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?

With a few exceptions, Catullus is interested in “bad” women who break the mold, and the more forcefully they do, the more fascinating they are to him. For him, the feminine ideal seems to have been not the bona mulier but the pessima puella, the “naughty girl.” Something similar can be said of Roman comedy, whose malae meretrices are often the stars of the show, and to whom Catullus alludes throughout his poetic corpus. This chapter explores poems in which women are explicitly marked as “bad” and argues that, in each case, Catullus uses their malitia as a way to consider and display tensions that arise when men and women compete for control. These women take on characteristics of comedy’s meretrices callidae, or “clever sex laborers,” while he aligns himself with familiar antagonistic stock types such as the “harsh father” or “braggart soldier,” figures through whom traditional aristocratic values and male concerns are caricatured.

Ekphrasis is the poetic device of describing one type of art within another, best exemplified by the Homeric “Shield of Achilles.” Ekphrasis is seen as a special element of the epic genre which often has metapoetic meaning.