The Unstated Climax of Catullus 64

Abstract

Definition of the class of poem which modern scholarship has agreed to describe by the convenient, if unauthorized, title of epyllion has never proved altogether successful. The claim has commonly been made that Catullus' sixty-fourth poem may be accepted as the type and that all or most of the features revealed in it may be assumed to exist more or less completely realized in earlier examples from the Alexandrian period: in particular, that the epyllion always possesses a secondary story enclosed within the primary one.