ABSTRACT

Of all the television serials and dramas designed solely to entertain-some commanding an audience as large as the readership of pennydreadfuls or romantic novelettes-perhaps the most spectacular in terms of ratings over the past twenty to thirty years have been those ‘soaps’ which serialize the vicissitudes in the lives of the fabulously wealthy. In the 1980s, for example, viewers all over the world followed avidly the loves, lies and woes of American oil magnates and millionaires: regular episodes full of romance, unscrupulousness, intrigues, legal battles, dangerous journeys, devastating illness, near death, families being reunited with relatives whom they had believed dead or of whose existence they had been completely unaware, and the obligatory happy ending for each calamity, though with the next disasters coming thick and fast. The greater part of the viewing public that consumes this type of entertainment is probably unaware that the literature of ancient Greece, which is generally thought of as high-brow in content and edifying rather than entertaining, could offer readers something in many respects remarkably similar: a goodly selection of fictional prose narratives. Some of these are fully extant or survive in fragments, others are now entirely lost. Their beginnings as a genre probably lie in the late Hellenistic period, and they came into their prime in the first and second centuries AD.