The sheer idealistic value of ancient Greek novels and novel fragments is well known. After reading these literary materials, it is easy to imagine the different functions that tragicomic fiction might have played in ancient literature. It is my purpose here to examine these functions under cognitivist and neuroesthetic approaches in an attempt to link their hypothetical universalist value with cognitive and neurological underpinnings which also postulate universal elements of human psyche or brain-determined processes. I first resort to Zeki’s description of concept formation in the brain and its relationship with art and literature; I afterwards apply Colm Hogan’s cognitivist theory of literary universals and emotions to romantic Greek novels. Special attention is paid to the role of women in these narratives as female characters frequently articulate the most exciting parts of the plot and condensate the universal and emotional values at stake during the adventures told in the novels.
When turning towards ancient Greek novels, we need to be aware that they belong to a specific cross-culturally scheme of love plots, named “romantic tragi-comedies”, where two lovers are separated and then reunited again after undergoing a bewildering set of adventures and, as Colm Hogan notes, several episodes very much related to death or death imagery (2003, p. 24). In general terms, ancient Greek novels are a group of texts that can be considered a genre of romantic tragi-comedies, although considering them a genre entails some problems regarding their miscellaneous origin and the instability of their denomination at their time (they were usually referred by the Greek equivalent terms for story, myth, or drama). What is quite clear is that they evolved from biographical stories composed to transmit the exploits of historical leaders (such as Alexander Magnus), as Herwig Maehler speculated a long time ago, which afterwards intertwined real historical facts with fictitious and usually fantastic elements, some of them imported from stories created in Egypt and the Near East regions.