Often reminiscent phraseology betrays quotations in solution. Frequently too very famous phrases are quoted directly. Calasiris greets Nausicles with that best of all wishes: “May the gods give you your heart’s desire!” Nausicles reminds Calasiris that the gifts of the gods are not to be despised. The maid Cybele assures Arsace that soon Theagenes will desert Chariclea for her, exchanging bronze for gold.[128] Emotional crises are described or expressed in Homer’s words. Arsace’s sleeplessness has the same manifestations as Achilles. Cnemon upbraids Chariclea for her pessimism about Theagenes’ fate in the words of Agamemnon to Chalchas. And Chariclea when she is questioned by physicians as to the cause of her illness only keeps repeating: “Achilles, Peleus’ son, noblest of Greeks!” as though only the apostrophe uttered by Patroclus could describe her dear Theagenes.[129] These are but a few illustrations of Heliodorus’ constant use of Homeric diction. No less did he use the language of the theater.[130] We have already seen how much his plot owes to the structure of Greek tragedy. From drama he took also a vocabulary of pungent metaphors to describe the progress of events in his story. Repeatedly the action is referred to as a tragedy.[131] And certain scenes by their wording imply a recognition, a _deus ex machina_, a prologue and a change from tragedy to comedy. These may, as Calderini suggests, be reminiscences of contemporary plays now lost, which readers of the time would recognize.[132] Certainly structure and language of the romance attest Heliodorus’ deep interest in the theater. The third striking element in the diction of Heliodorus is the rhetorical. He often uses all the artifices taught in the schools: alliterations, antitheses, set phrases. He loves the grand style. A speech, even one uttered by his charming heroine, is an opportunity for pomposity. He uses in excess that fine writing for descriptive passages which the schools taught and he scatters throughout his narrative pithy truisms or _sententiae_ which were part of the capital of the rhetorician. But these lapses into over-refined phrases, laborious symmetry and decorative rhetoric are less of a barrier to a modern reader than is his syntax. His sentence structure in general is not paratactic as is so much of Chariton and of Xenophon, but complex. Moreover these complex sentences are often exceedingly long with a kind of agglutinative accumulation of participial constructions that demands re-reading for comprehension. Yet he can be simple and pellucid in rapid narrative and emotional crises as the final Book shows. And it is just because much of his narrative is so exciting that we fall into resentful criticism when Homer nods in dull drowsiness.[133]