Even more than the noise and the clouds of dust raised by men and horses, the flashing of bronze armour and weapons is characteristic of Homeric panoramas of battle. When the Greeks armed themselves with helmets, shields, corslets and spears, the brightness lit up the sky, and all around the earth beamed in the shine of bronze (19.359–63). It blinded eyes, the glare of bronze from shining helmets, newly-polished corslets and bright shields, as they advanced in their masses (14.340–3).

I began the oral version of this paper by remarking that it was a great honour and pleasure to have been invited to visit the place in which it was delivered and to address my audience – and asking my audience to remember that I had said that.

Like many features of democratic Athens, the legal system is both strikingly familiar and disturbingly alien to the modern reader. The principle of trial by a jury of laymen is one which, though intermittently criticized, remains the basis of the decision-making process in modern Britain. At the same time, the size of the jury panels, their powers, the reliance on volunteer prosecutors, the use of an exchange of speeches as the method of presentation, these and other features diverge significantly from accepted practice in our own courts. My concern in this paper is with one striking divergence, the way in which the relationship between the legal system and society at large is conceptualized, and with the problems it raises. In modern developed societies the law and the lawcourts are fenced around with procedural, psychological, and in some cases constitutional barriers. The law itself is a self-contained system, distinct from other coercive forces, and perceived as separate from the political life of the community. Procedures and participants in the courts are given a degree of protection from constraints which apply elsewhere, in order to ensure that all relevant information is disclosed and that a verdict is given on the facts of the case, taken as far as possible in isolation from the rest of the lives of the participants and the community. All these barriers are absent in the context of classical Athens. In practice and in conception the law and its administration are in some important respects indistinguishable from the life of the community in general.

I think we have to accept that the term intertextuality serves a purpose. One of the terms it allows us to dispense with, allusion, has its disadvantages.

Up until recently I was happy with ‘allusion’: Vergil ‘alludes’ to Homer. The term was time-honoured, and, surely, unproblematical. Unproblematical, and not, so far as it went, and in the right hands, unsubtle. One meant that Vergil was not just using his source text (or his significant source text) as raw material. The source text became part of the new text, its characters and context were relevant to the new text. Thus, when in his opening speech Aeneas ‘quotes’ Homer's Odysseus, we sense that Vergil is casting Aeneas as a new Odysseus, comparing him and contrasting him with Odysseus, in a new Odyssey. And so the Aeneid proceeds: an allusive text, constantly alluding to Homer, re-forming Homer, remaking the Homeric characters, re-forming other texts in the same significant way … What texts? What texts does it not significantly re-form?

In the eighth book of Statius' Thebaid the Argives meet to appoint a successor to the dead seer Amphiaraus (275 ff.). Their choice falls on Thiodamas son of Melampus (277–9); he, however, is overwhelmed by the prospect, which he regards with a mixture of joy and apprehension (281–5). There follows an eight-line simile which David Vessey rightly describes as ‘unique in the Thebaid’ Thiodamas is compared to a young Parthian king who succeeds to the throne following his father's death (286–93):

sicut Achaemenius solium gentisque paternas

excepit si forte puer, cui vivere patrem

tutius, incerta formidine gaudia librat,

an fidi proceres, ne pugnet vulgus habenis,

cui latus Euphratae, cui Caspia limina mandet.

sumere tune arcus ipsumque onerare veretur

patris equum, visusque sibi nee sceptra capaci

sustentare manu nee adhuc implere tiaram.