This chapter introduces important distinctions between intended and actual readership, and between the early novels, the ‘sophistic’ novels, and other known novels. It concludes that both the intended and actual readers of ‘sophistic’ novels were from the educated elite, and that Chariton probably envisaged such readers too, while perhaps writing in such as way that readers might also be found further down the social scale. Readers of this sort may also have been envisaged by Xenophon and some other writers of fiction, but in no case much further down.

This chapter explores the ways in which the five novels diverge in their representation of sounds. Chariton seems well aware of what can be achieved by briefly-sketched sound effects, but brief sketches are all we get: he does not suggest that the written word might find it hard to convey varieties of sound. Xenophon is apparently not concerned to communicate sound effects at all. Achilles Tatius offers elaborate rhetoric and sometimes striking imagery in compensation for the written word’s inability to render sound. Both Longus and Heliodorus push their readers (in different ways) to reflect on the problem of communicating sound, each offering a different solution. That of Heliodorus for the representation of sung poetry is a striking advance on anything in the earlier novels, apparently learning from (but also upstaging) Philostratus’ Heroicus.

This chapter explores links between Antonius Diogenes and Petronius. It notes features shared between ‘The incredible things beyond Thule’ and the Satyrica: their twenty-four-book format, their element of comedy, the location and extent of their characters’ travels, and the types of incident they encountered. Of three possibilities – that Antonius Diogenes knew the Satyrica, that the author of the Satyrica knew Antonius Diogenes, and that both drew on a common source – it suggests that the first, entailing Antonius Diogenes’ knowledge of Latin, is least likely. The second option would place ‘The incredible things beyond Thule’ ca. AD 55, shortly after the publication of Chariton’s Callirhoe and before that of Petronius’ Satyrica. As to the third possibility, although on Jensson’s hypothesis of a lost Greek original for the Satyrica some of the novels’ shared features might derive from a Milesian-tale narrative, the pursuit of the hero and his companion by a powerful and vengeful force, the death of the arch-villain, and the location in the bay of Naples and south Italy have no parallel in any known Greek ‘low’ narratives.

This chapter argues that in Longus, Daphnis and Chloe, the depictions in the inset tales of male self-assertion and sexual violence are offered not as models which we may expect Daphnis to imitate (as suggested e.g. by Winkler) but as contrasts to his reciprocal and considerate relationship with Chloe.

This chapter refutes Dover’s arguments that anachronisms and an unstageable change of speaker demonstrate the text of the (second) Clouds that we have to be an incomplete revision, intended as a text only for reading, not for performance.

This chapter argues that, whereas many poets in the Garland of Philip never use Doric, several do so to evoke either a Leonidean or Theocritean pastoral world, and sometimes because their subject has a Dorian connection – so Myrinus, Adaeus, Thallus, Erucius of Cyzicus, and Antiphilus of Byzantium. That Cyzicus was originally a colony of Corinth and Byzantium of Megara seems not to be relevant, since Doric appears only rarely in these cities’ inscribed poetry. Finally I examine the puzzling case of the five epigrams on Sacerdos of Nicaea preserved in the Palatine Anthology (15.4–8), of which three use Doric, two do not. I suggest that more than one poet may have been chosen to composed sepulchral epigrams for this grandiose obelisk-monument of around AD 130, and that the composer of the Doric poems might have been Philostratus’ ancestry-conscious sophist, Memmius Marcus of Byzantium

This chapter argues that in Theocritus Idyll 7 Lycidas falls into none of the categories listed by Dover in his 1971 commentary (ostensibly a comprehensive list) but into a category he had overlooked, that of a fictional character from another poet’s work. This other poet, I suggest, was Philitas of Cos, whose very influential early Hellenistic poetry is known only from a few fragments and from later allusions and references. Among the many things explained by this hypothesis (and it remains only a hypothesis) are the Coan setting of Idyll 7’s narrative and the erotodidactic role of Philetas in Longus. The ‘Cydonia’ given as Lycidas’ origin becomes a Cydonia some kilometres north of Mytilene on Lesbos, arguably the hill-flanked coastal plain where Longus asks readers to imagine the estates on which Daphnis and Chloe pastured goats and sheep.

This chapter charts the knowledge of Apollonius Rhodius shown in imperial Greek literature, where there are fewer references in prose writers than might be expected for so prominent a poet, but much exploitation of his language by hexameter poets, above all by Dionysius Periegetes.

The first part of this chapter explores the effects achieved by Heliodorus in his naming of his characters – among them the unusual name Cnemon from Menander’s Dyscolus chosen to underline the features of his story that related closely to New Comedy, and the philosophically resonant name Aristippus for his pleasure-seeking father. The second part argues that Heliodorus’ detailed description (5.14) of the pastoral ‘theatre’ represented on the amethyst given to the merchant Nausicles in exchange for Charicleia was calculated to remind readers of Longus, in particular of the scene where Dionysophanes, Cleariste and their retinue seated ‘as a theatre’ spectate Daphnis’ goats responding obediently to his panpipe’s commands (4.15.2–4). Heliodorus invites his readers to contrast the miniature and rustic world of Longus with his own vast and densely populated canvas – and incidentally offers an argument for putting his novel later than that of Longus.

This chapter addresses the question of whether Attic Comedy is a direct descendant of Ionian iambus, and attempts to counter the argument of Ralph Rosen for direct descent.

This chapter argues that Longus highlights important features of his work that contrast with tragedy. The preface’s intertexts with Antigone and Hippolytus are crucial. The latter focuses attention on how to manage ἔρως, alerting us to differences in its presentation by Longus and by tragedians. The inset tales’ myths – divine lust leading to a young woman’s destruction or metamorphosis – present a story-type drawn upon by Attic tragedy and more generally by Greek narrative poetry. In confining destructive ἔρως to his inset tales, explicitly called μῦθοι, ‘myths’, Longus contrasts gods’ actions and mortals’ sufferings in traditional myths with their handling in his own story. Tragedy neither explores stories of mutual and symmetrical desire, nor presents positive images of female desire, both of which are crucial to the discourse of the novels. Longus plants a clue to this verdict on tragedy at 4.17.2, where Astylus, expressing surprise at Gnathon’s wish to have sex with a goatherd, ὑπεκρίνετο τὴν τραγικὴν δυσωδίαν μυσάττεσθαι, ‘acted out revulsion at the foul smell of goats’: the dramatic term ὑπεκρίνετο alerts the reader to the double entendre in τραγικὴν δυσωδίαν, which with the addition of the iota subscript often omitted in imperial Greek epigraphic and papyrus texts becomes τραγικὴν δυσωιδίαν, ‘the unpleasant singing of tragedy’.

This chapter sets out briefly the case for seeing in the character Dicaeopolis in Acharnians not (as proposed by many) an alter ego of Aristophanes, but his competitor Eupolis, from whose political stance in his comedies Aristophanes is circumspectly distancing his own.