8. At that moment we saw her serving-maid approaching from a distance and sprang apart: with me it went much against the grain and to my displeasure — what her feelings were I do not know.
This experience made me feel less unhappy, and I began to be full of hope: I felt as if the kiss, like some material object, were still on my lips and preserved it jealously, keeping it as a kind of treasury of delight; the kiss is the lover’s first favour. It is of the fairest part of the whole body — the mouthy which is the instrument of the voice, and the voice is the reflection of the soul. When lovers’ lips meet and mingle together they send down a stream of pleasure beneath the breast and draw up the soul to the lips. (Cf ch xxxvii. The idea is a commonplace of Greek and Latin literature, from a famous epigram of Plato’s onward; and Tennyson’s Fatima: “With one long kiss he drew My whole soul through my lips.”) I know that never before this did I feel such pleasure in my inmost heart: then for the first time I learned that there is no pleasure on earth comparable with a lover’s kiss.
9. When the time for dinner came, we drank with one another as before. Satyrus was serving the wine, and he devised a trick such as lovers enjoy. He exchanged our cups, giving mine to Leucippe and hers to me, after he had put in the wine and made the mixture: I had observed which part of the cup she had touched when drinking, and then set my own lips upon the same place when I drank myself, so that as my mouth touched the brim I seemed to be sending her a kiss by proxy: when she saw this, she comprehended at once that I was glad enough to kiss even the shadow of her lips. Presently Satyrus once more stole away the cups and again exchanged them: then I saw her copying my procedure and drinking from the same spot where I had drunk, and at this I was still more delighted. This happened a third and a fourth time, and indeed for the rest of that evening we were thus pledging kisses to one another.
10. When the dinner was over Satyrus came up to me and said: “Now is the time to play the man. Your sweetheart’s mother, as you know, is not in good health and is gone to rest alone: while Leucippe will take a stroll, before retiring to sleep, with no other escort than her maid Clio, her regular attendant: I will fall into conversation with Clio and lead her apart.” Acting on this suggestion, we lay in wait for them, I devoting my energies to the maiden, and he to Clio: and all turned out well; Clio disappeared, and Leucippe was left walking in the court. I thus bided my time until the greater part of the sun’s light was obscured, and then advanced to the attack, a bolder man since the success of my first onslaught, like a soldier that has already gained the victory and made light of war: for the arms that gave me such confidence were not a few — wine, love, hope, solitude: so that I uttered never a word, but without other preliminaries, as if all had been arranged between us beforehand, I threw my arms round her and kissed her. I was even beginning to make further advances, when we suddenly heard a noise behind us, and in our anxiety jumped apart: she retired to her chamber and I to the other part of the house, very angry at the spoiling of such a good beginning, and cursing the noise. While so engaged Satyrus met me with a smiling face: it appeared that he had seen all our proceedings, hiding behind some bushes in case anybody should come; and it was he that had made the noise, because he had seen someone approaching.
