The scenes which bring closure to the plots of the Greek ideal novels are all fundamentally supportive of the hierarchies of social order. The happy endings of these novels are happy not only because the lovers reunite, but also because elite youth are returned from slavery and degradation to their original elite station and accepted back into their natal families by their fathers. The joy of their return to high status is shared by the whole community, from the powerful citizens who control and represent it to the people who are left behind in slavery while the protagonists are rescued. The correctness of the social hierarchies of freedom, political power, and familial power is reinforced by the communal relief and satisfaction in seeing the characters correctly placed within the hierarchy.
This pro-elite ideology is inherent to the plot structure of the novels and appears to be inherited along with it, as the same ideology is visible in the Odyssey as well. This ideology does not permeate the texts in their entirety, but only becomes unavoidable in the scenes that resolve the plot. Several of the texts have scenes earlier on that could be interpreted as drawing attention to the suffering of less powerful people in society and even the unfairness of that suffering. This suggests that the authors were not entirely committed to the pro-elite ideology themselves. The persistent presence of this ideology in the closural scenes is then best attributed to the structure of the plot itself. Part of the drama of this plot is the protagonists’ loss of status and their triumphant resumption of their original status in the closural scenes; this can only happen within a hierarchical society, and the more severe the suffering of the lower classes, the more dramatic the return to the ranks of the elite is.</p
