Heliodorus’ An Ethiopian Tale is a precursor of modern mystery-adventure-romances. Most famous is its suspenseful but enigmatic opening, which is remarkable for its inherently visual nature. This chapter offers an interpretation of this scene from a cinematic perspective. It adapts Heliodorus’ clever opening into a screenplay, thereby demonstrating the concept of enargeia (Chapters 3 and 4) from a yet different point of view. The chapter additionally juxtaposes Heliodorus’ first scene to the intricate opening shots of two classic Hollywood thrillers: Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil and Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. The mystery inherent in Heliodorus’ opening is solved only when an eyewitness explains it later both to the characters and to the readers. This explanation constitutes what is today called a flashback. Hence the chapter examines complex flashbacks in a variety of film genres. Hitchcock’s cinema exhibits a number of lying flashbacks, with the one in Stage Fright the best-known example. But Heliodorus was there first.

This chapter analyses the novels’ poetic language, presenting some preliminary sondages which might indicate how much poetic vocabulary there is in three of our five complete Greek texts, and how much has classical and Hellenistic ancestry. It also looks selectively at the lexicon of some near-contemporary poets. Eight tables illustrate these heterogeneous sondages. After reviewing terms in Longus evoking epic, early melic poetry, and epigram, and some technical terms, it concludes that many words in Valley’s 1926 lists are not ‘simply’ poetic but are chosen to trigger some intertextuality, while others have little claim to be ‘poetic’ at all. Those remaining that cannot so be explained are few. Longus’ prose may be poetic in terms of his Theocritean subject, rhythmical sentences, and preference for parataxis over subordination: but his language is chiefly the language of prose. A brief overview of a small selection of potentially ‘poetic’ words in Achilles Tatius and Heliodorus suggests that they too have only a low proportion of ‘poetic’ words, a view corroborated by the paucity of ‘poetic’ words in Marcellus poems from the Via Appia, in the poet(s) of the Sacerdos monument at Nicaea, and in a sample from Ps.-Oppian’s Cynegetica that are also in the novelists. It concludes that in this period poets and writers of novelistic prose still draw vocabulary from two different linguistic pools.

This chapter explores the ways in which the five novels diverge in their representation of sounds. Chariton seems well aware of what can be achieved by briefly-sketched sound effects, but brief sketches are all we get: he does not suggest that the written word might find it hard to convey varieties of sound. Xenophon is apparently not concerned to communicate sound effects at all. Achilles Tatius offers elaborate rhetoric and sometimes striking imagery in compensation for the written word’s inability to render sound. Both Longus and Heliodorus push their readers (in different ways) to reflect on the problem of communicating sound, each offering a different solution. That of Heliodorus for the representation of sung poetry is a striking advance on anything in the earlier novels, apparently learning from (but also upstaging) Philostratus’ Heroicus.

The first part of this chapter explores the effects achieved by Heliodorus in his naming of his characters – among them the unusual name Cnemon from Menander’s Dyscolus chosen to underline the features of his story that related closely to New Comedy, and the philosophically resonant name Aristippus for his pleasure-seeking father. The second part argues that Heliodorus’ detailed description (5.14) of the pastoral ‘theatre’ represented on the amethyst given to the merchant Nausicles in exchange for Charicleia was calculated to remind readers of Longus, in particular of the scene where Dionysophanes, Cleariste and their retinue seated ‘as a theatre’ spectate Daphnis’ goats responding obediently to his panpipe’s commands (4.15.2–4). Heliodorus invites his readers to contrast the miniature and rustic world of Longus with his own vast and densely populated canvas – and incidentally offers an argument for putting his novel later than that of Longus.

This chapter documents the differences in the five novelists’ representation of the Greek past – mythical, archaic, classical and Hellenistic. I distinguished two groups: Xenophon and Longus each offer very little myth or history before the period of the events they narrate; Chariton, Achilles Tatius and Heliodorus, on the other hand, not only use much circumstantial detail to build up a classical or (in Achilles Tatius’ case) Hellenistic world in which their story is set, but also give that world temporal depth by exploitation of mythology, and occasionally by introducing events or persons from earlier Greek history. Xenophon’s and Achilles Tatius’ worlds are such that their similarity with that of readers can almost be taken for granted, with little incentive to ask in what way and to what effect these worlds are to any degree different from their own. Chariton and Heliodorus are different: the more or less determinable historical setting combines with a decidedly contemporary σφραγίς to give readers both a strong sense of Greek cultural continuity and the opportunity to identify features where their contemporary Greek world might be significantly different: the most important such difference is Roman control of the Greek world, which is also strongly hinted at by Longus despite his choice of a timeless, predominantly rural context.

