To me personally the defects in the romance lie not in the long narrative of Calasiris or in the early revelation of Chariclea’s identity, but in the excessive use of descriptive passages. Planned though they undoubtedly are to satisfy the craving of the age for a knowledge of the novel and the strange, or to give local color, they retard the development of the story. Often they are prolix and difficult because of an unfamiliar vocabulary and a complicated sentence structure. There are many such passages: descriptions of natural phenomena (the island city in the delta of the Nile, the straits at Calydon); of curious animals (crocodile and giraffe); of operations of war (a naval battle, the siege of Syene, the duel of Thyamis and Petosiris); the religious ceremonies at Delphi. These vary greatly in clarity and effectiveness, but in general they tend to be verbose and to retard the narrative. Such descriptions are however one of the conventional features of the Greek romance. And with all Heliodorus’ originality in plot, in his tripartite structure of epic, dramatic and cinematic features, he employs all the usual devices of Greek romance. These are oracle and oath, résumés, conversation and rhetorical speeches, letters and soliloquies, meditated suicide and apparent death, dreams and epiphanies. But Heliodorus makes these conventional devices integral parts of his plot. The oracle given by the Pythian priestess at Delphi early in the story motivates the plot until the very end when its meaning is explained and its prophecy fulfilled. The oath which Chariclea requires of her lover early in her travels protects her chastity through all the intimacies of palace apartment and prison dungeons. Résumés of events given several times by Cnemon, by Calasiris in his long narrative, by Charicles, clarify and facilitate the plot.[121] Conversation is used constantly on the battle field or in the boudoir, in palaces, in dungeons. Turn over the pages of Heliodorus’ Greek as you would a modern novel and test how often the pages are broken and enlivened by talk. Rhetoric colors some of the longer speeches, but in the court-room scene (the trial of Chariclea for poisoning Cybele) the procedure is described but the speeches are not quoted.