This project aims to improve our understanding of the early reception of the ancient Greek novels (written between the 1st and 4th cent. AD) by investigating for the first time their influence on late antique rhetorical writing (4th-6th cent.): theory, declamations, orations, exercises, descriptions, and letters written in Greek by the foremost rhetoricians of the era in the famous schools of Athens, Antioch, and Gaza. So far, points of connection have been hypothesized sporadically and, as a result of existing paradigms in modern-day scholarship, have never been conceptualized or analysed in methodologically satisfactory ways. This project will be the first systematic cross-analysis and will place the study of the early reception of the novels on an improved methodological footing. This project both continues and deepens two ERC grants on novelistic receptions (StG Novel Saints, 2014-19; CoG Novel Echoes, 2019-24) and expands their horizons by focussing on a previously unexplored corpus, which it interrogates with new research questions. These aim to achieve a more detailed and more comprehensive understanding of the late antique readership of the Greek novels. The project will thus enhance our knowledge of central issues of late antique literature: it will study how fiction was conceptualized in rhetorical theory and practice, reconstruct ancient literary criticism of the novels and help explain how they travelled through Late Antiquity into the Byzantine era.