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.

The first section of this introduction sets the scene for the volume as a whole by briefly considering the history of intertextuality within modern classical scholarship, both Latin and Greek, and then highlighting the special methodological and historical challenges that attend on comparative approaches to early Greek literature. As scholars increasingly agree on the need to read early Greek literature in a comparative way, it is argued, this only makes more urgent the question of how best to do so. The second section of the introduction highlights some of the core methodological, historical, and literary preoccupations of this book by exploring in chronological order two contrastive and complementary case studies from early elegy, one from Tyrtaeus and one from Simonides. Rather than providing a set of definitive answers about how these texts relate to epic tradition and/or particular epics, this section aims to give a sense of the sort of questions at stake in the following chapters. The introduction then concludes by summarising each of those chapters and highlighting interconnections between them.

This chapter explores metamorphosis by focusing on the so-called ‘shearwaters of Diomedea’ – a group of seabirds whose odd behaviour recalls their previous existence as humans. It puts these birds in conversation with other humans-turned-animals both ancient and modern and investigates how they reflect on the experience of transformation. The chapter reveals that both ancient and modern tales of metamorphosis draw on the notion of hybridity in so far as many of the creatures undergoing such a transformation are, in effect, hybrids: they retain part of their human identity while also sporting the body of an animal. At the same time the chapter points to an important difference between ancient and modern ways of thinking the human. It shows that modern tales of metamorphosis tend to explore the dissolution of the boundary that separates the human from all other animals. The ancient conversation, by contrast, returns to – and ultimately affirms – the positions of some of the Greek philosophers arguing for an essential human difference.

A look at the commemoration of the Persian Wars, especially the Battle of Thermopylae, through commemorative epigrams. A comparison of Spartan commemoration with that of other Greeks, concluding that initially the Spartans did not frame Thermopylae or the Persian Wars as a struggle for Greece or freedom, but as an arena for demonstrating excellence and winning glory.

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.

Chapter four investigates archaic inscriptions and the interplay of song and stone in the poetry of Simonides. The tradition of Simonides gives us both epitaphic inscription and choral epinician, two poetic genres whose means and methods might be seen as so widely divergent as to be unrelated. However, I will explore how the substance of song and the fixity of objects are both in play on both sides of the song and stone divide, through a situatedness that allows Simonides to make claims that memories of the past will endure into the future.

Chapter 3 analyses the carpe diem motif in Horace from an innovative angle. It argues that we gain a better understanding of the motif if we read it against the background of Horace’s literary criticism in the Ars Poetica. In the Ars Poetica, Horace compares a language’s lexical development to leaves falling from a tree: while some words disappear, old ones return. Both the image of leaves and the understanding of time as cyclical are also part of Horace’s poetry of carpe diem. The chapter shows that the poems as well as the individual words of which they consist evoke present enjoyment. The chapter combines innovative work on Horace’s literary criticism with new interpretations of some of Horace’s most famous Odes, including the ode to Leuconoe, C. 1.11. The chapter reveals the importance of Horace’s choice of words for his poetics of presence.

In his Holy Sonnets, Donne seeks to forget rather than remember his sins, begging God for ‘a heavenly Lethean flood’ to ‘drown’ his ‘sin’s black memory’ and implying that his very salvation may depend upon it: ‘That Thou remember them, some claim as debt; / I think it mercy if Thou wilt forget’. Such a desire for divine oblivion would seem to be the very inverse of the theologian Dr Donne’s well-known assertion that ‘the art of salvation is but the art of memory’, yet, this chapter argues, they are intimately joined in the Holy Sonnets. This chapter explores how the speaker’s uncertainty about his salvation connects the ‘art of death’ (ars moriendi) with the ‘art of memory’ (ars memorativa) as a mnemonic poetics of ruin and recollection. The transformation of the art of memory into an art of salvation in Augustine’s Confessions is central not only to Donne’s reputation as a ‘second St Augustine’ but also to the poetics of memory that shape the Holy Sonnets. Donne constructs the Holy Sonnets as a memory theatre in which to enact the drama of salvation by performing the role of Doctor Faustus, a part drawn from both Augustine’s Confessions and Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus.

Horace’s Greek lyric predecessors all had a distinctive relationship to Homer, and Horace had a problem in following them, since there was not really a figure in Roman culture comparable to Homer, even if Ennius looked like it in some ways. In the first three books of his Odes, published in 23 BCE, Horace made very few references to epic. But in his fourth book, published in 13 BCE after the death of Virgil and the publication of the Aeneid in 19 BCE, Horace engages systematically with epic, explicitly with Homer and Ennius. The chapter argues that it is in fact the new classic of the Aeneid that is the real focus of interest. The chapter closes by asking why Horace deliberately ignored the work of Livy in a book of poetry that was so interested in how best to represent and commemorate the Roman past.

These conclusions to the entire book begin by comparing ancient Near Eastern war memorials preserved in the archeological record, on the one hand, to biblical war commemoration that has been transmitted for millennia, on the other. Where one was carved in stone and displayed in competing palaces, the other was conducted in the framework of a single, yet composite, narrative (a “movable monument”). In contrast to what we encounter in ancient Egypt and Western Asia, the societies of the East Aegean produced forms of war commemoration that are much more similar to the biblical writings. After presenting a selection of this evidence from ancient Greece, the chapter examines some of factors that help explain the commonalities between “Athens and Jerusalem.” It then turns back to Wellhausen and reflects on the larger implications of the book for political theology.