The romance tradition in Persian literature is typically traced back to the early eleventh century, with the appearance of four important works: sections of the Shâh-nâma (Ferdowsi, d. 1020), Varqa-va-Golshâh (Ayyuqi, d. ca. 1030), Vâmeq-o-Azrâ (Onsori, d. 1039), and Vis-o-Râmin (Gorgâni, c. 1055). These works, the story goes, set the stage for Nezâmi Ganjavi (d. ca. 1209), whose “Quintet” firmly established the conventions of the Persian romance and provided the model for countless imitations, responses, and adaptations by poets well into the seventeenth century. This narrative, while accurate in the broad sense, comes with some significant drawbacks: it collapses a large body of poetry of considerable thematic and stylistic variety into a single category, elevates the work of one poet as the standard against which all others are measured, and posits the concept of “romance” as a fixed form and genre with its own historical trajectory. However, “romance” is not an indigenous term, and while our use of it, both in Western and Iranian scholarship, does illuminate some intriguing points of comparison between Persian, Greek, and European models, it makes it difficult to recreate the original context from which this literary movement emerged. What exactly is a “romance” in Persian literature? Where did it come from? What is its relationship with other forms and genres? This paper seeks to begin to address these questions through a thematic and structural reading of the four works mentioned above against some of their known sources, which include Pahlavi songs, Hellenistic novels, Arabic lyric poetry, and Abbasid court literature. The results of the study, although preliminary, already suggest a few important themes that warrant further investigation: that music may play a much more significant role in the performance and reception of the text than was previously thought; that content, and not form, is the dominant element in setting the horizons of expectation for a poem; that the conceptual distinction between epic, lyric, and romantic poetry will not map very well onto Persian literature without some careful adjustment of these terms; and finally, that a transformation of the “genre” seems to have occurred in the early eleventh century, in which poets inverted, interiorized, and destabilized their sources to create impossible moral dilemmas to which death was the only solution. Through this study, we hope to contribute to the ongoing effort to bring greater nuance and precision to the history of Persian literature.