The subjects listed in these lines are typical of nearly all the novels. An author selected new names for his hero and heroine and portrayed the same quest for love and adventure. The young pair always marvellously handsome fall desperately in love and plight their eternal fidelity in a sacred oath. Soon they are separated by misadventure or the cruel will of Fortune and suffer alone every misfortune and temptation, but by superhuman effort and often by the aid of the gods, they at last emerge triumphant and chaste and fall in exultation into each other’s arms. It was just because of this similarity of pattern that it became the fashion for critics to belittle these melodramas, to emphasize their similarities, and to disregard their individual characteristics and enthralling style. Erwin Rohde’s great critical study, _Der griechische Roman_, was perhaps the first to treat them with the serious consideration which they deserve. Now Rohde’s theories have to be in large part rejected because of new discoveries in papyri which have necessitated the re-dating of the extant novels and adding to their study fragments of novels hitherto unknown which help establish new types and give a basis for a new critique. My own discussion is to be concerned with the novels themselves, their individual characteristics, their literary qualities, viewed on the basis of their new dating. For this reason I shall spend little time on the famous theories of the origins of the Greek Romances and on their precursors. For my purpose of intensive, literary study it is enough to present these in outline. In regard to the origins of the Greek Romances, two special theories must be mentioned since they have had more vogue than any others. These are the theories of Erwin Rohde and of Bruno Lavagnini. Erwin Rohde in _Der griechische Roman_, which first appeared in 1876, recognized two essential elements in the Greek Romances: stories of love and stories of travel. He studied the precursors of these two types. He finally affirmed that the synthesis of the two, the romance, is a direct product of the rhetorical schools of the Second Sophistry which flourished in Greece during the Empire. Rohde based his work on the extant romances and the summaries of Photius (Patriarch of Constantinople, 858-886) and believing that none of this material antedated the second century of our era, he constructed his theory that “Greek romance was a product of the _Zweite Sophistik_, and had no direct connection either with the short story as represented by the Milesian Tales or with any Greek or Alexandrian literary form.”[3] W. Schmid in the third edition of Rohde (1914) summarized in an Appendix the new discoveries and theories after Rohde’s death.