11. A few days later, my father began to push on the preparations for my marriage with more haste than he had originally intended, because he was being troubled by frequent dreams. He thought that he was conducting our marriage ceremonies, and had already lit the torches, when the fire was suddenly put out [and, what disturbed him even more deeply, both Calligone and I vanished]. This made him in the greater hurry to unite us, and preparations were made for the wedding to be on the following day. All the bridal ornaments had been bought for the maiden: she had a necklace of various precious stones and a dress of which the whole ground was purple; where, on ordinary dresses there would be braidings of purple, on this they were of gold. In the necklace the gems seemed at rivalry with one another; there was a jacinth that might be described as a rose crystallized in stone (This does not refer to the shape of the gem, but to its colour.) and an amethyst that shone so brightly that it seemed akin to gold; in between were three stones of graded colours, all mounted together, forming a gem black at the base, white streaked with black in the middle, and the white shaded off into red at the top: the whole jewel was encircled with gold and presented the appearance of a golden eye. As for the dress, the purple with which it was dyed was no casual tint, but that kind which (according to the story the Tyrians tell) was discovered by the shepherd’s dog, with which they dye Aphrodite’s robe to this day. There was once a time, you must know, when purple was still an ornament forbidden to men; it lay concealed in the round cavity of a tiny shell. A fisherman captured some of these; he at first thought that he had obtained some fish, but when he saw that the shell was rough and hard, he was vexed with what he had caught, and threw it away as the mere offal of the sea. A dog found this windfall, and crunched it with its teeth; the blood of the dye streamed all over the dog’s mouth, staining its muzzle and indelibly imprinting the purple on its lips. The* shepherd, seeing his dog’s lips thus blood-stained, thought that the colour arose from a wound, and went and washed it in sea-water; but the blood only shone the brighter, and when he touched it with his hands, some of the purple appeared on the hand. He then realised the character of the shell, how it contained within it a medicament of great beauty; he took a fleece of wool and pressed it into the interior of the shell, trying to find out its secret; and the wool too appeared as though blood-stained, like the dog’s muzzle; thence he learned the appearance of the dye. He therefore took some stones and broke the outer shell which hid the substance, opened the hiding-place of the purple, and thus discovered what was a very treasury of dye.
12. My father then began to perform the sacrifices which are the necessary preliminaries to a wedding; and when I heard of this, I gave myself up for lost and began to look for some excuse to defer it, While I was thus engaged, a sudden tumult arose throughout the men’s part of the house: and this was what had occurred. My father was in the act of sacrificing, and had just placed the victims upon the altar, when an eagle swooped down from above and carried off the offering. It was of no avail that those present tried to scare him away; he flew off carrying away his prey. Now this seemed to bode no good, so that they postponed the wedding for that day: my father called in soothsayers and augurs and related the omen to them; and they answered that he must perform a sacrifice at midnight to Zeus as god of strangers upon the sea-shore, for that was the direction in which the bird had flown. [And that was the end of the matter: for it had indeed so chanced that the eagle had flown seaward and appeared no more.] At all this I was greatly delighted with the eagle, and I remarked that it was certainly true that the eagle was the king of all birds. Nor was it long before the event followed the prodigy which had foreshadowed it.
13. There was a certain youth of Byzantium, named Callisthenes. His father and mother were dead; he was rich, but profligate and extravagant. He, hearing that Sostratus had a beautiful daughter, wished, although he had never seen her, to make her his wife, and became her lover by hearsay; for such is the lack of self-control in the lewd, that they are led into the passion of love by means of their ears, and report has the same effect upon them as the ministry of the love-smitten eyes, acting upon the mind, has upon others. Before, then, the war broke out in which the Byzantines were engaged, he approached Sostratus, and asked him for his daughter’s hand, but Sostratus refused it because he loathed Callisthenes’ loose life. This enraged him, not only because he considered himself slighted by Sostratus, but because he actually was in love: for he pictured in his imagination the beauty of the maiden, conceiving inwardly that which he had never seen, and in this manner he fell, before he knew where he was, into a very bitter state of mind. The result was that he began to plot how he might at the same time be revenged upon Sostratus for the injury and accomplish his own desires; and to this end he purpos
ed to have recourse to a law of the Byzantines, to the effect that if a man carried off a virgin and instantly made her his wife, the penalty exacted was simply the fact of the marriage itself: so that he began to look about for an occasion to accomplish his ends.
14. Meanwhile the war broke out and the maiden came to live with us, but his knowledge of these facts did not restrain him from his plotting. He was assisted by the following circumstance; an oracle was current among the Byzantines to this effect: —
“There is an island city: they who dwell
Therein are named from trees. It makes as well
An isthmus on the sea, a bay on shore, Where, to Hephaestus’ joy, for evermore Consorts with him Athene, grey-eyed maid.
There let your rites to Hercules be paid.”
