Erotika Pathemata (“Disastrous Love Stories”) is a prose collection dating to the 40s or 30s bce . The author, Parthenius of Nicaea, was a Greek poet from Asia Minor, taken captive in Roman wars but freed because of his learning. He collaborated with Roman authors, including Vergil, and dedicated this work to the poet Cornelius Gallus. The stories, rewritten from various local Greek chroniclers and Peripatetic philosophers, run the gamut from mythological to semi-historical to historical time. There are little-known variations on familiar types and amusing sidelights on well-known mythological figures. The passions are typically illicit, the endings almost always disastrous. Parthenius edits out divine intervention and obviously fantastic elements, and gravitates to the grotesque, violent, and extreme violations of human custom, such as parricide, incest, and cannibalism. There is pathos, yet Parthenius treats these events in a distanced way, not without dry humor and paradox. Parthenius’s taste for mythographical novelty and historical subject matter, and his sympathetic treatment of illicit passion, have some parallels in contemporary Roman literature, for example Propertius’s Tarpeia elegy (4.4). But overall, Parthenius’s peculiar, antiheroic approach to erotic mythology represents a road not taken in extant Latin literature and differs markedly from the Greek novels that emerged later.