'How poetic are Philostratus' Erotic Epistles?'

This chapter reexamines the often mentioned, but rarely precisely defined, ‘poetic’ qualities of Philostratus’ Erotic Epistles. It uses several new approaches to ask what it means for such a prose text to count as poetic (such as compar- isons of vocabulary density statistics and percentage of text hapax legomena with samples of poetic, classical prose, and other imperial prose works) com- bined with traditional factors (‘poetic vocabulary’, prose rhythm, and dense accumulation of several kinds of poetic device). While labels like ‘prose epi- gram’ certainly have merit for some Epistles and passages, others are deter- minedly prosaic (e.g. cases excluding all Homeric and poetic vocabulary while alluding directly to Homeric passages)—an effect I term ‘prosaism’, as the in- verse of the Epistles’ better-known ‘poeticisms’.