Essays on the Greek RomancesHaight, Elizabeth Hazelton
History
Essays on the Greek Romances
Haight, Elizabeth Hazelton
Apuleius. Metamorphoses; Greek fiction -- History and criticism
Rattenbury goes on to illustrate his theory of the change from the
semi-historical to the purely fictitious romance by a study of the
Alexander Romance and the new fragments of other stories. The
pseudo-Callisthenes Alexander Romance in the oldest version extant is
dated about A.D. 300. But papyrus fragments indicate that a large part
of the material in it goes back to a time shortly after Alexander’s
death. From the evidence of our late pseudo-Callisthenes version which
probably followed tradition it would seem that history was treated as
fiction and little attention paid to the love-story of Roxane which
could have furnished such a lively erotic interest. New fragments of
other romances show other great rulers used as heroes.[23] One is the
Egyptian prince, Sesonchosis, called by the Greeks Sesostris.
Mythological characters too become protagonists in romances: Achilles
and Polyxena; the Egyptian Tefnut, daughter of Phre, the sun-god, who
took her adventures in the shape of a cat wandering in the desert of
Ethiopia. Other fragments run true to the general type of the Greek
Romances in manifesting now this, now that characteristic.
The sum total of all the fragments discovered up to date gives
convincing evidence of two important facts: first, the extant Greek
Romances are only a small part of the output of this genre; second, the
dating of all the fragments places them between the end of the first and
the beginning of the fourth century of our era. The Ninus Romance is the
earliest fragment, Chariton’s the earliest complete romance, that of
Achilles Tatius the latest. On this framework a chronological list of
the extant novels arranged on the basis of proved data and the
probabilities of internal evidence and comparisons, shapes like this:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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