Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from The Lost Tales of Miletus
Could scarcely fail to have had recourse to sources so popular as the fictions of Miletus. Whatever might have been the gifts of Parthenius as a poet, he wastes none of them on his task of compiler. He contents himself with giving the briefest possible outline of stories that were then in popular circulation, carefully divesting them of any ornament of fancy or elegance of style. His work, dedicated to the Latin poet, Gallus, seems designed to suggest, from the themes illustrated by old tale-tellers, hints to the imitation or invention of later poets. And, indeed, Parthenius himself states that it was for such uses to Gallus that his book was composed. But what stories, thus reduced to the mere ashes of their pristine form, might have been when they took life and glow from the art of the practised tale-teller, the yet extant and animated romance of The Golden Ass, by Apuleius, may enable us to guess. For though that romance as well as the story of the ass by Lucian, is generally supposed to have been borrowed from the earlier work of Lucius of.
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