The Flavian Age marked a decisive political break with the Julio-Claudian past. And yet Flavian literature has been repeatedly defined through a sense of epigonality, one that it itself cultivated, as Hinds observes. But, as Hutchinson comments of modern European literature, which also defines itself through ‘an anxiety of lateness’, backward-looking paradoxically can be associated with forward-thinking; lateness is one of the animating impulses of aesthetic creation. I shall argue here that, despite their different political and social conditions, Catullus was a foundational author in the development of the short poem for the Flavian poets Martial and Statius and their close contemporary Pliny the Younger, whose political career began under Domitian. All three authors raise the question of the cultural status of a form of poetry that from Catullus onwards was often described as lusus (‘play’) or iocus (‘jest’).