The narrative productions of the Graeco-Roman world, if not quite innombrables, are enormously diverse. A catalogue by extant genre alone would have to include epic, hymn, lyric, narrative elegy and iambus; tragedy, comedy, satyr-play, and mime; history, biography, philosophy, oratory, fable, novel; and a host of variously experimental crossbreeds between. Every one of these forms has left its own distinctive print on the narrative traditions of the West. This book is concerned with one historical strand out of many: the set of narrative values I have labelled ‘classical plotting’, and whose characteristics I have tried to describe in the preceding chapters.

Part II will argue that this paradigm's historical evolution, though it runs across generic boundaries, is the specific product of a handful of narrative genres, and indeed of a narrow band of the spectrum within each: Homeric epic, fifth-century tragedy, Graeco-Roman New Comedy, and the Greek love-novel. While the classical paradigm may well owe much of its historical resilience to its peculiarly efficient use of our innate cognitive apparatus for narrative processing, its original rise is tied to a series of unabashed cultural accidents in the Greek world over the half-millennium from 750 to 250 bc. Principal among these are: the existence and early canonisation of the Iliad and Odyssey; the invention of Attic drama, and the canonisation of three fifth-century tragedians; the late emergence of prose and of literary fiction; the peculiar relationship between Attic tragedy and comedy; and the closing of the Alexandrian literary canon by Aristophanes of Byzantium.