Xenophon of Ephesus and Orality in the Roman Empire

Abstract

The paper is divided into three parts. In the first I shall highlight the struc­tural properties of the text, rehearsing some of the arguments I made in my thesis as well as suggesting some new points of interest. For this I shall focus specially on the Jewish novels and the New Testament apocrypha. In the second part I shall concentrate on aspects of both form and content in the short stories which make up the novel and which we might term “novelle” or “folk stories”, perhaps even “local legends”, comparing them with other documents, both literary and non-literary, from its status as literature draw­ing the relevant conclusions.