Long mythological narratives are another feature of Tatius’ style. The sight of a painting makes it necessary for him to relate the whole story of Procne and Philomela to Leucippe.[210] The stories of the origins of the two ordeals to prove chastity are told with equal detail. The discovery of wine is elaborately related in the Tyrian version on the occasion of the festival of Dionysus.[211] These are a few out of many illustrations. Descriptive writing is employed as much as, perhaps more than, forensic or narrative. Indeed the purple patches almost overbalance plot, conversation and oratory. Works of art, setting for scenes, natural phenomena, the wonders of the world are introduced in highly colored digressions which are clearly the ekphraseis which the students of rhetoric were taught to compose and deliver. Achilles Tatius apparently was enamored of wall-paintings. He describes with gusto five and alludes to another. The subjects of all are myths. Two are familiar types in the frescoes found at Pompeii: Perseus and Andromeda, Achilles in women’s clothes among the daughters of King Lycomedes. One description of a painting opens the romance, a votive painting of Europa in the temple of Astarte at Sidon.[212] Sidon is the first word of the novel and this story is introduced as a tribute to the city where the first scene was laid, for the stemma on the coins of Sidon is Europa on the bull, pictured almost as Tatius presents her. The picture is described in vivid detail even to the flowers in the meadow and the shifting colors of the sea. Posture and garb of Europa are vividly sketched in words for he sees her “seated on the bull like a vessel under way, using the veil as a sail.” The keynote of the picture and the point of its application for Tatius is the little flying Eros who leads the bull and laughs back at the transformed Zeus. “Look,” said Clitophon, “how that imp dominates over land and sea.” A young man standing by exclaims that he too has suffered much from love. These exclamations are the point of departure for the recounting of love adventures. In Book III there is an equally long description of a painting by Evanthes in the temple of Zeus Casius.[213] The subjects are Andromeda and Prometheus and they seem to have been paired because both were chained to rocks, menaced by beasts and rescued by Argive heroes, Perseus and Hercules. Design, color, emotion are all described vividly and charmingly, but there is no point in the introduction of the paintings. The description of them is simply a purple patch of fine writing.