The novel, and in particular the romance genre, is at the heart of a billion dollar industry, but when did they originate. In this episode, Professor Tim Whitmarsh from the University of Cambridge takes us back to some of the world’s earliest fictional narratives, the novels of Ancient Greece in the first century CE. He and Tristan explore the themes of this literature, the elements of it which are echoed in modern novels, its relationships between Persian, Egyptian, Jewish and Greek literature, and the stories of cultural hybridization found in the texts. Tim is the author of Dirty Love: The Genealogy of the Ancient Greek Novel.