SOURCE: Selden, Daniel L. “Aithiopika and Ethiopianism.” In Studies in Heliodorus, edited by Richard Hunter, pp. 182-214. Cambridge, England: The Cambridge Philological Society, 1998.

In the following essay, Selden examines the Aethiopica as one of the earliest narrative texts to tackle the origins and structure of racial conflict.

You have been the veterans of creative suffering.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

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Once again Heliodorus' Aithiopika has become an exemplary tale for our time.¹ The most beautiful young woman in the Greek world, blond-haired and of gleaming white complexion, discovers fortuitously at age seventeen that her parents are actually black Ethiopians, who exposed her at birth on account of her anomalous skin colour.² Apprised of her African origin, she resolves forthwith to reclaim her race³ and, abandoning her adoptive family in Greece, embarks upon the long and harrowing passage across the Mediterranean Sea, through Egypt, and up the Nile to rejoin...