Now they had no idea what the oracle meant; but Sostratus, who was, as I said, (A mistake of the writer: we only know (from I. iii.) that Sostratus lived all his life at Byzantium, and sent his wife and daughter to Tyre on the outbreak of hostilities.) one of the generals in the war, spoke as follows: “It is time,” said he, “to send to Tyre and sacrifice to Hercules: the particulars of the oracle all agree with that spot. The god called it ‘named from trees,’ because it is an island belonging to the Phoenicians, and the phoenix-palm is a tree. It is a subject of contention to both land and sea, the sea striving for it in one direction, the land in the other; but it partakes of both, for it is founded in the sea and is yet not disconnected with the shore: there is a narrow strip of land which joins it to the mainland, forming a kind of neck to the island. (Pliny, Natural History, v. 19: “Then followeth the noble city Tyrus, in old time an Island, lying almost 3 quarters of a mile within the deepe sea: but now, by the great travaile and devises wrought by Alexander the Great at the siege thereof, joyned to the firme ground.”) Nor is it rooted to the bottom of the sea, but the water flows beneath it, and also beneath the isthmus, so that it presents the curious spectacle of a city in the sea and an island on land. As for the expression of ‘Hephaestus consorting with Athene,’ the riddling allusion is to the connection of the olive with fire, which are also found in company in our own country. There is there a sacred piece of ground walled in, where the olive grows with its gleaming foliage, and there is also fire in the ground which sends up a great blaze among the branches, the soot of which manures the trees. (Volcanic ground suits the olive, as it does the vine.) This is the affection existing between the fire and the plant, and it may thus be said that Athene flees not from Hephaestus.” Chaerephon, who was a fellow-general with Sostratus of superior rank, was a native of Tyre on his father’s side, and congratulated him on his interpretation. “You have explained the whole oracle admirably,” said he: “but it is not fire only, but water as well, which has properties not unworthy of wonder. I myself have seen some of these miraculous sights: there is, for example, a spring in Sicily which has fire mixed with its waters; if you look down you can see the flame shooting up from beneath, and yet if you touch the water it is as cold as snow: the fire is not put out by the water, nor is the water heated by the fire, but a truce reigns in the spring between the two elements. Then there is a river in Spain which does not seem at first sight different from any other river; but if you wish to hear the water talking, open your ears and wait a little: for if a gentle breeze strikes its eddies, the water thrills like a string: the wind acts as a plectrum upon the water, and the water sings like a lyre. Again, there is in Libya a lake ( — Was Bishop Heber thinking of some such story when he wrote of places “Where Afric’s sunny fountains Roll down their golden sand”? Perhaps he was referring to the colour of the soil alone. This account seems to be taken, with some modifications, from Herodotus iv. 195, who relates how the maidens of the island of Cyrannis, on the east coast of Africa, obtain gold from a lake by means of feathers smeared with pitch. He had also mentioned (iii. 102) that the sand, or soil, of parts of India is gold-bearing.) which may be compared to the soil of India: the Libyan maidens know its secret, that its water contains a store of wealth; this is preserved below as in a treasury, being intermingled with the mud of the lake, which is a very spring of gold. So they smear with pitch the end of a pole and thrust it down beneath the water: thus they open its concealed store-house, the pole being with respect to the gold what the hook is to a fish, for it does the fishing, while the pitch acts as bait; since all the gold which touches it (and nothing else) sticks to it and thus the pitch draws its capture to the land. That is the manner of the gold fisheries in this Libyan stream.”
15. After thus speaking, Chaerephon gave his opinion in favour of sending the sacrifice to be performed at Tyre, and the city also agreed. Callisthenes was successful in getting himself appointed one of the envoys, (The θβωρυί were strictly the quasi-sacred messengers sent by Athens to the Delphic Oracle and the great Hellenic games. But in later Greek the word came to be used for any kind of ambassador.) and at once, after arriving at Tyre by sea and finding out where my father lived, laid his snares for the women. They had gone out to see the sacrifice, which was indeed a very sumptuous affair: there was a great variety of different kinds of burnt perfumes, and many different nosegays of flowers; of the former, cinnamon, frankincense, and saffron; of the latter, jonquil, rose, and myrtle; the smell of the flowers competed with the scent of the perfumes, and the breeze as it travelled up into the air mingled the two together, so that it formed a gale of delight. The victims were many in number and various in kind: conspicuous among them were the cattle from the Nile.
