Publisher's Synopsis
This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1912 edition. Excerpt: ... CHAPTER II Plot, Character (humor), Sett1ng; StrucTure, Style The Greek Romances, evidently, have for their material the staples of the world's fiction--love and adventure, more or less interwoven; and it is upon this generic similarity in matter that their specific differences in treatment are thrown into relief. For the present purpose, which is rather to characterize critically the Greek Romance than to appreciate separately the Greek Romances, it will suffice to draw attention to some of the differences without dwelling on them. The comparison will serve the descriptive purpose in view, and will at the same time serve to modify, as far as may be needful, the generalizations put forward in the introductory sketch. In their plots, Heliodorus, Longus, and Achilles Tatius all employ, as has been observed, some agency other than natural causation and human character. Heliodorus distributes the extra-human action in his main plot almost equally between Fortune and Providence--the latter, perhaps, slightly predominating. The exposure of Chariclea, which, both chronologically and causally, begins the story, is by common consent regarded as an avowed surrender to Fortune (II. xxxi; IV. viii). But immediately Providence sends the good gymnosophist to the rescue--a rescue the providential nature of which is to be inferred indirectly., though clearly enough, from the hieratic estate of Sisimithres, and directly from the assertion of Calasiris (II. xxiii): "The Goddes have made them my children by chaunce" (U 63), which by its confrontation of "The Goddes" with "chaunce," puts the matter beyond doubt. It is the gods, then, that have controlled, through Fortune as their instrument, the whole of that triple chain of seeming coincidences which...
