As Aristotle was aware, comic drama's use of unretold stories – the fullest manifestation of what we would term ‘fiction’ – was far ahead of other narrative genres, which continued to draw from the mingled springs of history and myth. Aristotle has to scrape to find instances of poetic fiction elsewhere, naming only one actual title in each narrative mode: the freakish Margites for epic, Agathon's Anthos/eus for tragedy. The most striking experiments, disregarded by Aristotle, had been in prose: anecdote and dramatic invention in the historians; the pseudo-historical Socratic dialogue and fabulose Platonic myths; above all, the novelistic mutant Cyropaedia, a work of major influence in the ages, ancient and modern, when prose fiction was being invented. A generation after Aristotle, Menander's contemporary Euhemerus dented the mould by narrating a tale of transparent fantasy in his own first person; but even this Sacred history centred on familiar names from heroic myth, and none of these works aspired to a Homeric model of narrative form.

Such a classical epic fiction – narrated (as against performed), newminted (rather than mythical or historical) storytelling that emulates the values of economy, amplitude, and transparency in Homer and Attic drama – emerges to extant view only with Chariton of Aphrodisias in, probably, the first century ad, and with the four Greek love-novels that succeed him.