Many of these devices I recognize in the Greek Romances and especially in Xenophon of Ephesus. His narrative is as condensed as that of a scenario with lacunae, abrupt transitions, failures in an adequate vocabulary of emotion. The local history of Ephesus is emphasized and depicted. Scenes shift with cinematic rapidity. Hair-raising adventures succeed each other at an exciting pace. Bandits and pirates achieve robbery and kidnapping. High police officials or officers like G-Men perform valiant rescues. Court-room scenes as in many films vie with shipwrecks in interest. Documents like letters are presented to the reader’s eye as on the screen. Visions and dreams are made to seem as real as in fade-ins and fade-outs. There is a clear morality in the opposition of good and bad characters and in the final victory of the good. Hero and heroine captivate by their extraordinary beauty and maintain their chastity and fidelity against terrific odds. Hence their phenomenal virtue is rewarded by reunion in the end. Religion often plays a saving part (as on the screen for example in _Brother Orchid_). The Reader like the audience at the movie goes away with a sense of having been enlivened, entertained and vastly improved. For the function of the Greek romance in the second and third centuries A.D., when the universal rule of the Roman Empire gave scant scope for great oratory or tragedy under the blessings of an enforced peace, was to entertain and to edify. The Greek romance substituted for the adventures of the mind new themes: the excitements of passion, the interests of travel, and the consolations of religion. It was lifted out of the ranks of the trivial and the second-rate by its great central theme: that there is such a thing as true love; that weighed in the balance against it all the world is nothing; and that it outlives time and even death. Our own age in America, bleeding internally from the agony of a war which it is powerless to end, fearful for its own menaced security, demands from the cinema not only temporary oblivion and excitement, but encouragement to believe that love lasts even unto death, that heroes ride again and are victorious, and that finally, by the help of God, the right will conquer. IV _THE_ AETHIOPICA _OF HELIODORUS_ The life of Heliodorus is as obscure as that of each of the other writers of Greek romance, but in the tradition of his there is a special point of controversy. Was Heliodorus a pagan novelist or a Christian bishop? Or by some strange metamorphosis did the writer of the romantic _Aethiopica_ become in later and staider years the Bishop of Tricca? The only certain facts are found in the autobiographical sentence which concludes the romance, that he was a Phoenician of Emesa, of a family descended from Helios, the son of Theodosius.