beautiful even than Paris’ prize, was by now becoming reconciled with him. And since Chaereas had now nobly redeemed himself in the eyes of Love by his wanderings from west to east amid countless sufferings, Aphrodite felt pity for him, and, as she had in the beginning brought together this noble pair, so now, having harried them long over land and sea, she was willing once more to unite them.” The final consideration about Chariton must be the style of his work. And first of all the inquiry rises to our lips: how did the secretary of Athenagoras become so distinguished in the art of narration? Homer, I am convinced, is the master from whom, as Dante from Vergil, he took his beautiful style. The romance is rich in literary allusions, but beyond all others Homer is quoted repeatedly (twenty-four times indeed) and with great effectiveness. Sometimes a mere transitional phrase is adopted: “while the words were yet on his lips.”[42] In descriptions the brevity and simplicity of Homer are used with such nicety that the language often trails off naturally into the very words of the epic. In the thirty day festival at Babylon “the sweet savor arose to heaven eddying amid the smoke.”[43] Men are pictured fighting and in their close array “buckler pressed on buckler, helm on helm, and man on man.”[44] And as the conflict joined and Chaereas rushed against his enemies, he “smote them right and left and there rose a hideous moaning.”[45] Artaxerxes in his court is compared to Zeus among the assembled gods.[46] A phantom of Chaereas appears to Callirhoe resembling him “in stature, and fair eyes, and voice, and the raiment of his body was the same.”[47] When Callirhoe came into the court-room in Babylon, “she looked just as the divine poet says that Helen did, when she appeared to ‘them that were with Priam and Panthöos and Thymoëtes ... being elders of the people.’[48] At the sight of her, admiring silence fell, ‘and each one uttered a prayer that he might be her bedfellow.’”[49] Besides this use of Homeric phrases in descriptions, quotations are frequently introduced in conversations as if Chariton found only Homer’s words expressive to convey the thought of one character to another.[50] But far more important than such uses of Homeric phraseology is the intensification of emotional coloring by a quotation from Homer at a crisis of poignant feeling. When Callirhoe’s nurse calls her to get up for it is her wedding day, “her knees and heart were unstrung,” because she did not know whom she was to marry.[51] When Chaereas is told that his wife is an adulteress, “a black cloud of grief enwrapped him, and with both hands he took dark dust and poured it over his head and defiled his comely face.”[52] When Chaereas is determined to set sail in winter in search of his kidnapped bride, his mother begged him to take her with him and cried in Homer’s words: