Scylla’s Lament in the Ciris and the Latin Literary Tradition

In this chapter, Scylla’s lament in the Ciris and its complex intertextual links with other poems of the Augustan and imperial periods are considered. The hypothesis is advanced that, if this poem is an intentionally anachronistic Roman fake in a post-Virgilian or post-Ovidian world, it establishes a dialogue with contemporary Neronian or Flavian poetry by remaining relevant in an imperial, rather than a Republican, landscape as a poem to which poets allude. It can be argued that the Ciris-poet wrote in the imperial period after Ovid, and was part of a general revival of neoteric epyllion under the empire; compare Persius in his first satire or Lucan’s lost Orpheus. The poet of the Ciris should not be dismissed as an inferior composer because fashions change over time; note that Ovid, Lucan, and Statius are now thought of as canonical alongside Virgil, an unimaginable notion a century or so ago.