L’ecphrasis dans l’epyllion

Abstract

Even if the word epyllion is a modern invention, the poems that are described under this appellation share common features : these poems obviously engage with epic material on a smaller scale and invent ways of combining epos and λεπτότης. Some of the epyllia that have come down to us contain the description of a work of art. Such ecphraseis were probably intended as programmatic passages playing on the analogy between the poetic and the visual artifact. An analysis of these ecphraseis not only confirms this assumption, but also enables us to show that the authors who wrote epyllia intended to engage with epic as a literary genre : the works of art described in the epyllia were partly designed as allegories of the new poetic form invented by their authors. Some of the details in the description of Europa's flower-basket in Moschus' epyllion or of the coverlet for the wedding-bed of Peleus and Thetis in Catullus 64 are best explained as a metaphoric definition of a new form of epos.

Keywords

• Catullus
• Moschus
• ecphrasis
• flower-basket
• flowers
• coverlet