Who Read Ancient Novels?

Those who write about the ancient novel make assumptions, often implicit 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. Answers to the question “Who read ancient novels?” have tended to take a common form. Novel readers are somehow perceived to have been qualitatively different from the readers of other ancient books: they have been identified as the newly literate, a bourgeois class that supposedly flourished in the imperial period in the eastern Mediterranean, or they have been viewed as the sort of readers who reflect characters within the novels themselves, women or young men approaching adulthood. ¹ Indeed, Tomas Hägg combines these categorizing models and adds a third, those in need of religion, when he describes the novel audience as “rootless, at a loss, restlessly searching—the people who needed and welcomed the novel are the same as those who were attracted by mystery religions and Christianity: the people of 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 of course an increased level of 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