The ancient novel flourished during Rome's height of the 1st and 2nd c A.D. It did not fit any prior genre, though it borrowed from drama and epic and was written from a middle class perspective. Arguable the best example is Petronius' farcical [The Satyricon|Satyricon (Menippean satire).

For resources/scholarship, read pretty much anything by Mikhail Bakhtin, and The True Story of the Novel, by Margaret Anne Doody (Doody?) Director of Comp. Lit at Vanderbilt.