Technical medicine in Greek and Roman novels

The Greek and Latin romance novels make up a fascinating corpus of ancient literature. Compared to other genres, the ancient novel was a short-lived phenomenon and was something of a catch-all in terms of cultural references and literary devices. The novels provide valuable insight into lay audience, a part of ancient society that is difficult to reconstruct from our surviving evidence. As a form of literature designed to reach a mass audience, the novels can also inform us as to what knowledge may have been common or lay knowledge. My work contributes to the literary criticism of these novels in a way that enriches our understanding of how the Greeks and Romans perceived medicine.

The aim of this research is to investigate how technical medicine intersects with the fictional genre of the novel. To do this I explored a sample of seven novels in Greek and Latin written between the first and sixth centuries CE. In this dissertation I answer what representations of technical medicine appear in the novels, whether there is a correlation between the author's potential access to intellectually-driven cities and more representations of sophisticated medicine, and what parts of medicine had become widespread cultural knowledge by the time of the Roman Empire.