Chariton of Aphrodisias and the Invention of the Greek Love Novel

The best known variety of the ancient novel – sometimes identified with the ancient novel tout court – is the Greek love novel. The question of its origins has intrigued scholars for centuries and has been the focus of a great deal of research. Stefan Tilg proposes a new solution to this ancient puzzle by arguing for a personal inventor of the genre, Chariton of Aphrodisias, who wrote the first Greek (and, with that, the first European) love novel, Narratives about Callirhoe, in the mid-first century AD. Tilg’s conclusion is drawn on the basis of two converging lines of argument, one from literary history, another from Chariton’s poetics, and will shed fresh light upon the reception of Latin literature in the Greek world.