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.

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.

The idea of a narrator that is distinct from the author is a basic tenet of narratology. In ancient criticism, however, this idea absent. What is more, ancient critics tended to ascribe utterances of characters in general to authors. This, I argue, is not a deficiency but the expression of a distinctly ancient view of voice, which I reconstruct on the basis of a wide array of texts. Where we see several narrative levels nested into each other, ancient authors and readers envisaged narration as an act of impersonation. One upshot of my analysis is that, while it may be intriguing to explore metalepseis in ancient literature, the very idea of metalepsis conflicts with the premises of narrative as it was understood in antiquity. The ancient view of narration can be linked at least partly to the prominence of performance and therefore reveals the impact of socio-cultural factors; at the same time, it resonates with recent cognitive theory, notably embodied and enactive models of cognition.

This chapter introduces the main concerns and aims of this book with an opening case study on Phoenix’s Meleager exemplum in Iliad 9. It then surveys the recent developments of scholarship on allusive marking, especially in Latin poetry: it explores the ‘Alexandrian footnote’ and other tropes of allusion; challenges the assumption that such devices are distinctively bookish and scholarly; and introduces a new term for the phenomenon (‘indexicality’). The second half of the introduction outlines the author’s methodological approach to early Greek allusion, incorporating elements of both neoanalysis and traditional referentiality. The author focuses on ‘mythological intertextuality’ in archaic epic, exemplified through a close reading of the ‘Nestor’s cup’ inscription. This section considers the reconstruction of lost traditions, the question of Homeric allusion to Near Eastern poetry, and the gradual transition to ‘textual intertextuality’. No specific watershed can be pinpointed. The growing practice of citing other poets by name attests to increasingly greater engagement with specific texts, but the Iliad and Odyssey already provide a plausible example of direct intertextual allusion. The chapter closes by addressing three further issues of context that are central to this study: audiences and performance, poetic agonism, and authorial self-consciousness.

We resume the above discussion about sense perception and violence and delve further into the campaign Lucretius wages against presumed subjectivity. This chapter is a combination of two previously published articles (“Ocular Penetration, Grammatical Objectivity, and an Indecent Proposal in De Rerum Natura” and “Seminal Verse: Atomic Orality and Aurality in De Rerum Natura” ) both of which have undergone revision and expansion for the present volume. The weight of inquiry falls especially on sight and hearing, which are, perhaps not coincidentally, the primary modes of experiencing the poem or – to put it more in Lucretius’ parlance – the senses being assailed by the poem itself. Shown to be less than powerful in the womb in Chapter 2, here we find that Lucretius alters this uterine imagery to prove that men and their sense orifices are involuntary, womb-like repositories for nature’s inseminating forces.

In the sixth and final chapter, we continue to trace how Lucretius rehabilitates Roman men and their performed gender. Although I resume exploring the sexual language and figures by which Lucretius depreciates male presumptions of anatomical and sociological advantage, in “Vir Recreandus” I also tease out from the poem a positive argument about masculinity. Following the poet’s cues, I construct what an Epicurean man is, what he can do, what he is for, and how he can flourish in Lucretius’ reordering of the world. This Epicurean homo turns out to be manly in behaviors that, in part, map onto traditional scripts for a vir even while acting and self-regarding in ways that Romans would deem strange indeed. Much to Cicero’s vexation, Epicurean men become Rome’s true patriots.

From conception and lived experience, we proceed to death in Chapter 4. Although my focus is on Lucretius’ treatment of death and men’s fears of it, in “The Hole that Gapes for All” I persist with analyzing the themes of wombs, semen, fecundity and the ways by which Lucretius weaves this imagery into his criticism of human appetite for consumables, sex, and protracted life. In Lucretius’ poetics, the universe, the world, and individual human bodies all become sites of decomposition, insemination, and (re)birth. Death itself is shown to be pathologically eroticized as the final object of a man’s fear and lust – a desire Lucretius seeks to reform into an ethical acceptance of death. Lucretius’ point, I argue, is that, regardless of biological maleness and the security it bestows on Roman men, nature’s laws make wombs and tombs of them all in a never-ending cycle of death and rebirth.

Chapter 5 touches on some of the points brought up in Chapter 3, notably ancient views of character, but has a different focus – narrative motivation, a category prominent particularly in story-oriented narratology. The Odyssey is the origin of the classical Western plot, and yet the motivation of the Penelope scenes in books 18 and 19 does not follow the logic which modern realist novels have made our default model. Instead, I suggest, Odyssey 18 and 19 have a design premised on features that we encounter in medieval narratives, notably retroactive motivation, thematic isolation and suspense about how. The reason why Penelope has provoked innumerous psychologizing interpretations in modern scholarship is that her comportment is not psychologically motivated by Homer. Similar cases of motivation that are bound to strike the reader of modern novels as peculiar can be found in Homer and also later literature. At first sight, these cases may seem to conflict with the emphasis on motivation in Aristotle and the scholia, but in viewing motivation in terms of plot rather than psychology, the critics share common ground with the texts discussed.

The epilogue draws out some broader conclusions from this study, encouraging us to rethink traditional narratives of ancient literary history. Archaic poets already participated in a sophisticated and well-developed allusive system, and Hellenistic/Roman poets’ ‘footnoting’ habits are not as novel, bookish or scholarly as we might think. The epilogue further asks why these indices have not been identified or studied at such length before; it explores variation in indexical practice across genres and time; and it highlights further avenues for further research.