The primary interests of the romance, however, far outweighing its philosophy and its adventures, is love. Once more two enchanting young people meet at a festival of a god, fall in love at first sight, plight their troth, accompany each other through world-wide adventures, preserve their faith and their chastity and for their piety are at last united in perfect happiness. Theagenes and Chariclea join Chaereas and Callirhoe, Habrocomes and Anthia, Clitophon and Leucippe, Daphnis and Chloe in the undying annals of true love. And the reader closes Heliodorus’ novel with Cnemon’s comment: “I am at feud with Homer, father, for saying that love, as well as everything else, brings satiety in the end; for my part I am never tired either of feeling it myself, or hearing of its influence on others; and lives there the man of so iron and adamantine an heart, as not to be enchanted with listening to the loves of Theagenes and Chariclea, though the story were to last a year?”[134] V THE ADVENTURES OF LEUCIPPE AND CLITOPHON _BY ACHILLES TATIUS_ “Every romance,” says Aristide Calderini in writing of the Greek novels, “represents successively a new advance or a new type in its genre. Now the closest affiliation is with history, now with pastoral poetry, now with philosophy. While certain common elements persist, the general pattern of the whole changes; often the content is varied; often the limits.”[135] The variation within this new form of literature is richly illustrated by the novel we are now to study, the one which was probably written last of the extant Greek Romances as Chariton’s was the first. This is _The Adventures of Leucippe and Clitophon_ of Achilles Tatius. We know little of the author. Suidas, the lexicographer of the tenth century, wrote his brief biography: “Achilles Statius” (note the incorrect form of the name ‘Tatius’) “of Alexandria: the writer of the story of Leucippe and Clitophon, as well as other episodes of love, in eight books. He finally became a Christian and a bishop. He also wrote a treatise on the sphere, and works on etymology, and a mixed narration telling of many great and marvellous men. His novel is in all respects like that of the other writers of love-romances.”[136] Now though Suidas used earlier material and essayed accuracy, two statements in this biography are manifestly incorrect. There is nothing whatever in the romance to indicate that Tatius was ever a Christian and the story about his conversion and bishopric probably duplicates the similar tradition about his predecessor, Heliodorus, who was identified with a bishop of Tricca who bore his name. Moreover Tatius’ novel is very different in many particulars from all the romances which are now known. And it is these contrasts rather than the similarities which make him in our studies so excellent a foil for Chariton.