This chapter considers the prominence of and play with temporality in imperial Greek epic through a reading of three poems which thematise time in particularly self-conscious ways: Quintus of Smyrna’s Posthomerica, Triphiodorus’ Sack of Troy and Colluthus’ Abduction of Helen. These epics all return directly to the world of Troy, resurrect Homer’s idiolect and style, and locate their plots before or in-between the timespan of the Iliad and Odyssey. Analysing some key moments of temporal reflexivity in these poems, the chapter outlines the specific ‘imperial Greek temporality’ that they share, which connects these otherwise very different poems and renders them distinct from, for instance, Apollonius’ Alexandrian epic as analysed by Phillips. These poets proudly return to the literary distant past and use this past to convey their own imperial identities, revelling in their paradoxical positions as both pre- and post-Homeric.

This chapter is centred on the controversial epic ‘sub’ genre of the epyllion. Verhelst first underlines the scholarly debates surrounding epyllion as a category and then turns to look more closely at poems which themselves could be termed ‘epyllionic’, starting with the Homeric Hymn to Hermes, and moving through the Hellenistic age (Theocritus’ Idyll 24, Moschus’ Eros the Runaway, and the Batrachomyomachia) to late antiquity (the Orphic Argonautica and Colluthus’ Abduction of Helen). Verhelst focuses not just on the aesthetic dimensions of these poems, but also on the characters contained within them: ‘small’ characters in small epic (children, Hermes, eros, frogs and mice) and foreboding cameos by ‘large’ figures like Achilles. Verhelst shows how these texts manipulate their mythological, primarily Homeric, models to put grand epic heroics into a new perspective, be it comical or dark, and suggests how characterisation, size and speed are key ways to understand how these poems negotiate their own position in relation to Homer and the epic tradition, as ‘shrunken’, but not diminutive epic.

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 examines the peculiar practice, common in late antique epic poetry, of comparing a character to a divinity stripped of their visual attributes. From the works of Claudian, Nonnus, and Colluthus it analyzes three case studies that epitomize this form of comparison and illustrate its use in a specific literary and cultural context. Such comparisons are shown to rely on the reader’s familiarity with visual representations of the pagan gods and to reflect a growing interest in and engagement with the visual arts in late antique literature. In defining characters by attributes they do not possess, the poets draw attention to their visual ambiguity and vulnerability, and allow internal and external audiences to gaze at them uninhibitedly. Female characters in particular are thus proffered as objects of the lusting gaze and are denied individual visual identities and narrative agency. This literary emphasis on artistic beauty, stripped of its attributes and, by extension, divine power, resembles contemporary Christian attempts to de-contextualize pagan artworks by removing their religious attributes and associations, reframing them as purely aesthetic objects.

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?