In prose, there are full-grown novelettes combining love and adventure embedded in the Greek historians: Herodotus’ story of Candaules’ wife,[9] the story of Rhampsinitus’ treasure,[10] the story of the love of Xerxes,[11] the story of Abradatas of Susa and Panthea in Xenophon’s _Education of Cyrus_ which Whibley calls “the first love-story in European prose.”[12] Short stories or novelle in prose are known from the accounts of the Milesian Tales and from Parthenius’ miniature _Love Romances_. The Μιλησιακά were written in the second century B.C., by Aristides of Miletus and a collection of them was translated into Latin by Cornelius Sisenna who died 57 B.C. Their character was definite: they were erotic stories of a lascivious type. Their philosophy of life was that all men—and women—are sinners, and this belief was embodied in episodes from every-day life. Their amorality was such that the Parthian Surena was horrified when in the Parthian War of 53 B.C., a copy of the Milesian Tales was found in the pack of a Roman officer. Other short local tales, for example those of Sybaris and of Ephesus, shared these characteristics of realism, irony and disillusion. Parthenius of Nicaea wrote a collection of short _Love Romances_ of a very different type. This Greek elegiac poet of the Augustan Age wrote his _Love Romances_ in Greek prose as a storehouse for his friend, Cornelius Gallus, to draw upon for material for epic or elegiac verse; and for this reason he put them forth in the briefest and simplest form possible. Most of them are unfamiliar stories even when they are about well-known mythological characters. In many the love tales are set against a background of war. Short as they are, both their subject matter and style are significant for the development of Greek prose fiction. Moreover, the work of the rhetorical schools must be considered among the forerunners of the novel, both in Greek and Latin. Although we know now that the Greek Romances were being written before the time of the New or Second Sophistry which Rohde postulated to be their origin, still in the Greek Romances as well as in the _Satyricon_ and in Apuleius’ _Metamorphoses_, there are many illustrations of the influence of the practice cases of the rhetorical schools. A study of the _Controversiae_ in Seneca the Elder and in the pseudo-Quintilian, a study of _The Lives of the Sophists_ by Philostratus demonstrates that in these school exercises where “oratory became a theatrical fiction”[13] lay many first drafts of a new literary genre, the romance.[14]