This chapter provides an account of epic katabases (journeys to the Underworld) and treats the Underworld as both a theme and a location in early hexameter poetry. Sekita presents an overview of Underworld scenes and motifs featuring in Homer and Hesiod, and as reconstructed in the Epic Cycle and other epic poets. She also summarises the main scholarly achievements and developments regarding the possible interpretations of this material, including its reception in the iconography of Attic and Apulian vase-painting and place in the broader Mediterranean tradition.

This chapter examines how Pindar and Bacchylides make use of early epic (esp. Homer) in their victory odes, from an explicitly ’intertextualist’ perspective. It discusses (inter alia) the meaning of ’Homer’ in the fifth century BC to the earliest audiences of Pindar and Bacchylides and adverts to the complexity and multiplicity of the audiences of their victory odes. It argues furthermore for the critical importance and benefits of intertextual analysis of Pindar and Bacchylides, especially the ways in which interaction with texts such as those of archaic epic should prompt a wider openness to intertextual investigation of victory odes.

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.

This essay offers an overview of the non-canonical ancient Greek epics known as the “Epic Cycle” and their relationships with each other and with canonical Homeric and Hesiodic poetry.

The Trojan Horse was a ruse devised by the Greeks to gain entrance within the walls of Troy, which were otherwise impervious. The narrative of the Trojan Horse is associated with story traditions of the sack of Troy and the wiliness of Odysseus.