commonplaces of the paradox and the mixed-contrary-emotions topos to express his commonplace theme. Second, the Gymnosophist Sisimithres reiterates Heliodorus' more specific theme—the impiety of blood sacrifice. “The gods do not welcome the sacrifice that is being prepared for them,” he tells the king,

and now, to consummate their beneficence and, as it were, bring the drama to a joyous climax, they have produced this foreign youth as the betrothed of the maiden … ; come, let us recognize the divine miracle that has been wrought, and become collaborators in the gods' design. Let us proced to the holier oblations, and exclude human sacrifice for all time.

The sage has also expressed the ethics of destiny that we may infer from the plot: we must collaborate with divine design; or, as the king puts it, “since these events have been thus brought about by the direction of the gods, it would be criminal to run counter to their will.” The gods he refers to are the Lord Sun and the Lady Moon, to whom he consecrates the lovers as priest and priestess; but perhaps these deities are only figures of the Providence that also spoke in the Delphic oracle, which, Chariclea now “recognized … was being fulfilled in actual fact.”

The questions provoked by the Aethiopica—whether it is shaped primarily by a set of ideas or is designed to urge on us a particular cult—must now be answered. Its fundamental “idea” is a commonplace: that a beneficent fortune governs the lives of the virtuous. Heliodorus wholeheartedly accepted this conventional theme, as he did the other conventions of romance: the full cast of stock characters, the values of chastity and suffering love, the perils and wonderful reversals. To all these conventions he gave an unprecedented fullness. Details of setting, dress, speech, motive, all drawn from familiar life, attract us to the story itself, as does his fresh weaving of past with present action; and some of these vivifying details lead us to formulate opinions. When the Amorous Bandit Chief is the chief priest of Isis, and the Obtuse Father is the dean of Delphi, we cannot think well of their cults; but when austere sages express notions about the spiritual nature of the gods and the impiety of blood sacrifice, we must approve of them because they help to save the lovers. Is there not, however, a set of systematic references in the novel by which Heliodorus means to lead us to one god—Helios—and one set of religious and moral principles? I think there is not. Heliodorus refers to the divine by many commonplace names—daimōn, to theon, oi theoi, tychē, and so forth.⁵ It is true that people swear by the Sun with remarkable frequency in the Aethiopica (4. 13; 8. 1, 26; 10. 11; etc.) but usually in association with other powers, as when Chariclea, on the execution pyre, “raising her hands to the quarter of the heavens where the sun sent forth his beams … cried, ‘Sun and Earth and Powers that above and beneath our earth are beholders and avengers of wrongdoing in mankind, ye are witnesses to clear me of the charges brought against me.’” Still, it is Helios alone who is associated with fire that then refuses to burn her. But are the fires that had earlier destroyed Thyamis' camp, which Theagenes called “the unspeakable malignity of the divine will,” and the fire from which Calasiris with chicanery had plucked a palmed amethyst, also agents of Helios? I do not think that Heliodorus works with symbols as systematically as Longus. On the other hand, he has the Ethiopians providentially capture Chariclea on the day of the summer solstice at Syene (Aswan), when “the rays of the sun stand directly overhead.” Helios may indeed be the best, the chief, emblem of cosmic harmony; but it is the harmony itself that manifests the destiny which mankind seeks to know and collaborate with.

Does Heliodorus celebrate a particular moral code? We are told by the most authoritative speakers in the novel—Calasiris and the chief Gymnosophist—that we must collaborate with destiny, and the whole plot is evidence supporting this dictum. But the relationship between destiny and particular moral choice is as imprecise as the theology of the book. For example, Heliodorus says that either Fate brought Thisbe to her death, or her wickedness did it; either Chariclea's purity saved her from the pyre, or “the god” did it. Heliodorus speculates but does not decide. His code is really no more specific than the rule inscribed on the temple of Helios at Rhodes: “The first and greatest rule is to be pure and unblemished in hand and heart and to be free of an evil conscience.” On the other hand, there is one human power essential for collaboration with destiny—sophia. Wisdom is what is possessed by Calasiris and the Gymnosophists and acquired by Chariclea. With “higher knowledge” they perceive the just destiny that governs them.

