This talk looks at the corpus of Greek texts from antiquity known as the ancient novels, and explores what they can tell us about how ancient readers read fiction. In the modern world, novels are a familiar form of fiction, but should we import these assumptions onto the ancient world? In a world so full of mythological stories and epic heroics, were the love-stories and adventure narratives of the ancient novel seen as just another kind of fiction, or as something more innovative? While the term ‘novel’ implies a continuity between ancient and modern prose fictions, a closer look at the history of the term, the ancient texts themselves, and the evidence for their reception in Late Antiquity and beyond invites us to rethink our assumptions. By exploring the wider issues connected to the ancient novels as both scholarly construct and ancient genre, this talk aims to offer a more nuanced understanding of how ancient readers understood fiction, and to bring out just how relevant these ancient texts are for a modern audience.
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