ch fiction in the modern sense of the term,
and especially prose fiction, came to occupy a province in modern
literature which had been so scantily and infrequently cultivated in
ancient, it would hardly be proper to enter upon the present subject
with a mere reference to these other treatments. It is matter of
practically no controversy (or at least of none in which it is worth
while to take a part) that the history of prose fiction, before the
Christian era, is very nearly a blank, and that, in the fortunately
still fairly abundant remains of poetic fiction, "the story is the least
part" (as Dryden says in another sense), or at least the _telling_ of
the story, in our modern sense, is so. Homer (in the _Odyssey_ at any
rate), Herodotus (in what was certainly not intentional fiction at all),
and Xenophon[5] are about the only Greek writers who can tell a story,
for the magnificent narrative of Thucydides in such cases as those of
the Plague and the Syracusan cataclysm shows all the "headstrong"
_ethos_ of the author in its positive refusal to assume a "story"
character. In Latin there is nothing before Livy and Ovid;[6] of whom
the one falls into the same category with Herodotus and Xenophon, and
the other, admirable _raconteur_ as he is, thinks first of his poetry.
Scattered tales we have: "mimes" and other things there are some, and
may have been more. But on the whole the schedule is not filled: there
are no entries for the competition.

[Sidenote: The late classical stage.]

In later classical literature, both Greek and Latin, the state of things
alters considerably, though even then it cannot be said that fiction
proper--that is to say, either prose or verse in which the
accomplishment of the form is distinctly subordinate to the interesting
treatment of the subject--constitutes a very large department, or even
any regular department at all. If Lucius of Patrae was a real person,
and much before Lucian, he may dispute with Petronius--that
first-century Maupassant or Meredith, or both combined--the actual
foundation of the novel as we have it; but Lucian himself and Apuleius
(strangely enough handling the same subject in the two languages) give
securer and more solid starting-places. Yet nothing follows Apuleius;
though some time after Lucian the Greek romance, of which we have still
a fair number of examples (spread, however, over a still larger number
of centuries), establishes itself in a fashion. It does one t