GREEK ROMANCES

Parthenius is regarded as a connecting link of the Alexandrian school with the Roman poets on one side, and on the other with the romances which constitute the last phase of Greek erotic literature.[329] In these romances too, a number of my critics professed to discover romantic love.  The reviewer of my book in Nature (London) asked me to see whether Heliodorus’s account of the loves of Theagenes and Chariclea does not come up to my standard.  I am sorry to say it does not.  Jowett perhaps dismisses this story somewhat too curtly as “silly and obscene”; but it certainly is far from being a love-story in the modern sense of the word, though its moral tone is doubtless superior to that of the other Greek romances.  The notion that it indicates an advance in erotic literature may no doubt be traced to the legend that Heliodorus was a bishop, and that he introduced Christian ideas into his romance—­a theory which Professor Rohde has scuttled and sent to the bottom of the sea.[330] The preservation of the heroine’s virginity amid incredible perils and temptations is one of the tricks of the Greek novelists, the real object of which is made most apparent in Daphnis and Chloe.  The extraordinary emphasis placed on it on every possible occasion is not only very indelicate, but it shows how novel and remarkable such an idea was considered at the time.  It was one of the tricks of the Sophists (with whom Heliodorus must be classed), who were in the habit of treating a moral question like a mathematical problem.  “Given a maiden’s innocence, how can it be preserved to the end of the story?” is the artificial, silly, and vulgar leading motive of this Greek romance, as of others.  Huet, Villemain, and many other critics have been duped by this sophistico-mathematical aspect of the story into descanting on the peculiar purity and delicacy of its moral tone; but one need only read a few of the heroine’s speeches to see how absurd this judgment is.  When she says to her lover,

“I resigned myself to you, not as to a paramour, but as to a legitimate husband, and I have preserved my chastity with you, resisting your urgent solicitations because I always had in mind the lawful marriage to which we pledged ourselves,”

she uses the language of a shrewd hetaira, not of an innocent girl; nor could the author have made her say the following had his subject been romantic love:  [Greek:  Hormaen gar, hos oistha, kratousaes epithumias machae men antitupos epipeinei, logos d’ eikon kai pros to boulaema syntrechon taen protaen kai zeousan phoran esteile kai to katoxu taes orezeos to haedei taes epaggelias kateunase.]

The story of Heliodorus is full of such coarse remarks, and his idea of love is plainly enough revealed when he moralizes that “a lover inclines to drink and one who is drunk is inclined to love.”