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 the most bizarre and risqu ́e of the five "Greek novels" of idealized love between boy and girl that survive from the time of the Roman empire. Stretching the capacity of the genre to its limits, Achilles' narrative covers adultery, violence, disembowelment, pederasty, virginity-testing, and a conveniently happy ending. Ingenious and sophisticated in conception, Leucippe and Clitophon is at once subtle, stylish, moving, brash, tasteless, and obscene. This new translation aims to capture Achilles' writing in all its exuberant variety.

Prose fiction, although not always associated with classical antiquity, flourished in the early Roman Empire, not only in realistic Latin novels but also and indeed principally in the Greek ideal romance of love and adventure. Enormously popular in the Renaissance, these stories have been less familiar in later centuries. Translations of the Greek stories were not readily available in English before B.P. Reardon’s first appeared in 1989.Nine complete stories are included here as well as ten others, encompassing the whole range of classical themes: romance, travel, adventure, historical fiction, and comic parody. A foreword by J.R. Morgan examines the enormous impact this groundbreaking collection has had on our understanding of classical thought and our concept of the novel.