HELLENISTIC ROMANCE

adventure tale, usually with a quasi-historical setting, in which a virtuous heroine and her valiant lover are separated by innumerable obstacles of human wickedness and natural catastrophe but are finally reunited. A precursor of the modern novel, the Hellenistic romance is the source for classic love stories, such as those of Hero and Leander, Pyramus and Thisbe, Sappho and Phaon, and Daphnis and Chlo. Introduced in the 1st century BC, the form reached its height in the 2nd and 3rd centuries AD in the works of writers such as Chariton, Xenophon, Longus, and Heliodorus. It combined elements of the imaginative rhetorical exercise, popular Alexandrian poems and tales of love and adventure, the erotic Milesian adventure tale, Utopian stories, and travel narratives. An example of the Hellenistic romance is Chariton's Chaereas and Callirhoe (2nd century), a tale of lovers who marry and quarrel but are finally reunited.