It would be depressingly easy, and not very instructive, to document the neglect of ‘later’ Greek poetry in books that claim to offer accessible introductions to ancient literature; that it is still possible to do so from books written very recently, when the whole notion of ‘the classical canon’ has come under increasingly strenuous examination and the study of ‘later antiquity’ has properly come into its own, might seem more depressing still, though it also sheds light on how the academy views its task of disseminating trends in research more broadly. In any case, any such catalogue of neglect would be widely (and perhaps rightly) regarded as a rhetorical move of self-justification of a kind very familiar in academic discourse; after all, it took years of voluminous writing about the ancient novel before scholars in that field abandoned the ritual complaint about the ‘neglect’ of this literature (the torch has perhaps been handed on to the study of early Christian narrative).

Within the general context of increasing interest in Greek literature in the Roman period, interest in Dionysius the Periegete is certainly on the rise. Our knowledge of his extensive textual tradition is still expanding, and further editions are under way; the ideologies that structure his work have been explored in a series of publications by Christian Jacob (1990, 1991); and the welcome increase in the volume of publications over the last five years or so includes a collection of essays which is especially geared to one of my themes in this essay, Dionysius' relations with Hellenistic poetry and poets. Yet there are some basic aspects of his poetics that remain un-, or under-, studied. At the heart of the matter, I suggest, are two major backgrounds that need to be explored further.

The first is the reception of Hellenistic poetry in the imperial period. Dionysius is a neo-Hellenistic poet. Indeed, he is so convincing a neo-Hellenistic poet that a critic as astute as Tycho Mommsen placed him in the first century BCE on the basis of a whole array of stylistic and metrical and other sorts of linguistic criteria. Dionysius' true date has been known for a century and a quarter; but we are really none the wiser about what it was that gave rise to this extraordinarily competent and convincing Hellenistic imitation. It is not only that he imitates Apollonius, Callimachus, Nicander, Aratus and others in purple passages of his own, but that so many of his techniques of composition and allusion, and—as this paper will demonstrate—his formal evocation of certain styles of writing, are thoroughly Hellenistic. So the first thing that is needed is an exploration of the various ways in which imperial writers respond to the masters of the high Hellenistic period, and their successors: is Dionysius a representative of a special and distinctive strain in imperial poetics, or is he a particular instance of something more multiform and complex?

Oppian's address to Marcus Aurelius signals the end of his five-book didactic epic on sea-fishing and encapsulates the poetic project of the Halieutica: no ordinary fish-treatise, this poem illuminates the extraordinary realm of the sea and is presented as a gift and homage to the Roman emperor. The work, written by a Cilician during the joint rule of Marcus Aurelius and Commodus (176-180 CE), attained great popularity in antiquity, was used as a Byzantine school-text and was much admired in the Renaissance and subsequent centuries. In more recent times, however, Oppian has languished in relative neglect. At the turn of the twentieth century, Wilamowitz curtly (and characteristically) dismissed the Halieutica as tedious and derivative, a poem whose subject-matter stems less from first-hand observation than from a ‘stale’ academic knowledge:

Quintus' Posthomerica in fourteen books covers events from the Trojan saga that take place between the funeral of Hector, which marks the end of the Iliad, and the homeward journey of the victorious Greeks after the sack of Troy. Various hints in the text help us place the epic within the Roman Empire but do not allow much scope for further speculation on a more specific date. Relative chronology with other hexameter poets in the Roman period sets the composition of the Posthomerica in the third century, which saw a floruit of mythological poetry. For material shared between Quintus' Posthomerica and Oppian's Halieutica, which is placed between 177 and 180 CE, it is generally agreed that Quintus is drawing on Oppian, and the end of the second century is thus a plausible terminus post quern for the Posthomerica. Key to establishing a terminus ante quern for this epic is Triphiodorus' epyllion on the Sack of Troy, which is now dated to the late third century: scholarly opinion is divided about the direction of the borrowing between the two poets, but if Triphiodorus is drawing on Quintus, which seems to be more likely, then the Posthomerica can be placed before the end of the third century.

