groups of stories found in the Romances of the Round Table, we can see
what this step forward would mean. The tales which bear the title of the
Arabian Nights all have the same general setting and the same general
treatment, and they are put in the mouth of the same story-teller. The
Lancelot group of Round Table stories, however, shows a nearer approach to
unity since the stories in it concern the same person, and have a common
ultimate purpose, even if it is vague. When this point had been reached
the realistic romance would have made its appearance. We have been
thinking of the realistic novel as being made up of a series of Milesian
tales. We may conceive of it, however, as an expanded Milesian tale, just
as scholars are coming to think of the epic as growing out of a single
hero-song, rather than as resulting from the union of several such songs.

To pass to another possibility, it is very tempting to see a connection
between the _Satirae_ of Petronius and the prologue of comedy. Plautus
thought it necessary to prefix to many of his plays an account of the
incidents which preceded the action of the play. In some cases he went so
far as to outline in the prologue the action of the play itself in order
that the spectators might follow it intelligently. This introductory
narrative runs up to seventy-six lines in the _Menaechmi_, to eighty-two
in the _Rudens_, and to one hundred and fifty-two in the _Amphitruo_. In
this way it becomes a short realistic story of every-day people, involving
frequently a love intrigue, and told in the iambic senarius, the simplest
form of verse. Following it is the more extended narrative of the comedy
itself, with its incidents and dialogue. This combination of the
condensed narrative in the story form, presented usually as a monologue in
simple verse, and the expanded narrative in the dramatic form, with its
conversational element, may well have suggested the writing of a realistic
novel in prose. A slight, though not a fatal, objection to this theory
lies in the fact that the prologues to comedy subsequent to Plautus