For the Egyptian ox is especially favoured, both in bulk and in colouring: he is of very great size, with a brawny neck, a broad back, a great belly, horns neither small like those of the Sicilian cattle, nor ugly like those from Cyprus; but they spring up straight from the forehead, bending outward a little on either side, and their tips are the same distance apart as their roots, giving the appearance of the moon coming to the full: their colour is like that for which Homer so greatly commends the horses of the Thracian. The bull paces with neck well lifted up, as though he would shew that he was the king of all other cattle. If the story of Europa be true, Zeus put on the appearance of an Egyptian bull.
16. It so happened that at that time my mother (i.e. his step-mother.) was in delicate health: and Leucippe also pretended that she was ill and remained indoors, for by such means it was arranged by us to contrive to meet, while the others were away: the result of this was my sister went out to the spectacle with Leucippe’s mother alone. Callisthenes, who had never set eyes on Leucippe, when he saw my sister Calligone, thought that she was Leucippe, because he recognized Sostratus’ wife; without asking any questions, for he was carried away by the sight of her, he pointed her out to his most trusty servant, bidding him get together a band of robbers to carry her off, and instructed him how the attempt was to be made: a holiday was near at hand, on which, he had heard, it was customary for all the maidens of the place to come together on the sea-shore.
After giving these instructions, and after performing the sacrifice for which he had formed part of the embassy, he retired.
17. He had a vessel of his own — he had made all these preparations at home, in case he should succeed in such an attempt: so when the rest of the envoys sailed off, he weighed anchor and rode a little off the land, waiting in order that he might seem to be accompanying his fellow-citizens on their homeward journey, and that after the carrying off of the girl his vessel might not be too close to Tyre and so himself be taken in the act. When he had arrived at Sarepta, a Tyrian village on the sea-board, he acquired a small boat and entrusted it to Zeno; that was the name of the servant in whose charge he had placed the abduction — a fellow of a robust body and the nature of a brigand. Zeno picked up with all speed some fishermen from that village who were really pirates as well, and with them sailed away for Tyre: the boat came to anchor, waiting in ambush, in a little creek in a small island not far from Tyre, which the Tyrians call Rhodope’s Tomb.
18. However, the omen of the eagle
and the soothsayers happened before the holiday for which Callisthenes was waiting, and for the next day we made the prescribed preparations at night for sacrificing to the god. Nothing of all this escaped Zeno’s notice: when evening was now far advanced, we went forth, and he was following us. Hardly had we arrived at the water’s edge, when he hoisted the preconcerted signal; the boat rapidly sailed toward the shore, and when it had come close, it was apparent that it contained ten youths. They had already secretly posted eight others on land, dressed like women and with their faces closely shaved of all hair; each was wearing under his gown a sword, and they too carried a sacrifice in order to avoid all suspicion: we thought that they were women. No sooner had we raised our pyre, when they suddenly gave a shout, ran all together upon us, and put out our torches; and as we fled, all in disorder from the sudden surprise, they drew their swords, seized my sister, put her aboard the boat, quickly embarked themselves, and were off like a bird. Some of our party were flying, knowing and seeing nothing; others did see, and cried out, “Calligone has been carried off by brigands.” Their boat, however, was already far out at sea. When they began to approach Sarepta, Callisthenes observed their signal from a distance; he sailed to meet them, put the girl on board his ship, and quickly sailed for the open sea. I felt a great relief at my wedding being thus all unexpectedly made impossible, and yet at the same time I was of course much distressed at the way this great disaster had befallen my sister.
Complete Works of Achilles Tatius Page 4
