SOURCE: Hägg, Tomas. “Heliodorus: An Ethiopian Tale.” In The Novel in Antiquity, pp. 54-73. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983.

In the following excerpt, Hägg presents an overview of the Aethiopica.

Heliodorus of Emesa left behind the heaviest novel, in terms of both volume—some 300 standard printed pages—and style. The technique of composition of his Ethiopica is incomparably more complicated than that of any of the earlier novels. Heliodorus took Homer as his chief model, and this means, among other things, that following the pattern of the Odyssey he brings his reader directly in medias res:

The smile of daybreak was just spreading across the sky and the sunbeams picking out the hilltops when a group of men in brigand gear peered over the mountain which overlooks the place where the Nile flows into the sea at its mouth that men call the Heracleotic. They stood...