Lucian, A True Story
These are the themes and motifs of this book.
• travel to outer space. The two lovebirds always find themselves thinking about the impossible. encounter with alien life forms, including the experience of a first encounter event
• Interplanetary warfare and imperialism.
• Colonization of planets
• artificial atmosphere
• Liquid air
• Motif of giganticism
• Creatures as products of human technology. There are so many robots being experienced in this book
• Worlds working by a set of alternate ‘physical’ laws
• Explicit desire of the protagonist for exploration and adventure
Callirhoe is a love story. It is more about the dauThe title character, the daughter of Hermocrates, ruler of Syracuse, is of truly incomparable beauty, and therefore much-longed for and sought after. She has many suitors, but when she and Chaereas glimpse one another, it is love at first sight. And what a love: So smitten, Chaereas could barely make his way home; like a hero mortally wounded in battle, he was too proud to fall but too weak to stand. The citizens are so touched with the love of the two and plead the king to allow them to get married. . Romance trumps all here — not always credibly:
The major theme of this book is true love that conquers everything But things aren’t quite so simple: not knowing who she is to be wed to Callirhoe is terribly depressed (“she nearly expired”) before she sees that it is her beloved Chaereas she is to be united with. This sort of melodramatic confusion, the characters at the edge of the precipice and saved by recognition of the truth at the last minute, is repeated throughout the book. It does get a bit predictable, but the characters’ enthusiasm each time is quite winning: recognizing the man she loved, Callirhoe, like a dying lamp once it is replenished with oil, flamed into life again and became taller and stronger.
Therefore, the book begins with love triumphant — but the tests come soon enough. Callirhoe’s many disappointed suitors gang up to try divide the couple, and eventually their malicious efforts have some success: misled, angry Chaereas kicks his wife as she runs to embrace him, a blow to the diaphragm (yes, the διαφράγματος) knocking the wind and — so it seems — more out of her. In fact, everyone is convinced he’s killed her, and they even bury her in a fancy tomb. It would not be much of a romance if the heroine was killed off in book one (out of eight), and, of course, when the tomb-robbers come (as one surely knew they would), they find this beautiful woman isn’t dead at all. They kidnap her, and set sail for Miletus, where she is eventually sold to Dionysius, “the foremost citizen of Miletus and probably all of Ionia”. He had recently lost his own wife, when he finally sees Callirhoe.
Dionysius falls madly in love, but Callirhoe can only bemoan her fate:
My origins were but a fabulous dream. I am now what I have become, a slave and a foreigner.
Complications ensue, as Callirhoe’s beauty overwhelms all. She decides to throw in her lot with Dionysius; the fact that she is pregnant with Chaereas’ child (which she briefly considers aborting) also playing a role. Meanwhile, the Syracusans discovered that Callirhoe apparently had not died after all and set out to find her, Chaereas most eagerly of all. He comes tantalizingly close to Callirhoe — but never quite close enough. In addition, of course, each on occasion once again thinks the other lost and dead. Events move deep inland, across the Euphrates, and it is at Babylon, at a trial surrounding Callirhoe (more men in her life fighting over her) that she and Chaereas are reunited. It is, as Chariton makes sure the readers understand, an incredible moment:
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