This collection of essays derives from a 2009 conference at Rethymnon, Crete. The essays are all of high quality and the production is excellent. Although the topic is interpreted broadly, there are a number of connections among the essays.

D. Selden, ‘The Political Economy of Romance in Late Period Egypt’, presents a dazzling account of romance as it functions for Egyptians to articulate their position on the periphery of the great Mediterranean empires that ruled it almost continuously from the Achaemenids to the Caliphate. As in his previous innovative work on ‘text-networks’, Selden takes the question of genre to a completely new level, this time by looking at how Egyptians used romance to think through their position in history. He looks at different versions of the basic romance plot, each interpreted as a different kind of response to a particular situation, but cast in the language and action of its predecessors. These range from the Life of Ahiqar, an Aramaic text from c. 600 b.c.e., although itself a good example of a widely dispersed text network; the Brentesh Stele, dated to the late-fourth century b.c.e., which unlike Ahiqar is firmly rooted in a particular place and is thus more parochial in its aspirations for circulation; and the Coptic Cambyses Romance c. 600 c.e., which looks back to apocalyptic writings of the pre-Roman period and connects them with Jewish and Christian traditions of sacred history. Despite their differences, all are energetic responses by Egyptians to their own ‘decentred’ position. This is in contrast to the Hellenising Chariton, for example, where Egyptian readers would find themselves reduced to a mere literary trope. The more ‘classic’ novels often come across in criticism as clever at best, but Selden sees the genre as a cultural resource for a more broadly conceived social practice, an approach I find very promising.

Brigands are an excellent focus for thinking about the real and the ideal in the novels, because of their status as coherent communities that lie outside the rule of law. K. Dowden, ‘“But there is a difference in the ends …”: Brigands and Teleology in the Ancient Novel’, surveys the extensive literature on the subject of real and imagined brigands, and the various uses to which brigands are put in the novels, noting that these are multivalent and sometimes strike to the core issues of the genre. Dowden is one of the few scholars who still suggests a ‘deeper’ meaning for these novels from their resonance in the religio-philosophical imaginaire.

F. Zeitlin, ‘Landscapes and Portraits: Signs of the Uncanny and Illusions of the Real’, is interested in how descriptions of landscapes and painted scenes activate the dialectic between real and ideal, nature and art, fact and fiction – all central issues in the novels. Of particular interest is how such descriptions ‘break the frame’ and model the interpenetration of the two realms, producing an uncanny effect that is correlated with the fourth style of Roman wall painting. Zeitlin explores these issues in the series of gardens at the beginning of Leucippe and in the astonishing case of the painting of Andromeda ‘generating’ Charicleia.

The generative dimension of mimesis is also taken up by T. Whitmarsh, ‘The Erotics of Mimesis: Gendered Aesthetics in Greek Theory and Fiction’, who provides a more nuanced account of the role of the ‘feminine’ in the aesthetics of the novel. Besides the objectification of the female body by the androcentric ‘male gaze’, the novels also suggest that women are the source for the creative power of the genre, since art is a kind of ‘birthing’. Passages from Dionysius of Halicarnassus that subtly sexualise the process of creation and imitation connect well with the aesthetics of the novel, and may have provided Heliodorus with the scenario of the engendering painting of Andromeda that is at the heart of the Aithiopica.

Mimesis is also important in E. Bowie's ‘Caging Grasshoppers: Longus’ Materials for Weaving “Reality”'. Bowie argues that the status of Longus' fiction is unlike that of the other four Greek novels, because Longus' world is itself patently created out of the material of other fictional texts: especially lyric and pastoral. The contrast is also indicated by Longus' explicit allusions to Thucydides.

J. König, ‘Landscape and Reality in Apuleius’ Metamorphoses', argues there is a contrast in the landscape descriptions in Books 1–10 of the Metamorphoses, on the one hand, and Book 11, on the other, the former registering the erroneous path of Lucius' katabasis before his illumination. In particular, the wooden model of Mt Ida, which is described in 10.30 as the setting of the elaborate pantomime described by Lucius and then disappears into the earth in Book 10.34, marks the moment when the ‘theatricality’ of the novel is swept away in anticipation of the true and sanctified landscape (or rather seascape) of Book 11.

A number of essays suggest various kinds of explicit or implicit models for behaviour, such as G. Rosati's survey, ‘The Loves of the Gods: Literature as Construction of a Space of Pleasure’, of examples of where erotic activity is represented as a model for the reader/viewer, suggesting that the novel provides a space for erotic fantasy aimed at those whose reality is more limited in scope. F. Letoublon, ‘Mythological Paradigms in the Greek Novels’, discusses the story of Pan in Longus and Achilles Tatius. Pan's own transformation, she suggests, is a model for the development of the novels' characters. S. Montiglio, ‘“His eyes stood as though of horn or steel”: Odysseus’ Fortitude and Moral Ideals in the Greek Novels', wonders whether the figure of Odysseus, interpreted in the imperial period as the ideal of self-control, is a moral model for novel heroes. The ideal is indeed frequently held up by explicit allusions, but also humanised. Equally important to self-control is the capacity of novel heroes for displays of emotionality. The pirate Theron, who is the most Odyssean character in Chariton, is a stark contrast to Chaereas and other novel heroes, whose self-restraint makes room for the force of emotion. M. Doody, ‘Comedy in Heliodoros’ Aithiopika', surveys comic riffs in Heliodorus, but ignores D. Elmer's key 2008 TAPA article on the intertextuality of that novel.

Paschalis, ‘The Basic Plot of Callirhoe: History, Myth, and Aristotelian Poetics’, revisits the question of historical and epic sources for the plot of Callirhoe, beginning with the Aristotelian distinction between basic plot and secondary episodes. The comparisons between Helen and Callirhoe are in the latter category and do not undermine the novel's claim to being ‘ideal’. A novel suggestion is that the key driver of the basic plot, the anger of Chaereas, may have been the epic ‘anger’ of Achilles. However, the new comedy allusions in that episode seem to gravitate against this idea.

M. Labate, ‘Tarde, immo iam sero intellexi: the Real as a Puzzle in Petronius’ Satyrica', notes that a repeated scenario of the Satyrica is for the characters to fall into a trap from which escape is possible only by fleeing, suggesting that ‘Three Men on the Run’ might be a suitable title for the narrative dynamic of the novel. Encolpius' lack of cultural competence is repeatedly stressed in the novel as the root of his perpetual bewilderment.

R.H.F. Carver, ‘Between Photis and Isis: Fiction, Reality, and the Ideal in The Golden Ass of Apuleius’, gives a detailed reading of thematic connections in the Metamorphoses between Photis, the matrona of Book 10, and Isis herself, arguing that these associations draw the two human figures closer to Isis, not as antitheses, but as figures playing a similar mediating role in the transformations of Lucius. The argument puts forward an important assertion about the novel's meaning: Lucius' religious experience remains incomplete because it is not processed philosophically, a point of view for which Carver gives ample evidence from Plutarch and Apuleius' own Platonic writings. The illumination of the role of Photis in the story and the ‘noisy silence’ about her at the end I found quite compelling.