the epic or of the rhetorical exercise. Whichever of these two views is
the correct one, the discovery of the Ninos romance fills in a gap in one
theory of the origin of the realistic romance of Petronius, and with that
we are here concerned. Before the story of Ninos was found, no serious
romance and no title of such a romance anterior to the time of Petronius
was known. This story, as we have seen, may well go back to the first
century before Christ, or at least to the beginning of our era. It is
conceivable that stories like it, but now lost, existed even at an earlier
date. Now in the century, more or less, which elapsed between the assumed
date of the appearance of these Greek narratives and the time of
Petronius, the extraordinary commercial development of Rome had created a
new aristocracy--the aristocracy of wealth. In harmony with this social
change the military chieftain and the political leader who had been the
heroes of the old fiction gave way to the substantial man of affairs of
the new, just as Thaddeus of Warsaw has yielded his place in our
present-day novels to Silas Lapham, and the bourgeois erotic story of
adventure resulted, as we find it in the extant Greek novels of the second
and third centuries of our era. If we can assume that this stage of
development was reached before the time of Petronius we can think of his
novel as a parody of such a romance. If, however, the bourgeois romance
had not appeared before 50 A.D., then, if we regard his story as a parody
of a prose narrative, it must be a parody of such an heroic romance as
that of Ninos, or a parody of the longer heroic romances which developed
out of the rhetorical narrative. If excavations in Egypt or at Herculaneum
should bring to light a serious bourgeois story of adventure, they would
furnish us the missing link. Until, or unless, such a discovery is made
the chain of evidence is incomplete.

The two theories of the realistic romance which we have been discussing
assume that it is a parody of some anterior form of literature, and that