Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Hellenistic prose fiction is not a self-evident category. The Greek novel, as conventionally understood, is almost certainly a product entirely of Roman times ( Bowie 2002 ). Xenophon of Ephesus, Achilles Tatius, Longus, and Heliodorus undoubtedly wrote in the first four centuries of our era; there is some debate over Chariton, but most commentators locate him in the first century ce . The various fragments are harder to date; recent critics have, however, tended to locate them in the first century ce or later. This absence has not deterred the quest for traces of proto-fiction in the Hellenistic period; indeed, it has, perhaps predictably, stimulated it. The formative work of modern scholarship on Greek prose fiction – still subtly influential – has been Erwin Rohde's Der griechische Roman und seine Vorläufer , first published in 1876. Rohde's interest lay primarily in the Imperial novel, a phenomenon he sought to explain by revealing its “forerunners” ( Vorläufer ) in the Hellenistic period: principally, erotic poetry and prose travel narrative. The novel, in his view, was the hybrid offspring of these two Hellenistic forms. Rohde's work has inspired a number of attempts to locate the origins of the Imperial novel ( Lavagnini 1921 ; Giangrande 1962 ; Anderson 1984 ), but in general this kind of evolutionary narrative has fallen out of favor (see esp. Perry 1967 : 14–15). ... log in or subscribe to read full text