Stories from the mountains, stories from the sea

This work is an examination of the extent and nature of influence from Greek and Roman epic upon the Halieutica of Oppian of Cilicia, a text on salt-water fishing in five books of epic verse, and the pseudo-Oppianic Cynegetica, a similar work devoted to hunting over four books. Passages that digress from technical instruction and the more developed similes have been chosen for analysis due to their thematic links with earlier Greek and Roman heroic and didactic epics. Recently developed approaches to study of the intertextual relationship between the Roman epic poets and their Greek predecessors have been adapted to the study of the Halieutica and the Cynegetica. This approach highlights differences between the response of these poets and of their Roman counterparts.