This chapter examines several passages in Aristophanes’ Wasps where I argue that obscene language and sexual elements in the dramatic action have been missed by readers and commentators.

This chapter argues against the view of Perry 1967 (to some extent endorsed by Reardon 1971) that the novels were popular literature, written for a juvenile readership and ‘for the edification of children and the poor-in-spirit’: rather, it suggests, the intertextuality with high literature of the classical period and the level of education it implied point to an elite readership, among whom some of the few women to receive such an education were doubtless numbered.

The Introduction sketches the content of the book’s forty-six chapters in varying degrees of detail and relates them to the author’s developing interests and, in the case of imperial Greek poetry and the Greek novels, to the increasing scholarly attention given to these subjects over the last thirty-five years.

This chapter observes that Longus promotes an αἰπόλος, ‘goatherd’, to bear the privileged name Daphnis, transferring his canonical role of βουκόλος, ‘cowherd’, to other herdsmen – something easily done, since all play the syrinx. But Longus’ Daphnis does not inherit the capacity of the Theocritean αἰπόλος for singing mellifluous song: whereas Chloe does sing sola, Longus’ males, including Daphnis, do not, except for the cowherd in the inset tale at 1.27 and Philetas in his recollections at 2.3.2: instead they tell μῦθοι, ‘myths’. It suggests that Longus might have envisaged his own, often poetic, prose achieving what song had achieved for Theocritus’ Polyphemus, and that his elimination of male solo song was part of his programme of refashioning Sappho and Theocritus in prose. It is noted that of the three characters to whom, from a Theocritean Daphnis, the status of βουκόλος is transferred, Dorcon twice saves Daphnis, but his understanding of eros does not advance the couple’s; that of the βουκόλος Philetas does, and his advice is important; Lampis’ impact, however, like Dorcon’s, is ephemeral, and his character unpleasant. Despite Philetas’ positive role, Dorcon’s and Lampis’ actions may hint that Theocritus was wrong to privilege βουκόλοι, who in Longus can be boisterous and self-assertive, and that a society which gave cowherds free rein would be rougher than one in which standards of behaviour were set by goatherds and shepherds.

The chapter’s first objective is to give a flavour of the post-classical vocabulary in Longus’ artistic prose and to determine at what literary level the authors with whom he shares such vocabulary locates him. After noting some hapax legomena, and documenting some fifty words and a score of usages first found in post-classical literary texts ranging from Epicurus to Himerius, I concluded that, while these were only a sub-class of the numerous cases of vocabulary and usage that Longus shares with post-classical authors, they showed that, while Longus does himself often Atticise, he does so much less consistently than other Atticising writers of the late second and early third centuries. In some respects, then, his linguistic behaviour can be seen as analogous to that of Chariton. whose vocabulary matches that of several writers of the first century AD. But though writing in a period when Atticism was gaining strength, and may well have been prominent in some places, Chariton does not follow this path: a century and a half later Longus was writing in a world where some lexicographers and sophists both preached and tried to practise hard-core Atticism; but he himself blends Atticist and post-classical usage without apparent concern. It is conceded that the data marshalled could not establish a firm date for Longus’ writing, but it is suggested they point to the 220s or 230s AD.

This chapter argues that it was unlikely that an Attic theatre audience, many of whom will have studied with a sophist, could not tell the difference between Socrates and a sophistic teacher of rhetoric, and that it was significant that it was only well into the play, when Aristophanes had established his ‘Socrates’ as like the ‘real’ Socrates in several respects, that he started to bring out the role of his stage-figure in teaching rhetoric – a role he gave him because his purpose in Clouds was to κωμωιδεῖν, ‘make fun of in a comedy’, both Socrates and sophists. This argument hangs to some extent on the socio-economic distribution of spectators in the theatre of Dionysus in Athens, and on the size of that theatre.

