ABSTRACT
The new links with earlier romantic literature allow to see the sexual codes of the lovers in a new light. It is illuminating to look at Greek and Sumerian versions of a conversation between a pregnant heroine and the new lover who will legitimise her fatherless child. The sexual standards in the Greek novels seem clear and simple: chastity for the girl, a rather more relaxed ideal for her partner. Longus' technique is completely different and equally characteristic. Daphnis is simply given a cock-and-bull story by his sexual instructress Lycaenion to tell Chloe. The novelists present a wide spectrum of alternative sexual behaviour, and once more a corresponding variation in its presentation and literary use. It is in Petronius, in a Roman environment, that matters are at least differently nuanced: people find Eumolpus commenting on his own hypocrisy towards the parents of a pupil he is privately scheming to seduce.
