The Mustering of the Delphians (4.19–21)

At the end of Book 4 the Delphians, encouraged by the tricky priest Calasiris to arrange an expedition in pursuit of Charicleia and her alleged abductor Theagenes, muster for war—an episode that turns out to be inconsequential. This chapter reads the phase as one of a series of Heliodorean experiments with ‘false beginnings’, in the context of a narrative that is itself fundamentally about the question of origins (i.e. the mystery of Charicleia’s birth). The Delphians, crucially, misread the genre of the episode, believing themselves to be at the start of an epic or a history, not a romance, where what the narrative is morally centred around is the desire of the young couple rather than the dominant, normative values of society as a whole. The chapter closes with some reflections on the wider historical context of Heliodorus’ era, in particular the gendering of agency in such abduction cases.

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