I hope that not all of the nonsense I was taught in school is still being taught to schoolchildren. I learned that the literary genre of the novel was invented in England in the 18th century. In the Signet Classic edition of Henry Fielding's Tom Jones, copyright 1963, the highly-respected critic Frank Kermode asserts that "Tom Jones, published in 1749, was the second great novel. The first, Richardson's Clarissa Harlowe, preceeded it only by a year."
Fielding himself knew better. On the title page of his earlier novel Joseph Andrews Fielding acknowledges that he is imitating Cervantes -- Don Quixote, anyone? And before Cervantes -- and his clear mockery of earlier Spanish novels -- came Rabelais with Gargantua et Pantagreul, which in turn was preceded by Medieval novels in Latin and Greek, and, to cut right to the chase, ancient Greeks wrote novels beginning in the first century BC at the latest, imitated by two Latin authors, Petronius with his Satyricon and Apuleius with the Golden Ass (stop giggling, it means donkey).
Aside from ancient Greek novels which exist only in fragments, there are five entire ones: one each by Chariton in the 1st century AD, Achilles Tatius, Longus, Xenophon of Ephesus in the 2nd century, and Heliodorus of Emesa in the 3rd.
Lucian, a much more skilled writer, lived in the 2nd century AD and wrote in many genres including the novel, although none of his novels has survived entire. Lucian made fun of absolutely everything, including the gods. (Is this why we don't have the complete text of any of his novels?)
Many fragments of previously-lost ancient Greek novels are among the papyri unearthed, primarily at Oxyrhynchus, since the late 19th century. In 1995 Susan Stephens and John Winkler collected all of the known fragments in their volume Ancient Greek Novels: The Fragments, which includes texts, translations and commentaries; since 1995, however, still more new fragments have come to light, primarily from Oxyrhynchus.
We know that the ancient novel was more a Greek and a Latin phenomenon; however, the two finest examples of the ancient novel which survive are both Latin. In the first century AD, Petronius, generally believed to have been the official of the same name who served under the Emperor Nero, published a huge novel, the Satyricon, which only survives in fragments; however, the fragments add up to several hundred pages. Petronius relentlessly lampoons the decadence and tastelessness of Rome's newly-rich, a favorite literary pastime of ancient Romans whose families had been rich for a little longer. Although a rich and varied pageant of life is related by the narrator, he himself, distanced from the author's intended audience by a thick layer of irony, cares for little besides his comically unsuccessful attempts to prevent others from making love with his beloved, the young, beautiful, perpetually-available man Giton.
Perhaps the greatest surviving novel of Greek or Latin antiquity, until the possible unearthing of a complete masterpiece by Lucian, is the 2nd-century Golden Ass by Apuleius.
Apuleius' novel is beloved, but linguistically, it is strange. Apuleius himself apologizes at the beginning of the work, in case his Latin should offend native speakers. But he says that it is right that his tale should be told in strange speech, for it has to do with the transformation of a man into a donkey and back again, and is itself the transformation of a Greek novel into Latin.
It was once believed, but no more, that the Greek novel on which Apuleius based his work was written by Lucian. Certainly the world views of the two authors are far, far apart: Lucian mocks everything, even the gods, while Aouleius is a very pious pagan. The protoganist of his novel is turned into a donkey accidentally, because he had too much curiosity and too little awe before supernatural things. And he is rescued and turned back into a man by praying to the Goddess of Heaven -- we generally know her as Isis, but as the pleading donkey says to Her, She is known by many names, and he lists many of them -- and then he becomes a very pious monk of Her cult.
The hilarious, rollicking story (with its very serious pagan religious underpinnings) is full of bad people doing bad things. However, they often interrupt their various bad deeds to tell each other stories, the longest of which, the story of Cupid and Psyche, takes up nearly a quarter of the entire novel, and has often been published separately, and has inspired many, many painters and sculptors. Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream is based partly on the Golden Ass, which appeared in a very popular English translation by William Adlington in 1566.
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