where suicide seemed justifiable, misadventures with pirates, or a turn of affairs which threatened a woman’s virtue.  Before the student reached the point of arguing the case, the story must be told, and out of these narratives of adventure, told at the outset to develop the dilemma, may have grown the romance of adventure, written for its own sake.  The story of Ninos has a peculiar interest in connection with this theory, because it was probably very short, and consequently may give us the connecting link between the rhetorical exercise and the long novel of the later period, and because it is the earliest known serious romance.  On the back of the papyrus which contains it are some farm accounts of the year 101 A.D.  Evidently by that time the roll had become waste paper, and the story itself may have been composed a century or even two centuries earlier.  So far as this second theory is concerned, we may raise the question in passing whether we have any other instance of a genre of literature growing out of a school-boy exercise.  Usually the teacher adapts to his purpose some form of creative literature already in existence.

Leaving this objection out of account for the moment, the romance of love and perilous adventure may possibly be then a lineal descendant either of the epic or of the rhetorical exercise.  Whichever of these two views is the correct one, the discovery of the Ninos romance fills in a gap in one theory of the origin of the realistic romance of Petronius, and with that we are here concerned.  Before the story of Ninos was found, no serious romance and no title of such a romance anterior to the time of Petronius was known.  This story, as we have seen, may well go back to the first century before Christ, or at least to the beginning of our era.  It is conceivable that stories like it, but now lost, existed even at an earlier date.  Now in the century, more or less, which elapsed between the assumed date of the appearance of these Greek narratives and the time of Petronius, the extraordinary commercial development of Rome had created a new aristocracy—­the aristocracy of wealth.  In harmony with this social change the military chieftain and the political leader who had been the heroes of the old fiction gave way to the substantial man of affairs of the new, just as Thaddeus of Warsaw has yielded his place in our present-day novels to Silas Lapham, and the bourgeois erotic story of adventure resulted, as we find it in the extant Greek novels of the second and third centuries of our era.  If we can assume that this stage of development was reached before the time of Petronius we can think of his novel as a parody of such a romance.  If, however, the bourgeois romance had not appeared before 50 A.D., then, if we regard his story as a parody of a prose narrative, it must be a parody of such an heroic romance as that of Ninos, or a parody of the longer heroic romances which developed out of the rhetorical narrative.  If excavations in Egypt or at Herculaneum should bring to light a serious bourgeois story of adventure, they would furnish us the missing link.  Until, or unless, such a discovery is made the chain of evidence is incomplete.