Books: Toga & Dagger

AN ETHIOPIAN ROMANCE (277 pp.) −Heliodorus−University of Michigan ($4.95).

A band of armed robbers climb a hill near the mouth of the Nile and stare down at an awesome sight. A richly laden but crewless merchant ship is moored near shore, the remains of a banquet lie scattered along the beach, and all around sprawl the bodies of slain men. Only two are alive: a badly wounded young Greek named Theagenes, who is being tended by Charicleia, a girl so beautiful that the brigands think she must be a goddess.

Thus Heliodorus opens his swashbuckling Ethiopica, one of the ancestors of the historical novel. Even when it first appeared−about A.D.250−it was a full-fledged historical, for Heliodorus was writing about a period 750 years before his own time. This early blood-and-thunder melodrama comes magnificently alive in this new translation by Columbia University’s Jay Professor of Greek, Moses Hadas.

Old Reliable Deus. The trouble on the beach is only a sand-flea bite compared to the other dangers awaiting dauntless Theagenes and Charicleia. She is determined to achieve her rightful place in the world, having learned that she is actually the daughter of King Hydaspes of Ethiopia. Because Charicleia was born white, her terrified mother, Queen Persinna, had exposed her on a mountainside to escape the wrath of the King, but a kindly merchant found the infant and saw that she was transported safely to Greece. Before she can make it home. Charicleia is captured by pirates, sold into slavery, cast into a dungeon, poisoned, sentenced to be burned at the stake. She often shocks the rather priggish Theagenes by escaping her fate through cajolery and subterfuge. He prefers to meet things head on, whether his opponent is an amorous Persian princess, a champion wrestler, an enraged hull or the royal executioner. Finally they win through to Ethiopia, but arrive as prisoners of war scheduled to be sacrificed to the sun god. It needs one more superhuman effort by old reliable deus ex machina before Charicleia can claim her birthright and live happily ever after.

Durable Conventions. Heliodorus fleshes out his narrative with excursions into Egyptian and Ethiopian culture, discourses on religion, military tactics, natural history, and love. His form and mode of thought had a great effect on men of the Renaissance: Tasso and Cervantes borrowed from him; many of the Elizabethans−particularly Sir Philip Sidney in The Arcadia−mined his work. The conventions he pioneered of a noble hero and heroine, accompanied by friends who are more comic and far more human, still survive in books, movies and TV serials.

Of Heliodorus himself almost nothing is known except that he was a Hellenized Phoenician who, thinks Translator Hadas, may have had an admixture of Negro blood. There was a probable purpose in his writing: to propagandize for the gentle philosophy of the gymnosophists, an obscure ascetic Hindu sect, and to proclaim the humanity, culture and martial skill of the dark-skinned Ethiopians. Today, nearly 1,700 years after his death, both messages have relevance, but the Ethiopica will mostly be read now, as it always has been, as a rattling good adventure story.