Word: heliodorus
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Iliad and the Odyssey) marks another important addition to the ancient classics that are being turned into briskly readable, contemporary English by such able writers as Robert Graves (The Golden Ass of Apuleius. Lucan's Pharsalia), Rolfe Humphries (Ovid's Metamorphoses), Moses Hadas (An Ethiopian Romance by Heliodorus), Dudley Fitts and Robert Fitzgerald (Sophocles' Theban plays), Stanley Alexander Handford (Caesar's Gallic Wars...
...ETHIOPIAN ROMANCE (277 pp.) −Heliodorus−University of Michigan...
...Thus Heliodorus opens his swashbuckling Ethiopica, one of the ancestors of the historical novel. Even when it first appeared−about A.D.250−it was a full-fledged historical, for Heliodorus was writing about a period 750 years before his own time. This early blood-and-thunder melodrama comes magnificently alive in this new translation by Columbia University's Jay Professor of Greek, Moses Hadas...
Durable Conventions. Heliodorus fleshes out his narrative with excursions into Egyptian and Ethiopian culture, discourses on religion, military tactics, natural history, and love. His form and mode of thought had a great effect on men of the Renaissance: Tasso and Cervantes borrowed from him; many of the Elizabethans−particularly Sir Philip Sidney in The Arcadia−mined his work. The conventions he pioneered of a noble hero and heroine, accompanied by friends who are more comic and far more human, still survive in books, movies and TV serials...
...Heliodorus himself almost nothing is known except that he was a Hellenized Phoenician who, thinks Translator Hadas, may have had an admixture of Negro blood. There was a probable purpose in his writing: to propagandize for the gentle philosophy of the gymnosophists, an obscure ascetic Hindu sect, and to proclaim the humanity, culture and martial skill of the dark-skinned Ethiopians. Today, nearly 1,700 years after his death, both messages have relevance, but the Ethiopica will mostly be read now, as it always has been, as a rattling good adventure story...
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