Virginity and representation in the Greek novel and early Greek poetry

This book began as an inquiry into the nature of the relation between παρθενία and the creation of literature in the ancient Greek novels. In order to better understand why female παρθενία plays such a central role in generating narrative action in the ancient Greek novels, I chose to take seriously the novels’ apparent lack of direct engagement with contemporary discourses on virginity and instead to look backward, to earlier Greek literary models in which παρθενία functions as a formative narrative force. A comprehensive interpretation of all pre-Christian texts concerned with παρθενία being neither practical nor necessary, I have focused on three major authors whose works exerted a decisive influence on later narrative tra-ditions and who engage most fully with the thematic potential of virginity: Homer, Sappho, and Aeschylus. All of them date from the very beginnings of Greek litera-ture and are separated from the novels by at least five centuries. Moreover, they belong to three different genres: epic, lyric, and tragic.