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.

This chapter argues that the authorial persona of Herodotus Book 2 is much closer to that of the rest of his work, and suggests that Herodotus’ use of speeches in historical narrative was not (as suggested by Fornara) a momentous innovation but a technique he owed to narrative elegy, some of it presenting as early as the seventh century an account of conflict between Greeks and non-Greeks in western Asia Minor.

The chapter first reviews hypotheses concerning the nature of ‘Milesian tales’. Harrison 1998 had proposed a modified version of Bürger 1992, suggesting that in this genre an anchor-narrator told of scabrous events in a quasi-ethnographic account of his visits to various places; Jennson 2004 had suggested that the Amores transmitted as Lucian’s pointed to Μιλησιακά in which the key-narrator recounted adventures that were both his own and told to him by others, i.e. just what we find Encolpius doing in the Satyrica; and Regine May had argued in 2010 that the prosimetric ass-papyrus P.Oxy. 4762 preserves part of Aristides’ Μιλησιακά, ‘Milesian Tales’. After noting these hypotheses the chapter briefly explores the impact of Μιλησιακά on the Greek novels. Finally it investigates their earlier history, suggesting that just as Sybaritica, ‘Sybaritic tales’, linked to them by Ovid, are shown by Aristophanes’ Wasps already to be a form of λόγοι, ‘stories’, circulating in the 420s BC, so too Μιλησιακοὶ λόγοι, ‘Milesian stories’, may have already been current in Athens by then, linked to Miletus’ fame as a provider of dildoes (cf. Aristophanes’ Lysistrata) and as Aspasia’s city of origin.

This chapter compares Philicus’ Demeter of ca. 275 BC (which, at the time of writing, I followed all scholars since Medea Norsa in classifying as a hymn) with the Delphic paeans of Philodamus (ca. 340 BC) and Limenius (between 128 and 108 BC). It argues that Philicus’ poem locates the exchange between Iambe and the Demeter not at Eleusis but at Prospalta, where a cult of Demeter and Persephone is attested, and that it may have proposed a role for that cult in the development of ritual αὶσχρολογία in Attica. The interest in Attic cults shown by a Corcyrean domiciled in Alexandria matches Callimachus’ decision to compose his very Attic Hecale. By contrast the Delphic paean of Philodamus is focussed chiefly on its place of performance and monumental inscription, albeit setting Dionysus’ arrival at Delphi, where he is be honoured alongside Apollo with cyclic choruses, in a wider geographical frame. Geography is important for the paean of Limenius too, offering a very Athenian version of Apollo’s reaching mainland Greece and proceeding to Delphi, a version appropriate for the Pythais from Athens by which we know it to have been performed.

This chapter explores the modes of fictionality in Philostratus’ Heroicus and In honour of Apollonius.

This chapter offers a short sketch of poetic output with special reference to the Roman provinces Achaea and Asia, and with an eye on how far we can differentiate ‘professional’ poets from virtuoso amateurs.

This chapter documents the differences in the five novelists’ representation of the Greek past – mythical, archaic, classical and Hellenistic. I distinguished two groups: Xenophon and Longus each offer very little myth or history before the period of the events they narrate; Chariton, Achilles Tatius and Heliodorus, on the other hand, not only use much circumstantial detail to build up a classical or (in Achilles Tatius’ case) Hellenistic world in which their story is set, but also give that world temporal depth by exploitation of mythology, and occasionally by introducing events or persons from earlier Greek history. Xenophon’s and Achilles Tatius’ worlds are such that their similarity with that of readers can almost be taken for granted, with little incentive to ask in what way and to what effect these worlds are to any degree different from their own. Chariton and Heliodorus are different: the more or less determinable historical setting combines with a decidedly contemporary σφραγίς to give readers both a strong sense of Greek cultural continuity and the opportunity to identify features where their contemporary Greek world might be significantly different: the most important such difference is Roman control of the Greek world, which is also strongly hinted at by Longus despite his choice of a timeless, predominantly rural context.

This chapter attempts a fuller survey of poetry in the reigns of Hadrian, Pius and Marcus. For epigram it draws on both the Greek Anthology (Pollianus and Ammianus for scoptic; Rufinus and Strato for erotic) and epigraphy (with examples of Iulia Balbilla’s faux-Aeolic elegiacs on one of the Memnon colossi). The section on hexameter poetry highlights the poems of Marcellus of Side (again epigraphic texts play an important role) and of Dionysius Periegetes, with some discussion of Pancrates and only a mention of Oppian’s Halieutica. The final section, on melic poetry, has Mesomedes as its chief exhibit.

This chapter discusses the absence from Longus of institutionalised community religion and of one of its central elements, priests, who (like priestesses) are found in the other four novels. A reason for this might be that some rural cults ran themselves and thus differed from polis-based religion. The only character within the story eligible for description as a holy man is Philetas: he has a very close relationship with Eros, who watches over him. The story’s narrator, however, relates in the preface how a shadowy exegetes explained the paintings in the Nymph’s grove: yet this exegetes, on whose say-so the novel’s four books are offered, lacks authority. Longus reverses the novelistic trope of supporting his story by a Beglaubigungsapparat: instead his exegetes’ interpretations of the painting’s scenes leave the reader quite uncertain about the reality of their world.

This chapter discusses Hadrian’s taste in poetry (a preference for Ennius over Vergil; Antimachus over Homer); his own surviving poems, with discussion of some dedicatory and sepulchral epigrams, and with a proposal about the nature of the possibly polymetric Catachannae mentioned by the Augustan History; and poetry composed with an eye to his approval, like the Altar of the high equestrian official L. Iulius Vestinus (perhaps dateable precisely to 24 January AD 132) and the mysterious inscribed elegiacs from Baetica, signed by ‘Arrian the proconsul’, on a hunter’s proper offerings to Artemis.

This chapter documents Old Comedy’s presentation of alcoholic consumption, both in a sympotic context and elsewhere, and to bring out how different was the perception of the consumption of wine by discerning citizens in a symposium, mixed with water and in moderation, from that by women or slaves, typically indiscriminately, neat and to excess

After defining ‘real’ and ‘ideal’ in relation to character or behaviour and to setting, this chapter notes that, whereas the other four Greek ‘ideal’ novelists create a realistic background, whether using personal observation or historiography, Longus draws chiefly on literary texts that themselves present a fictional world (Homer and Theocritus) or one that is semi-fictional (archaic melic poetry). ‘The Country’ explores Longus’ debt to Theocritus’ landscape, especially that of Idyll 1, advertised by his preface as several steps removed from the real world. The chapter then discusses the relation of 2.32 to Theocritus 1; of 1.17.3 to Sappho and Anacreon via Theocritus 11, complicated by the term ἀληθῶς, ‘really’; and of the apple at 3.33.4 to Sappho’s epithalamia, Ibycus, and Theocritus 28. ‘The city’ explores the literary forebears of Longus’ Megacles; ‘The sea’ looks at his ‘Tyrian’ pirates’ origins in earlier novels, especially Chariton’s; and ‘Reality’ considers how his use of Thucydides underlines his own fictionality. Overall it is the chapter’s stress on the fictionality, rather than on the poetic status, of most of Longus’ intertexts that differentiates its writer’s position from those of Richard Hunter and Maria Pia Pattoni.