Epic from Epigram: The Poetics of Valerius Flaccus' Argonautica

Abstract

This article makes the case for the importance of epigram, in terms of both form and content, for Valerius Flaccus' Argonautica . In the battle scenes of Books 3 and 6, in particular, recurrent allusions to epigrammatic themes unveil Valerius' poetics of epigram that evoke the dead for poetic purposes. As part of this, the apostrophe te quoque serves as an epitaphic gesture that marks the Argonautica , with its recurrent civil war imagery, as an epitaph on the golden age. In addition, Valerius employs these epitaphic markers as an organising device, a narrative "glue" that makes the Iliadic and the Odyssean parts of his narrative hang together.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 21 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.