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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.

Traditional accounts of the minor epic have emphasised alternately their emanation from the rhetorical training of the Elizabethan schoolroom and their erotic experimentalism, but the wide variousness and peculiar constitution of the minor epic canon demand a more concerted account of where the genre fits into the career models available to the poets of the 1590s and early seventeenth century. Identifying the three primary examples by Lodge, Marlowe, and Shakespeare as immediately successful and lastingly influential, this chapter turns to less studied epyllia by Heywood, Marston, Fletcher, and Chapman to propose that secondary minor epics are best understood as calculated acts of emulation, a way for professionalising poets to map their relations to the works of their predecessors, rivals, and peers.

Christopher Marlowe’s radicality has often been situated in his biography, in the rumours of his atheism, homosexuality, and renegade lifestyle. This chapter focuses instead on his edgy, recalcitrant, and defiant poetics. Surveying his major poetic works (his translations of Lucan and Ovid, his lyric poem ‘The Passionate Shepherd to His Love’, his epyllion Hero and Leander, and the blank verse of his plays), the chapter explores how Marlowe’s work resists teleological or end-driven modes of thought. His work does so in many ways: through lines of verse that seem to reach beyond their own end-stopped form, through a kind of anti-narrative poetic eddying that celebrates non-normative sexuality and play, and through a complex defiance of epic triumphalism.

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.