ABSTRACT
It seems likely, however, that many Romans and Greco-Romans, instead of adopting Manichaeanism or Christianity, preferred to read novels or romances. Whether this applied chiefly to women, as has been asserted, we do not know, but feel inclined to doubt: surely men read novels too, as they do today. And indeed, political and military goings-on were so depressing and wearisome that many people belonging to what might be described as the intelligentsia turned not only to religion but to the novel. In particular, in the later third century, they read Heliodorus, who was the last of the great novelists: they read his Aethiopica.
