The Romance of Reception

This paper examines how the question of whether Eastern literature influenced the Greek novel has shaped the way scholars interpret the papyrus fragments of Greek prose fiction. When Erwin Rhode raised this question about the fully extant Greek novels in 1876, the stakes were the Hellenic “purity” of the genre and its value as a representative of Greek literature. As Whitmarsh (2011) has shown, Rohde’s answers were bound up in an orientalist perspective typical of the end of the nineteenth century.

This paper considers the reception of the Greek novels in seventeenth century France. I argue that a fervent wave of early modern fictional responses to the genre can illuminate new approaches to Heliodorus’s Aethiopica and new connections between it and the development of the novel in Western Europe.

Although recent work has begun to alter our perception of the late-antique and Byzantine reception of the imperial Greek novels, one holdover from the previous two centuries of scholarship is an enduring idea that early and Medieval Christian readers would have found the content of non-Christian prose fiction scandalous.

In the history of scholarship on Imperial Greece, Erwin Rohde’s 1876 Der griechische Roman is considered groundbreaking for two primary reasons: not only was it the first comprehensive scholarly treatment of the ancient Greek novel, but it also provided the first extensive account of the ‘Second Sophistic’, seen as the backdrop against which the novels should be understood.