Preface

A plan for the collection and publication of Ben Edwin Perry’s articles and reviews was first conceived by Perry himself at some point just before the appearance in 1967 of his magnum opus on ancient prose fiction, Ancient Romances. Perry’s original scheme was to reprint almost all of the many articles and reviews on both prose fiction and the fable and several versions of the plans he developed to do so exist in the archives of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. These reveal the serious, deliberate and repeated consideration he gave during this period to how he was going to present his legacy aside from Aesopica, Ancient Romances and his other books. Subsequent events were to prove that he ought to have hurried; before the end of the next year, he was to die, the undisputed “leading authority on ancient fiction in the English-speaking world.”¹

Perry’s widow eventually passed responsibility for the project of gathering and publishing the collected papers to another faculty member in the Urbana Classics department, Mark Naoumides. Unfortunately, Naoumides himself was to die unexpectedly in 1977 at the age of 46, at which point the plans for Perry’s opuscula seem to have been entirely forgotten. We happened to pick up the trail by pure chance. After the death of Bryan Reardon, who became the most influential scholar of the Greek novels in the generation after Perry, his copy of Ancient Romances came as a gift to one of us through the kindness of his widow, Janette. Tucked into the front of the book was a photocopy of the entry on Perry from the Biographical Dictionary of North American Classicists, which had been penned by one of our graduate school teachers at Urbana, William M. Calder III.² Reardon was not in the habit of writing marginalia or otherwise marking texts that he read, but this final sentence of Calder’s vita of Perry had been underlined boldly by him: “His articles on the novel deserve to be collected.” In the margin Reardon had added: “NB!” Wondering why such a volume had never appeared.” We soon learned through the aid of Bruce Swann, then Classics librarian at Urbana, of the archival materials concerning Perry housed there.³

The current volume does not follow exactly any of Perry’s own proposed organizational plans for his kleine Schriften but it is based closely on the latest version of the table of contents present in the University of Illinois archives, where we found that Perry’s wish was to have one volume contain his writings on Apuleius and Lucian, followed by a substantial appendix of miscellaneous works. We have modified this by choosing a slightly broader focus—ancient prose fiction as a whole—and eliminating everything that did not fall squarely under this rubric aside from his important early article “The Early Greek Capacity for Viewing Things Separately.”

While Perry’s book reviews are models of lucid judgment and scholarly restraint, and while he planned for them to be included in his collected works, we have chosen not print any of them in this volume. The reviews are primarily of historical and biographical interest and, by contrast with the articles, hold relatively little on their own to engage the interest of modern critics working on ancient fiction. We have taken the liberty of including one amusing and revealing exchange of correspondence in the appendix but have otherwise not attempted to illuminate or evaluate Perry from a biographical perspective.

One of our aims was to allow the collection to appear in a form that accords more with Perry’s own projected revisions. The archival materials in Urbana include a large number of notes that he made in preparation for their republication. He was not a scholar afraid of correcting himself (as he often felt himself to be doing in Ancient Romances), but he limited himself to minor changes and updates in these papers in an attempt, in particular, to clarify his phrasing and thought. From their form—asides to himself or reminders to return to certain passages—it is clear that his...