When seen from the perspective of Don Quixote, the origins of the novel can appear unfathomable. Looking backwards from where we stand, it can seem as if Don Quixote always existed, or as if Don Quixote somehow had to exist. Such has been the force of its impact on literary history. Before Don Quixote, we can identify a variety of fictional genres, not without interest in themselves, but of relatively minor importance when compared with what the Quixote spawned. In the European tradition these forms include the chivalric romances such as Amadís of Gaul, to which Cervantes makes direct and repeated references, as well as fictional autobiographies of rogues such as the Lazarillo de Tormes, pastoral tales like La Diana of Jorge de Montemayor and L'Arcadia of Jacopo Sannazaro, and a number of Italian Renaissance epics, of which Ludovico Ariosto's Orlando furioso is arguably the most important. In the still more distant literary past stand the archaic adventure romances, such as Heliodorus' Ethiopian History and the anonymous Apollonius of Tyre and, before these, the towering tradition of ancient epics written in verse. Some of these pre-novelistic genres were strong enough to exert a continuing pressure on literary history in spite of the novel's rise to a position of near complete dominance; as for others, the novel became their unforeseeable and incongruous continuation.