This chapter brings Sappho fr. 44V into dialogue with queer theorist Lee Edelman’s notion of reproductive futurism. As part of its represention of the wedding entourage of Andromache and Hector, Sappho fr. 44V invites us to reconsider the value of “undying fame” (aphthiton kleos) when this eminently heroic commodity is imported from martial epic into a poetic space where love, desire, and marriage overshadow military pursuits. It is argued that Sappho fr. 44V is a wedding song being queered at the very moment of its performance. It is not just not a real wedding song, and therefore a fictional wedding song – which is where those who have rejected the epithalamium hypothesis have tended to leave it. Rather, Sappho fr. 44V is a “wedding song” inverted, turned inside out.

It is an error to suppose that Latin literature was restricted to a small literate elite; performance before a large public audience (e.g. at a festival or the ludi scaenici) was often the primary form of ‘publication’, prior to the distribution of a written text in a book. Catullus’ poems 62 and 67, both written in dramatic form, were presumably meant for performance; poem 61 is a marriage hymn, sung by two choruses as part of the bride’s procession; poem 63 is a narrative hymn, sung and danced probably at the ludi Megalenses. There are good reasons to believe that poem 64, normally cited as the defining example of an ‘epyllion’ (a genre invented by modern scholarship), was composed as the libretto of an elaborate stage performance. Poems 68a and 68b are entirely separate from each other, addressed to different recipients: 68a is a letter of apology, 68b an elaborate mythic celebration of the poet’s doomed love affair, addressed to Allius but in the hope of reaching a more extensive audience.

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.