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After which, when the soldiers led her away bound to Alexander, her very mien and gait showed her to be a woman of dignity and high mind, not betraying the least sign of fear or astonishment. And when the king asked her who she was, she said, "I am the sister of Theagenes, who fought at the battle of Chaeronea with your father, Philip, and fell there in command for the liberty of Greece."
In three years after the death of Periander, 585 B.C., the oligarchal power was restored, and Corinth allied herself with Sparta in her schemes of aggrandizement. As a result of commercial opulence, the people succeeded in overthrowing the government, an oligarchy of Dorian conquerors, and elevating a demagogue, Theagenes, to the supreme power, B.C. 630.
He is very eloquent upon the Shepherd of Hermas, Theagenes and Chariclea, and the Ethiopics of Heliodorus. Turpin, Scudery, Cotterel, Sidney, the countess D'Anois, and "all such writers as were never read," next pass in review. Boccace and Cervantes occupy a very principal place. The modern French writers of fictitious history from Fenelon to Voltaire, close the first epistle.
Wells then spoke of Lucius Apuleius and his Golden Ass, which contains the story of Cupid and Psyche, with other matter rich and rare, and went on to the romance of Heliodorus, Theagenes and Chariclea and in it the presiding deities of Love and Wine appear in all their pristine strength, youth, and grace, crowned and worshipped as of yore.
The Thracians seized her, and took her to Alexander, where she proved herself a woman of courage by her noble and fearless carriage, as she walked in the midst of her savage captors. The king enquired who she was, to which she replied she was the sister of Theagenes, who fought against Philip to protect the liberty of Greece, and who fell leading on the Thebans at Chæronea.
It was otherwise, they say, in the days of Theagenes and Chariclea. "How! will you never be satisfied with hearing?" says their historian, who, when he came to a prosperous epoch in their history, seems to have had a discreet suspicion that he might be too long; "Is not my discourse yet tedious?"
But Clitophon and Leucippe, clinging to the forecastle, are comfortably wafted by the winds and waves to the coast of Egypt, and landed near Pelusium, where they hire a vessel to carry them to Alexandria; but their voyage through the tortuous branches of the Nile is intercepted by marauders of the same class, Bucoli or buccaniers, as those who figure so conspicuously in the adventures of Chariclea and Theagenes.
So did Heliodorus in his sugared invention of that picture of love in Theagenes and Chariclea, and yet both these wrote in prose: which I speak to show, that it is not rhyming and versing that maketh a poet, no more than a long gown maketh an advocate: who, though he pleaded in armour, should be an advocate and no soldier.
And when the king asked her who she was, "I am," said she, "the sister of Theagenes, who fought the battle of Chaeronea with your father Philip, and fell there in command for the liberty of Greece." Alexander was so surprised, both at what she had done, and what she said, that he could not choose but give her and her children their freedom to go whither they pleased.
But these pleasing traits are not sufficient to atone for the improbability of the incidents, relieved neither by the brilliant fancy of the East, nor the lofty deeds of the romances of chivalry: and the reader, wearied by the repetition of similar scenes and characters, thinly disguised by change of name and place, finds little reason to regret that "the children of the marriage of Theagenes and Chariclea," as these romances are termed by a writer quoted by d'Israeli in the "Curiosities of Literature" have not continued to increase and multiply up to our own times.