e assumed
date of the appearance of these Greek narratives and the time of
Petronius, the extraordinary commercial development of Rome had created a
new aristocracy--the aristocracy of wealth. In harmony with this social
change the military chieftain and the political leader who had been the
heroes of the old fiction gave way to the substantial man of affairs of
the new, just as Thaddeus of Warsaw has yielded his place in our
present-day novels to Silas Lapham, and the bourgeois erotic story of
adventure resulted, as we find it in the extant Greek novels of the second
and third centuries of our era. If we can assume that this stage of
development was reached before the time of Petronius we can think of his
novel as a parody of such a romance. If, however, the bourgeois romance
had not appeared before 50 A.D., then, if we regard his story as a parody
of a prose narrative, it must be a parody of such an heroic romance as
that of Ninos, or a parody of the longer heroic romances which developed
out of the rhetorical narrative. If excavations in Egypt or at Herculaneum
should bring to light a serious bourgeois story of adventure, they would
furnish us the missing link. Until, or unless, such a discovery is made
the chain of evidence is incomplete.

The two theories of the realistic romance which we have been discussing
assume that it is a parody of some anterior form of literature, and that
this fact accounts for the appearance of the satirical or cynical element
in it. Other students of literary history, however, think that this
characteristic was brought over directly from the Milesian tale[84] or the
Menippean satire.[85] To how many different kinds of stories the term
"Milesian tale" was applied by the ancients is a matter of dispute, but
the existence of the short story before the time of Petronius is beyond
question. Indeed we find specimens of it. In its commonest form it
presented a single episode of every-day life. It brought out some human
weakness or foible. Very often it was a story of illicit love. Its
philosophy of life was: No man's honesty and no woman's virtue are
unassailable. In all these respects, save in the fact that it presents one
episode only, it resembles the _Satirae_ of Petronius. At least two
stories of this type are to be found in the extant fragments of the novel
of Petronius. One of them is related as a well-known tale by the poet
Eumolpus, and the other is told by him as a personal experience.