Ancient world

As Pierre Daniel Huet noted in 1670, the tradition of epic works went back as far as Virgil and Homer. The regular format was verse, suiting the purpose of tradition in a culture of oral performances. Today, we see this tradition as going back even further, to the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh, and in Indian epics such as the Ramayana and Mahabharata.

It is more difficult to speak of the influence of the shorter performances of regular storytelling on the medieval traditions which led to the development of the novel/novella.

There was a third tradition of prose fictions, both in a satirical mode (with Petronius' Satyricon, the incredible stories of Lucian of Samosata, and Lucius Apuleius' proto-picaresque The Golden Ass) and a heroic strain (with the romances of Heliodorus and Longus et al.). The ancient Greek romance was revived by Byzantine novelists of the twelfth century. All these traditions were rediscovered in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, ultimately influencing the modern book market.