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.

This chapter explores coincidences and divergences between Hesiod’s conception of language and those found in Akkadian literature. First, it provides a synopsis of Hesiod’s ideas about language and the interrelation of these ideas with the poet’s broader poetics. Then it discusses how Hesiodic conceptions of language are deeply intertwined with the interpretation of divine names. The chapter also investigates how Hesiod’s particular ways of interpreting theonyms is used to endorse hermeneutic practices anchored in an oral tradition. It explores the differences between the Theogony and its cuneiform counterparts, especially by comparing how wordplay and etymology are deployed in the analysis of divine names.

This chapter considers the case of the Song of Emergence that has proved central to several contributions collected here, but approaches the comparison as an opportunity to appreciate the distinctive differences reflected in the various relevant sources. This chapter emphasises the role of female wife–mother figures as destabilising elements in Hesiod’s Theogony, in contrast to the more limited roles of female characters particularly in the Song of Emergence, and locates that gendering theme within the wider context of early Greek mythology. This comparison allows us to see the individual element working within its own context, to determine what is distinctive about each tradition and so, finally, to understand all of them better. Genealogy, at least in the way most Classicists would like to practise it, is neither possible nor profitable. But the comparison remains, and its analogy can tell us a lot.

This chapter takes a metapoetic approach to Lucretian allusion to show that the DRN figures the phenomenon of echo as a metaphor for literary appropriation. Lucretius culminates his discussion of acoustic phenomena and hearing with the example of the echo (DRN 4.549–94). Insofar as echo is introduced as the most prominent effect in the perceptible world of the atomic reverberations that give rise to auditory aisthēsis, I argue that Lucretius' multiple allusions to earlier poetry in this passage also serve to illustrate metapoetically the process itself of hearing. The ideas inherent in this Lucretian passage find parallels in the fragmentary papyri of Philodemus.