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.

A meditation on how militaristic commemoration continues to influence attitudes towards war and increase the liklihood of more wars being fought in the future. Since the Spartans did not initially commemorate their wars as acts of liberation or altrusim, leading in the beginning to fewer rather than more wars, we should reconsider framing our wars as virtuous and selfless campaigns to help others, at least if we want wars to stop occurring.

A study of Archaic Spartan commemoration, starting with Homeric ideas and the poetry of Tyrtaeus. A look at some key commemorative events in Archaic Sparta, including Sparta’s relationship with Samos and the Messenian Wars. A consideration of the role of commemoration in Spartan religion and cult.

This chapter considers how the language of memory and knowledge indexes tradition. In Homeric epic, characters’ memories coincide with the audience’s recollection of intertextual and intratextual episodes (e.g. Aeneas’s flight from Achilles, Heracles’ labours, Diomedes’ wounding of Ares) and sometimes mark selective retellings of tradition (e.g. Agamemnon on recruiting Odysseus). On occasion, characters’ knowledge even extends proleptically to the future (e.g. Hector on Achilles’ death). Few comparable cases of characters’ mythical recall are visible elsewhere in archaic epic or lyric poetry because of our fragmentary evidence and differences in narratological presentation. But lyric poets also index tradition through the memories of their narrators, evoking both other myths (e.g. Theognis on Odysseus) and their own wider cycles of song (e.g. Sappho). They also appeal directly to the audience’s knowledge (e.g. Pindar on Ajax, Bacchylides on Thebes). From Homer onwards, memory and knowledge proved recurring but varied indices of allusion.