I have traced Keats's Hellenism as a romance between the poet and his classical Muse. The representation of antiquity involves, precisely, a longing for presence, a desire to re-situate the sublime fictions of the past within the belated space of modernity. Keats's Muse is always feminine, whether disguised as Cynthia, Lamia, or Moneta; hence the poet's rhetoric of desire or romance, a lover's discourse addressed to the bright goddess. In Hyperion, certainly, it is the stern father-figure of Milton who presides over the narrative's endeavour to monumentalize antiquity, but we can sense the strain of his influence, an oppression which Keats evidently desires to soften when he transfers allegiance to Apollo (a god of flowers, standing ‘ankle-deep in lilies of the vale’) and Mnemosyne. Book III of Hyperion lightens the burden of the epic ‘masculine’ diction of the previous two books by returning to what Hazlitt called ‘an effeminacy of style’, which may, indeed, prove to be the most authentic idiom of Keats's romance with antiquity. Earlier I suggested that the language of flowers in Endymion (an exemplary ‘effeminate’ style) works to question the conventional model of classical antiquity available to Keats. In the case of Lamia, we might say that it is a text which witnesses the ironic cohabitation of ‘masculine’ and ‘effeminate’ modes.