This chapter argues for and interprets allusions to the invocation before the Catalogue of Ships (Il. 2.484-93) in Ibycus’ ’Polycrates Ode’, Pindar’s Paean 6 and Paean 7b, and Simonides’ ’Plataea Elegy’. It then considers these four poems together as a unique case study for the early reception of Homer. For no other passage from the Iliad or the Odyssey can we trace an equally extensive afterlife in early Greek lyric. The author argues that the unusual prominence of the narrator’s personality and the exceptionally emphatic claim to objective truth in Il. 2.484–93 made these lines a privileged point of reference for subsequent explorations of the nature of poetic authority.

After defining ‘real’ and ‘ideal’ in relation to character or behaviour and to setting, this chapter notes that, whereas the other four Greek ‘ideal’ novelists create a realistic background, whether using personal observation or historiography, Longus draws chiefly on literary texts that themselves present a fictional world (Homer and Theocritus) or one that is semi-fictional (archaic melic poetry). ‘The Country’ explores Longus’ debt to Theocritus’ landscape, especially that of Idyll 1, advertised by his preface as several steps removed from the real world. The chapter then discusses the relation of 2.32 to Theocritus 1; of 1.17.3 to Sappho and Anacreon via Theocritus 11, complicated by the term ἀληθῶς, ‘really’; and of the apple at 3.33.4 to Sappho’s epithalamia, Ibycus, and Theocritus 28. ‘The city’ explores the literary forebears of Longus’ Megacles; ‘The sea’ looks at his ‘Tyrian’ pirates’ origins in earlier novels, especially Chariton’s; and ‘Reality’ considers how his use of Thucydides underlines his own fictionality. Overall it is the chapter’s stress on the fictionality, rather than on the poetic status, of most of Longus’ intertexts that differentiates its writer’s position from those of Richard Hunter and Maria Pia Pattoni.

This chapter explores how archaic Greek poets evoke and challenge prior traditions and texts through appeals to hearsay (e.g. φασί, λόγος). Case studies include the Iliad’s appropriation of theogonic and Theban myth; Homeric allusion to specific character traits (Antilochus’ speed, Nestor’s age, Achilles’ ancestry, Odysseus’ cunning); agonistic engagement with other traditions (the Iliad’s countering of Achillean immortality, the Odyssey’s positioning of Penelope against the Catalogue of Women); and further indexed allusions across the works of Hesiod, the Homeric Hymns, and other epic fragments. Indexical hearsay is even more prominent in lyric poetry, from Archilochus to Pindar: case studies include Archilochus and fable, Simonides on Hesiod’s Arete, Theognis’ Atalanta, Bacchylides’ Heracles, Ibycus’ Cassandra, Sappho’s Tithonus, sympotic skolia on both Ajax and the tyrannicides, and Pindar’s flexible mythologising. Poets employed this device to signal mastery of tradition, to challenge alternative myths, to foreground major intertextual models, to invite audiences to supplement untold details, and to authorise creative reworkings of tradition. The ‘Alexandrian footnote’ has a long history before Alexandria.