Warren E Blake Translator (1 results)

Hardcover without dust jacket. Brown covers with black spine. Gold design to front cover and lettering to spine. Bumping noted to upper corners and bottom edges. Pages clean and unmarked. Spine tight. The story is set against a historical background of ca 400 BC. In Syracuse, Chaereas falls madly in love with the supernaturally beautiful Callirhoe. She is the daughter of Hermocrates, a hero of the Peloponnesian War and the most important political figure of Syracuse, thus setting the narrative in time and social milieu. Her beauty (kallos) overawes crowds, like an earthly counterpart of Aphrodite's, as noted by Douglas Edwards.[2] They are married, but when her many disappointed suitors successfully conspire to trick Chaereas into thinking she is unfaithful, he kicks her so hard that she falls over as if dead.[3] There is a funeral, and she is shut up in a tomb, but then it turns out she was only in a coma, and wakes up in time to scare the pirates who have opened the tomb to rob it; they recover quickly and take her[4] to sell as a slave in Miletus, where her new master, Dionysius, falls in love with her and marries her, she being afraid to mention that she is already married (and pregnant by Chaereas). As a result, Dionysius believes Callirhoe's son to be his own.