Alatiel—Antiochus

Alatiel and Antiochus are joined by a brief but consequential love affair formed amid war, captivity, and displacement. He is charged with guarding her in Smyrna after Osbech leaves to fight; instead, Antiochus breaks faith with his master and becomes her lover. When defeat makes their position unsafe, the two escape to Rhodes. Antiochus’s final act is to entrust Alatiel to a friend, but the intimacy that follows between her and the merchant carries the story beyond the promise he made at his deathbed.

An attachment formed in displacement

The relationship begins after Osbech, king of the Turks, has taken Alatiel and made her his wife. When he prepares to confront the King of Cappadocia, he leaves her at Smyrna in the care of Antiochus, a trusted servant and friend. Osbech is killed in battle, and his army is defeated. In the unsettled aftermath, Antiochus remains responsible for the woman his master has left behind.

Antiochus is older than Alatiel, but he is able to speak her language. That shared speech matters: for years, as the story presents it, she has lived like someone deaf and dumb, unable to understand others or make herself understood. Their communication gives the two a point of contact that her earlier displacement had denied her. The narrator says that, within a few days, familiarity grows between them and their relationship passes from friendly intercourse to amorous privacy. Alatiel reciprocates his desire, and the two take pleasure in one another.

Their intimacy is therefore both a refuge from isolation and a breach of obligation. Antiochus does not wait for Osbech’s return or preserve the trust placed in him; he and Alatiel become lovers while the absent master is still the person to whom her care had been entrusted. The account does not make their bond a public or secure partnership. It grows in private under the shadow of Osbech’s defeat and the possibility that a new conqueror will arrive.

Flight to Rhodes

When Antiochus and Alatiel learn that Osbech has been defeated and killed and that the victorious King of Cappadocia is advancing toward Smyrna, they decide not to remain and await him. They secretly take a large part of the valuable possessions belonging to Osbech and escape to Rhodes. The flight binds them together in a practical undertaking as well as a love affair: they leave the place where their attachment began with wealth taken from the household Antiochus had been serving.

Their refuge proves temporary. Antiochus falls gravely ill and draws near to death. At this point, his relation to Alatiel shifts from lover to caretaker concerned with what will become of her after he is gone. A Cypriot merchant, a close and much-loved friend of Antiochus, is lodging with him. Antiochus summons both the merchant and Alatiel, and asks the merchant, if he dies, to take charge of his possessions and of her, and to care for her as he would have cared for Antiochus himself. He explains his concern that she would otherwise remain a stranger without aid or counsel. His appeal makes explicit that his attachment includes anxiety for her safety beyond his own life.

The deathbed trust and its aftermath

The merchant and Alatiel weep at Antiochus’s request and promise to carry it out if he dies. Antiochus soon does die, and the two arrange his honorable burial. His last appeal thus gives the relationship an aftermath: Alatiel is not simply left behind, but passed into the protection of the person Antiochus trusts most. The gesture is an act of friendship toward the merchant and of solicitude toward Alatiel, even though the story has already shown Antiochus’s earlier disloyalty to Osbech.

A few days later, the merchant prepares to return to Cyprus and asks Alatiel what she wishes to do. She says she would gladly go with him and hopes that, for Antiochus’s sake, he will treat her as a sister. The merchant agrees to meet her wishes and, to protect her from possible affronts during the voyage, presents her as his wife. This protective claim shapes the conditions of their travel: on the Catalan carrack, they are assigned a small cabin on the stern and share a narrow bed, so that their actions will not contradict the identity he has declared.

Their intimacy is not described as the purpose either had when leaving Rhodes. Yet, before they reach Baffa, darkness, opportunity, and the warmth of the shared bed draw them into an affair. The story says they are moved by equal desire and forget both the friendship and the love of Antiochus who has died; before reaching the merchant’s home in Cyprus, they form an alliance together. The shift is striking: the promise to preserve Antiochus’s care for Alatiel becomes the setting for a new bond between the two survivors.

Significance within Alatiel’s story

Antiochus’s relationship with Alatiel belongs to a chain of attachments formed as she is repeatedly moved across political and maritime worlds. Here, language enables closeness after prolonged isolation, while the threat of conquest turns private intimacy into flight. The lovers’ refuge in Rhodes cannot hold, and Antiochus’s death ends their shared life almost as soon as they have escaped Smyrna.

The episode also holds care and desire in tension. Antiochus violates his master’s trust by becoming Alatiel’s lover, yet at the end he acts to ensure that she will not be abandoned without support. Alatiel, in turn, promises to remember him and accepts his friend’s protection, but the voyage creates a new intimate relationship before it reaches Cyprus. The bond between Alatiel and Antiochus is thus brief, shaped by danger and dependence, and preserved in the narrative through the deathbed trust that both concludes their affair and leads directly into its successor.