In a few cases in which a poet of the Imperial Age (such as Propertius, Ovid or Petronius) retells a Virgilian scene, it is possible to recognize a particular poetic technique. It had not passed unnoticed
by earlier scholars, but I propose now to name it ‘the technique of the interstitial formations’. In the
cases studied, the new poets seem to look for a sort of gap in the previous narration, an
interstice that they filled and developed to the point of making it the centre of the narrative interest
in their own version of the scene.
