and the Tales of the Argonauts. They
appeared in prose, too, in narratives like the story of Sinbad the Sailor,
of a much later date. A more definite plot and a greater dramatic
intensity were given to these tales of adventure by the addition of an
erotic element which often took the form of two separated lovers. Some use
is made of this element, for instance, in the relations of Odysseus and
Penelope, perhaps in the episode of AEneas and Dido, and in the story of
Jason and Medea. The intrusion of the love motif into the stories told of
demigods and heroes, so that the whole narrative turns upon it, is
illustrated by such tales in the Metamorphoses of Ovid as those of Pyramus
and Thisbe, Pluto and Proserpina, or Meleager and Atalanta. The love
element, which may have been developed in this way out of its slight use
in the epic, and the element of adventure form the basis of the serious
Greek romances of Antonius Diogenes, Achilles Tatius, and the other
writers of the centuries which follow Petronius.

Before trying to connect the _Satirae_ with a serious romance of the type
just mentioned, let us follow another line of descent which leads us to
the same objective point, viz., the appearance of the serious story in
prose. We have been led to consider the possible connection of this kind
of prose fiction with the epic by the presence in both of them of the love
element and that of adventure. But the Greek novel has another rather
marked feature. It is rhetorical, and this quality has suggested that it
may have come, not from the epic, but from the rhetorical exercise.
Support has been given to this theory within recent years by the discovery
in Egypt of two fragments of the Ninos romance. The first of these
fragments reveals Ninos, the hero, pleading with his aunt Derkeia, the
mother of his sweetheart, for permission to marry his cousin. All the
arguments in support of his plea and against it are put forward and
balanced one against the other in a very systematic way. He wins over
Derkeia. Later in the same fragment the girl pleads in a somewhat similar
fashion with Thambe, the mother of Ninos. The second fragment is mainly
concerned with the campaigns of Ninos. Here we have the two lovers,
probably separated by the departure of Ninos for the wars, while the
hero, at least, is exposed to the danger of the campaign.

The point was made after the text of this find had been published that the
large part taken in the tale by