Further investigation of the foundation traditions of Metapontium, focusing on the persistence of much more ancient Indo-European mythic traditions and time-reckoning traditions and the presence of those elements in the bricolage that constitutes the Aeolian mythic system of Metapontium foundation narratives and their relationship to Anatolian Aeolian tradition.

Analyses the re-animating culture of imperial Greek culture, focusing on sophistic declamations, ethopoetic exercises, ‘close encounter’ descriptions and Homeric performance. Suggests how all these spaces reveal a strong and very textually engaged awareness of the concept of ‘doubleness’ (being and not being the subject of one’s impersonation). By reading these modes alongside depictions of performance from within the Posthomerica (Nestor’s song, the song of the bards and the debate between Ajax and Odysseus) argues for the direct influence that they exerted on Quintus’ composition, providing models for how to expand creatively within the boundaries of a canonical, traditional text.

The purpose of Chapter 2 is to make my philological discoveries accessible to a non-specialist audience. The chapter begins with the textual history of the Rus Primary Chronicle. It outlines the annalistic format and historical contents of this notoriously difficult text, whilst also providing details about the extant manuscripts and the nature of their compilation. Next, the chapter offers the first ever anglophone history of chronicle studies in Russia and the West. It does so by focusing on the careers of two main figures: the eighteenth-century apostle of German philology in Russia, August Ludwig von Schlözer, and the great early twentieth-century giant of Russian chronicle studies, Aleksei Shakhmatov. It is a strategy which requires my review of the remaining literature to be selective in the extreme. Yet this too has its benefits, since my aim is to solve but a single problem. Why were two extraordinarily gifted philologists, and generations of their successors, never able to identify the liturgical sources of the Rus Primary Chronicle? I ultimately conclude that the traditions of modern philology trained these thinkers to analyse the historiographical past, but in so doing it blinded them to the existence of the liturgical past.