2. The Genre: Novels Proper and the Fringe

The far greater part of antiquity's audience for prose fiction readers all over the Greek world who found food for their dreams in exciting accounts of what seemed to be historical events quite certainly remained unaware of the literary ties between Callirhoe, the Life of Aesop and the Letters of Chion. In the final count, then, the only texts that we can properly class as novels are those which the majority of ancient readers will have understood as fiction in the sense of the theoretical definition diegema plasmatikon or argumentum . Thus the term can only be applied to the group of narratives which, on the basis of Macrobius' remarks, can be considered homogeneous. The other texts must remain "fringe novels", even if the boundaries between these and the "novels proper" cannot be as clearly marked as some scholars demand. Keywords: fringe novels; Letters of Chion; Life of Aesop