SOURCE: Perry, Ben Edward. “Chariton and the Nature of Greek Romance.” In The Ancient Romances: A Literary-Historical Account of Their Origins, pp. 96-148. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967.

In the following excerpt, Perry describes the development of the Greek novel and credits Chariton for his part in creating the new literary form of the romance.

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Thanks to the recovery of fragments written on papyrus in the second century after Christ, it is now generally believed that Chariton's story of Chaereas and Callirhoe is the earliest of all our extant Greek romances. The nature of the book itself, considered from a literary-historical viewpoint in comparison with the other extant romances, is such as to confirm this belief in a positive way; so much so that the relatively early dating of Chariton which we now accept on the basis of documentary evidence was maintained on grounds of style and content...