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Updated: June 29, 2025
Menelaus and Clinias, the confidants and trusted friends of the hero, are the dullest of all dull mortals a qualification which perhaps fits them in some measure for the part they are to bear in the story, as affording some security against their falling in love with Leucippe, a fate which they, of all the masculine personages, alone escape.
He is, of course, condemned to death forthwith, and Thersander is triumphing in the unexpected success of his schemes, when the judicial proceedings are interrupted by the appearance of a religious procession, at the head of which Clitophon is astonished by recognizing his uncle Sostratus, the father of Leucippe, who had been deputed by the Byzantines to offer sacrifices of thanksgiving, at the Temple of Diana, for their victory over the Thracians.
Her affection, however, continues undiminished; but Clitophon, while visiting, in her company, her country residence in the neighbourhood of the city, is thunderstruck by fancying that he recognizes, in the disfigured lineaments of a female slave, said to be a Thessalian of the name of Lacoena, who approaches Melissa to complain of the ill-treatment she has received from the steward, Sosthenes, the features of his lost Leucippe.
Yet the next moment, when Leucippe enters with a fawn he has killed, it appears that she does not realize the difference between man and the brute creation. Thus we are for ever shifting from one plane of convention to another. There is no fixed starting-point for our imagination, no logical development of a clearly-stated initial condition.
But in time the divine fury infected even the royal damsels in their quiet chamber; they were seized with a fierce longing to partake of human flesh, and cast lots among themselves which should give up her child to furnish a cannibal feast. The lot fell on Leucippe, and she surrendered her son Hippasus, who was torn limb from limb by the three.
The madness of Leucippe is still incurable, till a stranger named Choereas makes his appearance, and introducing himself to Clitophon, informs him that he has discovered from the confession of a domestic, that Gorgias, an officer who fell in the late action with the Bucoli, captivated, like every one else, by the resistless charms of the heroine, had administered to her a philtre, the undue strength of which had excited frenzy instead of love.
After much persuasion, Clitophon accedes to this arrangement, with the sole proviso that nothing but the fiançailles, or betrothal, shall take place in Egypt, and that the completion of the marriage shall be deferred till their arrival in Ephesus on the plea that he cannot pledge his faith to another in the land where his beloved Leucippe met with her fate.
In the early part of the story, during the scenes in Tyre and Egypt, the action is carried on with considerable spirit and briskness; the author having apparently thus far kept before him, as a model, the narrative of Heliodorus. But towards the conclusion, and, indeed from the time of the arrival of Clitophon and Melissa at Ephesus, the interest flags wofully. The dénouement is inevitably foreseen from the moment Clitophon is made aware that Leucippe is still alive and in his neighbourhood, and the arrival of Thersander, almost immediately afterwards, disposes of the obstacle of his engagement to Melissa; but the reader is acquainted with all these circumstances before the end of the fifth book; the three remaining books being entirely occupied by the proceedings in the judicial assembly, the recriminations of the high-priest, and the absurd ordeal to which Leucippe is subjected all apparently introduced for no other purpose than to show the author's skill in declamation. The display of his own acquirements in various branches of art and science, and of his rhetorical powers of language in describing them, is indeed an object of which Achilles Tatius never loses sight; and continual digressions from the thread of the story for this purpose occur, often extremely mal-
In this mountain there dwelt one of the earth-born primeval men of that country, whose name was Evenor, and he had a wife named Leucippe, and they had an only daughter who was called Cleito.
It was not far from the sea, a plain situated in the midst of the isle, the most beautiful, and, they say, the most fertile of plains. About fifty stades from that plain, in the middle of the isle, was a mountain. There dwelt one of those men who, in the very beginning, was born of the Earth, Evenor, with his wife, Leucippe. They had only one daughter, Clito.
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