SOURCE: "The Origin of the Realistic Romance among the Romans," Classical Philology, Vol. VI, No. 3, July, 1911, pp. 257-70.

In the following excerpt, Abbott searches in other genres—including the epic, the serious heroic romance, the mime, and the prologue of comedy-for elements that could have influenced Petronius's composition of the first known realistic romance.

One of the most fascinating and tantalizing problems of literary history concerns the origin of prose fiction among the Romans. We can trace the growth of the epic from its infancy in the third century before Christ as it develops in strength in the poems of Naevius, Ennius, and Cicero until it reaches its full stature in the Aeneid, and then we can see the decline of its vigor in the Pharsalia, the Punica, the Thebais, and Achilleis, until it practically dies a natural death in the mythological and historical poems of Claudian. The...