Critics have long recognized that the Elizabethan minor epic or 'erotic epyllion', dealing largely with mythological love affairs and including Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis, form a coherent generic cluster and testify to an intense albeit apparently rather short-lived literary vogue. This chapter argues that the general critical determination to understand these poems as Ovidian has ignored that their distinctive style is quite unlike that of Ovid. It locates these poems instead within a wider category of medium-length mythological narrative verse in both Latin and English, unified by asensuous and ecphrastic style as well as shared features, including stock characters (such as Venus, Proserpina and Glaucus) and set pieces (such as the ‘Garden of Venus’ motif). Latin examples precede the first English instances, and, where studied at all, have been variously described as epyllia and epithalamia, but have almost never been discussed in relation to the English genre. The chapter argues that the Elizabethan English epyllion of the 1590s functioned as a proxy for formal epithalamia, which, due to the Queen's age and lack of an heir, largely disappeared in England in this decade.

This chapter turns to a third influential facet of the Horatian lyric tradition: the development in English literary culture of the major political ode. Unlike moralizing lyric or psalm paraphrase, this form, of which the most famous early modern example is Andrew Marvell’s 1650 ‘Horatian Ode on Cromwell’s Return from Ireland’, made a relatively late appearance in English poetry, with only scattered and marginally canonical examples (such as those by Jonson, Drayton and Fanshawe) prior to Marvell.

This chapter therefore seeks to answer two related questions. What are the defining features of the political ode in early modern England, taking into account the full panoply of the Latin (and, for these purposes, primarily neo-Latin) tradition? And how different do the landmarks of English achievement in this form – including poems by Jonson and Drayton as well as Marvell and Cowley – appear if read within the Latin literary context from which they emerged? It identifies several phases in the maturing of the formal panegyric ode as written in England in the latter sixteenth century before the form entered the vernacular.

Chapter 3 charts the prevalence of physical description in Senecan tragedy, arguing that this is not a symptom of Rezitationsdrama, but a consequence of Seneca’s interest in physiognomy and pathogonomy, both of which use bodily signals to evaluate the quality of people’s internal psychological / emotional / mental states. Like coherence and exemplarity, physiognomic analysis unites the quasi-personal and purely fictional elements of character, on the one hand by encouraging audiences to infer a psychology behind characters’ surfaces, and on the other by focusing attention on textual signs and symbols. This chapter discusses the confluence of bodily and mental states in Seneca’s Phaedra and Oedipus.

Several of the most remarkable political poems of the mid-seventeenth century, including Marvell’s ‘First Anniversary’ (1655) and Dryden’s ‘Astraea Redux’ (1660), belong to a genre which has not been clearly defined in English literature. These substantial poems, each of several hundred lines, derive elements from a range of panegyric forms, including the tradition of the political ode discussed in ; but the main generic model for poetry of this sort, which is little represented in English before Marvell’s ‘First Anniversary’, is the panegyric epic of the late antique poet Claudian: a genre, new to Latin when Claudian began writing, which combined the techniques of prose panegyric with contemporary (rather than mythological) epic. This chapter seeks to set the major seventeenth-century English examples of this form – as well as a handful of English-language precursors – within the wider context of a Latin genre which, though now obscure, was both widely understood and frequently composed throughout early modern Europe.

Now that we have come to the end, I would like you to turn back, dear reader, to the front cover of this book, or, in the more likely event of your reading it in digital form, to scroll back to the top. Take a close look. The image is of a face carved from the pages of an old volume, a piece of art combining the plastic forms of sculpture and mask with hints of more abstract fictional representation. As sculpture, the work’s medium and its content coincide in being fully three-dimensional: this is not a physically flat description in print, or a (slightly less flat) painting, but a material, graspable visage, and the very fact of its materiality draws a particularly close analogy to an actual human face. It is, however, a face with no back; the head stops abruptly at the book’s cover. Unlike more traditional sculpted portraits, this is not a bust, it has no neck and shoulders; it is a detached, free-floating face, and this incompleteness evokes, to my mind at least, the theatrical mask.

Seventeenth-century English poetry is renowned for its religious lyric, especially that of Herbert, Donne, Crashaw, Vaughan and Traherne. In Chapters 2 and 3 we saw how the interest in metrical and formal variety, which is such a marked feature of Herbert’s 'Temple' (1633), can be traced back to the Latin poetic experiments and innovations of the latter sixteenth century, and specifically to the technical and tonal variety of the most influential of the psalm paraphrase collections. This chapter deals in large part with another of the influences upon Herbert’s distinctive style – namely the largely (though not exclusively) Jesuit poetics of Latin devotional verse, which combined with the tradition of formal variety, scriptural paraphrase and religious epigram to revolutionary effect in seventeenth-century England. It traces the development of religious verse in England from the mid-sixteenth through to the early eighteenth century, and describes how the new kind of devotional lyric was read and written alongside older types of religious verse, especially scriptural and devotional epigram and paraphrase.

