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EMESA (Ancient city) SYRIA
Heliodorus, a Greek romance-writer, who was born at Emesa in Phoenicia, and
flourished under the emperors Theodosius and Arcadius at the close of the fourth
century. He was raised to the dignity of a bishop of Tricca in Thessaly. Heliodorus
is best known as the author of a Greek romance, entitled Aithiopika, being the
history of Theagenes and Chariclea, the latter a daughter of a king of Aethiopia.
It is in ten books. This work was unknown in the West until a soldier of Anspach,
under the Margrave Casimir of Brandenburg, assisting at the pillage of the library
of Matthias Corvinus, at Buda, in 1526, being attracted by the rich binding of
a manuscript, carried it off. He sold the prize afterwards to Vincent Obsopaeus,
who published it at Basle in 1534. This was the celebrated romance of Heliodorus.
Poetry, battles, piracies, and recognitions fill up the piece; there is no picture
of the mind, no attempt at character-drawing carried on with the development of
the action. The incidents point to no particular era of society, although one
may perceive, from the tone of sentiment throughout, that the struggle had commenced
between the spirit of Christianity and the grossness of pagan idolatry. Egypt
is neither ancient Egypt, nor the Egypt of the Ptolemies, nor the Egypt of the
Romans. Athens is neither Athens free nor Athens conquered--in short, there is
no individuality either in the places or persons; and the vague pictures of the
French romances of the seventeenth century give scarcely a caricatured idea of
the model from which they were drawn.
This text is from: Harry Thurston Peck, Harpers Dictionary of Classical Antiquities. Cited Nov 2002 from The Perseus Project URL below, which contains interesting hyperlinks
Heliodorus, Romance-Writer, the author of the oldest and by far the best of the Greek romances.
Heliodorus, the son of Theodosius, was a native of Syria, and was born, not, as
Photius says, at Aminda, but at Emesa, as lie himself tells us at the end of his
romance :--Toionde peras esche to suntagma ton peri Theagenen kai Charikleikleian
Aithiopikon ho sunetaxen aner Phoinix Emesenos, ton aph' Heliou, genos, Theodosion
pais Heliodoros. The words ton aph' Heliou genos no doubt mean that he was of
the family of priests of the Syrian god of the Sun (Elagabalus). He lived about
the end of the fourth century of our era, under Theodosius and his sons. He wrote
his romance in early life. He afterwards became bishop of Tricca in Thessaly,
where he introduced the regulation, that every priest who did not, upon his ordination,
separate himself from his wife, should be deposed. (Socrat. H. E. v. 22.) Nicephorus
(H. E. xii. 34) adds that, on the ground of the alleged injury which had been
done to the morals of young persons by the reading of the Aethiopica, a provincial
synod decreed that Heliodorus must either suffer his book to be burnt, or lay
down his bishopric, and that Heliodorus chose the latter alternative. The story
has been wisely rejected by Valesius, Petavius, Huet, and other scholars ; and
it is the more improbable from the fact that there is nothing of a corrupting
tendency in the Aethiopica. We have no further accounts of the life of Heliodorus.
(Phot. Cod. 73.)
His romance is in ten books, and is entitled Aethiopica, because the
scene of the beginning and the end of the story is laid in Aethiopia. It relates
the loves of Theagenes and Charicleia. Persine, the wife of Hydaspes, king of
Aethiopia, bore a daugnter, whose complexion, through the effect of a Greek statue
on the queen's mind, was white. Fearing that this circumstance might cause her
husband to doubt her fidelity, she resolved to expose the child, and committed
her, with tokens by which she might afterwards be known, to Sisimithras, a gymnosophist,
who, being sent on an embassy into Egypt, took the child with him, and gave her
to Charicles, the Pythian priest, who hapopened to be in Egypt. Charicles took
the child to Delphi, where he brought her up as his own daughter, by the name
of Charicleia, and made her priestess of Apollo. In course of time there came
to Delphi a noble Thessalian, descended from the Aeacidae, and named Theagenes,
between whom and Charicleia a mutual love sprung up at first sight. At the same
time Calasiris, an Egyptian priest, whom the queen of Aethiopia had employed to
seek for her daughter, happened to arrive at Delphi; and by his help Theagenes
carried off Charicleia. Then follows a long and rapid series of perilous adventures,
from pirates and other lawless men, till at last the chief persons of the story
meet at Meroe, at the very moment when Charicleia, who has fallen as a captive
into her father's hands, is about to be sacrificed to the gods : she is made known
by the tokens and by the testimony of Sisimithras, and the lovers are happily
married.
