Melitte the widow of Ephesus is the most elaborately drawn character in the romance. There is even a long personal description of her: she is as beautiful as a statue with skin like milk, cheeks roses, hair thick, long, golden, and about her the radiance of Aphrodite. Clitophon admits he saw her with pleasure. Indeed she is so magnetic that the kisses she was pleased to bestow on him stirred him.[161] She knew what she wanted and how to get it. During four months she had to woo Clitophon though she was rich and young and her husband has been lost at sea. Finally since Clitophon was convinced that Leucippe was really dead, he yielded and agreed to marry her, though on condition that they should not be united until they arrived at Ephesus. She was as passionate as Clitophon was cold. On the ship she made ardent love to him while he begged her to philosophize on love’s nature. After Clitophon secretly received Leucippe’s letter, he had to pretend illness to postpone the fulfillment of her desires. Then Melitte sent for her so-called Thessalian slave Lacaena (really Leucippe) and begged her to concoct a philtre that would arouse Clitophon’s feeling. She is very outspoken about the fact that Clitophon seems made of iron or wood; that indeed she seemed to love a statue.[162] And she had the ability to express to Clitophon every feeling she had without inhibition and in most picturesque language. At her wedding breakfast in Alexandria she punned merrily about the postponement of their union. “I’ve heard of a cenotaph but never before of a cenogam.”[163] The bellying sail on the ship she compared to a pregnant woman’s body; indeed she converted the whole ship into symbols of marriage.[164] She also compared herself to thirsty Tantalus standing by a river but not allowed to drink. She could match Clitophon’s arguments and his quibbles did not deceive her: “You are playing the sophist, dearest!” she commented. When from the discovery of Leucippe’s letter to Clitophon and her husband’s safe return she knew that she had lost Clitophon, she visited him secretly in prison and poured out on him all her wrath and all her passion. Her denunciation of him as eunuch, hermaphrodite, senile nonentity shifted to adoration; and passion finally concentrated into so ardent and well argued an appeal for one embrace that she was victorious. Clitophon admitted ironically that love had taught her rhetoric and that he was vanquished, so he gave the remedy to a sick soul and even on the prison floor enjoyed her![165]