Oaths are not important in the structure of the plot. Once Leucippe swears to her father by Artemis that she has told him a true story about being still a maid.[152] Dreams are frequent and are significant. Four are reported which are vital factors in the plot. Clitophon’s father dreams that while he is conducting the wedding ceremonies of his son and Calligone the torches are extinguished. This dream leads him to hasten the marriage so distasteful to Clitophon and it would have been consummated at once had not Calligone been kidnapped by Callisthenes under the impression that she was Leucippe.[153] Then Clitophon had persuaded Leucippe to let him spend the night with her and with the aid of Satyrus was already in her bedroom. Leucippe’s mother who had just had a dream that a robber with a naked sword was playing the part of Jack the Ripper with her daughter, rushed in and interrupted the amour.[154] Later on, Leucippe and Clitophon on the same night have similar dreams. A goddess appears and warns each that their love must not be consummated until the goddess decks the bride and opens her temple to the bridegroom. This apparition makes them postpone the rites of Aphrodite.[155] In Book VII Sostratus, Leucippe’s father, sees in a dream an apparition of Artemis who tells him that he will find Leucippe and Clitophon in Ephesus. He goes to Ephesus then on a sacred embassy and finds that Artemis does not lie.[156] This tendency to a repeated use of the same device for forwarding the plot is seen in greater extravagance and exaggeration in the use of apparent deaths. Leucippe is supposed to meet violent death three times, twice before the eyes of her lover, once in vivid narrative told to him in prison. First she is sacrificed by brigands by being disembowelled before an altar. Second she is beheaded on the deck of a ship by black pirates and her head tossed into the ocean. Third she is murdered by an assassin hired by Melitte.[157] In the first two cases ghastly details make the executions seem real, but Leucippe always survives and reappears with a plausible but exotic story. Surely in this exaggeration Achilles Tatius is using thinly veiled satire of the device of improbable reappearances in the Greek romance.