This chapter is an abstract of a paper that argued that historians of Greek civic culture in the Roman Empire should draw on the novels for details of Greek city life, of the behaviour of its elites, and of the relation between city and country – something Fergus Millar did, quite independently, and very effectively, in his UCL inaugural lecture ‘The world of the Golden Ass’ in March 1981.

This chapter argues that the poets whose epigrams were assembled by Philip of Thessalonice in his Garland share predominantly North Aegean origins, and that their mentions of Romans and of visits to Rome should be taken as evidence of these Romans being their ‘patrons’ much less often than they were by Gow and Page 1968: rather, some at least of these poets were more probably from the propertied Greek elite (as Crinagoras of Mytilene certainly was) and made short visits to Rome either as envoys on behalf of their cities or as tourists, picking out in their poetry its monuments that had Hellenic connections. Only Philodemus seems certainly to have become a long-term resident of Italy, and his contrast of his simple abode with Piso’s mansion does not demonstrate him to be financially dependent on him.

This chapter analyses several roles of silence in Greek novels before Heliodorus. On a macro-level, it suggests that the writing of the text was itself a breaking of silence, manifested in narrators’ openings in Achilles Tatius and Longus. Moving to characters, it reviews situations where the choice of silence is crucial to plot development – most far-reaching in Longus, where the couple’s origins must be concealed for four fifths of the narrative to allow them to grow up as simple herdsfolk. In Chariton too the choice between speech and silence repeatedly affects plot development. Silence is often allied with deception, twice with fear. In three novels a protagonist’s romantic involvement with a third party is crucially suppressed in communications between the couple. Next addressed are types of silence closely related to the novels’ central theme of eros, whether as a symptom, or the silent kissing Cleinias suggests to Cleitophon. Different is the silent awe a protagonist’s dazzling beauty triggers. Finally some topoi shared with other genres are examined: ‘everybody else was silent, but X began to speak’; and ‘for a long time X was silent, but eventually began to speak’. It is concluded that silence’s uses reveal it as an important element in constructing an engaging narrative, noting that of these writers only Longus has an ‘unmarked’ use of σιωπ- to mean little more than ‘he/she stopped speaking’.

This chapter examine some ways in which Greek novels flaunt and make play with their textuality, particularly Antonius Diogenes’ The incredible things beyond Thule and Longus’ Daphnis and Chloe. It argues that Antonius Diogenes presents recurrent tensions between the textual and the oral and highlights the importance of γράμματα, ‘letters’, to communication within his narrative, mirroring its writing down on wooden tablets that readers encounter in its frame. It also proposes meta-literary functions both for the name of the Arcadian envoy to Tyre, Κύμβας, ‘Cymbas’, since one of the meanings Hesychius gives the noun κύμβη is πήρα, ‘bag’ ( i.e. the receptacle in which the wizard Paapis carried his magic books) and for the twisting and turning of Mant(in)eas in P.Oxy. 4761. Longus apparently follows Antonius Diogenes in (unusually) specifying the number of his work’s books, but γράμματα, ‘letters’, have no role within his narrative (despite being taught to the young couple): that narrative is an entirely oral response by an unnamed exegete to a γραφή in the sense ‘painting’, and though within it tales are told, nothing is ever written or inscribed, not even in Dionysophanes’ paradeisos or in his civic elite world.

This chapter attempts a taxonomy of the metaphors in Daphnis and Chloe under the heads symptoms and concomitants of desire (where Longus’ metaphors situate his writing unambiguously in the Greek literature of ἔρως, ‘desire’); desire in society; anthropomorphisation of the inanimate and of animals; body-parts with a mind of their own; literary and meta-literary activity; and the world of learning.

This chapter explores the religious practice of characters in the five ‘ideal’ Greek novels, arguing that despite these works’ overall presentation of a world that is in many ways ‘realistic’, their representation of religion diverges from ‘reality’. At one end of the spectrum the behaviour of the rustic couple Daphnis and Chloe is almost hyper-religious, and it is only in Longus’ novel that we find a full range of traditional religious practices, including vows and libations. In the other four many features correspond to behaviour in the ‘real’ world – prayers, offerings, sacrifices, feasts and festivals: but libations are sometimes not poured when they might be expected; rituals associated with marriage or burial are omitted or played down; and, most strikingly, the practice of making a vow to a god at critical moments to secure help or rescue, a practice documented in the ‘real’ world by epigraphy and literature from the archaic period down to at least the third century AD, is wholly absent. Possible reasons for this absence are briefly discussed: is it simply a generally soft-focus and elliptical account of religious behaviour, or is it the avoidance of a device which, if deployed, would risk short-circuiting characters’ tension-creating peril in cliff-hanging situations?

This chapter aims at the sort of overview that the editors of ANRW then encouraged, and brings together the place of poetry in sophists’ education; an account of the many various poetic genres in which sophists composed, with citation of what we have from the only one of these genres to have survived, epigram; and epigrams on sophists composed by others.

This chapter argues that, unlike all other Greek novelists, Longus shows knowledge of Callimachus’ poetry, both the Aitia (whence his use of ἀρτιγένειος, twice: 1.15.1 and 4.10.1) and the Epigrams (whence the figurative ἕλκος of 1.14.1, near to Longus’ first use of ἀρτιγένειος). These strong cases increase the probability that some other words (ἐπτoηθεῖσαι 1.22.2) and themes (e.g. the simultaneous death of two young siblings at 4.24.2, cf. Call. Anth.Pal. 7.517; the recondite myth of Branchus, 4.17.6, cf. Call. fr. 229 Pfeiffer) are drawn from Callimachus. In explaining why Callimachus might attract Longus’ interest, it is proposed that the four-book format of Daphnis and Chloe, unique in the novels, might be a further Callimachean intertextuality, calculated to invite readers’ reflection on how Longus’ work could be read as a series of Aitia, that of the cave of the Nymphs (in the preface and Book 4) complementing those of the inset tales of Books 1 to 3.

