Fiction and Education in the Roman World - The Cultivation of the Reader

What was fiction in the Roman world - and how did ancient readers learn to make sense of it? This book redefines ancient fiction not as a genre but as a sociocultural practice, governed by the institutions of Greco-Roman education. Drawing on modern fiction theory, it uncovers how fables, epic, and rhetorical training cultivated "fiction competence" in readers from childhood through advanced studies. But it also reveals how the ancient novels - including Greek romance, fictional biography, and the fragmentary novels - subverted the very rules of fiction pedagogy they inherited. Through incisive close readings of a wide array of canonical and paraliterary texts, this book reframes the classical curriculum as the engine of literary imagination in antiquity. For classicists, literary theorists, and anyone interested in ancient education, it offers a provocative reassessment of fiction's place in cultural history - and of how readers learned to believe, disbelieve, and decode narrative meaning.

List of contents

Part I. An Education in Fiction: 1. Introduction; 2. Fable as fiction; 3. Epic pleasure; 4. Rhetoric and Revisionist Fiction; Part II. A Novel Education: 5. A Novel Education; 6. Aesop and the Gift of Speech; 7. Apollonius Doctus; 8. Alexander's War of Words; 9. Conclusion; Appendix 1: Ancient Sources on Postclassical Education; Appendix 2: Catalogue of Alexander Rhetorical Themes and Exercises; Bibliography; Subject Index; Index of Passages.

Product details

• Authors: Jacqueline Arthur-Montagne
• Publisher: Cambridge Academic
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Release: 30.04.2026
• EAN: 9781009721646
• ISBN: 978-1-009-72164-6
• Illustrations: Worked examples or Exercises
• Series: Greek Culture in the Roman World
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > Linguistics and literary studies > General and comparative literary studies; HISTORY / Ancient / General, Classical texts, History of Education, Ancient World, Ancient Rome, BCE to c 500 CE, Ancient Greek and Roman literature, c 1 to c 500 CE, Literature of Greece