ABSTRACT

Those who write about the ancient novel make assumptions, often implic­ it and often unconscious, about its intended audience and its relationship to those texts perceived to belong to the ancient high culture. From these assumptions they frequently draw conclusions about the novel’s origins, its cultural impact, and its ultimate significance as a literary artifact. An­ swers to the question “Who read ancient novels?” have tended to take a common form. Novel readers are somehow perceived to have been quali­ tatively different from the readers of other ancient books: they have been identified as the newly literate, a bourgeois class that supposedly flour­ ished in the imperial period in the eastern Mediterranean, or they have been viewed as the sort o f readers who reflect characters within the novels themselves, women or young men approaching adulthood.1 Indeed, Tomas Hagg combines these categorizing models and adds a third, those in need o f religion, when he describes the novel audience as “rootless, at a loss, restlessly searching-the people who needed and welcomed the nov­ el are the same as those who were attracted by mystery religions and Christianity: the people o f Alexandria and other big cities around the eastern Mediterranean. But a prerequisite for the genesis and flourishing of this genre, here as in eighteenth-century England, was o f course an in­ creased level o f literacy in the population . . . The population outside the big cities, the women, people looking for romanticism and idealism-all now had the opportunity to have their wishes fulfilled.”2