Hello and welcome to Literature and History, episode 89, the Ethiopia of Heliodorus.

This program is on the Ethiopia, an ancient Greek novel written in the mid-200s or 300s

CE, and indeed the longest and most elaborate work of prose fiction to survive from Greco-Roman

antiquity. The Ethiopiaica gets its name from its setting. The novel, the written in Greek

and starring mainly Greek-speaking protagonists, takes place primarily in Northeastern Africa,

first Egypt, and then at the books climax in Ethiopia. In a sentence, the Ethiopiaica tells the

story of a pair of young lovers, how they met, how they fell in love, how an extraordinary string

of circumstances and adventures contrived to keep them apart and threaten their lives,

and how these adventures concluded. The Ethiopiaica is part of a body of ancient Greek novels and

novellas that survive from roughly 50 to 300 CE. These novels and novellas are often called

romances, both in the sense that they generally contain love stories, but also in the medieval

sense that they are fantastic adventure sagas. In the pages of these ancient novels, brave and

beautiful heroes and heroines navigate their ways through unjust and threatening worlds,

their virtue and love for one another the only constants in shifting landscapes of villains and

perils, and from time to time kindly in support of allies. The standard anthology of all these works,

scholar BP Reardon's collected ancient Greek novels, contains what survives from this genre,

19 works in total, six of them complete, and the rest in various states of fragmentation.

Of all of these, the one we're reading today again Heliodorus' Ethiopiaica is the longest,

and once it re-emerged into European literary history after the 16th century,

it became one of the most influential. To be clear here, at the outset of this show,

the other romantic adventure novels that survive in Greek, in complete form from this period,

Arcarotans Calaroe from the mid-first century, xenophon of Ephesus's Ephesian tale from the mid-second

...