ABSTRACT
Five extant works of literary fiction, unnamed in generic terms in their own time and relatively neglected by mainstream scholarship until quite recently, have now come to be regarded as a corpus in their own right amongst a wide variety of Greek prose fiction flourishing during the first few centuries AD. The prose creations attributed to Chariton, Xenophon of Ephesos, Achilles Tatius, Longus and Heliodoros which revolve around fantasies of love and marriage are now known variously as ‘the early novel’, ‘the ideal novel’, ‘the typical novel’, ‘the romance’, ‘the romance novel’ or ‘the novel of love and adventure’ to distinguish them as a coherent group from other contemporary fictional works such as fantastic travel tales, romanticised biography, the acts of Christian apostles — to name the most obvious.
