More than
a dozen of them are imbedded in the novel of Apuleius, the
_Metamorphoses_, and modern specimens of them are to be seen in Boccaccio
and in Chaucer. In fact they are popular from the twelfth century down to
the eighteenth. Long before the time of Petronius they occur sporadically
in literature. A good specimen, for instance, is found in a letter
commonly attributed to AEschines in the fourth century B.C. As early as
the first century before Christ collections of them had been made and
translated into Latin. This development suggests an interesting possible
origin of the realistic romance. In such collections as those just
mentioned of the first century B.C., the central figures were different in
the different stories, as is the case, for instance, in the Canterbury
Tales. Such an original writer as Petronius was may well have thought of
connecting these different episodes by making them the experiences of a
single individual. The Encolpius of Petronius would in that case be in a
way an ancient Don Juan. If we compare the Arabian Nights with one of the
groups of stories found in the Romances of the Round Table, we can see
what this step forward would mean. The tales which bear the title of the
Arabian Nights all have the same general setting and the same general
treatment, and they are put in the mouth of the same story-teller. The
Lancelot group of Round Table stories, however, shows a nearer approach to
unity since the stories in it concern the same person, and have a common
ultimate purpose, even if it is vague. When this point had been reached
the realistic romance would have made its appearance. We have been
thinking of the realistic novel as being made up of a series of Milesian
tales. We may conceive of it, however, as an expanded Milesian tale, just
as scholars are coming to think of the epic as growing out of a single
hero-song, rather than as resulting from the union of several such songs.

To pass to another possibility, it is very tempting to see a connection
between the _Satirae_ of Petronius and the prologue of comedy. Plautus
thought it necessary to prefix to many of his plays an account of the
incidents which preceded the action of the play. In some cases he went so
far as to outline in the prologue the action of the play itself in order
that the spectators might follow it intelligently. This introductory
narrative runs up to seventy-six lines in the _Menaechmi_, to eighty-two
in the _Rudens_, a