Introduction

Abstract The Introduction sets out the book’s approach to reading Valerius Flaccus’s Argonautica, proposing that Valerius’s intertextual practices can be read as a form of “cosmopoetics,” namely that he uses language, images, and ideas from earlier literature to collectively build a picture of the cosmos’s operation within his poem. It argues that an eclectic set of philosophical theories informs Valerius’s choices and highlights meteorology as a particularly critical focus of Valerius’s engagement, proposing that the cosmological and meteorological motifs that Valerius mobilizes help to suffuse the poem with notions of destabilization and strife that resonate with the poem’s surface-level heightening of civil war. Looking to move beyond “pessimistic” and “recuperative” readings of the epic, it sketches out the relevance of Valerius’s philosophical approach to the sociopolitical environment of Flavian Rome, before concluding with a structural and thematic overview of the book.