INTRODUCTION Katerina Carvounis and Richard Hunter 1 It Would Be

INTRODUCTION

Katerina Carvounis and Richard Hunter

It would be depressingly easy, and not very instructive, to document the neg lect 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 in creasingly 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 per haps 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 com plaint about the 'neglect' of this literature (the torch has perhaps been handed on to the study of early Christian narrative). More interesting than such lamentation might be a consideration of why this neglect of later Greek poetry has persisted for so long and why this seems to be a particularly appropriate moment to reflect on further directions that modern scholarship can take when dealing with this body of poetry. Later Greek poetry was composed in a period that has long been regarded as one of decline, and the absence, until recently, of updated editions and detailed commentaries meant that these texts were not very accessible to the majority of modern scholars, while the lack of external information on most later Greek hexameter poets makes it difficult to place them in a literary and historical context. In some centres of continental—particularly, in more recent years, French and Italian—scholarship, however, great strides have been made towards the edit ing and elucidation of later Greek poetry. The outstanding Bude Nonnus (to which, admittedly, at least one Englishman contributed) under the direction of Francis Vian, taken together with the individual commentaries on the Para phrase that are being published with the guidance of Enrico Livrea, promises to open new perspectives for Nonnian studies. Notwithstanding important indi vidual contributions, it seems indeed fair to say that the neglect of later Greek poetry is a predominantly Anglophone phenomenon. The reasons are inevitably complex, but the institutional organisation of the discipline is not the least of them: understandably, in view of the demands of a curricular structure, the 'job market' in the United States and Great Britain privileges alleged 'centrality' and experience and willingness in teaching over wide swathes of ancient litera ture beyond individual specialisms, and this offers little encouragement to graduate students to strike out along the less trodden paths of ancient poetry.

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There may, however, be a whiff of change in the air. Four of the contributors to the present volume have either recently completed or are engaged in doctoral research on later Greek poetry at English universities, and one of the stimuli for the conference on which this volume is based1 was the simultaneous presence at Cambridge of three of them. Moreover, the last few decades have seen the publication of critical editions of a number of these works, and the number of conferences and collective volumes is steadily increasing.2 The literature and culture of the Antonine and Severan periods have attracted special interest,3 and the outpouring of writing about the Second Sophistic can only have a beneficial effect in the long term on the study of later poetry also. Many new papyri have appeared since the collections of Denys Page4 and Ernst Heitsch,5 and plans for a new edition of the fragments of Greek poetry of the Imperial period have been announced.6 Furthermore, some disciplinary developments are in fact fa vourable to a higher profile for this poetry. One, already mentioned, is the much greater interest by 'classicists' in 'later antiquity': for any serious explor ation of the meaning and implications of those labels and of the transition from the classical to the Byzantine world, later poetry, whether preserved in manu scripts, papyri or inscriptions, offers primary material of primary importance. A text such as the Orphic Argonautica, for example, is by any sLundards an extra ordinary document from an extraordinary culture, if only we could read what it is saying... How valuable Nonnus' Dionysiaca can be as a way into the thought world of late antiquity is slowly becoming accepted, even in Great Britain and the United States. Secondly, there is the disciplinary tendency to be concerned with 'themes', rather than individual poets; the study of, say, 'sexuality' or 'childhood' or 'education' offers a space for texts which they would otherwise find it difficult to claim 'in their own right', and several of the papers in this collection illustrate potential approaches. From a 'purely literary' point of view, of course, these poems make a clear appeal to the modern interest in allusion and intertextuality, in generic forma tion and experimentation, and in the innovative shaping of myth—all familiar features of 'belatedness'—and it might be thought surprising that they have not been more exploited in these ways. Among possible explanations two deserve mention here. First, there is the remarkable growth of interest in and scholar ship on Hellenistic poetry in the last thirty years or so, a development in which, of course, Francis Vian played yet again a crucial role; this may, as it were, have deferred interest in the even more post-classical. How approaches to, say, Apollonius' use of Homer should differ from approaches to the Homeric re- workings of, say, Nonnus (for whom, of course, Apollonius was himself part of the inherited tradition) or the use of Apollonius himself in the Orphic Argo nautica are extremely interesting (and difficult) questions, and ones deserving much more attention than they have received. Secondly, it must be acknowledged that it is in the realm of Latin poetry that the major theoretical and practical advances have been made in the study of 'belatedness' in ancient literature. The current golden age for 'Silver Latin'

