The story is told by Clitophon in the first person. He describes falling in love with Leucippe at first sight, his wooing of her, their elopement, and their shipwrecks, captures, trials, and perils. They are eventually enable to marry through the intervention of the goddess Diana. Achilles Tatius' Leucippe and Clitophon is the most bizarre and risque of the five “Greek novels” of idealized love between boy and girl that survive from the time of the Roman empire. Stretching the capacity of the genre to its limits, Achilles' narrative covers adultery, violence, disembowelment, pederasty, virginity-testing, and a conveniently happy ending. Ingenious and sophisticated in conception, Leucippe and Clitophon is at once subtle, stylish, moving, brash, tasteless, and obscene.
