The Greek Novel

THIS PAPER PRESENTS SOME SUGGESTIONS for the general interpretation, in broad terms, of the Greek novel, and outlines the use made of the form by different writers; it may be regarded as a gloss on Ben Edwin Perry's important recent book The Ancient Romances: A Literary-historical Account of their Origins (Berkeley 1967).' For one finds little discussion of the novel in general, and of that little some is distinctly misdirected: I refer to K. Ker6nyi's forty-year-old theory of the religious origin of the novels as Mysterientexte, a theory recently revived by R. Merkelbach.2 Though misdirected, however, the theory is not lacking in insight, and we shall return to it in due course. Perry himself, concerned as he is principally with origins, has not a great deal to say about the novel in its developed form. Discussions of individual novels are rather more common; but they are not always related to a general framework in the history of literature and ideas. Thus a comprehensive consideration of the novel may not be out of place.3 The great theme of Perry's book is the importance of the cultural factor in the genesis of the novel, a factor notably obscured by the standard work on the subject, Rohde's Der griechische Roman,4 with its Aristotelean biological explanation, to use Perry's terms, of the apparently blind development of literary forms. One should surely look to the broad conditions of society for the essential explanation of any artistic product, and, for the precise shape it takes, to the deliberate intention of the author. Yet as far as the Greek novel is concerned scholars have not commonly done so.5