epic offers important lessons for the study of later Greek poetry, but they are of course lessons to be used with care. 'Silver Latin' epic is a potentially danger ous analogy for a number of reasons, not least the fact that the four major poets involved (Lucan, Statius, Valerius Flaccus and Silius Italicus) not only all composed within the space of a couple of generations of each other, but are all represented by long poems in (broadly speaking) the same genre; just as they nourished each other, so criticism on each of these poets may be helpful and suggestive for the others. Despite some special cases of intertextuality (Quintus and Triphiodorus, for example), the glib way in which we have been writing of 'later Greek (hexameter) poetry' misleadingly suggests a far greater chrono logical and generic affiliation than actually exists on the Greek side (cf. Section 2 below), and respecting difference will be one of the great challenges for the serious study of this poetry. Nevertheless, the positive stimulus that work on Latin poetry offers far outweighs the dangers of mindless transposition, and that stimulus is by no means restricted to work on Flavian epic; the student of Nonnus' Dionysiaca would, for example, be very ill-advised to ignore recent work on Ovid's Metamorphoses. After all this, of course, it will still be asked whether some of these poems are worth reading 'for themselves' (whatever that might mean). We very much hope that this volume will go some way towards providing a partial answer, and we are happy to allow a place for 'value judgements' in criticism; some of these poems, however, now carry with them critical baggage which is out-of- date and/or, what is far worse, based on fairly cursory reading. If this volume encourages renewed examination of both the poems themselves and some still influential critical assumptions, then it will have more than served its purpose.

Any survey of the Greek poetry of the Roman empire must necessarily be very selective, and what follows is no exception; particular attention is paid to authors and poems discussed further in this collection, and the arrangement is broadly by genre. Despite the uncertainties of chronology, a connection has been suggested be tween the flourishing of didactic poetry in the second and early third centuries and that of narrative poetry from the later third century onwards.7 Both Diony- sius Periegetes, author of the Periegesis in 1187 hexameters and possibly, among other works, a fragmentary Lithiaca on stones, and Marcellus of Side, author of a lengthy Iatrica or Chironides} lived under Hadrian. The Halieutica of Oppian of Cilicia, a poem in five books on fish, is placed between 177 and 180 on the basis of its dedication to an Antoninus and his son and co-ruler, who are understood to be Marcus Aurelius and Commodus. Under Oppian's name has also been transmitted a poem in four books on hunting known as the Cynegetica, which can be placed in the first part of the third century on the

