The eighth chapter begins with the question of why monumental epic came to be written again after a period of neglect; it suggests that the epyllion provided a way forward. After a history of republican epics after Ennius, Vergil’s Aeneid and Ovid’s Metamorphoses form the primary subjects of this chapter. Coverage focuses on what was innovative about them, language, plot, historical contexts, and style, and compares them to one another.

This chapter focusses on a genre, which in recent scholarship has been unmasked as a modern invention: the ‘epyllion’. About the definition of this highly problematic term no consensus can be reached (metre? length? topic? structure?). Literary histories claim that the genre was born in the Hellenistic period and flourished again in Catullus’ time, with his Poem 64 as its main representative. Generally, they do not provide any examples of the ‘genre’ from Late Antiquity. And yet, one could argue in favour of a late antique ‘revival’, with both Latin (Dracontius, Reposianus, Ausonius, Aegritudo Perdicae) and Greek (Triphiodorus, Musaeus, Colluthus, Orphic Argonautica) representatives. This chapter looks at the ways these poems reflect genre awareness through an analysis of prefaces, prologues and other passages which stand out as (potentially) metapoetic. How do these late antique poems engage with their grand epic models? To what extent do they present themselves as a different (sub)genre and as traditional or innovative? Is the shortness thematised? If it was not a distinctive genre yet in Hellenistic times, did the epyllion, perhaps, become a genre in Late Antiquity?

In this and the next chapter, I turn to a poetic form that plays a particular role in the aesthetics of late antiquity, namely, the hexameter narratives generally known as epyllia. In this chapter I will be looking specifically at how an epyllion narrates a story of eros. The parochial fights over definition – what precisely is or is not an epyllion, and is it a genre recognized in antiquity? – need not detain us here, though such debates have repeatedly vexed scholars.1 I have already indicated that questions of form need to go far beyond such restricted, formal perspectives. This chapter is primarily more concerned with the issue of scale, namely, what the effect is of taking a grand subject and renarrating it in the space of a few hundred lines. If scale matters, then the epyllion’s treatment of eros should prove to be a particularly telling space in which to interrogate how the scale of narrative – its form – affects its perspective. What can and cannot be said in a love story? How long should a love story be? How does size matter?