Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 December 2014
Hellenistic and Roman Imperial prose fiction sprang from the ashes of the Haxāmanišiyan Empire (c.550-330 BCE). The multicultural autonomy that Iranian regents afforded their subject peoples laid the groundwork for social policy under Alexandros, the Diadokhoi, and Roman governance of the Near East. As literary fiction developed over the course of the ‘long’ Hellenistic period, the diversity of languages and cultures not only shaped the kinds of narratives produced: polyglossia became a subject of representation in and of itself, as did the possibilities of translation between one language and another.
This essay builds on material contained in my entry ‘Greek Novel, Translation’, in Brill's online Encyclopedia of Ancient Greek Language and Linguistics, cited below and in the bibliography as Selden (2014).