basis of its dedication to Caracalla. To the second and third centuries are also assigned three surviving hexameter poems on astrological themes by Dorotheus of Sidon, Maximus and [Manetho]. Mythological narrative epics survive from the third to the fifth centuries and include the following works on the Trojan, Dionysiac and Argonautic mytho logical cycles: Quintus' Posthomerica, an epic in fourteen books from the (later?) third century, narrates the events that fall between the funeral of Hector, which concludes the Iliad, and the storm that hits the victorious Greeks on their homeward journey from Troy; Nonnus' Dionysiaca, in forty-eight books from the mid-fifth century—the longest poem in the whole Greek and Latin literary tradition—describes (to summarise absurdly) the birth of the young god Diony sus, his loves, travels and battles (notably the Indian campaign) and his ultimate recognition as a god; and the Orphic Argonautica in 1376 verses, perhaps of the first half of the fifth century CE,9 offers Orpheus' account of the journey of the Argonauts. In addition to these surviving narrative poems, we also have information about lost poems, such as the Metamorphoseis of Nestor of Lar- anda and the Heroikai Theogamiai in sixty books by Nestor's son, Peisander of Laranda.10 Alongside the long mythological epics, there are also three mythological epyllia surviving from this period, two of which deal with the Trojan cycle:" Triphiodorus' Sack of Troy (691 verses), of the late third or early fourth cen tury, deals with the Trojan Horse and the Sack of Troy; Colluthus' Rape of Helen (392 verses) from the late fifth or early sixth century describes the judge ment of the goddesses, Paris' visit to Sparta and his return—with Helen—to Troy, while Musaeus' shorter Hero and Leander (343 verses), also of the late fifth or early sixth century, narrates the tragic story of two lovers separated by the Hellespont.12 Ancient authorities inform us that Triphiodorus and Colluthus also composed (now lost) epics on contemporary topics: Triphiodorus a Mara- thoniaca, a Hippodameia, a lipogrammatic Odyssey and a paraphrase of Homeric similes,13 while Colluthus wrote a Persica on Anastasius' victory against the Persians in 506, a Calydoniaca and several panegyrics.14 There are further examples of authors who composed both mythological and contemporary or historical poetry; Soterichus of Oasis may have been one such author in the reign of Diocletian, but his works have not survived.15 On the Latin side of the tradition, Claudian's hexameter panegyrics alongside his mythological poem De Raptu Proserpinae, all of which he composed in Latin after leaving his native Alexandria to go to Rome in the late fourth century, attest to the same poet composing mythological and contemporary themes. Hexameter poetry celebrating historical events seems indeed to have flourished in this period, but no examples of such works survive in full.16 The fragmentary Blemyomachia, which is known only from papyri,17 may offer one such exam ple: it may be described as a verse panegyric or historical epic, as it relates in Homeric style the battle of the general Germanos against the Blemyes, with the combatants' names having been taken from epic catalogues.

Our view of the literary history of these centuries is importantly dependent upon papyri. On the one hand, papyri containing works which also survive in the manuscript tradition, such as Oppian's Halieutica, [Manetho's] Apoteles- matica, Triphiodorus' Sack of Troy and Nonnus' Dionysiaca,™ can tell us something of the early reception history of these poems. On the other hand, the papyri have also revealed otherwise unknown poems on mythological, histori cal or contemporary, and Christian themes, and some new hexameter fragments have tentatively been attributed to known poets, such as Dionysius, Soterichus and Colluthus.19 What survives of the works of Dioscorus of Aphrodito and Pamprepius of Panopolis we owe entirely to the papyrological tradition;20 Dio scorus' works in particular, which include the original autograph of hexameter compositions, copies of the Iliad and Homeric scholia and tables with conjuga tions of verbs, offer a rare insight into the life and learning of a man of letters in sixth-century Egypt. Other hexameter fragments dealing with contemporary issues include, for example, a funerary oration on the death of a professor from Berytus (GDRK 30) and an encomium to a Roman leader (GDRK 36), from the fourth and fifth centuries respectively. Mythological poetry is also well repre sented: a hexameter Hymn to Dionysus (third century CE) offers evidence for the continuation of the genre of the narrative hymns most familiar from the Homeric Hymns,21 and the fragmentary Bassarika and Gigantias, which also survive on papyrus,22 offer a background to aspects of the Dionysiac mytho logical cycle that will later be treated in full in Nonnus' Dionysiaca. Hexameters were also adopted for Christian themes. In addition to parts of the Sibylline oracles,23 there are also among the publications of the Bibliotheca Bodmeriana a series of Christian poems in hexameters; one that is of particular interest—not least because of its early date—is the Vision of Dorotheus {P. Bodmer XXIX) in 343 hexameters, which is generally placed between the third and fourth centuries and describes the vision of a Christian in the house of God.24 In the fourth century, Gregory of Nazianzus wrote hexameter verses on topics ranging from moral to autobiographical themes, while his contemporary Apollinaris of Laodicea paraphrased a number of Psalms into hexameters. This practice was also adopted in the following century by Nonnus in his Para phrase of the Gospel of St John25 Whereas Nonnus is (probably) an example of a Christian author writing on pagan themes, Claudian shows us a pagan poet in the court of a Christian emperor composing on Christian themes (AP 1.19-20). A century after Nonnus, the empress Eudocia used Homeric half- or whole lines to compose a cento on Christian themes. From the sixth century come three examples of ekphraseis in hexameters, the most famous of which perhaps is by Paul the Silentiary on the Church of Saint Sophia, to which is added a description of the pulpit. The other two surviving descriptions in hexameters are Christodorus' description of statues in the gymnasium of Zeuxippus in Constantinople and that of the cosmos painted in the baths of Gaza by John of Gaza. From the seventh century on, the hexameter, which is the subject of the

