this fact accounts for the appearance of the satirical or cynical element
in it. Other students of literary history, however, think that this
characteristic was brought over directly from the Milesian tale[84] or the
Menippean satire.[85] To how many different kinds of stories the term
"Milesian tale" was applied by the ancients is a matter of dispute, but
the existence of the short story before the time of Petronius is beyond
question. Indeed we find specimens of it. In its commonest form it
presented a single episode of every-day life. It brought out some human
weakness or foible. Very often it was a story of illicit love. Its
philosophy of life was: No man's honesty and no woman's virtue are
unassailable. In all these respects, save in the fact that it presents one
episode only, it resembles the _Satirae_ of Petronius. At least two
stories of this type are to be found in the extant fragments of the novel
of Petronius. One of them is related as a well-known tale by the poet
Eumolpus, and the other is told by him as a personal experience. More than
a dozen of them are imbedded in the novel of Apuleius, the
_Metamorphoses_, and modern specimens of them are to be seen in Boccaccio
and in Chaucer. In fact they are popular from the twelfth century down to
the eighteenth. Long before the time of Petronius they occur sporadically
in literature. A good specimen, for instance, is found in a letter
commonly attributed to Æschines in the fourth century B.C. As early as
the first century before Christ collections of them had been made and
translated into Latin. This development suggests an interesting possible
origin of the realistic romance. In such collections as those just
mentioned of the first century B.C., the central figures were different in
the different stories, as is the case, for instance, in the Canterbury
Tales. Such an original writer as Petronius was may well have thought of
connecting these different episodes by making them the experiences of a
single individual. The Encolpius of Petronius would in that case be in a
way an ancient Don Juan. If we compare the Arabian Nights with one of the