Abstract
This note introduces a new piece of evidence into the long-standing debate on the date of the proem of Valerius Flaccus’ Argonautica. A recently excavated agonistic inscription from Naples records a victory by the emperor Domitian in a contest of praise poetry for his deceased brother Titus at the isolympic Sebasta festival. A poem of this kind is described by Valerius Flaccus in the proem of his own epic and it is suggested that the two poems by Domitian are the same. Details of Valerius’ description of the Domitianic poem accord with known qualities of agonistic encomia. If this argument is accepted, we have a new terminus post quem for the completion of the proem: after 82 CE.
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