Though very deficient in those characteristics of modern fiction which
appeal to the universal sympathies of our nature, the romance of Heliodorus is
extremely interesting on account of the rapid succession of strange and not altogether
improbable adventures, the many and various characters introduced, and the beautiful
scenes described. The opening scene is admirable, and the point of the story at
which it occurs is very well chosen. The language is simple and elegant, though
it is sometimes too diffuse, and often deviates from the pure Attic standard.
The whole work, as compared with the best of later Greek romances, that of Achilles
Tatius for example, has the superiority of greater nature, less artificial and
rhetorical elaboration, with more real eloquence, less improbability in its incidents,
and greater skill in the management of the episodes, and, in short, the superiority
of a work of original talent over an imitation. It formed the model for subsequent
Greek romance writers. It is often quoted by the title of Charikleia, just as
the work of Achilles is quoted by that of Leukippe, from the names of the respective
heroines.
In modern times the Aethiopica was scarcely known till, at the sacking
of Ofen in 1526, a MS. of the work in the library of Matthias Corvinus, king of
Hungary, attracted, by its rich binding, the attention of a soldier, who brought
it into Germany, and at last it came into the hands of Vincentius (Opsopoeus,
who printed it at Basel, 1534, 4to. Several better MSS. were afterwards discovered,
and in 1596 a new edition was brought out in folio, at Heidelberg, by Commelinus,
with the Latin version of Stanislaus Warsichewiczki, which had been printed in
1552 at Basel, and in 1556 at Antwerp. The edition of Commelinus was re printed
at Lyon in 1611, 8vo., and at Frankfort in 1631, 8vo. This last edition, by Daniel
Pareus, was the first divided into chapters. The edition of Bourdelot, Paris,
1619, 8vo., is full of errors, and the notes are of little value. The edition
of Peter Schmid, Lips. 1772, 8vo., only differs from that of Bourdelot by the
introduction of new errors. At length, in 1799, an excellent edition of the text
and Latin version, with a few notes, chiefly critical, appeared in Mitscherlich's
Scriptores Graeci Erotici, of which it forms the 2d volume, in two parts, 8vo.
Argentorat. anno VI. A still better edition was brought out in 1804, at Paris,
by the learned Greek Coraes, at the expense of his friend, Alexander Basilius,
in 2 vols. 8vo. The first volume contains an introduction, in modern Greek, in
the form of a letter to Alexander Basilius, and the text, with various readings.
The second volume contains notes in ancient Greek, and other illustra tive matter.
The Aethiopica has been translated into nearly all modern languages.
(Fabric. Bibl. Graec. vol. viii.; the Prefaces of Mitscherlich and Coraes ; Jacobs,
in Ersch and Gruber's Encyclopadie, s. v.; Hoffmann, Lex. Bibliog. Script. Graec.
s. v.)
There is an iambic poem, in 269 verses, on the art of making gold,
which is attributed by a MS. in the royal library at Paris to Heliodorus the bishop
of Tricca. It exists in MS. in several libraries in Europe, and is printed, from
the Paris MS., in Fabric. Bibl. Graec. vol. viii. The title is Heliodorou philosophou
pros Pheodosion ton melan Basile/a, peri\ th=s tw=n filoso/fwn Mustikh=s te/xnhs
(i. e. Alchymy), di Iambon Kuhn and Hoffmann (Lex. Bibl. s. v.) believe the poem
to be genuine, but Jacobs calls it the clumsy fabrication of a later time, to
which the name of Theodosius was prefixed to give it the semblance of authority;
and he sug gests that the name Heliodorus may have been used, after the fashion
of the Alchymists and Rosicrucians, on account of its etymological signification.
(Ersch and Gruber's Encyclopadie, s. v.)
This text is from: A dictionary of Greek and Roman biography and mythology, 1873 (ed. William Smith). Cited Nov 2005 from The Perseus Project URL below, which contains interesting hyperlinks
Fronto, of Emisa, the uncle of Longinus, taught rhetoric at Athens, and wrote many orations, in the reign of Alexander Severus. There are two epigrams by him on points of grammar in the Greek Anthology. (Suid. s. v. Phronton Emisenos; Brunck, Analect. vol. ii.; Jacobs., Anthol. Graec. vol. iii., vol. xiii.)
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