Achilles Tatius Leucippe And Clitophon Books I Ii

The first modern commentary in English on this most sophisticated and brilliant of ancient Greek novels. With its freewheeling plotline, its setting on the edge of the Greek world, its ironic play with the reader's expectations and its sallies into obscenity, it will appeal strongly to students and instructors.

Publisher Description

Achilles Tatius' Leucippe and Clitophon is the most bizarre and risqu ́e of the five "Greek novels" of idealized love between boy and girl that survive from the time of the Roman empire. Stretching the capacity of the genre to its limits, Achilles' narrative covers adultery, violence, disembowelment, pederasty, virginity-testing, and a conveniently happy ending. Ingenious and sophisticated in conception, Leucippe and Clitophon is at once subtle, stylish, moving, brash, tasteless, and obscene. This new translation aims to capture Achilles' writing in all its exuberant variety.

A charming Greek romance narrated by its hero. Achilles Tatius was a Greek from Alexandria in Egypt; he is now believed to have flourished in the second century AD. Of his life nothing is known, though the Suidas says he became a Christian and a bishop and wrote a work on etymology, one on the sphere, and an account of great men. He is famous however for his surviving novel in eight books, The Adventures of Leucippe and Clitophon, one of the best Greek love stories. Clitophon relates to a friend the various difficulties which he and Leucippe had to overcome before they are happily united. The story is full of incident and readers are kept in suspense. There are many digressions giving scientific facts, myths, meditations, and so on, the interest of which redeems irrelevance.

Prose fiction, although not always associated with classical antiquity, flourished in the early Roman Empire, not only in realistic Latin novels but also and indeed principally in the Greek ideal romance of love and adventure. Enormously popular in the Renaissance, these stories have been less familiar in later centuries. Translations of the Greek stories were not readily available in English before B.P. Reardon’s first appeared in 1989.Nine complete stories are included here as well as ten others, encompassing the whole range of classical themes: romance, travel, adventure, historical fiction, and comic parody. A foreword by J.R. Morgan examines the enormous impact this groundbreaking collection has had on our understanding of classical thought and our concept of the novel.

The Fifth International Conference on the Ancient Novel, which was held in Houston, Texas, in the fall of 2015, brought together scholars and students of the ancient novel from all over the world in order to share new and significant developments about this fascinating field of study and its important place in the field of Classical Studies. The essays contained in these two volumes are clear evidence that the ancient novel has become a valuable part of the Classics canon and its scholarly attempts to understand the ancient Graeco-Roman world.