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An attempt to retrace modern romance through story, tale, fable, epic, ballad, and legend to its earliest origines in the dawn of civilization is outside the purpose of this work.

Indeed, from the earliest imaginative narrative down to the tales of Daphnis and Chloe and of the Golden Ass, there was no real prototype of our novel. Doubtless the romance of the European Middle Ages, with its stories of chivalry and tales of love and adventure, was foreshadowed by the Greek and Latin epics. Those stories of the wanderings of Ulysses and of Æneas, of the siege of Troy, and of the search for the Golden Fleece. Doubtless also the Milestan Tales, recounting chiefly love in its grosser form, were the precedents of the Italian novelle and French fabliaux and chansons de geste.

The Latin Apollonius of Tyre was undoubtedly derived from a lost Greek original of perhaps the third century, and presents one of the earliest love stories we can assign to that literature; and we know that the Æthiopica of Heliodorus of Emesa was not only widely read