divine, queen of all that are in hell, the principal of them that dwell in heaven, manifested above and under one form of all the gods and goddesses.”[374] The whole story of Apuleius pictures, according to Riefstahl, the striving of the individual towards the All. The cosmic Eros has taken the place of the ancient Greek Eros, who was a terrible power, often identified with the blind, cruel Τύχη. To this cosmic Eros Apuleius has given the name of Isis.[375] Riefstahl to be sure pushes too far his theory of an underlying philosophical content in Apuleius, representing the romance “as an artistic unit ... and as an issue of the writer’s intellectual interests and personality,” “ein künstlerisch gestaltetes Anschauungsbild der existenziellen Lebensgrundlage des Neuplatonismus.”[376] Yet he does point out astutely the fundamental difference in Apuleius which makes his _Metamorphoses_ another distinct type of romance, the subjective philosophical. A word now in retrospect. By the end of the second century A.D., this new genre of literature, the romance, had developed to full stature. Already besides the author of the Ninus romance, Chariton, Lucian and Apuleius had written their stories, and perhaps also Xenophon of Ephesus. The different types of romance were already established: the historical romance, the love romance with its secondary interests of adventure and religion, satirical romance, the subjective philosophical romance. The pastoral was soon to be added. That is, in the second century of our era, a new type of literature was created, a type which was to be the most popular in the modern world.[377] It is strange to find that so distinguished and perceptive an historian as Rostovtzeff in his histories of Rome does not recognize the significance for the early empire of this new literary form. In describing the second century, he writes:[378] “Except for the troubled reign of Marcus Aurelius, the Roman Empire under the Antonines enjoyed profound peace, broken only by distant wars on the frontier. Within the empire life appeared to be, as it had been in the first century, a steady forward movement for the diffusion and enrichment of civilization. The creative power of Rome seemed to have reached its zenith. There was, however, one disquieting symptom: after the brilliant age of the Flavians we note an almost complete sterility in literature and art. After Tacitus, and after the artists who worked for Trajan ... the decades that followed failed to produce a single great writer or a single notable monument of art....