Chariton’s "Callirhoe" is likely the earliest of the so-called ancient Greek novels, composed around the 1st century CE. Scholarly consensus claims it left little trace in later literature and was lucky to survive antiquity. And yet, both the material evidence for the text’s survival and literary allusions to it which have been identified in recent scholarship suggest that the novel’s afterlife was more vibrant than conventionally believed. This, however, has not yet been explored systematically, nor the consequences for the field realised. This project aims to offer the first comprehensive analysis of Callirhoe’s reception in later Greek texts from the first millennium CE. It will identify hitherto unexplored allusions to Callirhoe in a varied range of genres from postclassical literature, including fictional epistolography, Late Antique epic, Byzantine hagiography, and later novels. In doing so, it builds new ways of understanding the development and early reception of the ancient novel. Rather than confirming the straightforwardly linear view of the genre assumed by most scholars, Callirhoe’s reception history suggests that later readers understood the novel as a more diverse and malleable form. Through tracing Callirhoe’s early reception history this project aims to not only definitively refute the current scholarly consensus about the work’s negligible afterlife, but also offer new insight into the history of the European novel as a genre in antiquity and beyond.