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.