Aethiopica (200-400 AD) by Heliodorus

Book Review
Aethiopica (200-400 AD)
by Heliodorus
Aethiopica (Wikipedia)

   Like many disciplines in the humanities, literature has gone through decades of "revisionism" led by scholars of the "isms," socialism, feminism, post-modernism.  Inevitably, this process would grow to include the narrative of the creation of the novel itself, since academic categorizing is a favorite target of all groups seeking to amend the status quo. The traditional explanation for the "creation" of the novel is that it happened in the 18th century, in England, and that it was preceded by several influencing traditions, notably the continental tradition of the "Romance," and the popular press of 16th and 17th century England.   The revisionist approach moves the horizon back thousands of years and across continents, making the case that the novel is a global phenomenon that includes important contributions from the near east and an entirely separate tradition in East Asia. 

  To me, this argument misses the point of the underlying argument locating the creation of the novel in 18th century England because, in my mind, it is a combination of writer and audience, and the AUDIENCE for novels could not exist in any serious way before the creation of the printing press and the impact that invention had on the availability and popularity of printed literature.  It's possible to read a book like Aethiopica and imagine an ancient audience, but when it comes to, how exactly, the books were created and disseminated it gets a little dodgy.  What was the literacy rate in a pre-printing press society, and how were books made to reach a mass audience?  Even a cursory  consideration of these factors would seem to indicate against the idea that the novel "existed" in Ancient Rome.

  Like almost all examples of ancient novel-like prose fiction, the story of Aethiopica involves a variation on the boy meets girl, girls is kidnapped by bandits or pirates, boy finds girl.   The expansion of Aethiopica into the political power politics of the ancient near east is noteworthy, especially since Greeks themselves feature onl peripherally, with the major contest being between rogue Egyptian bandits, an Ethiopian polity and the Persian Empire.    Written firmly in the Roman era, Aethiopica harkens back to time before Rome, and in that sens it is a historical novel.