Heliodōrus in Harpers Dictionary of Classical Antiquities

1. A Greek poet, from whom sixteen hexameters are cited by Stobaeus (Serm. 98), containing a description of that part of Campania situated between the Lucrine Lake and Puteoli, and where Cicero had a country residence. Some suppose him to have been the same with the rhetorician Heliodorus mentioned by Horace ( Sat. i. 5.2), as one of the companions of his journey to Brundisium. 2. An Athenian physician, of whom Galen makes mention, and who also wrote a didactic poem, under the title of Ἀπολυτικά, "Justification," of which Galen cites seven hexameters. 3. A native of Larissa, who left a treatise on optics, under the title of Κεφάλαια τῶν Ὀπτικῶν, which is scarcely anything more than an abridgment of the optical work ascribed to Euclid. He cites the optics of Ptolemy. The time when he flourished is uncertain; from the manner, however, in which he speaks of Tiberius, it is probable that he lived a long time after that emperor. Oribasius has preserved for us a fragment of another work of Heliodorus, which treats of the κοχλίας, a machine furnished with a screw for drawing water. 4. A Greek romance-writer, who was born at Emesa in Phœnicia, and flourished under the emperors Theodosius and Arcadius at the close of the fourth century. He was raised to the dignity of a bishop of Tricca in Thessaly. Heliodorus is best known as the author of a Greek romance, entitled Αἰθιοπικά, being the history of Theagenes and Chariclea, the latter a daughter of a king of Aethiopia. It is in ten books. This work was unknown in the West until a soldier of Anspach, under the Margrave Casimir of Brandenburg, assisting at the pillage of the library of Matthias Corvinus, at Buda, in 1526, being attracted by the rich binding of a manuscript, carried it off. He sold the prize afterwards to Vincent Obsopaeus, who published it at Basle in 1534. This was the celebrated romance of Heliodorus. Poetry, battles, piracies, and recognitions fill up the piece; there is no picture of the mind, no attempt at character-drawing carried on with the development of the action. The incidents point to no particular era of society, although one may perceive, from the tone of sentiment throughout, that the struggle had commenced between the spirit of Christianity and the grossness of pagan idolatry. Egypt is neither ancient Egypt, nor the Egypt of the Ptolemies, nor the Egypt of the Romans. Athens is neither Athens free nor Athens conquered-in short, there is no individuality either in the places or persons; and the vague pictures of the French romances of the seventeenth century give scarcely a caricatured idea of the model from which they were drawn. Various editions have been published of the romance of Heliodorus. The best are those of Bekker (1855) and Hirschig, in his Erotici Scriptores (1856). There is an English translation by Smith (London, 1856). See, also, Dunlop, History of Fiction, pp. 18-24 (3d ed. 1845), where an analysis of the novel is given; Chauvin, Les Romanciers Grecs et Latins, ch. viii. (1862); Rohde, Der griechische Roman (1876); and the article Novels and Romances.

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