This PhD thesis explores the conflicting narratological momenta at play in Heliodorus’s Aethiopica (approx. fourth century C.E.) and their relationship to the novel’s irreconcilable ideological impulses. The conception of this novel as a whole is still dominated by the readings of Jack Winkler and John Morgan: the former sees it as a playful work about hermeneutical questions; the latter singles out its teleological drive and moralising side. Developing a narratology of possibilities, the first part of this dissertation argues that both interpretations fundamentally misconceive the Aethiopica’s nature by advocating a single ‘correct’ reading. I demonstrate that this novel is a magic box containing numerous possible narrative scenarios on a broad spectrum, of which a playful and pluralising, on the one hand, and teleological and reductive, on the other hand, mark the extremes. The final chapter of my dissertation ventures into the intellectual landscape of late antiquity: I explore hypothetical interpretations that might emerge if we viewed the Aethiopica from perspectives associated with two non-Christian interpretative communities of its time—rhetorically trained pepaideumenoi and Platonists—that is to say, with their cognitive habits in mind. While the ‘educated’ reading focuses on Heliodorus’s engagement with the Classical past, the Platonist interpretation zooms in on the novel’s allegorical side. From the Aethiopica’s receptivity for these ideologically charged readings, I infer that the novel is a playing field for what I call ‘cognitive identities’ of the late imperial era—by which I mean those elements of social identity that concern methods of information processing. To conclude, my thesis aims to achieve something that has all too often remained an unfulfilled promise in narratologically oriented literary criticism: to bridge the gap between formal analysis and cultural, discursive interpretation.