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Euripides' Alcmaeon and the Apollonivs Romance
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 February 2009
Extract
The genesis of the Greek prose romance is still in large part shrouded in darkness, in spite of the researches of Erwin Rohde, one of the greatest scholars of the last generation. The reasons are evident; the material at our disposal is far too scanty, the loss of early specimens of this literary form is far too great to allow of a flawless reconstruction of the history of the Greek romance. The same lacunae have also prevented us from obtaining as complete an insight into the sources of the extant romances as would be desirable. Rohde conjectured that the genre was the result of a skilful combination of mythological narrative and adventure novel; Warren thought that the Greek prose romance had about the same origin and took the same development as the old French prose romance—that is, it developed out of the epic. At all times scholars have been aware of the fact that the great role which love plays in the Greek romance has a parallel in the tragedies of Euripides, who may be considered the first tragic poet to introduce the love theme on the stage. But so far as I am aware, it has not been pointed out that Euripides was drawn upon for whole episodes in order to enrich the plot of the novel. Yet such seems to have been the case for one of the best-known passages of the Apollonius Romance, as I shall endeavour to show in the following pages.
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- Copyright © The Classical Association 1924
References
page 57 note 1 Rohde, E., Der griechische Roman und seine Vorlaufer, Leipzig, 1900Google Scholar.
page 57 note 2 Warren, F. M., A History of the Novel previous to the Seventeenth Century, New York, 1895, pp. 21Google Scholarsqq.
page 57 note 3 Rohde, , op. cit., pp. 31Google Scholarsqq.
page 57 note 4 Ibid.
page 57 note 5 On this work cf. Hartung, , Die byzanHnische Novelle, Archiv f. d. Studium d. neueren Sprachen, L(1872), p. 28Google Scholar; Rohde, p. 435; Durilop, , History of Prose Fiction, London, 1896, I. 82Google Scholar.
page 58 note 1 Tragicorum Graecorum Fragmenia, ed. Nauck, A.2. pp. 479Google Scholar sqq.
page 58 note 2 Bibl. III. 7. 7.
page 58 note 3 Aarne, A., Vcrxeichnis der Märchetttypen, Helsinki, 1911Google Scholar, types 403A; 510A; 511.
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