How important are gods to the Greek novel? And how much do the novels encourage the view that the gods are active in human affairs? In this chapter I consider the frequency with which named, and also unspecified, gods are mentioned and how essential they are to the action of the novel. I shall conclude that in many cases it is not enough simply to view them in terms of literary convention and that literary convention itself depends on some acceptance within the world of the novel of beliefs that would be held in the real world.

The range of narrative literature considered by specialists in the ancient novel has increased and diversified over the last twenty or so years. The more diverse the novel, the less that can be said in general about any single issue, ‘gods in the novel’ included. For this chapter, however, I revert to the so- called ‘ideal novel’, by which I mean the novels of Chariton, Xenophon, Achilles Tatius, Longus and Heliodorus. These form an unusually close-knit group of apparently very similar plots and often comparable tastes. It is unfashionable but not wholly irresponsible to speak of them as a genre. At the same time, they do themselves vary in character, and perhaps the divine is one area where they differ significantly. These are all imperial texts: the earliest, Chariton, must be mid to late first century AD, and the latest, Heliodorus, could be anywhere between the 220s and the 350s.