present volume, slowly gives way before the iambic trimeter and Byzantine dodecasyllable.26

The corpus of material from which the poems discussed in this volume comes is thus very diverse, but the historical, religious and educational contexts in which they were composed reveal both variations and some shared charac teristics which make grouping both possible and instructive.27 Thus, for exam ple, different poets engage in different ways and to very different extents with the political context of the Roman empire: 'historical' narrative and encomium have a very obvious purchase on the contemporary world,28 and poetry for and/or to Roman patrons and emperors, such as the Hali'eutica and the Cyne- getica, and poetry which acknowledges the realities of Roman power, such as Dionysius' Periegesis, may simultaneously emphasise and bridge a gap be tween 'Greek' and 'Roman' cultures; the reality of that gap is in fact a central question of the social and cultural history of the empire. On the other hand, mythological poems such as Nonnus' Dionysiaca, Quintus' Posthomerica, Tri- phiodorus' Sack of Troy and Colluthus' Rape of Helen, seem to contain con siderably fewer, if any, in some cases, overt references to a contemporary con text, Greek or Roman; we may perhaps contrast Apollonius' Argonautica, where recent scholarship has revealed important layers informed by the con temporary Ptolemaic world. It remains possible, however, that we have simply not yet learned how to read these poems: efforts have, for example, recently been made to recover hints in Quintus' epic that bear on its context.29 One way in which the Roman world certainly does impinge even on Greek mythological poetry is through the thorny problem of whether or not some Greek poets in the Imperial period drew on the Latin, as well as the Greek, lit erary tradition. The example of Claudian in the late fourth/early fifth century serves as a reminder that poets could be equally well versed in both Greek and Latin, and the existence of papyrus fragments with Latin-Greek translations of the Aeneid, for example, indicates that this text at least was being read in the original by Greek speakers in Egypt in Nonnus' own time. Although there is no compelling reason why Greek-speaking authors of the Imperial period cannot have been directly dependent on famous Latin texts such as Virgil's Aeneid, it is difficult to resolve this issue, especially for earlier poets like Quintus and Triphiodorus: neither can divergences in specific passages on shared subjects between a late Greek author and a possible Latin model necessarily speak against direct influence nor do shared points guarantee such an influence, since two poets may be independently drawing on a (now lost) common source.30 There are also cultural issues here which go well beyond individual debates about literary borrowing. The Greek poetry of Christian poets, for example, is a special case, as the establishment in the mid-fourth century of Christianity as

