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Ovid's epic response to Vergil gives body to what the Aeneid already shadows forth: the intractable paradoxes undermining epic dreams of a harmonious, organically united polity. But the intertextual conversation among Latin epics did not stop with the Metamorphoses. This chapter examines briefly how Ovid crucially and fundamentally shaped his epic successors' civic visions, sketching the parameters of generic re‐vision from Lucan to Silius Italicus. The intrafamilial civil war regularly dramatized by Vergil's successors moulds their epic cities around political desperation and gendered conflict. Vergil shaped the beginnings of the urbs aeterna into a providential narrative whose logical telos was Augustan Rome, bequeathing to later epic intense engagement with the nature and limitations of the polity. But Ovid shared that engagement; what the post‐Augustan epicists read in Vergil they read in part through the lens Ovid had provided them. His Thebes particularizes just how the providential city comes to grief.

The chapter looks at the relation of Homeric structures to Callimachus' Hecale and Apollonius' Argonautica. It starts from criticism of the time, and from the ideas of Aristotle on Homer and unity. These ideas present a point of reference for Hellenistic poets; but they also obscure the importance in Homer and these poets of ‘parataxis’, of expressive sequences of parallel items. Apollonius' work, forcefully articulated into books, creates a paratactic combination of one and many, complicated by a single ‘trial’ in Colchis. Book-structure and other structuring highlights multiple perspectives. The Hecale plays with ‘one’, ‘two’, and double perspectives in a single work. The poets diverge from Homer and match Homer's depth; they are both experimental and ethically searching.

This introductory chapter explains the need for the present study by contrasting its aims with recent approaches to Valerius' Argonautica. Of particular importance is this book's attempt to historicize the poem by arguing that it reflects the restorative ideals of Vespasianic Rome, a moment characterized by political renewal following the civil wars of 68–69. In order to carry out this poetics of renewal, it is argued that Valerius had to confront the iconoclastic rhetoric of his most recent epic predecessor, Lucan. It is suggested that Valerius construes the refoundation of the imperial project and the rehabilitation of the epic genre as mutually reinforcing acts of renewal and rebirth. The remainder of the chapter outlines the most salient features of the chapters that follow.

This chapter examines the evidence for dating Valerius' Argonautica, one of the most vexed and contested issues in criticism of the poem. Barring the appearance of new evidence, a complete and incontestable solution to this difficult issue will remain elusive. However, since this study regards the epic as a product of Vespasianic Rome a reexamination of the evidence is in order. This is made all the more pressing in light of the positions adopted by several of Valerius' most recent and influential commentators, who suggest that composition of the poem extended well into the reign of Domitian. An analysis of both the external and internal evidence shows that there is no compelling reason to assign to Valerius' poem a period of composition extending beyond the 70s, that is, that the Argonautica was composed almost entirely within the reign of Vespasian.

This chapter seeks to illuminate Hellenistic poems by pursuing what they did with some aspects of Homer and with some ideas that were connected with Homer in the Hellenistic period. Accordingly, the inquiry will not consider the abundant and important evidence for poems that have been more or less lost; it will concentrate on one surviving epic, the Argonautica, and one partially surviving epic, the Hecale.

This chapter discusses Blitzstein’s work from 1929-1931, including his first E. E. Cummings song cycle, is 5; the symbolist opera Parabola and Circula, the ballet Cain; the score to Ralph Steiner’s abstract film, Surf and Seaweed; the opera The Harpies (after the Argonautica); and the Piano Concerto.

The introduction defines characterization in Roman poetry as a form of allusion, and establishes its basis in Stoic philosophy, rhetorical practice, and mechanisms of exemplarity. Repetition and emulation of models rather than uniqueness and Cartesian interiority better define Roman approaches to literary character. Pervasive referentiality in Roman poetry is explained through an articulation of Ovidian poetics, an “Ovid code”. The introduction also contains a summary of each of the chapters. A case study of Apollonius’ Thetis as a composite of the Iliadic Achilles and the hymnic Demeter illustrates poetic genealogy and allusion through characterization.

The myth of Jason and the Argonauts, preserved in two extant epics by Apollonius and Valerius Flaccus, has inspired a number of films. This chapter builds on the discussion of Homer by exploring how two Jason and the Argonauts films engage with the Argonautica epics, and key themes such as narrative structure (the distinction between epic, romance, tragedy, and adventure) and the depiction of the Olympian gods. These epic narratives, in both literature and film, question and reassess epic conventions in important ways, as the chapter's discussion of Jason's heroism shows.

This paper studies the reception of the Homeric Hymns in some pagan and Christian poets of Late Antiquity. It offers some methodological remarks on ‘quotations’ or ‘allusions’ and re-use of epic code; and on the need to distinguish between instances of epic language reused by Late Antique poets and actual quotations or borrowings from the Homeric Hymns. After an overall view on the presence of the Hymns in some major poets of Late Antiquity (especially Nonnus of Panopolis, Proclus, the Orphic Argonautica), I deal with the reception of the Hymns to Hermes, whose presence can be detected in papyri, inscriptions and highbrow poems (either pagans or Christians) from the second century until the fifth century AD. I argue that in Late Antiquity the concept of epic code was extended to the whole Homeric corpus, probably by the influence of school education.