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.

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.