In a romance, however, this perception does not become a matter for philosophical speculation. It becomes a recognition, and it is described in the conventional terms of the paradox. For example, when Calasiris read Chariclea's hieroglyphic scarf, he “recognized and admired the wise dispensation of the gods. Filled with mingled feelings of pleasure and pain, I went through the singular experience of weeping and rejoicing at the same moment. My soul felt relaxed by the discovery of unknown facts and the conclusive explanation of the oracle” (4. 9). No tidier application of certain Aristotelian concepts of aesthetic pleasure could be found: the “relaxation” of tense appetite for knowledge brought on by surprising but probable recognition that evokes an inference about destiny. Heliodorus' readers, however, would doubtless have recognized in his references to sophia a concept broader than the aesthetic recognition. Particularly in the third century, one relied on wisdom to resolve the problems of life. The fundamental problem presented to anyone who can perceive that there is a cosmos is, simply, to know the cosmos. Knowing it, he might understand the past and the future, judge both, and act in the present. By this means he could control what demanded control in life—ignorance, misfortune, passion—and harmonize himself with the cosmos, which is Wisdom itself. Nobody in Heliodorus' book fully exemplifies the virtues of a third-century sage. The wise work comic intrigues and Aristotelian schemes of recognition; they suffer through ignorance and passion and misfortune, and only the gods—or the plot—bring them to happiness.

In fact, Heliodorus' most persistent emblem, or concept, of god and destiny is not Helios or wisdom but the plot of a stage play. He seems, on the one hand, to emulate the vividness and economy of drama; on the other hand, he scorns its extravagances and improbabilities and uses these to argue his own relative credibility.⁶ In any case, drama provides a kind of middle term in his analogies between plot and destiny, poet and god, recognition and wisdom; and, as a middle term, it serves nicely to express the relationship between ideas and poetry in the Aethiopica. The idea is that destiny saves the pure, who collaborate with it through wisdom; but destiny is a plot in which we are all characters, and therefore the plot itself, the poetry, so to speak, demonstrates the truth of the idea. By being well-plotted, the novel becomes of itself an emblem of the idea. No extrinsic idea or argument need be found to explain what happens in the masterpiece; the meaning of the plot emerges from the intrinsic plot. Art can of itself express the meaning of life because life is the product of a divine art. Such notions are doubtless symptomatic of a certain preciosity, of an age where art reflects heavily on itself and poetry becomes a prime subject of poetry. In any case, here, in the last of the Greek romances, god becomes a divine comedian who works with the materials of tragedy; he is, in short, a romancer. Here, near the end of our history, as the Gymnosophist observes, the god has brought “the drama to a climactic point”—to a lampadion dramatis, “lampadion” being the “point” on the coiffure of one of the stock female masks used in comedies. Then Heliodorus, the god's collaborator, signs his work with the boast that he is a descendant of the Sun, though there is no real reason to doubt the legend that he had become a Christian bishop of witch-ridden Thessaly, where he introduced clerical celibacy. …

Notes

1. Ethiopia was for the earlier Greeks a semilegendary land on the southern rim of the world (washed by the Ocean Stream), occupying all of Africa south of Egypt and Libya. The exact dwelling of the sun might be on the lower borders of the Red Sea and Indian Ocean. In the Odyssey Homer calls its black inhabitants “the most remote of men,” and in the Iliad Zeus dines with the “blameless Ethiopians.” Being exotic, the Ethiopians were thought to be pure, especially in their religion, which was thought to be heliocentric. Diodorus Siculus (History 3.1) says they were the first people to practice religion, making them even more ancient (and perhaps wiser) than the inhabitants of Mother Egypt. See Donald Levine, Greater Ethiopia (Chicago, 1974), chap. 1.

2. Franz Cumont (The Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism, trans. Grant Showerman, 1911 [Dover Reprint, 1956], pp. 127, 134) summed up the development of the sun cult:

   When it transformed the ideas on the destiny of man, astrology also modified those relating to the nature of divinity. … Solar pantheism, which grew up among the Syrians of the Hellenistic period as a result of the influence of Chaldean astrology, imposed itself on the whole Roman world under the empire. … The last formula reached by the religion of pagan Semites and in consequence by that of the Romans, was a divinity unique, almighty, eternal, universal and ineffable, that revealed itself throughout nature, but whose most splendid and most energetic manifestation was the Sun.

3. In my view, this makes it extremely unlikely that the aim of Heliodorus' novel is “to illustrate in an edifying fiction the veracity of the oracle, the prestige of Delphi as a religious or intellectual center, the civilizing mission of Apollo's city” (E Feuillâtre, Etudes sur les Ethiopiques, p. 147).

4. Andromeda boasted that she was more beautiful than the Nereids, who complained to Poseidon, who flooded Ethiopia and sent a monster, to whom Andromeda was offered, naked, on a rock. But Perseus, passing by with Medusa's head, saved her; and their son, Perses, became the progenitor of the Persians.

5. Heliodorus also uses the odd neo-Pythagorean name for the gods, hoi kreittones. For a view of Heliodorus' “theology,” see Franz Altheim, Helios und Heliodor von Emesa (Amsterdam, 1942).

6. But Jacob Burckhardt long ago (1852) remarked that “when epic and drama lost their popular and living force, romance became the appropriate substitute form” (The Age of Constantine the Great, trans. Moses Hadas [Anchor Books, 1956], p. 225).