Publisher Description

The first modern commentary in English on this most sophisticated and brilliant of ancient Greek novels. With its freewheeling plotline, its setting on the edge of the Greek world, its ironic play with the reader's expectations and its sallies into obscenity, it will appeal strongly to students and instructors.

Achilles Tatius' Leucippe and Clitophon is a "Greek novel" composed in the second century AD. Like the other five novels that survive from this period, it focuses on the mutual love of a boy and a girl and the travails and obstacles that prevent them from consummating that love. This new translation (which incorporates detailed notes) aims to capture the variety and vivacity of Achilles Tatius' writing. A substantial introduction sets the text in its historical and literary contexts.

The Greek Novels have moved from the margins to the centre-stage over recent decades, not just because of their literary qualities and thrilling narratives, but also because they offer revealing insights into the culture of the Greek world of the Roman Empire: sexual mores, the position of women and men, identity, religion. Achilles Tatius' Leucippe and Clitophon, the most influential of the novels in antiquity, remains the favourite of many. With its freewheeling plotline, its setting on the edge of the Greek world (in modern Lebanon), its ironic play with the reader's expectations and its sallies into obscenity, it represents a new, mature, sophisticated stage in the development of the novel as a genre. This is the first commentary in English on Achilles for over 50 years, a period that has seen great strides forward in the understanding of the literary, linguistic and textual interpretation of this brilliant text.

Love and Providence provides the first study of the recognition scene in Greek "romantic" novels and its significance in the ancient literary tradition.