Add to ORKGIn the universe of Greek novels, as in that of the Classic Greek city, religious celebrations constitute a special time for young people to meet one another: they were civic as much as a religious occasions. As they are the prelude to the love story that the author will narrate, he is provided with the opportunity for an artful literary exercise, that of ekphrasis of a religious celebration. While Greek novels certainly bear traces of this exercise, which is inscribed in the schools of rhetoric, part of the programme of the progymnasmata, and duly indexed in different ancient treatises, it takes diverse and often disappointing forms. Indeed, sometimes mere chronological markers, at others pure dramatic conveniences, religious celebrations m...