Chapter 2: The Greek Jeweled Style Fotini Hadjittofi Michael Roberts’s ground-breaking monograph argued that a set of stylistic features became prominent in Latin poetry during the fourth and fifth centuries CE: brilliant verbal and/or visual patterning, episodic fragmentation, ekphrastic description, enumeration and paradoxical juxtaposition – together these constitute the jeweled style, which scholars of late Greek poetry have subsequently detected in poets spanning the whole period from Quintus of Smyrna (third century) to Nonnus of Panopolis (fifth century) and the latter’s sixth-century imitators. 1 This contribution aims primarily to undertake an ‘archaeology’ of this style in late Greek poetry: It will first try to detect its presence in poetry, starting from the third century; it will argue that Greek prose is both an earlier and a more frequent vehicle for the jeweled style than Greek poetry, and it will finally provide some preliminary explanations as to why much of Greek poetry throughout late antiquity continued to be written in a markedly archaic, Homericizing style, which can be conceived as the opposite of the jeweled style. A Greek jeweled style in the third century? 1 For the jeweled style in Quintus’ Posthomerica see the recent reading of Book 13 by Avlamis (2019: 184–6). It is commonplace to qualify Nonnus’ style as jeweled; see e.g. Agosti (2004/05) and De Stefani and Magnelli (2011: 557). See also below. 33