SOURCE: Bowersock, G. W. “The Aethiopica of Heliodorus.” In Fiction as History: Nero to Julian, pp. 149-60. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994.

In the following essay, Bowersock examines how the author of the Historia Augusta made use of the Aethiopica.

The discovery of papyri has pushed back the chronology of the extant novels to dates far earlier than those contemplated by Erwin Rohde in his still valuable Der griechische Roman und seine Vorläufer (third edition, 1914). Most of the novelists known to us now appear to have written in either the first or the second century a.d.¹ One, however, is evidently of a later date. The fifth-century ecclesiastical historian Socrates identifies him with none other than a bishop in Thessaly at the time of Theodosius I.² His novel was alleged to represent a literary indiscretion from the author's benighted early years. Most scholars have refused, perhaps a...