Essays on the Greek RomancesHaight, Elizabeth Hazelton
History
Essays on the Greek Romances
Haight, Elizabeth Hazelton
Apuleius. Metamorphoses; Greek fiction -- History and criticism
In the love-story of Charite the interest centers in a lover and his
lass; both are persons in high life, both are faithful. A dream
furnishes an apparition of the dead husband. But the villainy of a
treacherous friend makes the story a tragedy involving murder and
suicide. The story of Cupid and Psyche, true to the type of the Greek
love romance, starts with a religious beginning, the worship of a mortal
girl Psyche as the goddess of love; is motivated by a Greek oracle;
describes at length the proving of the heroine in tasks imposed by the
will of an unfriendly deity; depicts Psyche’s apparent sleep of death;
and finally consummates a happy ending for the lovers through a saving
god, who is Cupid the hero himself. A pastoral note which affiliates the
story with _Daphnis and Chloe_ is introduced by the presence of the
friendly god Pan, who acts as a wise old adviser and comforter to Psyche
in her great despair. And the conventional use of _excursus_ creates a
new pictorial character in brilliant descriptions of Venus charioted
over the sea, of the Palace of Cupid, of Cupid asleep, of the wedding
banquet of the lovers.
In the story of Lucius and Isis in Book Eleven, many of the conventional
devices of the Greek Romances appear: dreams, epiphanies, religious
festivals, a _dea ex machina_. So in Chariton Aphrodite and Fortune
contend for the control of the lovers; in Xenophon of Ephesus Artemis
and Isis are the two saving goddesses; in Heliodorus Apollo and Isis are
prominent though the philosophies of the Gymnosophists and of the
Neo-Pythagoreans have a share in the plot; in Achilles Tatius Artemis
reigns supreme; in Longus Pan and the Nymphs guide the destinies of the
young lovers. The difference in Apuleius is that the whole quest of the
hero is for some meaning in life and when magic, adventure, mythology
and human amours can not supply it, he finds through conversion a union
with a mystic goddess who sublimates his emotion and absorbs his life
into her service.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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