THE ‘EPYLLION’

Small-scale hexameter narratives on mythic subjects have always been regarded as a special feature of Hellenistic poetry. Even if the term ‘epyllion’ has no ancient authority, there has seemed to be a phenomenon which cannot be ignored. Modern discussion has, however, been bedevilled by the grouping together of poems so diverse as to render that grouping almost meaningless, however many individual points of contact they may share. Two very broad groups may in fact be identified. On one side are ambitious poems of considerable length, such as Callimachus' Hecale and the lost Hermes of Eratosthenes (cf. SH 397) which ran to well over a thousand verses; on the other are shorter narratives of, roughly speaking, between one hundred and three hundred verses, best exemplified for us by Moschus' Europa. Although the term ‘epyllion’ is sometimes used to refer to both groups, it is in fact the second, shorter group which proved to be of greater subsequent significance for the more familiar tradition of Latin ‘epyllion’. In seeking to draw formal distinctions between poems, three possible criteria may be singled out for special notice.

A first criterion is scale. Theocritus' narrative of Heracles' loss of Hylas (13.25–75) has many points of technique in common with the poems that will be considered in this chapter, but its fifty-one verses offer a significantly more compressed narrative than, say, the account of Polydeuces and Amykos (22.27–134), which otherwise seems closely related to it, at least in structural terms.