In the spring of the year after the events of Aristotle Detective, a plot is launched at the end of the Anthesteria festival. Anthia, heiress to the late Pherekrates’ fortune, disappears from her uncle’s house. Has she been abducted by someone hoping to force a marriage and get his hands on her fortune? Her uncle asks Aristotle and Stephanos to discreetly find out where she is and rescue her before her reputation is ruined and she becomes unmarriageable. The only clue to her whereabouts points to her having been taken to Delphi. Aristotle and Stephanos set out in pursuit.
As well as overhearing Aristotle discoursing on various matters (mainly antiquarian and literary), we also meet the young Menander, who gets involved with our heroes in an adventure he will later incorporate into one of his plays, and a stunningly handsome young man, who is in love with an equally stunningly beautiful young woman. The two of them undergo most of the vicissitudes the Oxford Classical Dictionary tells us are typically experienced by the characters in the Greek novels of the first and second centuries AD: attempted seduction by rich or powerful figures, a siege, fire, separation, capture by pirates, enslavement, kidnapping, and being sold off to a brothel, despite all of which they are happily re-united, still virgins. To cap it all, Aristotle looks forward at the end to something which is neither tragedy nor comedy, and is in fact the novel. In doing so, he manages to anticipate Jane Austen’s famous remark that “Three or four families in a country village is the very thing to work on” by some twenty-one and a half centuries.
So, how does the book work apart from all the games of spot-the-reference? Stephanos is more fully realised as a character this time. The descriptions and atmosphere are well done – I liked the Anthesteria itself, the rural wedding and the consultation of the Oracle at Delphi. The detective story element seems almost to be a convenient framework to support the story Margaret Doody really wants to tell. I do wonder if she might be happier just doing straight historical fiction. However, I will continue following the adventures of Aristotle and Stephanos in the next book.
Doody's Aristotle Series
