Breadcrumbs Section. Click here to navigate to respective pages.
Chapter
Chapter
Kalasiris, however, is no more a straightforward narrator than is Heliodoros.12 In fact, he comments himself (2.24.5) on the appar ently tricksy quality of his story-telling. By the time he tells Charikleia’s story to Knemon, Kalasiris has long known her to be the natural daughter of the King and Queen of Ethiopia, exposed by her mother at birth because of her white skin, but he suppresses this knowledge so that Knemon (and through him the reader) can actively participate in the discovery. First he learns (through a reported narrative, 2.30ff.) that she is only the adopted daughter of her ostensible father, Charikles, the priest of Apollo, and how she came to be adopted. Then (2.35) he is granted an enigmatic prophecy by the Delphic oracle, and visited in his sleep (3.11) by Apollo and Artemis who tell him to take the young lovers with him to Egypt and onwards. Assisting their love against Charikles’ wishes through a complex and duplicitous intrigue, he eventually tricks Charikles into allowing him to see the embroidered band exposed with her, a message from the Ethiopian queen to her abandoned child.13 The performance of Kalasiris is in many ways emblematic of the whole novel, intensely self-aware, theatrical, manipulative, enigmatic. He is the focus where the roles of author and reader intersect. Like the reader he has to make speculative sense out of cryptic fragments of information, and like the author he employs less than complete release of information to puzzle and please his audience; he is both a solver and setter of riddles. But his narrative does not resolve all the ambiguities it poses. The obscure oracle is in fact a predictive armature around which the whole future course of the plot is built.14 Some elements of it are obvious and others are resolved by Kalasiris, but it also looks beyond his death to the very end of the novel. It is another large-scale riddle, whose answers are supplied by the course of the story itself. Its last couplet, which predicts that the lovers will: . . . reap the reward of those whose lives are passed in virtue: A crown of white on brows of black only receives full explication in the last sentence of the work, when Theagenes and Charikleia, now formally to be married and honorary Ethiopians (hence the brows of black), don the white mitres of the High Priest of the Sun and High Priestess of the Moon in Ethiopia. In the interim, it has served to elicit deliberately misguided guesses about the ending of the novel, for example as the terms of its prophecy appear to be fulfilled in the human
DOI link for Kalasiris, however, is no more a straightforward narrator than is Heliodoros.12 In fact, he comments himself (2.24.5) on the appar ently tricksy quality of his story-telling. By the time he tells Charikleia’s story to Knemon, Kalasiris has long known her to be the natural daughter of the King and Queen of Ethiopia, exposed by her mother at birth because of her white skin, but he suppresses this knowledge so that Knemon (and through him the reader) can actively participate in the discovery. First he learns (through a reported narrative, 2.30ff.) that she is only the adopted daughter of her ostensible father, Charikles, the priest of Apollo, and how she came to be adopted. Then (2.35) he is granted an enigmatic prophecy by the Delphic oracle, and visited in his sleep (3.11) by Apollo and Artemis who tell him to take the young lovers with him to Egypt and onwards. Assisting their love against Charikles’ wishes through a complex and duplicitous intrigue, he eventually tricks Charikles into allowing him to see the embroidered band exposed with her, a message from the Ethiopian queen to her abandoned child.13 The performance of Kalasiris is in many ways emblematic of the whole novel, intensely self-aware, theatrical, manipulative, enigmatic. He is the focus where the roles of author and reader intersect. Like the reader he has to make speculative sense out of cryptic fragments of information, and like the author he employs less than complete release of information to puzzle and please his audience; he is both a solver and setter of riddles. But his narrative does not resolve all the ambiguities it poses. The obscure oracle is in fact a predictive armature around which the whole future course of the plot is built.14 Some elements of it are obvious and others are resolved by Kalasiris, but it also looks beyond his death to the very end of the novel. It is another large-scale riddle, whose answers are supplied by the course of the story itself. Its last couplet, which predicts that the lovers will: . . . reap the reward of those whose lives are passed in virtue: A crown of white on brows of black only receives full explication in the last sentence of the work, when Theagenes and Charikleia, now formally to be married and honorary Ethiopians (hence the brows of black), don the white mitres of the High Priest of the Sun and High Priestess of the Moon in Ethiopia. In the interim, it has served to elicit deliberately misguided guesses about the ending of the novel, for example as the terms of its prophecy appear to be fulfilled in the human
Kalasiris, however, is no more a straightforward narrator than is Heliodoros.12 In fact, he comments himself (2.24.5) on the appar ently tricksy quality of his story-telling. By the time he tells Charikleia’s story to Knemon, Kalasiris has long known her to be the natural daughter of the King and Queen of Ethiopia, exposed by her mother at birth because of her white skin, but he suppresses this knowledge so that Knemon (and through him the reader) can actively participate in the discovery. First he learns (through a reported narrative, 2.30ff.) that she is only the adopted daughter of her ostensible father, Charikles, the priest of Apollo, and how she came to be adopted. Then (2.35) he is granted an enigmatic prophecy by the Delphic oracle, and visited in his sleep (3.11) by Apollo and Artemis who tell him to take the young lovers with him to Egypt and onwards. Assisting their love against Charikles’ wishes through a complex and duplicitous intrigue, he eventually tricks Charikles into allowing him to see the embroidered band exposed with her, a message from the Ethiopian queen to her abandoned child.13 The performance of Kalasiris is in many ways emblematic of the whole novel, intensely self-aware, theatrical, manipulative, enigmatic. He is the focus where the roles of author and reader intersect. Like the reader he has to make speculative sense out of cryptic fragments of information, and like the author he employs less than complete release of information to puzzle and please his audience; he is both a solver and setter of riddles. But his narrative does not resolve all the ambiguities it poses. The obscure oracle is in fact a predictive armature around which the whole future course of the plot is built.14 Some elements of it are obvious and others are resolved by Kalasiris, but it also looks beyond his death to the very end of the novel. It is another large-scale riddle, whose answers are supplied by the course of the story itself. Its last couplet, which predicts that the lovers will: . . . reap the reward of those whose lives are passed in virtue: A crown of white on brows of black only receives full explication in the last sentence of the work, when Theagenes and Charikleia, now formally to be married and honorary Ethiopians (hence the brows of black), don the white mitres of the High Priest of the Sun and High Priestess of the Moon in Ethiopia. In the interim, it has served to elicit deliberately misguided guesses about the ending of the novel, for example as the terms of its prophecy appear to be fulfilled in the human
Click here to navigate to parent product.
ABSTRACT
J. R. MORGAN