1898.] SMYTH — PERICLES AND APOLLONIUS. 21 {J 



Ephesiaca and the ApoUoiiius. The marriage of the principal 

 figures of the romance is in both instances at the beginning and 

 not at the end of the adventures. The stories are alike in the in- 

 tended assassination of the heroine by a slave commissioned 

 by a jealous mistress ; the compassion of the murderer ; the 

 escape of the heroine; her preservation of her purity in a 

 brothel, and the final recognition of the lovers in a temple by 

 means of the hero's repetition in a loud voice of his adventures. 

 ApoUonius is succoured by an old fisherman of Cyrene ; Habro- 

 komes sojourns with a fisherman of Syracuse. Rohde conjectures 

 that the idyllic sequestration of such a picture of contented poverty 

 called forth imitators (^Der griechische Roman, p. 412). The wife 

 of ApoUonius is regarded by mistake as Artemis herself, and the 

 same mistake is made with regard to Antheia. The correspondence 

 between the two romances is briefly indicated by W. Meyer {Sit- 

 zungsberichte der Milnch. Akad. Phil. CL, 1872, p. 3), and the 

 parallelism is more fully made out by Rohde {^Der griechische Ro77iany 

 pp. 412, 413). The latter even finds in the brevity and dryness of 

 the narrative an indication of a significant correspondence of man- 

 ner in the two narrators, for the usual romantic style of the period 

 was overflowing with pathos and color. 



A correspondence so exact and even verbal is only explicable 

 upon the theory that one of the narrators was the imitator of the 

 other. Of course it is quite conceivable that some Latin follower 

 of later Greek sophistry had ventured an imitation of the Greek 

 prototypes of erotic romance poetry, but the possibility of such an 

 explanation disappears, and the conviction that the Latin Apol- 

 lonius is a translation of an original Greek romance becomes irre- 

 sistible when the student discovers in the text — as in a palimpsest^ 

 Rohde says — a double stratum of pagan-Greek and Christian-Latin 

 conceptions, customs and turns of expression. It is clear enough 

 that the pagan ground work and the clumsily adjusted Christian 

 additions are by different hands ; and if in the oldest Latin version 

 two writers are found to be engaged upon the old text there is 

 hardly a more simple explanation conceivable than that a Greek 

 romance originally written by a Greek of the ancient faith was 

 translated by a Christian of the Latin half of the empire. The love 

 of arts evinced by both men and women in the ApoUonius romance 

 smacks more of Greek manners than of Roman, or Christian- 

 Roman iconoclastic zeal ; while such a passage as that in which 



