ABSTRACT
Les Aventures de Telemaque ruled uncontested for twenty-five years. Imitations appeared in either verse or prose but none achieved its distinctive style. Only the anonymous Temple de Gnide published in 1725 caused a surprise and an enchantment similar to Telemaque. As mythology has fallen from favor and education no longer centers on mastery of the classics, the Temple de Gnide seems at first an outdated, vapid love story compared with the modern questioning of etlinocentrism in the Lettres persanes epistolary fiction, and the political weight of the straightforward, energetic prose of L'Esprit des Lois. The essential theme and character of the story, love, allegorized by Venus, emerge from an opening description that is heavily coded. Another of poetry's descriptive topoi, ekphrasis, appears in the first canto in a long development on the decorative paintings inside the temple illustrating Mars and Venus's love affair.
