The story told so far has been diachronic, describing (broadly) a shift from first-century romances preoccupied with the corroboration of civic Hellenism to Heliodorus' fourth-century Charicleia and Theagenes, which offers a radical challenge to Hellenocentric conceptions of identity. In this second section, I want to consider instead the durability of the romance narrative as a form of cultural expression (without sacrificing alertness to variety). Why was it felt that the romance continued to offer meaningful perspectives upon life over such a long period, despite the huge social and cultural upheavals between the first and the fourth centuries? My argument in this section is that the romance structure is both expressive and supple. It embodies a particular way of expressing the relationship between self and society, one that could be identified over a long period as characteristically Greek, while also accommodating the radical changes that Greek identity underwent over four centuries.

This chapter addresses the role of desire in the narrative economy of the romances. My aim here is not so much to diagnose the romances as concretisations of sexual mentalité in wider imperial culture – a task that has occupied much recent scholarship – as to map out the multiple modes of desire that motivate the plot, and to use that as a basis for a cultural–historical account of the romance form (a project that will cover the next three chapters).