Advice on marriage and the proper deportment for wives begins with the earliest Greek literature. While Homer's Andromache and Penelope provide practical role models, Hesiod (Works and Days 695-705, Theogony 568-612), followed (in iambics) by Semonides (frr. 6, 7), forcefully articulates male concerns about evil wives and women's wicked wiles. Hesiod's imperatival infinitives as well as his viewpoint reverberate more than a millennium later in a poem of advice composed, probably in the early 380s, by the Christian Gregory of Nazianzus for the marriage (νῦν μὲν σοὶ τόδ' ἔδωκα γαμήλιον, ‘now I have given you this wedding gift’, 2.2.6.108) of Olympias, elder daughter of Vitalian, a local Nazianzene worthy. This paper seeks to contribute to recent revaluations of Gregory's poetry—and hence of his place in the larger development of later Greek hexameter poetry—by illustrating how reading of the Olympias poem is enriched by exploration of its literary allusions and intertexts and its poetic craftsmanship. My title adopts Gregory's own image of ‘sugaring the pill’ of instruction for the young by writing in verse, but I extend the expression to include the pleasure that any reader may obtain in recognising Gregory's literary artistry, even when unpalatable prescriptions for female married life are the theme. Since the corpus is not well known, I begin by locating the poem within the context of Gregory's verse.

Over the last thirty years or so our understanding of the world of late antiquity has undergone a radical transformation. In addition to the important contributions by historians such as Peter Brown (on the body and society) and Averil Cameron (on the evolution of Christian discourse), new perspectives have also been opened up on the material culture of the later empire. In the arena of literary criticism, however, signs of any analogous transformation have been much less obvious. Though, of course, it is easy to overstate the case, it is nevertheless clear from the bibliographic record that the literature of the late antique period has not yet been subject to the intense critical attention of other epochs, such as the Second Sophistic. This article will attempt on a necessarily modest scale to address this lack of critical attention.

My primary focus is the fifth-century CE epic poem, the Dionysiaca of Nonnus, a product of Roman Egypt, written in Greek in forty-eight chapter-length books. It runs to over 21,000 hexameter lines—some five thousand lines longer than Homer's Iliad—and tells the story of the wine-loving Dionysus, the hero whose destiny it is to become a god. Though its influence on the wider literary culture of late antiquity was profound, it has remained a marginalised and neglected text within the history of modern classical scholarship. The Dionysiaca exists as an often quoted yet rarely read compendium of obscure mythological information, and is periodically mined for allusions to earlier and implicitly ‘better’ poets whose works have only survived in fragmentary form, but it is rarely considered on its own terms.

The rapes of Nicaea and Aura, in Books 15-16 and 48 respectively of the Dionysiaca, are two of the most disturbing episodes in Nonnus' epic. The first figures a young huntress who does not hesitate to murder her persistent admirer; the second has another huntress—ex-protegée of Artemis—killing and eating her own offspring. As will become obvious in this section, these two stories have attracted a fair amount of attention from scholars of the Dionysiaca. Most interpretative approaches have, however, tended to look for exclusively ‘classical’ models and influences. While there is no doubt that the Dionysiaca is an immensely learned poem, borrowing from and playing with a great variety of ancient texts, its content cannot be explained with reference to classical intertexts only. My paper asks how these stories would relate to contemporaneous concerns and cultural trends. It will suggest that the rejection of marriage and childbearing, which is evident in these episodes, is informed by Christian ideas on sexuality, and has to be viewed as part of the extensive ‘repackaging’ of classical antiquity to suit new agendas, which is a feature of much contemporary literature.

‘Bad poetry is written daily, and married women seduced; but it is seldom that a seduction becomes as famous as Helen's, or that a poem as bad as Colluthus’ survives for fourteen centuries to be re-edited with all the apparatus of scholarship and equipped with commentary at the rate of a page for every two lines of verse. γᾷ δ' ἐπισκήπτων πιϕαύσκω: Colluthus is one of the very worst ancient poets to have come down to us. His only notion of the art is to arrange in hexameters phrases borrowed from his predecessors, with little sense of their appropriateness or of narrative coherence. It is as if a parrot had learnt to fit his pseudo-speech to the metre of Shakespeare. Colluthus can give delight, but only to a connoisseur of the ludicrous.’ The opening paragraph of Martin West's review of Enrico Livrea's annotated edition of Colluthus may be the most devastating appreciation of The Abduction of Helen ever written. At the other end stands Giuseppe Giangrande's review of the same edition: ‘Colluthus was a poète savant, who delighted in skillfully borrowing, often with felicitous “humour” and “malice”, from his epic models, and who dexterously applied oppositio in imitando within the framework of arte allusiva.’

