ABSTRACT
The romance, the last new genre produced by classical antiquity, has had a bad press. Macaulay’s dismissal was absolute: on his copy of one of the five surviving Greek romances he wrote ‘Detestable trash’, and on another ‘A most stupid, worthless performance’. A modem critic, after the more moderate observation that ‘the demerits of the Greek romances are clear’, sums it up as follows: ‘Cardboard lovers, buffeted by Fate, drift on a stream of sentimental rhetoric , . . through predictable perils, to a predictable happy ending. The categories are those of the B-feature Western: the fag end of epic.’1 The full-scale, straight faced versions of romance are all Greek: in Latin literature it has left its trace only in the parodies by Petronius and Apuleius,2 and in occasional disdainful references by Roman litterati. Literary theorists such as Horace and Quintilian do not so much as mention it; and there is no generic name for it in either Latin or Greek, despite its instantly recognisable, stereotyped plot.
