This chapter explores how early prose writers made use of intertextuality, from the emergence of prose until the classical age. First, it considers the earliest writers, especially early Greek mythographers and philosophers, who faced the challenge of dealing with the authoritative world of epic poetry. To inherit this credibility, they could either acknowledge its importance or reject it. In many cases, they tried to improve upon the poets or kept their narratives up to a certain point before swinging in another direction. Second, the chapter studies the developments in the classical age and focuses especially on Herodotus, who cites poets, but never prose writers, favourably. Harsh attacks are reserved for those predecessors whose work was recognised as significant and thus as a direct competitor.

Inscribed metrical texts are often marginalised in the study of archaic and classical poetics. This chapter integrates examples from c. 725 to c. 450 BCE with wider practices of intertextuality, where epigrams both share techniques with other kinds of literature and have some distinctive modes of signification. Early epigrams frequently use formulas to demonstrate the adherence of a dedication or funeral to traditional norms. The apparent decline in use of glaukopis on the Acropolis after 550 BCE suggests that these formulas were not just metrically convenient: semantics mattered. Epigrams also replicate formulaic phrases from both elegy and epic with their traditional connotations intact; such connotations enrich our understanding of Phrasicleia’s epitaph (CEG 24), and of ancient epigrammatists’ conceptualisation of the relationship between oral and inscribed poetry. Inscriptions, unlike other texts, also invited interpretation against monuments situated nearby. Early dialogues of this type tend to be cooperative rather than polemical. Examples discussed include Onatas’ signatures at Olympia, the tripods at the Theban Hismenion described by Herodotus, and the relationship of the Eion herms to CEG 2–3.

Lucian of Samosata emerges as a complex character through his writings, showcasing a deliberate engagement with ambiguity and boundary transgressions. From his caustic and comedic attitude towards Olympian deities to later categorisations as an enemy of Christianity in the tenth-century Suda lexicon, Lucian remains elusive in his spiritual allegiances as well. Similarly, the diverse reception of his theocentric writings prompts a valid inquiry into the best approach to understanding his work. Situating Lucian within the context of the Greco-Roman author’s perceptions of the divine and scholarly inquiries into Greco-Roman religion, this chapter considers his stance regarding religion in general and Christianity in particular. The chapter suggests viewing Lucian as a social anthropologist studying human perceptions of the divine. By delving into the socio-pragmatics of religious practices, Lucian verbalises long-standing debates, shedding light on the realities of belief and disbelief in the contemporary pagan and Christian divine systems.

The sixth chapter covers the origins of Roman historiography. As usual, they are in Greece, and as usual the Romans do something rather different with their model. From its origins in Cato down to what many considered its perfect form in Livy, the Romans were deeply interested in their own pasts. But history-writing was not as it is in the modern world: the ancient historian did little of what we would consider research. Here again, therefore, literary elements were to the fore: choosing the right kind of story to tell and telling it in the right way were the important things. Discussions of Ennius, Cato, Caesar, Sallust, Asinius Pollio, and Livy.

This chapter explores the interplay between identification and distance that Lucian sets up for his readers in relationship to the speaking characters in the Dialogues of the Courtesans. While readers are, at times, invited to identify with the plights of these ‘others’ as partners in restrictive power structures, at other times, the otherness of the courtesans is emphasised through female verbal markers, female-specific cults, and women-only sexuality. Again and again, the subjectivity of the courtesan is offered to the reader, only to be withdrawn from their grasp. And, in fact, in its current form, the collection begins with a soldier and ends with a virgin – the courtesan managing to slip away. Lucian’s play with the courtesan’s subjectivity leaves his readers full of suspicions about intentional misdirection, both by the characters within the stories and by the author Lucian himself.

This chapter considers how we might approach the intertextual relationship between two highly fragmentary texts, in this case Sophocles’ Judgement, a satyr play that dramatised the Judgement of Paris, and the epic Cypria in which that mythological episode featured. The exiguous textual remains of both works are taken as a prompt to consider intertextuality in its broader sense, namely the interrelationship of texts in ways that go beyond direct verbal allusion. The framework of possible worlds is employed to conceptualise the relationship between satyr drama and the world of epic and tragedy on which it draws, suggesting that the latter may be thought of as an actual world on which the alternative world of the former is predicated. Using this as a model of intertextuality allows us to examine the movements of the satyric plot as it opens up and closes down possibilities for radically alternative outcomes. In this reading of Judgement, we see Sophocles engaging with both the Cypria and that epic’s own intertextual network, with the satyrs acting paradoxically as both disruptors of the mythical tradition and a force that supports the story reaching its traditional conclusion.

This chapter considers some aspects of the intertextual and intervisual dynamics of Euripides’ Cyclops with particular reference to the cave represented by the skēnē. The particular links of the Cyclops to Sophocles’ Philoctetes are used to explore a network of allusive possibilities in both plays going back to Homer’s ‘Cave of the Nymphs’ in Odyssey 13 and embracing the lost Philoctetes plays of Aeschylus and Euripides. The powerful mediating role of Homer’s cave is seen to be transferred to the caves of drama as the boundary between the seen and the unseen, between the past, present, and future, and as a strongly suggestive marker of the difference between epic narrative and dramatic representation. As the Homeric cave had separate entrances for mortals and gods, so did the Athenian stage. In exploring some of the richness of ‘intertextual allusion’ in fifth-century drama, the chapter also contributes to the appreciation of the differences in allusive practice between tragedy, comedy, and satyr play and of how poets acknowledged and exploited those differences.

The third chapter covers the span of Roman oratory, from its first (lost) beginnings to the importance of Greek models, to its full flourishing in the work of Cicero. It emphasises throughout how central to Roman aristocratic life the art of good speaking was, how competitive an art form it was, and that the people were sophisticated auditors. Cicero necessarily dominates the discussion, but we try to capture the style of a few others, including Cato the Elder.

Lucian is an author inextricably connected to prose. In this chapter, I argue that poetry is a crucial and overlooked aspect of his literary identity. After an initial account of the striking presence of poetry in Lucian’s oeuvre and in wider Second Sophistic intellectual production, which operates beneath and beyond statements of disdain and disavowal, I turn to a close examination of three very different pieces of Lucian’s verse writing – from remixed tragic and epic ‘quotations’ in the Menippus and Zeus Tragoedus, to the ghostly new Homeric compositions in the True Histories – and highlight some key features of a Lucianic poetics. I ultimately suggest how this poetics articulates Lucian’s wider approach to the literary tradition, and his perception of his own role in continuing it. Lucian’s new-old verse provides him with a self-constructed mandate to reanimate the genres and conventions of the inherited past, to deflate them, disrupt them, and ultimately repossess them.

How much continuity was there in the allusive practices of the ancient world? This chapter explores this question here by considering the early Greek precedent for the so-called ‘Alexandrian footnote’, a device often regarded as one of the most learned and bookish in a Roman poet’s allusive arsenal. Ever since Stephen Hinds opened his foundational Allusion and Intertext with this device, it has been considered the preserve of Hellenistic and Roman scholar-poets. This chapter, however, argues that we should back-date the phenomenon all the way to the archaic age. By considering a range of illustrative examples from epic (Iliad, Odyssey, Hesiod), lyric (Sappho, Pindar, Simonides), and tragedy (Sophocles, Euripides, Theodectes), it demonstrates that the ‘Alexandrian footnote’ has a long history before Alexandria.