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This paper presents the classic treatment of this loose grouping of poets in the middle of the first century BC, exploring their interrelationship and common poetic themes and forms (especially the epyllion).

Clearly transitional between the Eclogues and the Aeneid, this poem shows generic strain in its second half, especially in the proem to Book 3 with its anticipation of martial epic, and in the Aristaeus section at the end of Book 4, where the interplay of questions of literary form and political commitment is brilliantly explored (Homeric, neoteric, Hesiodic, Hellenistic).

The first chapter shows that Milton became familiar with Ovid at an early age through practices of translation and imitation. Noting close parallels with and specific verbal echoes of Ovid's writing, it demonstrates that the young Milton has a surprisingly keen grasp also of the broader patterns and concerns of Ovid's works. It suggests further, moreover, that Milton became increasingly attentive to revisions of Ovid by earlier writers. Beginning with some of the Ovidian elements in the early Latin works it turns to Milton's first English poem, ‘On the Death of a fair Infant dying of a Cough’, and ends with a discussion of his masque Comus. As he moves into English, Milton's reading of Ovid responds also to the adaptations of the Elizabethans, most notably Spenser and Shakespeare, but also the epyllion writers and Marlowe who are especially drawn to the stories of Daphne and Venus and Adonis.

This chapter focuses on the depiction of Ariadne in Catullus 64. Catullus' sixty-fourth poem is an extraordinary work, which takes the form of the Hellenistic epyllion, already a subtly sophisticated sub-genre, and pushes it to its limits. In this poem, Catullus inverts again a genre characterized by inversion to make contact once more with conventionally epic elements through his treatment of the myth of the Argonauts, whilst preserving neoteric contact with the feminine in the form of the Ariadne ecphrasis. This 213-line section (which takes up just over half of the poem) is also one of the most important, and most sensitive, treatments of the story of Ariadne in classical literature. It was recognized as a formative influence by later Latin poets not only for their own versions of Ariadne's story, but even for their portrayal of other characters, such as Vergil's Dido and Ovid's Scylla.

The Perseus and Andromeda episode in Manilius’ Astronomica (5.538-613) is an anomalous epyllion, downplaying the amatory themes prominent in the epyllion form and in other retellings of the myth. Manilius replaces human or mythological characters with elements from the personified natural world. The resulting vision of a powerful and sympathetic natural world acts as an imaginative counterpoint to Manilius’ account in the work as a whole of the universe that surrounds and controls us. Moreover, phrases and images from Manilius’ description of stars in the Perseus-Andromeda constellation group reappear in the epyllion, though often in an oblique and riddling way. Through this network of intratextual connection, the stars seem to exert their influences within the fabric of the poem itself, though, as always in astrology, this influence is not straightforward, but winding and oblique.

This chapter argues that Catullus’s poem 64 (a miniature epic or epyllion), though original by modern standards, is shot through with forms of translation that were common at Rome, in particular what we might call generic translation. Frequently the narrative flow of this long poem is paused to lavish attention on items associated with the transfer of culture from East to West. It is argued that these descriptions are self-reflexive moments where the poem probes its own unsettling status as a translation of the Alexandrian epyllion into Latin form. But even as this metapoetic subtext voices apprehension about the poem’s imported status, it poses the poet-translator as a contemporary hero in a belated world where all great deeds have already been done and all great texts have already been written.

Chapter 2 focuses on Catullus’s poem 64, his “epyllion” (“miniature epic”) on the marriage of Peleus and Thetis, with its great central ecphrasis of a tapestry depicting the myth of Ariadne and Theseus. Adopting an immensely allusive technique typical of the Hellenistic Greek poetry of Alexandria, Catullus here puts forward an inconsistent narrator who laments moral decline from archaic Greece to contemporary Rome while expressing a highly ambivalent and idiosyncratic receptivity to the heroic Greek past. Catullus thus encourages his audience to enter as Romans into an archaic Greek world seen in part through Alexandrian eyes, while pressing this audience to reflect on the broader phenomenon of elite philhellenism as it existed in the late Republic. Assimilated to the lover’s persona familiar from Catullus’s lyric and elegiac poetry, the narrator treats the Greek past itself as an eroticized object both eminently desirable and ultimately disappointing. With this problematic invitation beyond the here-and-now Catullus 64 offers both ironic and sympathetic commentary upon a culture of viewing like that implied by the illusionistic tableaux of contemporary Second Style wall painting.

Marlowe’s 1593 Hero and Leander is often treated as “fetishistic” because of the way it combines an erotic story with a unique obsession with objects, an obsession most evident in the three consecutive ekphrases (of Hero’s clothing, Leander’s body, and the Temple of Venus) with which the poem begins. But Marlowe’s work is more dynamic than such an approach would suggest. By analyzing stylistic correspondences between Marlowe’s work and the largely neglected literature of post-Augustan antiquity, especially the Greek romances of the Second Sophistic, this chapter shows that Marlowe’s poem has absorbed into itself the ekphrastic style of this earlier literature in order to undo its fetishized aestheticism from within. In the end, Hero and Leander critiques literary history by introducing an awareness of the historical brutalities that previous aestheticism excludes.

Lucretius wanted to reach a wider public than just his patron Memmius; Philodemus and the authors he cited took it for granted that both prose and poetry were meant to be heard by a general audience. Demetrius On Style treated historians as analogous to poets, and serious letter-writers to epideictic orators, implying oral delivery in each case. Caesar’s war commentaries, as annual reports to the People rather than the Senate, were probably composed to be read out in public. Catullus’ attacks on Caesar presuppose a wide audience; poems 61–3 are evidently for performance; and the genre we call ‘epyllion’ may have been intended to accompany music and dance. The ‘Greek stage’ attested at Rome in the second and first centuries BC may have influenced both Catullus and Virgil to imitate the ‘mimes’ of Theocritus.

This chapter discusses the reception in the Renaissance of the episode of Orpheus found in Ovid’s Metamorphoses and argues that the Ovidian Orpheus, who rejects women and teaches the love of boys to his fellow Thracians, is a figure of anxiety in the English Renaissance, largely because his authorial persona combines misogyny with the teaching of pederasty and because of the homosocial environment of the Inns of Court, in which many Orphic poems were composed. After analysing attempts to suppress or moralize away Orpheus’ preferences in authors such as Arthur Golding, it provides an in-depth study of Orpheus’ reception in two poems in the epyllion genre. The first, attributed to Richard Barnfield, does not openly portray Orpheus’ homosexual preferences but paints his attraction for other husbands, and contains homoerotic hints, whereas the other, anonymous work condemns Orpheus as a sodomite, albeit not without ambiguity.

In this chapter, Scylla’s lament in the Ciris and its complex intertextual links with other poems of the Augustan and imperial periods are considered. The hypothesis is advanced that, if this poem is an intentionally anachronistic Roman fake in a post-Virgilian or post-Ovidian world, it establishes a dialogue with contemporary Neronian or Flavian poetry by remaining relevant in an imperial, rather than a Republican, landscape as a poem to which poets allude. It can be argued that the Ciris-poet wrote in the imperial period after Ovid, and was part of a general revival of neoteric epyllion under the empire; compare Persius in his first satire or Lucan’s lost Orpheus. The poet of the Ciris should not be dismissed as an inferior composer because fashions change over time; note that Ovid, Lucan, and Statius are now thought of as canonical alongside Virgil, an unimaginable notion a century or so ago.