Page:The Classical Heritage of the Middle Ages.djvu/60

 42 THE CLASSICAL HERITAGE [chap. chance — rvxrj. Chance, stringing itself out in a succession of unexpected happenings, cannot make a plot to satisfy an intelligent person. Such a plot would have been abominable to ^schylus or Sopho- cles or Aristotle or to Homer; for the adventures which befall Odysseus in the Odyssey serve to bring out that hero's greatness of character, and are accom- plished by him as only he could have accomplished them. But the hero and heroine in these Greek romances are characterless puppets, to whom nothing happens in accordance with any law of life or fate. Yet we may bear in mind that in the Greek romances fantasy is dominant, and hence there is no rationally constructed sequence of occurrences ; and also that in the Old Com- edy the plot was far less rigorous than in tragedy. But Aristophanes was a wilful giant, rollicking in imagin- ings which no chains of reason could hold. He could also revere the greatness of ^schylus. The imagination of the Greek romances consists mostly in failure to ap- preciate causality in fiction, and to grasp the laws of life. These stories also are rhetorical, the writers lov- ing their polished, conventional, and often borrowed phrases. There are lengthy descriptions of the coun- tries to which the lovers come, and the customs of the people. The poems of the Alexandrian poets, The- ocritus and Moschus, were pictorial, and contained charming pictures of the deeds or situations of their heroes. Achilles Tatius seeks to outdo these real poets with elaborate descriptions of actual paintings which his lovers' eyes chance to rest on.^ 1 The Leudppe and Clitiphon opens with a long description of a picture of Europa and the Bull, seen by Clitiphon in a temple at