tendency to abandon an ostensibly historical background in favour of a purely fictitious setting. The relative dates of the authors are by no means certain, but the fortunate discovery of papyrus fragments of Charito and Achilles Tatius supports the view, probable on other grounds, that Charito is to be considered the earliest, and Achilles Tatius the latest. It is therefore of interest to notice that Charito, though his hero and heroine are creatures of his imagination, introduces some historical characters and some historical events; his main story is fictitious, but he seems to have been at pains to lend it a historical flavour. Heliodorus, somewhat later, presents a picture of a fairly definite historical period, but no more; his characters are all fictitious and there is no historical authority for the sequence of events which he describes. Achilles Tatius degrades romance from the realm of princes to the level of the bourgeoisie. His story is frankly fictitious, and he evidently had no feeling that romance should be related to history.”

Rattenbury goes on to illustrate his theory of the change from the semi-historical to the purely fictitious romance by a study of the Alexander Romance and the new fragments of other stories. The pseudo-Callisthenes Alexander Romance in the oldest version extant is dated about A.D. 300. But papyrus fragments indicate that a large part of the material in it goes back to a time shortly after Alexander’s death. From the evidence of our late pseudo-Callisthenes version which probably followed tradition it would seem that history was treated as fiction and little attention paid to the love-story of Roxane which could have furnished such a lively erotic interest. New fragments of other romances show other great rulers used as heroes.[23] One is the Egyptian prince, Sesonchosis, called by the Greeks Sesostris. Mythological characters too become protagonists in romances: Achilles and Polyxena; the Egyptian Tefnut, daughter of Phre, the sun-god, who took her adventures in the shape of a cat wandering in the desert of Ethiopia. Other fragments run true to the general type of the Greek Romances in manifesting now this, now that characteristic.

The sum total of all the fragments discovered up to date gives convincing evidence of two important facts: first, the extant Greek Romances are only a small part of the output of this genre; second, the dating of all the fragments places them between the end of the first and the beginning of the fourth century of our era. The Ninus Romance is the earliest fragment, Chariton’s the earliest complete romance, that of Achilles Tatius the latest. On this framework a chronological list of the extant novels arranged on the basis of proved data and the probabilities of internal evidence and comparisons, shapes like this:

It is to be observed that from internal evidence Xenophon of Ephesus probably came before Heliodorus. Longus is sui generis, and so stands apart from the typical genre of the novels; in fact is a unique specimen of another type, the pastoral romance.

The new discoveries from the papyri with the consequent re-dating of all known material has given a strong impetus to new study of Greek Romances; new editions of text with translation are being brought out by English, French, Italian and American scholars.[24] The introductions to some of these editions, especially those of Calderini and Dalmeyda, are the first distinguished literary work in the field since Rohde with the exception of Samuel Lee Wolff’s monograph on The Greek Romances in Elizabethan Prose Fiction, New York, 1912.

The time has now come for a literary study in English which will make available foreign criticism and present perhaps some new ideas. I plan to discuss in successive chapters Chariton, Xenophon of Ephesus, Heliodorus, Achilles Tatius and Longus, and to suggest something of their influence. Then I shall take up the Λούκιος ἢ ὄνος attributed to Lucian and his True History and finally I shall show the synthesis of the novel of adventure and the true Greek romance of love in the great Latin novel, Apuleius’ Metamorphoses.

II
CHARITON’S CHAEREAS AND CALLIRHOE

There are two reasons for beginning a perusal of the Greek Romances with Chariton’s Chaereas and Callirhoe. It is “the earliest Greek romance of which the text has been completely preserved.” It is “a lively tale of adventure in which a nobly born heroine is kidnapped across the sea from Syracuse to Asia Minor, where her beauty causes many