This chapter surveys Greek writing of 31 BC–AD 270 that might have impinged on the novels, or been somehow influenced by them. In 31 BC–AD 50, before any known novels, little that might have impacted a novelist writing in AD 50 can be seen in Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Nicolaus of Damascus or Strabo, or in hexameter poetry: but erotic epigrams, especially those of Rufinus (writing ca. AD 40–60, apparently in Asia Minor near the novels’ birthplace), may have caught novelists’ eyes. In AD 50–160 sophistic rhetoric’s explosion encouraged fictionality in declamation and in the imaginative scenarios of Dio’s Euboean, Trojan and Borysthenitic speeches. An erotic theme was central to the Araspas, lover of Pantheia, by Dionysius of Miletus or Caninius Celer. Plutarch comes near to a mini-novel in his story of young Bacchon’s kidnapping in his Ἐρωτικός, and many Lives have novelistic cliff-hanging incidents. Achilles Tatius’ ‘scientific’ digressions chime with the popularity of paradoxography (Pamphila, Phlegon, and Favorinus). Between 160–220 Iamblichus’ Babyloniaca and Aelian’s Histories show paradoxography’s continued popularity; Lucian plays games with fictionality and himself wrote a novel. Pausanias, Athenaeus and Philostratus present tales of desire in a way improbable in a world without novels. Discussion of Heliodorus’ relation to other literature dominates assessment of AD 220–270.

This chapter argues that the representation of the inhabited world by the Periegesis of Dionysius of Alexandria, dateable between 130 and 18, is not, as sometimes suggested, timeless, but very alert to the impact of Rome on peoples it has incorporated into its empire, and displays pride in the Hellenic culture that has spread even beyond that empire’s frontiers.

This chapter, necessarily making much use of Barber 1989, explores Western European illustrated editions of Longus, Daphnis and Chloe between 1626 (Crispin de Passe the Younger) and 2014 (Karl Lagerfeld’s Moderne Mythologie), picking out for closer analysis in a table nine printed between 1890 (Raphaël Collin and Eugène-André Champollion) and 1961 (Marc Chagall), editions which are witnesses to the European taste of the last decade of the nineteenth century and the first six decades of the twentieth. That table registers the different scenes in Longus chosen by different illustrators, which might have been expected to cluster around a few favourites: but alongside some favourites (Daphnis and Lycaenion, Chloe bathing Daphnis and herself, the couple’s wedding night) there are, as it reveals, many chosen by only two artists, some by only one. Other phenomena that emerged from its analysis are that Paris was the pre-eminent location for the production of illustrated editions, and that, unlike Crispin de Passe the Younger in 1626, later artists chose subjects bearing upon the couple’s growing understanding of ἔρως, ‘desire’, much more than ones depicting their few adventures.

At the end of our journey through the simile worlds of five poems, what have we learned about the simile world of epic poetry more broadly? Which characters and situations can be found in each poem? How do the pain, love, hunger, fear, cold, danger, and so forth experienced by those characters differ across poems, and how do they stay the same? How do similes immerse us in those feelings and experiences? The shape of the simile world resembles that of the mythological tales that form the basis of most epic stories, in that both are defined by the tension between a stable core common to every telling and the details that individual narrators change, omit, or create to tell their own unique version of the tale. To a great extent, the narrative in a traditional medium like epic or about a traditional story like the Trojan War is created by these tensions. And similes, a key feature of the epic genre, are framed by expressions that identify sameness and difference as an explicit focus of our attention.

A dreary overstuffed catalogue of bygone orators or a magnificent intellectual achievement? A swan song for public speech or an apology for the art of eloquence? A timid retreat into academic leisure or a brazen challenge to civil war and Caesar? Despite the divergent viewpoints of these questions, it is hard to come away from Cicero’s Brutus without seeing merit in each of them. There is some of almost everything in Cicero’s stunning dialogue, and for that reason its seeming hodgepodge of intellectual curiosity, political statement, and documentary diligence has spurred modern observers to widely differing interpretations.