Afterword

Abstract The Afterword revisits the idea of Valerius’s intertextual practice as a form of cosmopoetics. It highlights ten different types of passage that form the most common targets of his allusivity and reviews the methods whereby they are integrated into his own textual cosmos. It then reminds the reader that while Valerius’s cosmos is full of instabilities—prone to fiery irruption and collapse, susceptible to disease, and driven by capricious divine whim (or atomic randomness) and human overreach—this cosmos and its philosophical underpinnings do not reflect Valerius’s personal view of the larger, extra-poetic cosmos. Instead, the microcosm of Rome is to be seen as the real-world analogue of Valerius’s poetic cosmos. The Afterword concludes with a look toward the idea that Valerius’s intertextual cosmopoetics is not unique to his Argonautica but is, instead, a poetics of the epic genre at large.