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the official religion of the Roman Empire means that Christian poetry always has a particular relationship with 'official culture'. Just as the allusive borrow ing of Latin poetry puts Roman culture 'into' Greek in a special way, by ac knowledging the reciprocally parasitical relationship of the two cultures, since the days when Graecia capta..., so the use of a traditional Greek verse-form and a traditional poetic language to celebrate the triumph and values of Christi anity is no idle literary pastime, but one fraught with ideological significance.31 Apart from the political and religious context, we must also pay attention to the educational context within which Greek-speaking poets of the Roman Em pire composed hexameter poetry; the link between poetry and rhetorical educa tion in this period is generally acknowledged.32 Treatises relating to rhetorical education draw attention to the importance of the Homeric epics and the use of episodes from the Homeric saga in educating future orators, poets and writers,33 and in introducing students to preliminary exercises in rhetorical composition (progymnasmata), teachers of rhetoric built on the pupils' familiarity with the Homeric epics to illustrate techniques of composition; the exemplary progym nasmata offered, for instance, by Libanius in the mid-fourth century and his student Aphthonius largely deal with themes from the Trojan Cycle.34 More over, the ever-increasing body of hexameter fragments on contemporary ma terial which derive from an educational context offers an invaluable insight into educational practices in the Roman period,35 as they provide direct evidence of how speakers of Greek in this period were taught to compose hexameter poetry after Homer.36 The case of ethopoeae—that is, the imaginary speeches of a character facing a particular situation—is especially illuminating for the rela tionship between education and contemporary poetry.37 Most ethopoeae on papyrus are in hexameters and attest to the importance of Homer in education, while also confirming the predominance of poetry in Greek culture in Egypt.38 Some themes that are dealt with in ethopoeae are also found in the longer poems from this period, highlighting the relationship between education and poetry. For example, Calliope's consolation speech to Thetis following the death of Achilles occurs only in an ethopoea on P.Graves and Quintus' Posthomerica HI, while the speech of an anonymous Indian warrior desiring a dead girl at the beginning of Dionysiaca XXXV may be compared with Achil les' speeches upon seeing the dead Penthesileia offered in Libanius' ethopoeae (12-13 Foerster).39 All hexameter poetry of course engages, both actively and 'by default', with the Homeric poems; '[t]he traditional language of epic is the basis of the lan guage of all subsequent hexameter and elegiac poetry...and so Homer is imma- nently present in a special way in the very fabric of much Greek poetry.'40 From the lipogrammatic Iliad and Odyssey of Nestor of Laranda and Triphio- dorus respectively to Eudocia's centos consisting of unchanged Homeric half- lines, and from the 'Homerising' style of Quintus to the luxuriantly Dionysiac aesthetic of Nonnus, the poetry of the third to the sixth centuries covers a very wide range of engagement with the Homeric heritage and with what the classi-

cal and Hellenistic periods had made of that heritage. The variety of engage ment with the past which is on show in these poems is matched by the scholarly task which awaits. Alongside the fundamental tasks of editing and elucidat ing—and very much remains to be done here, even for Nonnus who enjoys two excellent recent editions—the principal challenge is that of 'contextualisation'. How and why were these poems written and read? How 'localised' in space and time are poetic traditions? How is change over time to be plotted—can we tell whether and how Homerising language and gestures were received differ ently in the third century from the fifth? What is the relationship between an 'archaising' poem and the educational culture in which it was nourished? In what ways can poetry on pagan subjects also speak to a Christian audience? To what extent are we dealing with a version of the situation often posited for the Hellenistic period, namely 'elite poetry' on one side and 'popular/unlearned' poetry on the other? How many different versions of this dichotomy need we posit? What were the processes by which pagan Greek traditions were appro priated by Christian poets, and where does the poetry of inscriptions fit in the overall picture? The present volume examines the use of the hexameter tradition within dif ferent genres by a selection of Greek-speaking poets in the Roman Empire: didactic poetry is represented by Dionysius Periegetes and Oppian (second cen tury), mythological epic by Quintus (third century) and Nonnus (fifth century). Christian poetry by Gregory of Nazianzus (fourth century), and the epyllion by Colluthus (late fifth/early sixth century), while hexameter poetry on contempo rary material is here represented by inscriptions. The contributors focus, on the whole, on the poets' engagement with the Homeric tradition, as this engage ment is influenced by their own literary cultural context. Jane Lightfoot dis cusses Dionysius Periegetes' engagement with the Iliadic 'Catalogue of Ships', while Emily Kneebone examines Oppian's didactic techniques and purposes within the educational and political context of the Roman Empire. Katerina Carvounis takes Quintus' version of a battle among the gods to discuss his en gagement with Homer, while Fotini Hadjittofi reads the rapes of Nicaea and Aura in Nonnus' Dionysiaca against the backdrop of contemporary (Christian) attitudes to virginity, marriage and procreation, and Rob Shorrock focuses on Nonnus' proem in the Dionysiaca and then discusses the theme of poetic inspi ration in the changing worlds of paganism and Christianity. Three contributors engage with Colluthus' epyllion on the Rape of Helen: Michael Paschalis draws attention to Colluthus' innovations in dealing with the myth of the abduction of Helen and what this can tell us about the poet's narrative techniques; Lucia Prauscello discusses Colluthus' engagement with post-Homeric bucolic tradi tions and Homeric exegesis that foreshadows Paris' future beyond the end of the epyllion, and Enrico Magnelli examines Colluthus' use of the literary tradi tion to point to Paris' characterisation within the epyllion. Mary Whitby fo cuses on a poem by Gregory of Nazianzus containing advice to the young bride Olympias (Carm. 2.2.6) and discusses examples in Gregory's style, drawing

