Abstract
This essay looks at the history of the novel, starting from the influential postwar critical insistence on the importance of the novel as a nineteenth-century genre. It notes that this tradition singularly fails to take account of the history of the novel in antiquity–for clear ideological reasons. It then explores the degree to which the texts known as the novel from antiquity, such as Longus’s
Daphnis and Chloe, Petronius’s
Satyricon, or Heliodorus’s
Aethiopica, constitute a genre. Although there is a great deal of porousness between different forms of prose in antiquity, the essay concludes by exploring why the ancient novel, ignored by critics for so long, has now become such a hot topic. It argues that much as the postwar critics could not fit the ancient novel into their histories, now the ancient novel’s interests in sophisticated erotics, narrative flair, and cultural hybridity seem all too timely.
origin of the word Python!
Ovid, Hyginus, Robert Graves, Erwin Rohde, and Karl Kerenyi have all written extensively about the creature and the myths associated with him, but the earliest known mention of the dragon-like beast Python is in the
According to the story, a serpentine monster named Python was terrorizing all of Greece, in pursuit of Leto, a lesser goddess of the dark night sky. Python was a hideous creature whose body was so vast that it could flatten entire acres of cities and fields. Its bite, breath, and presence were poisonous, radiating an evil miasma into the areas around it. The reason for its violence was that Hera was wrathful toward Leto for laying with Zeus, and Hera dictated that Leto would not be allowed to give birth to her twins (Artemis and Apollo) anywhere that the sun shines. Python pursued everywhere that Leto fled, and many smaller islands actually swam away from Leto s efforts to escape to them: the islands both feared the monster s carnage and