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No issue in scholarship on the ancient novel has been discussed as hotly as the origin of the Greek love novel, also known as the ‘ideal’ novel. The present book proposes a new solution to this old problem. It argues that the genre had a personal inventor, Chariton of Aphrodisias, and that he wrote the first love novel, Narratives about Callirhoe, in the mid‐first century AD. This conclusion is drawn on the basis of two converging lines of argument, one from literary history, another from Chariton's poetics. A revisitation of the literary‐historical background provides the basis for further analysis: among other things, it considers Chariton's milieu at Aphrodisias (especially the local cult of Aphrodite), the dating of other early novels, and Chariton's potential authorship of the fragmentarily preserved novels Metiochus and Parthenope and Chione. Chariton's status as the inventor of the Greek love novel, suggested by the literary‐historical evidence, finds further support in his poetics. I argue that Narratives about Callirhoe is characterized by an unusual effort of self‐definition, which can be best explained as a consequence of coming to terms with a new form of writing. The book is rounded off by a study of the motif of Rumour in Chariton and its derivation from a surprising model, Virgil's Aeneid. This part also makes a significant contribution to the reception of Latin literature in the Greek world.

Despite the resurgence of interest in representations of character in literary studies generally and Classical studies in particular, and despite the goldrush towards ancient fiction in the last two decades, no volume has yet been devoted to exploring character and characterization in ancient Greek novels. This award-winning study analyses the characterization of the protagonists in the five extant, so-called ‘ideal’ Greek novels (i.e. those of Chariton, Xenophon of Ephesus, Achilles Tatius, Longus, and Heliodorus). The book offers close readings of techniques of characterization in each novel individually and thereby combines modern (mainly, but not exclusively, structuralist) narratology and ancient rhetoric, the latter of which was the predominant literary theory in the heydays of the Greek novels. The book argues that three conceptual couples central to ancient theory of character—typification/individuation, idealistic/realistic characterization, and static/dynamic character—construct character in these narratives more ambiguously, more elusively and in more complex ways than has been realized so far. The book explores to what extent and how the novelists construct individuating characteristics for their characters alongside typification; it also suggests that ‘ideal’ is probably not the most felicitous label to refer to these novels, as the abilities of their protagonists to acquire and develop rhetorical control over others thematizes psychologically realistic issues rather than idealistic ones; and it challenges the widely-held view of static character in these novels by tracing character development in a number of protagonists. It also makes clear how intimately presentations of character are intertwined with self-portrayal and performance of the self.