The tradition of unclassical scriptural paraphrase, such as that found in Du Bartas’ Sepmaines and Lucy Hutchinson’s Order and Disorder, has attracted some thoughtful critical attention in recent years. But Du Bartas’ work was modelled – albeit with elements of contention – on didactic epic of the type exemplified by Palingenius’ Zodiacus Vitae, an ubiquitous schooltext which was the very opposite of 'sub-canonical' in the seventeenth century. For the modern reader, approaching Milton's Paradise Lost via Virgil and Homer, the digressive mode of Du Bartas and the unclassical elements of Paradise Lost seem anomalous. Early modern poets and readers, however, were taught to approach the classics via approved Protestant or quasi-Protestant works composed by near contemporaries. Of these, the Zodiacus Vitae, though now largely forgotten and when remembered, almost universally misrepresented, was in England among one of the most influential. This chapter takes the achievement and allure of Palingenius’ poem seriously as a model in examining some of the very large number of examples of ‘unclassical epic’ read and composed by English authors in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

This chapter treats allegory in the Posthomerica in light of late antique thinking on personification. Tracing Quintus’ deployment of the technique, it centres on the shield of Achilles, which contains the fullest personification allegory: the Mountain of Arete. Scholars have focused on the literary-philosophical aspects of this image. I argue that Quintus uses personification self-consciously as a literary device. Drawing on contemporary conceptions of personification from both the Greek and Latin traditions – rhetorical treatises, school exercises and literary works (particularly Prudentius’ Psychomachia, which applies personification full-scale into hexameter verse) –this chapter shows how the Posthomerica reflects ideas in these texts about the inherently duplicitous nature of this mode of writing. Highlighting the tensions in his allegorical configurations, Quintus reveals a sophisticated understanding of personification as a productive but problematic system of divergence and convergence between different worlds and perspectives. By so doing, he advertises limits and challenges of his own poetic creation – a text both rooted in the Homeric past and a product of its time.

The much-debated engagement of late antique Greek poetry with Latin models could have important consequences for the interaction between the two literary traditions in this period. The present chapter focusses on Ovid and Nonnus. In the song contest between the Pierides and Calliope in Ovid’s Metamorphoses 5, the Pierides focus on the gods’ transformations as they flee from Typhoeus and hide in Egypt, while Calliope’s lengthy song about Proserpina’s rape begins with the defeat and punishment of Typhoeus. We examine how the Typhonomachy myth in Nonnus’ Dionysiaca may have been inspired by these complementary narratives of the same myth in Ovid’s epic. The flight of the gods sung by the Ovidian Pierides features in Nonnus’ own Typhonomachy (Dion. 1.142–3); moreover, Cadmus and Typhoeus are portrayed in Dionysiaca 1 as singers of similar calibre, while Cadmus, disguised as a pastoral singer carrying ‘deceiving pan-pipes’, recalls the deceitful Mercury of Ovid’s Metamorphoses 1. Like Nonnus’ Cadmus enchanting Typhoeus, Mercury, on Jupiter’s orders to free Io, assumes a shepherd’s shape and puts the hundred-eyed herdsman Argus to sleep with stories and the music of his pan-pipe.

Around 500 CE Colluthus, writing in Greek, and Dracontius, writing in Latin, each composed an epyllion on the Abduction of Helen. However, apart from title, date, and genre, the two works have very little in common. This chapter presents an interpretation of the two poems that connects them with contemporary historical and social developments. On the one hand, the role of Hermione in Colluthus is connected with the changing role of children in late antique society, under the influence of Christian morality. On the other, the attitude towards Vergil in Dracontius is explained from the late antique political context (being after the fall of Rome) and the perspective of the author as an advocate in Carthage under Vandal rule. A comparison between the two poems sheds interesting light on how the ‘antehomeric’ narrative was adapted respectively in the East and the West: in Colluthus' Egypt and in Dracontius' Africa.

This chapter looks at the adaptations, mutations, and analogies of Ovidian themes and dynamics of metamorphosis in Greek and Roman narrative poems. The first part offers a sampling of metamorphic moments in Nonnus’ Dionysiaca, arguing for a far-reaching comparability with Ovidian techniques, and also opening up a comparison between Dionysiac metamorphosis and metamorphosis in the Christian story. The second part explores the uses of metamorphosis in Latin Christian poetry on biblical stories, and in narratives of conversion, taking examples from biblical epic, Paulinus of Nola, and Prudentius. The question is posed of whether there is a specifically Christian poetics of metamorphosis.

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?