Achilles Tatius
Achilles Tatius
The novelist of Leucippe and Clitophon
b. c. 2nd century AD
Achilles Tatius was a Greek novelist who probably wrote in the second century AD, though almost nothing certain is known about his life. The tenth-century Byzantine encyclopedia known as the Suda claims he was from Alexandria and eventually became a Christian bishop, but this may be confusion with another man of the same name.
His surviving work, Leucippe and Clitophon, is one of the five extant ancient Greek novels. It tells the story of two young lovers separated by pirates, shipwrecks, apparent deaths, and rival suitors — the standard furniture of ancient romance, but deployed with unusual sophistication. Achilles Tatius writes in the first person (rare for the genre), fills his narrative with rhetorical set-pieces and ekphrases, and maintains an ironic distance from his own conventions that has led some scholars to read the novel as parody. Others take it straight. The ambiguity is part of the pleasure.
The novel was enormously popular in Byzantium and influenced Renaissance literature after its rediscovery in the sixteenth century. It remains the most technically accomplished of the surviving Greek novels after Heliodorus.
Works (2)
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1
Leucippe and Clitophon prose
A Greek novel of love and adventure. Leucippe and Clitophon endure shipwrecks, pirates, false deaths, and rival suitors before finally reuniting. The...
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