say "Fiction" (for it is neither more nor less), was regarded as not
merely the inseparable but the constituent property of poetry, even
though those who held this were doubtful whether poetry must necessarily
be in verse. It is another fact of the greatest importance that the
ancients who, in other forms than deliberate prose fiction, try to "tell
a story," do not seem to know very well how to do it.

The _Odyssey_ is, indeed, one of the greatest of all stories, it is the
original romance of the West; but the _Iliad_, though a magnificent
poem, is not much of a story. Herodotus can tell one, if anybody can,
and Plato (or Socrates) evidently could have done so if it had lain in
his way: while the _Anabasis_, though hardly the _Cyropædia_, shows
glimmerings in Xenophon. But otherwise we must come down to Lucian and
the East before we find the faculty. So, too, in Latin before the two
late writers named above, Ovid is about the only person who is a real
story-teller. Virgil makes very little of his _story_ in verse: and it
is shocking to think how Livy throws away his chances in prose. No:
putting the Petronian fragments aside, Lucian and Apuleius are the only
two novelists in the classical languages before about 400 A.D.: and
putting aside their odd coincidence of subject, it has to be remembered
that Lucian was a Syrian Greek and Apuleius an African Latin. The
conquered world was to conquer not only its conqueror, but its
conqueror's teacher, in this youngest accomplishment of literary art.

It was probably in all cases, if not certainly, mixed blood that
produced the curious development generally called Greek Romance. It is
no part of our business to survey, in any detail, the not very numerous
but distinctly interesting compositions which range in point of
authorship from Longus and Heliodorus, probably at the meeting of the
fourth and fifth centuries, to Eustathius in the twelfth. At one time