The Primal Voyage and the Ocean of Epos

This paper looks at some key examples of the symbolic use of the sea and of sea-voyaging as images for epic poetry, for original poetic enterprise and for the progress of the plot within a poem. Beginning from the emblematic use of this symbolism in Hellenistic poetics, it traces the treatment in Catullus 64 of the journey of the Argo as the primal voyage of both human culture and Greco-Roman literature, suggests some further allusions to voyage-symbolism to add to those already known in Virgil's Georgics, and examines the analogy between the progress of the Trojans' voyage and of the epic plot in Virgil's Aeneid. It concludes by looking at two odes of Horace, one of which is a test case for the limits of epic-ocean symbolism.