Perhaps the most prominent cognitivist concept in recent narratology is the Theory of Mind. Alan Palmer, Lisa Zunshine and others have been highly influential with their claim that mind reading is at the core of our engagement with narrative in general. However, these scholars have not only ignored how controversial the idea of the Theory of Mind is in psychology – ancient literature, I believe, also belies their argument about narrative at large. Mind reading is certainly central to our responses to modern realist novels, but ancient narratives, as my test case, Heliodorus’ Ethiopica, illustrates, were more invested in the reconfiguration of time than in individualized minds. Plot was crucial for the experiential quality of narrative hailed by critics, as shown in Chapter 2. This prominence of plot is reflected in Aristotle’s Poetics and other critical works. In order not to play off plot against character, I propose experience as a category that integrates cognitive processes as well as matters of plot.

Chapter 6 continues to upend the limiting Greek–foreigner binary model. Heliodorus’s novel Aithiopika (c. fourth century CE) traces the peripatetic journey of Charicleia, an Aithiopian princess exposed at birth because of the dissonance between her white skin and her parents’ black skin. During Charicleia’s travels, skin color remains a volatile element: she exploits it as a disguise (Heliod. Aeth. 6.11.3–4), her companion Theagenes uses skin color as a marker of trustworthiness (7.7.6–7), and a prophecy destabilizes both perspectives (2.35.5). Throughout the novel, Heliodorus wields skin color as a negotiable ethnographic tool that does not necessarily correspond to identity. This flexibility underscores Charicleia’s own fluidity between several performative categories. She can be a beggar and a princess, a docile woman and the leader of her entourage, the daughter of a Greek man and an Aithiopian man. Readers are forced to be patient as Heliodorus masterfully manipulates time to create a gap between what his characters know and what his readers have already grasped.

Heliodorus’ Ethiopica, discussed in Chapter 10, still awaits its discovery by scholars of ancient aesthetics. The latest of the five fully preserved ancient Greek piercingly reflects on the aesthetics of deception. After a close reading of a passage from book 3 that sharply juxtaposes deceit and aesthetic illusion and simultaneously intimates their similarity, I will explore their blending together in the Athenian novella. The aesthetics of deception also pertains to the Ethiopica themselves, which are designed to enthral the reader and simultaneously threaten to dupe her. A Platonic intertext that evokes the condemnation of poetry in the Republic highlights this danger. At the same time, Heliodorus recasts the aesthetics of deception differently from Plato and suggests an allegorical reading of his novel that envisages aesthetic illusion ultimately as a means of overcoming deception.

In the first decades of printing, medieval romances were edited and printed en masse, sometimes in luxurious in-folio formats. Sixteenth-century works of long prose narrative also drew on Classical epic and the dialogue. Notwithstanding these significant classical and medieval influences, there was no formal theorization of the novel in the sixteenth century—and indeed no single term to designate 'the novel' in this period. This absence of rigorous theorization and terminology contributed to making the period's vernacular prose narrative a privileged medium for literary experimentation: Rabelais's works were of course experimental in the highest sense, but other forms were also forged and promoted: in particular, sentimental and pastoral forms as well as the humanist model of the Greek novel based on Heliodorus. This period also forged new devices such as suspense and serialization, which would become signature features of the novel in the nineteenth century. Through all its incarnations and in the midst of formal experimentation, long prose narrative in this period opened a new horizon for reading: as a hobby, a pleasurable activity to fill the idle moments of life.

The artifacts examined in this and the following chapter are “document” novels: starting in the late seventeenth century, novelists pretend their works were written by the protagonists themselves, chiefly in the form of memoirs or letters. Examining memoirs and other non-epistolary document novels, this chapter shows a clear process of isomorphism, as first-person documents come to resemble each other as they become more popular. The chapter also demonstrates that while the use of the first person was much more abundant in the seventeenth-century novel than typically acknowledged, that first person was not written but voiced (characters told their own stories to others). As such, there is no continuity between the dominant first-person technologies of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

This chapter is the first of three that attempt to empirically measure the commonly attested rupture between the roman and the nouvelle around the year 1660. (This rupture is a version of the frequent opposition in English literary history between romance and novel.) According to Du Plaisir’s 1683 Sentiments sur les lettres, the use of inset narratives would appear to be a defining formal characteristic of the roman. After exploring the haphazard spread of this device from the French translation of Heliodorus’s Aethiopica in the 1540s to the opening of the seventeenth century, the chapter details the rise and fall of various sorts of insetting up to 1750.