attention to his appropriation of Homeric diction within a Christian context. Finally, Gianfranco Agosti discusses the style and context of epigraphic poetry. We are only too aware of how partial and imbalanced a selection of both po ets and approaches this volume represents; there are, of course, pleas in mitiga tion which we could enter—the link of this volume to a conference, the length- limits sensibly imposed by the editors of Ramus—but we hope that this collec tion will (at least) encourage others also to look harder at this poetry and what it has to teach us.

In closing we would like to offer our warmest thanks to everyone who participated in the Cambridge conference, to the contributors for their helpfulness and patience during the inevitably drawn-out process of turning conference papers into a volume, to the Faculty of Classics at Cambridge for its generous support of the original conference, to the British Academy for supporting Katerina Carvounis while at Cambridge by means of a post-doctoral research fellowship, and to Helen Morales for guiding us towards Ramus. Finally, we would like to record our debt to John Penwill, Associate Editor of Ramus, for the time, attention and care which he devoted to the volume in its final stages; his sharp eye and persistent questioning have improved the volume in countless places.

Murray Edwards College (New Hall) and Trinity College, Cambridge

NOTES

1. 'Signs of Life? New Contexts for Later Greek Hexameter Poetry', Faculty of Classics, Cam bridge (19-21 April 2007). 2. For Dionysius Periegetes see REA 106 (2004) 177-261, for Nonnus Hopkinson (1994c), and for Quintus Baumbach and Bar (2007b); there is a forthcoming volume edited by J.-L. Fournet on Dioscorus of Aphrodito. Collections and surveys which range over more than one author include Keydell (1931 and 1941), Alsina (1972), Trypanis (1981) 365-413, Whitby (1994), Winkler and Williams (1982), Gigli Piccardi (2003) 7-101, Paschalis (2005b) and Johnson (2006). Forthcoming work on the poetry of this period includes Miguelez Cavero (2008) and Shorrock (2009). Hopkin son (1994d) provides an excellent introduction to the themes and questions raised in a number of Greek poets in the Imperial period. 3. Cf. Russell (1990), Swain, Harrison and Eisner (2007). 4. Page (1943). 5. Heitsch (1963-4). 6. Cf. Agosti (2002a) 51. A list of literary papyri by author, genre, title, attribution, location and inventory number can be found at the following website: http://promethee.philo.ulg.ac.be/cedopal (accessed 04.2008). 7. See,e.g., Alsina (1972) 149, Vian (1963) xxiii, Trypanis (1981) 369-73. 8. See Bowie (1990) 66-70. 9. Vian (1987) 46. 10. See Ma (2007). 11. Cf. Potter (2004) 184-96. 12. For episodes within Nonnus' Dionysiaca composed as epyllia see D'Ippolito (1964), Vian (1986)335.

