ABSTRACT
It is not often that we can watch the birth, death, and resurrection of a literary genre. We can do this with a version of the small-scale epic developed in Alexandria at the time of Apollonius. This type of poem (sometimes termed the ‘epyllion’, or the ‘miniature’ or even the ‘minor’ epic) became very popular, not just in Alexandria, but also in Rome. But it did die-some time in the first century of our era. The trouble was that, like the Tasmanian Tiger, it was too specialized. New literary predators and new literary colonists rendered it extinct.
