Ethiopian Story, Volume II

Adventurous romance. Ethiopian Story by Heliodorus of Emesa (modern Homs in Syria), written probably in the 360s AD and alternatively entitled Theagenes and Charicleia after its protagonists, represents the stylistic and narratological acme of ancient prose fiction and was an important literary model during the Byzantine Empire and throughout Europe from the sixteenth century onward. Set in the vanished world of the independent Greek city-state, drawing on the whole literature of the classical Greek past, and narrated with thrilling virtuosity, the novel reimagines the standard plot of the romantic novel in its story of Charicleia, a seventeen-year-old girl, the white child of the king and queen of Ethiopia, who is abandoned at birth and raised by foster fathers Ethiopian, Greek, and Egyptian in the shadow of the baleful Persian Empire. She and Theagenes, a descendant of Achilles with whom she falls in love, survive wanderings and perils by their valor and their wits until they arrive in Ethiopia, where Charicleia’s identity is confirmed in the most elaborate of all recognition-scenes, and she and Theagenes are given priesthoods. Charicleia embodies an open and decentered world where Hellenism is no longer the privileged vantage-point and identity can be shaped by culture, chosen, and personalized. The values embodied and safeguarded by the hero and heroine, in particular marriage, chastity, and a code of elite morality, were not only cherished as hallmarks of Greek civilization but increasingly valorized under the Empire. For an age characterized by great religious and philosophical diversity, Ethiopian Story cleanses and ennobles these values, and thus showcases a vision of paganism fundamentally Greek but available to all. This edition features text, translation, and explanatory material fully current with modern scholarship.