This next chapter examines material from a variety of genres and eras: Propertius' Elegies (29–16 bce) and Ovidian poetry (late first century bce to early first ce), Roman new comedy (late third to second centuries bce), the fables of Phaedrus (mid-first century ce), and the prose novels of Petronius (mid-first century ce) and Apuleius (mid- to late second century ce). Despite their range, these sources are united by common characteristics. They are all from ‘playful’ genres, employing humour, satire and subversion in order to challenge conventions – whether literary and generic or social and moral. They exhibit irreverence towards the sober moralising traditions of myth, exemplum and history, and probe the boundaries of the concept of pudicitia as we have seen it outlined in previous chapters in the more traditional media. Livy is an innovative and subtle historian, and Valerius Maximus a thought-provoking and complex compiler of exempla, and they are by no means representatives of a monolithic and unquestioning Roman moral tradition (as Chapters 2 and 3 have argued). Nevertheless, there is a certain sincerity and directness in their moralising that provides a foil to the texts that will be examined here.

All the texts studied in this chapter are broadly associated in one way or another with the ancient concept of the fabula (fable), a kind of narrative that was as traditional to Roman culture as the exemplum, yet directed towards a more popular, less well-educated audience.