page_title: Milesian tale
section_title: Legacy
hierarchical_section_title: Milesian tale / Legacy
context_page_description: The Milesian tale is a genre of fictional story prominent in ancient Greek and Roman literature. According to most authorities, a Milesian tale is a short story, fable, or folktale featuring love and adventure, usually of an erotic or titillating nature. M. C. Howatson, in The Oxford Companion to Classical Literature, voices the traditional view the Milesian tale is the source "of such medieval collections of tales as the Gesta Romanorum, the Decameron of Boccaccio, and the Heptameron of Marguerite of Navarre".
  Gottskálk Jensson of the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, however, offers a dissenting view or corrective, arguing the original Milesian tale was:
  a type of first-person novel, a travelogue told from memory by a narrator who every now and then would relate how he encountered other characters who told him stories which he would then incorporate into the main tale through the rhetorical technique of narrative impersonation.
  This resulted in "a complicated narrative fabric: a travelogue carried by a main narrator with numerous subordinate tales carried by subordinate narrative voices".
context_section_description: Though the idea of the Milesian tale served as a model for the episodic narratives strung together in The Satyricon by Gaius Petronius Arbiter and The Golden Ass by Lucius Apuleius (second century CE), neither Aristides's original Greek text nor the Latin translation survived. The lengthiest survivor from this literature is the tale of "Cupid and Psyche", found in Apuleius, which Sir Richard Burton observed, "makes us deeply regret the disappearance of the others".
  Aristidean saucy and disreputable heroes and spicy, fast-paced anecdote resurfaced in the medieval fabliaux. Chaucer's "The Miller's Tale" is in Aristides' tradition, as are some of the saltier tales in Boccaccio's Decameron or the Heptameron of Marguerite de Navarre.
caption: A Byzantine mosaic depicting a scene from The Golden Ass by Lucius Apuleius
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