with the giraffe is not a matter of coming to terms with a new experience, so much as an exercise in matching Heliodoros’ delib­ erately eccentric formulations with what is already known about giraffes.1 Knowledge about giraffes in late antiquity will have derived from autopsy in only a very few cases, although exotic animals were regularly exhibited in the arena. However, there exist a number of descriptions in classical authors which confirm that a literate reading public could be counted upon to have at least second-hand information about the animal.2 What all this means is that the description of the giraffe func­ tions on a second level as a riddle aimed at the reader. The infor­ mation it releases at such a measured pace serves as a series of clues from which the animal can be identified, although Heliodoros does not observe the modern protocol in such games of making the clues progressively easier.3 The answer to the riddle of course is the name of the creature: the rules of riddling entail both that the answer should be postponed until all the clues have been supplied and that it must be properly given, even when it has become perfectly obvious. So although the Greek word kamilopar-dalis is introduced in a way formally consistent with the dramatic frame of the narrative (i.e., it is supplied by people within the story rather than by authorial statement), it functions to confirm to the reader that this passage truly was a riddle, and that the riddle is now over. Heliodoros has taken some pains to observe the proprieties of realism here. The use of an ignorant audience within the fiction allows the riddle to be accommodated without damage to dramatic illusion. Nevertheless, once the riddle is recognized as such it becomes a game played directly between author and reader, bypassing the dramatic situation and even the narrative structure. Perhaps we can think of two Heliodoroi, first the author, a real man sitting in a room somewhere writing this text, and second the narrating voice in the text, which is just as much part of the fiction as the events it narrates. The narrator maintains the dramatic realism, but the author grimaces over his shoulder at the reader, playing with the etymology of the word kamelopardalis in a way which is not meaningful for the Ethiopian-speaking spectators. Similarly the reader operates on two planes: one addressed by the narrator, responding to events with the immediacy of real experi­ ence, the other bookishly responding to the author’s textual game,