The chapter first reviews hypotheses concerning the nature of ‘Milesian tales’. Harrison 1998 had proposed a modified version of Bürger 1992, suggesting that in this genre an anchor-narrator told of scabrous events in a quasi-ethnographic account of his visits to various places; Jennson 2004 had suggested that the Amores transmitted as Lucian’s pointed to Μιλησιακά in which the key-narrator recounted adventures that were both his own and told to him by others, i.e. just what we find Encolpius doing in the Satyrica; and Regine May had argued in 2010 that the prosimetric ass-papyrus P.Oxy. 4762 preserves part of Aristides’ Μιλησιακά, ‘Milesian Tales’. After noting these hypotheses the chapter briefly explores the impact of Μιλησιακά on the Greek novels. Finally it investigates their earlier history, suggesting that just as Sybaritica, ‘Sybaritic tales’, linked to them by Ovid, are shown by Aristophanes’ Wasps already to be a form of λόγοι, ‘stories’, circulating in the 420s BC, so too Μιλησιακοὶ λόγοι, ‘Milesian stories’, may have already been current in Athens by then, linked to Miletus’ fame as a provider of dildoes (cf. Aristophanes’ Lysistrata) and as Aspasia’s city of origin.

This chapter investigates how Donne’s ‘To His Mistress Going to Bed’ and Thomas Nashe’s Choice of Valentines make cultural use of Amores 1.5 and 3.7. Framing the analysis through articulations of power and impotence, we see how literary representations of sexual performance or failure reveal covert engagements with questions of politicised myth-making and story-telling. Sex is read here as a vocabulary which has a potent place in the support and subversion of the Augustan and Elizabethan regimes.