ABSTRACT
What was the significance of the regular degradation of the elite protagonists in the Greek novels? The method through which this question is addressed uses a conceptual framework indicated by (1) Orlando Patterson’s concept of slavery as a form of social death, that is, the slave-owners’ attempt to define the slave as a person without honor, and (2) James Scott’s analysis of how dominated people resist domination by creating their own version of power relations, the hidden transcript, an intellectual basis for other forms of resistance. The Introduction reviews the elite’s degrading construction of the slave in detail and notes literary forms such as the fable and Plautine comedy in which servile hidden transcripts could have been insinuated into public discourse. Authors such as Xenophon and Chariton may have used the novel as another genre through which hidden transcripts were made public.
