Ancient Greek Romances

Peter Parsons

In 1834, T.B. Macaulay left Holland House to unaccustomed silences, and set sail for Madras, where he was to save £30,000 and draft the penal code. Indian leisure inspired him to reread Greek. Thucydides, Euripides, Demosthenes, all got good marks. Fiction came off less well. Macaulay was a great reader of novels (to his father’s and Clapham’s distress); the Governor-General’s court wept over his copy of Clarissa. He was also a great connoisseur of trash: he adorned his copy of Santo Sebastiano, or the Young Protector with a league-table of fainting-fits (first prize to the heroine: ‘Julia de Clifford, 11’). But the Greek romances were too much for him. He pronounced with characteristic decision. At the end of Heliodorus’s Ethiopian Story, he noted. ‘The best of the Greek Romances, which is not saying much for it’; on Xenophon’s Ephesian Story, ‘A most stupid, worthless performance, below the lowest trash of an English circulating library’; on the Leucippe and Clitopho of Achilles Tatius, simply ‘Detestable trash’.

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[*] The adventures of Tinuphis are published by Michael Haslam, in Papyri edited in honour of E.G. Turner, Egypt Exploration Society, London, 1981. Phoenician Story was published by Albert Henrichs. Die Phoinikika des Loltianos, Bonn, 1972. On the black and white bandits, see brilliant papers by C.P. Jones, Phoenix 34 (1980), and Jack Winkler, Journal of Hellenic Studies 100 (1980).