Milesian tale

Later, in the first century BCE, the serious-minded historian Lucius Cornelius Sisenna translated Aristides into Latin under the title Milesiae fabulae (Milesian Fables) for an intellectual relaxation.

Milesian tales quickly gained a reputation for ribaldry: Ovid, in Tristia, contrasts the boldness of Aristides and others with his own Ars Amatoria, for which he was punished by exile.

Plutarch, in his Life of Crassus, explains that, after the defeat of Carrhae in 53 BCE, some Milesian fables were found in the baggage of the Parthians' Roman prisoners.

[3] Though the idea of the Milesian tale served as a model for the episodic narratives strung together in The Satyricon by Gaius Petronius Arbiter and The Golden Ass by Lucius Apuleius (second century CE),[4][5] neither Aristides's original Greek text nor the Latin translation survived.

The lengthiest survivor from this literature is the tale of "Cupid and Psyche", found in Apuleius, which Sir Richard Burton observed, "makes us deeply regret the disappearance of the others".