When rhetorical prose superseded composition in verse, the greater facility of style naturally led to more detailed narratives, and the sophist who would have been a poet in the time of Callimachus, became a writer of prose romances in the final period of Greek literature. The first ascertained beginning of this style of light reading, which occupies so large a space in the catalogues of modern libraries, was in the time of the Emperor Trajan, when a Syrian or Babylonian freedman, named Iamblichus, published a love story called the "Babylonian Adventures." Among his successors is Longus, of whose work, "The Lesbian Adventure," it is sufficient to say, that it was the model of the "Diana" of Montemayor, the "Aminta" of Tasso, the "Pastor Fido" of Guarini, and the "Gentle Shepherd" of Allan Ramsay. While the sophists were amusing themselves by clothing erotic and bucolic subjects in rhetorical prose, an Egyptian boldly revived the epos which had been cultivated at Alexandria in the earliest days of the Museum. Nonnus probably flourished at the commencement of the fifth century A.D. His epic poem, which, in accordance with the terminology of the age, is called "Dionysian Adventures," is an enormous farrago of learning on the well-worked subject of Bacchus. The most interesting of the epic productions of the school of Nonnus is the story of "Hero and Leander," in 340 verses, which bears the name of Musaeus. For grace of diction, metrical elegance, and simple pathos, this little canto stands far before the other poems of the same age. The Hero and Leander of Musaeus is the dying swan-note of Greek poetry, the last distinct note of the old music of Hellas. In the Byzantine literature, there are works which claim no originality, but have a higher value than their contemporaries, because they give extracts or fragments of the lost writings of the best days of Greece. Next in value follow the lexicographers, the grammarians, and commentators. The most voluminous department, however, of Byzantine literature, was that of the historians, annalists, chroniclers, biographers, and antiquarians, whose works form a continuous series of Byzantine annals from the time of Constantine the Great to the taking of the capital by the Turks. This literature was also enlivened by several poets, and enriched by some writers on natural history and medicine.