This article argues that Palaephatus’ Peri Apiston should be read as an intervention in ancient debates about the status of ‘incredible reports’ (apista legomena) as sources of information regarding the past and contemporary worlds. After carefully reviewing the arguments previous scholars have adduced to deny the author’s serious historical and epistemological interests, the discussion proposes that Palaephatus sought to steer a middle course between those who tended to accept these narratives unquestioningly, like the readers of paradoxographical collections, and the mainstream historiographical and geographical writers who denied that apista legomena had any value as historical records. Palaephatus emerges from the article as the author of an antiquarian text whose approach to handling mythic evidence was relevant for a variety of ancient genres – historiography, paradoxography, geography, mythography – which relied on information drawn from more or less incredible reports.

The intertextual relationship between Flavian poetry and Greek literature has been of increasing scholarly interest in recent years.1 Statius, specifically, adopted and reworked several themes which are central to Greek drama, not to mention the influence the latter exerted on his character sketching, descriptions, motifs and poetic art in general.2

This paper focuses on Praxilla’s Achilles (fr. 748 PMG), examining its form, its content, and the possible literary context in which the verse may originally have been embedded. The fragment represents a rare instance of an epic verse reused almost in its entirety (the adjective τεόν excepted), and appears to have dealt with the embassy episode of Iliad 9, perhaps within the framework of an invocation to Achilles or a dialogue (in the Underworld?) involving the hero.

The paper discusses a dozen passages from book 2 of Valerius Flaccus’ Argonautica, proposing some twenty new conjectures.