13. There are two entries in the Suda on Triphiodorus (T 1111 and T 1112), which are usually taken to refer to the same poet; for Triphiodorus' lost works see Dubielzig (1996) 11-15. 14. Cf. Suda x 1951, Alan Cameron (1965) 481. 15. Suda o 877; Livrea (1999) suggests that Soterichus may be the author of P.Oxy. 4352. 16. See Alan Cameron (1965) 481 on Christodorus' haurica in six books on Anastasius' vic tory against the Isaurians in 497 and the empress Eudocia's epic on the Persian wars of her husband Theodosius II in 421. 17. See Livrea (1978), MacCoull (1981), Steinriick (1999). 18. The Triphiodorus papyrus (P.Oxy. 2946) established that poet as a precursor of Nonnus and has been an important stimulus to re-assessment of the relative chronology of mythological poetry between the third and fifth centuries; cf. Alan Cameron (1970) 478-82. 19. Cf., e.g., Livrea (1978) 23-31 for Olympiodorus of Thebes as a possible author of the Ble- myomachia; Keydell (1934) suggested that Colluthus may be the author of the hexameter fragment Mertens-Pack31835 (PSI 7.845). 20. For Dioscorus see Fournet (1999); for Pamprepius Livrea (1979), with the cautionary sum mary of McCail (1978) 38f. 21. See Zumbo (1997), Furley (2007). 22. Livrea (1973); against the attribution of these works to Dionysius Periegetes cf. Bowie (1990)79. 23.Cf.Lightfoot(2007). 24. Hurst, Reverdin and Rudhardt (1984); see Agosti (2002b) for the importance of the poems in this collection in the literary-historical context of late antiquity. 25. Agosti (2003a) 100 adduces Dracontius as another example of a poet composing in both Christian and pagan themes; for the readers and audience of Nonnus' Dionysiaca and Paraphrase see ibid. 95-102. On other Christian poets using the hexameter see, e.g., Fournet (2003b) on the fifth-century lawyer and hexameter poet Theodoras. 26. See Agosti in Agosti and Gonnelli (1995) 356f., where, as examples for this transition, he mentions Marianus of Eleutheropolis (under Anastasius I), who paraphrased hexameter poets in iambics, and George of Pisidia (under Heracleius), who used dodecasyllables for his historical poems and the Hexameron. 27. For a concise account cf. Hopkinson (1994a), Schubert (2007). 28. Cf., for example, P.Oxy. 4352, fr. 5.II. 18-39, which begin with Capitoline Zeus' crowning of Diocletian, having taken pity on men; for such poetry in general cf. Viljamaa (1968). 29. Cf., e.g., Bertone (2000), Hadjittofi (2007). 30. There is helpful guidance in the articles 'Nonno' and 'Trifiodoro' of G. D'lppolito in Ency clopedia Virgiliana (Rome 1984-1991). For Quintus see now Gartner (2005). 31. See Agosti (2002b) 74-76 for the emergence of Christian poetry in classical metre. 32. See, e.g., Hose (2004), with the review by E. Amato in Plekos 7 (2005), 155-60 (www.plekos.uni-muenchen.de/2005/rhose.pdf), and Agosti (2005b). 33. Cf., e.g., Aelius Theon, Progym. 70.26-9: 'practising the exercises is very necessary not only for those who intend to act as orators, but also if anyone among poets or speech-writers or any others wishes to wield the power of words'. 34. For an overview cf. Kennedy (1983) 54-73, and see also Part I of Carvounis (2005). 35. Fundamental accounts in Morgan (1998) and Cribiore (2001). 36. Cf. Hopkinson (1994a) 3-6. 37. On ethopoeae in the Imperial period see the essays in Amato and Schamp (2005), especially Agosti (2005b) 36-38. 38. Cf. Fournet (1992) 261 f. 39. Cf. Agosti (2005b) 59. 40. Hunter (2004c) 238.

10 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.35.229, on 01 Oct 2021 at 21:45:32, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0048671X00004872