ABSTRACT
The first question to be considered in any discussion of the ancient novel in its historical and literary context is naturally that of its origins, the genre being something of an anomaly within the gamut of classical Greek and Latin literature. It was therefore only right and proper that Erwin Rohde, whose large-scale monograph Der griechische Roman und seine Vorläufer sparked off modern research into this subject some 120 years ago now, should concentrate principally on the problem of the novel’s genesis. Unfortunately, scholars working on the genre tended to dwell thenceforth on this one aspect so that, until the 1960s at least, findings were limited in the main to theories on possible forerunners. Rohde cannot be entirely exempted from the blame for this. His methods were, it is true, quite typical for the age of historicism-with its focus not on the literary works in question, but on the sources to be revealed behind them. However, in the case of the novel there was one further reason for such neglect of the actual texts at the centre of the quest for forerunners: in the eyes of late nineteenth-century classical scholars ancient narrative prose had next to no aesthetic value as literature. It was this one-sided way of thinking, not the soon obsolescent historicist approach, that continued to dominate studies on the genre until some twenty-five years ago.
