Propertius’ self-proclamation as the ‘Roman Callimachus’ in elegy 4.1 is something of a provocation in a poem and book of Vigilian epicizing ambition – a provocation staged in Horos’ immediate reassertion of a doctrinaire interpretation of Callimachean programmatics. This chapter unpacks these apparent tensions chiefly through exploration of Propertius’ attention to Virgil’s prior programme of Callimachean allusion: thus elegies 4.3, 4.6 and 4.11 recycle Virgil’s use of the Coma Berenices to mediate Caesar’s catasterism; 4.6 reconstitutes the Callimachean hymns that lie behind the shield of Aeneas; 4.9 identifies the rival Callimachean and Apollonian models that Virgil unites in Aeneas’ visit to the future site of Rome; and the book as a whole is peppered with scholarly readings of Virgil’s learnedness. In this way Propertius 4 shows that Callimachus was always already a patriotic poet (despite the tendentiousness of the Roman recusatio), that Virgil had his own claim to Callimachean (and so to Propertian) refinement, and that genre does not preclude an elegist from Virgilian themes (hence Propertius’ obsessive matching of Virgilian and Callimachean stichometries and line-counts).

Drawing together and supplementing the structural and stichometric parallels observed beween Propertius and Virgil so far, this chapter refreshes an old debate about the genesis of Book 4 with the argument that the collection builds into itself a carefully designed Virgilian architecture. Or rather, architectures: Propertius 4 vacillates beween a ten-unit bucolic substructure and a twelve-unit epic superstructure; like the Georgics and the whole Virgilian corpus that encloses that work, it locates at its centre a Callimachean ‘Victoria Caesaris’, complete with Apolline temple; and in the ostensibly ‘Iliadic’ 4.7 and ‘Odyssean’ 4.8 it inverts the Homeric diptych of the two hexads of the Aeneid, but in a way that also recognizes the Virgilian sequence and how it is blurred. Symbolic of this protean book is Vertumnus in elegy 4.2, the shapeshifting god whose loquacious statue – the work of the Mamurius who fabricated the eleven copies of Numa’s legendary shield – not only replicates, en abyme, the book’s range of Virgilian lexis, but also encodes its Virgilian structure. A coda to the chapter shows that Ovid repeatedly draws on Vertumnus as ambassador of metamorphic elegiac-epic poetics.

This chapter examines the elusive notion of humour in Greek epic. According to Aristotle (Poetics 1448b24) it was Homer who, along with founding most other genres of literature, established ‘the schema of comedy’. Hosty begins by surveying our limited evidence for Homeric humour – both within the Iliad and Odyssey and in mysterious works like the Margites – and proceeds to examine the relationship between Greek epic and the humorous, analysing the potentially whimsical elements of the Epic Cycle, the wry domestic detail of Callimachus’ Hecale, the determinedly straight-faced pastiche of the Batrachomyomachia, and the gleeful absurdity of Lucian’s ‘prose epic’ the True Histories.

Discussion of the transfer of cult knowledge from Anatolia to European Hellas in both the Bronze Age and Iron Age, with a close examination of Ephesian Artemis and other Asian Mother-goddess figures with consideration of Ur-Aeolian (= Ahhiyawan) and Aeolian involvement in the process.

The fourth chapter introduces several ‘personal voices’, immediately complicating our understanding of how personally to take them: the authors discussed here seem to offer us an unmitigated look at their inner lives, but Latin literature does not, for the most part, work like that. Through discussions of Lucilius, in-depth treatment of Catullus, and exploration of the letters of Cicero, we show the public nature even of what seems most personal.

I loathe everything to do with The People,’ writes Callimachus, and this (public) turning away from the public poetry of the fifth century is a stance, a gesture, repeated in a multiformity of guises throughout the texts of the Hellenistic period. Although the practices of literary production, performance and circulation are known in even less detail for this period than for the fifth century (and many questions about, say, the constitution of the public of Hellenistic literature are simply not answerable with any security), none the less there are much-discussed and highly significant shifts both in the conditions of literary production and in the presentation of the poet’s voice which require some brief introductory remarks.