Poetaster, plagiarist, parrot, and so on. During the last two centuries, Colluthus has been widely reputed an utterly bad poet by both amateur readers and professional scholars: his reputation is not much better than that once enjoyed by, say, Eudocia or Dioscorus of Aphrodito. It is therefore unsurprising that the literary features of his poem have won very little attention from the res publica philologorum. Efforts have been made to emend its (very badly transmitted) text, and much ingenuity has been devoted to the study of its sources and its diction; but few scholars have tried to analyse the Rape of Helen as a literary work. The present paper hopes to be a first step towards such a goal. Let me say from the very beginning that I am not concerned at all with Colluthus' inspiration, skill or the quality of his poetry. This is not what I mean by speaking of a ‘revaluation’ of our poem. Nor am I trying to follow in the steps of Giangrande, who once made a sustained effort to demonstrate that Colluthus was fond of learned allusion in an almost Alexandrian way—Giangrande rightly pointed to Colluthus' irony, but his interpretations of single passages and phrases were for the most part ill-founded, and it was quite easy for Livrea, in a spirited reply to Giangrande, to dispose of them. My concern is a simple one: what was the aim of the Rape of Helen? Are there any ‘signs of life’ in those 394 hexameters—to put it in other words: are we sure that Colluthus aimed at a slavish rewriting of the story of Paris and Helen with the bare addition of some Nonnian flavour, or rather may we suppose that his poetical project was slightly more ambitious?

It is nowadays a commonplace to state that every literary genre is a highly selective segment of a broader world of potential representations, and presents itself to the reader as a complete, self-contained model of interpretable mimesis of that particular aspect of reality. Yet this is especially true of bucolic poetry, whose very act of foundation rests on a joint effort, on the part both of the poets and their readers, to ‘conjure up a pre-existing “bucolic” tradition’ in the very same act of ‘founding such a tradition’. Theocritus' pastoral universe has its own bucolic hallmarks: landscape, gods and ‘professional’ accessories such as those required of a rustic life (milk-pails, shepherd's staffs, goatskin-coats and the like) are appropriately paraded and customised, and these hyper-‘realist’ markers are casually made to exist on the same level as the most unrealistic aspects of bucolic life (Theocritus' shepherds sing their time away while occasionally looking after their flocks). But it is especially in later imitators and interpreters that the possibilities of Theocritus' pastoral microcosm become necessities: generic consistency and recognisability are constantly pointed out and alluded to by obsessive repetition and normalisation of Theocritus ‘open’ pastoral world. The aim of the present paper is to read Colluthus' exploitation and, I would say, mobilisation of such a crystallised pastoral world against the background of ancient exegesis on the ‘bucolic problem’. In particular, it will be shown how bucolic criticism and Homererklärung (together with some important Hesiodic elements) are indissolubly intertwined in Colluthus' interpretation and reception of Theocritus' pastoral world. Comprehensiveness in charting Colluthus' critical response to such reading practices will not be attempted here: instead attention will be focused on those passages where Colluthus' scholarly engagement with bucolic generic conventions and their later accretions has a more direct impact on his narrative strategy.

Nowadays, scholars usually speak of a ‘renaissance’ of poetry in the Greek literature of late antiquity, underlining at the same time the new relevance of poetic communication in late antique society and the renewal of our interest in this not so well-known production of late Greek literature. Renaissance and related terms are, of course, effective ways to describe the flowering of Greek poetry from the fourth to sixth centuries CE, so long as this does not undervalue the importance of continuity (which is not the same as tradition). Even the most significant innovation in late antique Greek poetry, namely the so-called ‘Nonnian manner’ or ‘modern style’, stems from a longtime sedimentation and perfectioning of linguistic and stylistic features which can be traced back to the Hellenistic age. Albert Wifstrand, in his seminal book of 1933, already pointed to this major fact, which Mary Whitby has systematically dealt with in an important article of 1994. Moreover, recent studies demonstrate that for a proper understanding of late antique poetry one must take into account Christian poetic production as well, which stands four-square within the traditions of Greek literature (in spite of the fact that classical = pagan is an equation which dies hard for some classicists). In the present paper both pagan and Christian epigrams will be considered to equally represent the aesthetics of late antiquity (or estetica antico-bizantina, to use Averincev's terminology).