Characters
For Prus it was axiomatic that historical fiction must distort history. Characteristically, at times, in historical fiction, his choices of characters' names show considerable arbitrariness: nowhere more so than in "A Legend of Old Egypt."
- The protagonist is assigned the name of the hawk-headed Egyptian god Horus;
- Horus' mother, the Greek variant of the name of the Biblical Moses' wife, Sephora (Exodus 2:21);
- Horus' teacher, the name of Moses' father-in-law, Jethro (Exodus 3:1); and
- Horus' beloved, a Greek name that means "bearer of victory", Berenice (there were several Egyptian queens of that name in the Ptolemaic period).
Read more about this topic: A Legend Of Old Egypt
Famous quotes containing the word characters:
“I have often noticed that after I had bestowed on the characters of my novels some treasured item of my past, it would pine away in the artificial world where I had so abruptly placed it.”
—Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)
“There are as many characters in men
As there are shapes in nature.”
—Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso)
“It is open to question whether the highly individualized characters we find in Shakespeare are perhaps not detrimental to the dramatic effect. The human being disappears to the same degree as the individual emerges.”
—Franz Grillparzer (1791–1872)