This chapter investigates the role of Hellenistic kings and queens as victorious horse owners. It is asked to which degree the different dynasties of the period used equestrian victories as a means of representation. The fact that Philip II and his son Alexander had a different approach to agonistic competition gave leeway to their successors’ competitive behavior: Whereas the Antigonids and Seleucids refrained from equestrian competition, the Ptolemies became the most successful royal family in terms of athletics. They sponsored promising athletes, established a new category of contests, and were imitated by their courtiers with regard to their engagement in chariot races. In the agonistic context, the Ptolemies presented themselves as a victorious, Macedonian dynasty which integrated the female members of the family into an image of power. The Attalids, in contrast, labelled themselves a loving family of united brothers in which no disputes over the throne ever occurred.

This chapter argues that, unlike all other Greek novelists, Longus shows knowledge of Callimachus’ poetry, both the Aitia (whence his use of ἀρτιγένειος, twice: 1.15.1 and 4.10.1) and the Epigrams (whence the figurative ἕλκος of 1.14.1, near to Longus’ first use of ἀρτιγένειος). These strong cases increase the probability that some other words (ἐπτoηθεῖσαι 1.22.2) and themes (e.g. the simultaneous death of two young siblings at 4.24.2, cf. Call. Anth.Pal. 7.517; the recondite myth of Branchus, 4.17.6, cf. Call. fr. 229 Pfeiffer) are drawn from Callimachus. In explaining why Callimachus might attract Longus’ interest, it is proposed that the four-book format of Daphnis and Chloe, unique in the novels, might be a further Callimachean intertextuality, calculated to invite readers’ reflection on how Longus’ work could be read as a series of Aitia, that of the cave of the Nymphs (in the preface and Book 4) complementing those of the inset tales of Books 1 to 3.

This chapter discusses modern trends in the study of late antique Latin poetry, namely the aesthetics of the jeweled style and especially the scholarly discourse on ‘nonreferentiality’ in allusion, and seeks to apply the concepts underlying this scholarship to late antique Greek epic, in particular to Triphiodorus and Quintus of Smyrna. As a case study and the focus of the chapter, allusions to Apollonius’ Argonautica, previously noted but undiscussed in scholarship on Triphiodorus, are discussed at length. The chapter ends with a re-examination of the in-proem in Book 12 of Quintus’ Posthomerica, and argues, in a nuancing of recent scholarship, that the passage’s much-discussed allusion to Callimachus can be read as ultimately ‘nonreferential’ in function.

This chapter examines the range, scope, generic roots and poetics of Hellenistic paradoxographical collections. The cultural context surrounding the production of the first paradoxographical collections in Ptolemaic Alexandria is thoroughly explored. The relationships between paradoxography, wonder and previous traditions of Greek ethnographic writing and contemporary Peripatetic scientific writing are outlined through the examination of Antigonus of Carystus’ Collection of Marvellous Investigations, Ps. Aristotle’s On Marvellous Things Heard, Herodotus’ Histories, Callimachus’ Aitia and Aristotle’s biological writings.

Although there appears to be a lot in common between Ovid’s Fasti and Metamorphoses in terms of how they connect the present to the past through aetiology, the chapter argues that in fact there are profound differences in the role of aetiology in each poem. The Fasti is full of examples of past actions that have become fixed in a form that endures in current ritual, but there are vanishingly few examples of ritual aetiology in the Metamorphoses. The Fasti is really about religion while the Metamorphoses is really about mythology. Even though scholars of religion in both the ancient and modern worlds have seen a tight connection between myth and ritual, the chapter argues that we should follow Ovid in disavowing the myth/ritual nexus.

This chapter is concerned with the fable, in this case the Akkadian fable of The Date-Palm and the Tamarisk, which travelled eastward to Persia and westward to Greece: in both places, the fable retained its ‘deep structure’ but underwent adaptations on the surface to suit the new localities. The fable posed a fundamental question to its audiences – is the cult of the gods more important than preservation of humans? – and provided a platform on which views and beliefs of other cultures could be built, with the change of scene or characters as needed.