239Chariton’s Callirhoe , Antonius Diogenes’ The Wonders Beyond Thule , and Novel Histories of Genre

This chapter proposes a new approach to the long-vexed debate about the genre of the Greek novel by focusing on the early reception of novelistic texts and what such traditions reveal about postclassical readers’ understanding of the genre. Despite the lack of explicit theorisation of the novel in antiquity, current scholarship tends to consider the corpus as a stable canon from which generic conventions can be derived, creating a workable if implicit framework for analysis. This, however, risks ignoring the more ambiguous evidence from later readers such as the Byzantine patriarch Photius, who claims in the Bibliotheca that the fragmentary The Wonders Beyond Thule attributed to Antonius Diogenes, a text rarely seen as a key representative of the corpus, represents the origin of the genre. This chapter uses Photius’ statement as a starting point from which to explore the divergent reception histories of both The Wonders Beyond Thule and Chariton’s Callirhoe , which modern scholarship has tended to prioritise as the earliest extant novel and perceived progenitor of the genre. By taking Photius’ claims seriously but not literally, this chapter explores what the early reception histories of The Wonders Beyond Thule and Callirhoe respectively reveal about later readers’ attitudes towards the novel as a genre. By focusing on the reception rather than the origins of the novel, this chapter aims to challenge scholarly assumptions about how fixed the novelistic genre was perceived to be in antiquity, and to argue for a more fluid and porous approach to this question amongst postclassical novel-readers.