ABSTRACT
It has recently been suggested that ancient women wrote novels, but there is no evidence for this and the arguments, which are based on the prominent role women played in ancient novels and the sympathetic description of their lives, are not convincing. Though it is, of course, possible (but hard to prove) that some novels, unknown to us now, were written by women, it seems highly unlikely that the names of some of the authors of ancient novels that have been preserved conceal female writers. Moreover, since most ancient novels are Greek, and probably stemmed from the Greek cities of the eastern Mediterranean, the question of a
possible female (pseudonymous) authorship falls outside the geographical scope of this study.2