This chapter argues that, unlike Dio in his Euboean Oration, in which the countryside is always presented positively and the city almost wholly negatively, Longus does not make his rustics entirely virtuous or his city-dwellers wholly bad. I differentiated between virtues of ἦθος, ‘character’, and virtues of πρᾶξις, ‘action’, illustrating the differences between those of the country and of the city by an analytical table. I noted especially Longus’ presentation of piety and impiety, of deception and of artifice, and of fear and boldness, concluding that the country’s vices prompt readers to reflection as much as do its virtues.

This chapter tabulates the number of pieces of direct discourse in each book of Daphnis and Chloe, the number of sentences in each of these, and the number of words in each sentence. As well as some immediately obvious results – e.g. that the first case of direct discourse in surprisingly late in Book 1 (1.14.1), and is given to Chloe; that the number of speeches, and speakers, rises book by book – it explores some of the effects Longus’ artistry achieves: the quasi-stichomythia of Daphnis’ internal debate at 3.6 and the stichomythic exchange between him and Chloe at 3.10; the play with vocatives; the differences between emotional reflections expressed in mainly short, paratactic sentences, and the instructions of Philetas, Lycaenion and of the Nymphs, the arguments of Lamon, or the pleas of Gnathon, all articulated in more complex sentences. Unlike Morgan 2021 it does not bring indirect discourse into the discussion.

This chapter analyses the novels’ poetic language, presenting some preliminary sondages which might indicate how much poetic vocabulary there is in three of our five complete Greek texts, and how much has classical and Hellenistic ancestry. It also looks selectively at the lexicon of some near-contemporary poets. Eight tables illustrate these heterogeneous sondages. After reviewing terms in Longus evoking epic, early melic poetry, and epigram, and some technical terms, it concludes that many words in Valley’s 1926 lists are not ‘simply’ poetic but are chosen to trigger some intertextuality, while others have little claim to be ‘poetic’ at all. Those remaining that cannot so be explained are few. Longus’ prose may be poetic in terms of his Theocritean subject, rhythmical sentences, and preference for parataxis over subordination: but his language is chiefly the language of prose. A brief overview of a small selection of potentially ‘poetic’ words in Achilles Tatius and Heliodorus suggests that they too have only a low proportion of ‘poetic’ words, a view corroborated by the paucity of ‘poetic’ words in Marcellus poems from the Via Appia, in the poet(s) of the Sacerdos monument at Nicaea, and in a sample from Ps.-Oppian’s Cynegetica that are also in the novelists. It concludes that in this period poets and writers of novelistic prose still draw vocabulary from two different linguistic pools.

This chapter traces the different uses of the term φοῖνιξ / Φοῖνιξ, the cognate adjectives φοινικός and φοινικοβαφής, and verb φοινίττω, running from this last’s allusive use to describe Theagenes’ bloodstained cheek at the beginning of Book 1 to the revelation at the novel’s close that its writer is a Φοῖνιξ, ‘Phoenician’. Ι noted how these uses span the word’s range of meanings – crimson, date, palm, Phoenician – and how Phoenicia’s importance is augmented by the mysteriously unnamed Tyrian’s victory at Delphi and by the description of the ship on which the trio escape as Φοινίκιον … φιλοτέχνημα, ‘a Phoenician masterpiece’ (5.18), a mis-en-abyme of the literary masterpiece which transports the couple from Delphi to Meroe.

This chapter offers arguments for dating Chariton between AD 41 and AD 62, Ninus between AD 63 and ca. AD 75, and Xenophon after AD 65. It suggests that the stylistic similarity of Metiochus and Parthenope to Chariton might point to proximity in date. I canvas a date between AD 98 and AD 130 for Antonius Diogenes, who might, like Chariton and the author of the Ninus, hail from Aphrodisias. Finally for Achilles Tatius I propose a date no later than AD 160. My footnotes in this volume take account of some important data from recently published papyri and of the valuable contribution of Henrichs 2011.

The first section of this chapter reworks ‘Les animaux dans le Daphnis and Chloé de Longus’ (2005) given to the second Tours colloque organized by Bernard Pouderon in 2002. After reviewing the roles played by animals (often of agents important for the plot), and noting their appearances’ frequent intertextuality with Homer, Hesiod, Alcaeus, Sappho and Theocritus, it turns to terms for the master-slave relationship, whose debut comes unexpectedly late in the novel: οἰκέτης, ‘house-servant’, first at 2.12; δουλεύω, ‘I am a slave’, first at 2.23; δοῦλος, ‘slave’, first at 3.31; δέσποινα, ‘mistress’, first at 3.25; δεσπότης, ‘master’, first at 3.26. It argues that a significant parallel (hinted at by the comparison between the obedience of Daphnis’ goats and that of οἰκέται to their master’s command at 4.15.4) should be seen between different relations of dominance – sheep and goats dominated by shepherds and goatherds; slaves and people of low rank dominated by members of Greek city elites – and that this parallel prompts readers to contemplate the control exercised by Rome over the Greek world and its city elites. Such contemplation is invited by the analogy between Longus’ story of a couple suckled by animals and that of Romulus and Remus suckled by a wolf, and by his choice of name for the couple’s son, Philopoemen, that of a historical character whom Plutarch says some Roman called ‘the last of the Greeks’.