FOR OLD BOOKS NEW DUST JACKETS
What the blurbs might say if ancient novels hit the mass market.
market them today? Managing Editor Lee Michaelides takes a crack at it.
Chaereas and Callirhoe by Chariton
If you read only one Greek romance this summer, this should be it!
Classicist B.E. Perry calls Chariton's ground-breaking work "Greek romance as it should be written." And why is this book, which dates back to the first century A.D., groundbreaking? This is the earliest complete novel ever found. This is the ur-novel!
Leucippe and Clitophonby Achilles Tatius
On top of the classical charts!
Archaeological evidence suggests that if the ancient Greeks had a best-seller list, this book would be numero uno. Try this on for sheer poetry: "For a kiss is the premier pleasure, lovechild of the mouth, and the mouth is the loveliest member of the body, for it is the organ of speech and speech is a shadow of the soul itself. The union and commingling of two mouths radiates pleasures down into the bodies and draws up the souls toward the kissing lips."
Daphnis and Chloe by Longus
Better than Blue Lagoon!
Two youths learn about sex and love in this secondcentury pastoral romance. "Chloe, seeing Daphnis naked, was lost in gazing at his beauty and felt weak, unable to find fault with any part of him. Daphnis, seeing her in fawnskin and garland of pine, holding out the bucket, thought he was seeing one of the Nymphs from the cave." Translator Christopher Gill considers the novel one of the genre's most artistic and skillfully written.
An Ephesian Taleby Xenophon ofEphesus
Louis L'Amour without the cactus!
Translator Graham Anderson says Tale has many of the qualities of a good old western. It's "a specimen of penny dreadful literature in antiquity; it exhibits in vintage form the characteristics of the melodrama and the popular novel as it portrays the tribulations of a pair of lovers harassed by misfortune." And what of scholars who consider the novel crude, clumsy, simplistic, and cliche-ridden? They're probably right, says Anderson! "Such stories," he writes, "if we surrender to them, embody a primitive and satisfying view of the world."
An Ethiopian Stoty by Heliodorus
A love story of epic proportions!
The action begins as bandits scan the Nile Delta. They see a merchant ship "moored by her stern, empty of crew but laden with freight. This much could be surmised even from a distance, for the weight of her cargo forced the water up to the third line of boards on the ship's side. But the beach a mass of newly slain bodies, some of them quite dead, others halfalive and still twitching, testimony that the fighting had only just ended. To judge from the signs this had been no proper battle. Amid the carnage were the miserable remnants of festivities." And two young lovers... terrified yet defiant!
