“The Ties that Bind,” takes us in a new direction as we begin to explore Lucretius’ curative efforts toward his male audience. Quite naturally then, we train our focus on the famous honey-rimmed cup of medicine metaphor of 1.921–50 (4.1–25). We find that the verses present a figure denser than the simple doctor-patient-medicine schema. Rather surprisingly, Lucretius has woven into the image a complex set of allusions to mythical female characters. In overlapping ways, Lucretius identifies his authorial voice with Circe, Helen, and the Sirens as he seeks to seduce, drug, and divert his audience away from what they might imagine to be their dearest goals in life. Lucretius reveals that the emasculating web of deceit he spins becomes a safety net to rescue his audience from the trap of self-delusion and superstition in the face of nature’s laws.

While some Classicists have made cases for the birth of fiction, linking it to various authors and texts, others have argued that fictionality is a core concern of Greek literature from its beginnings to the Imperial era. In chapter 2, I agree with the idea that fictionality did not have to be discovered at some point but then proceed to argue that neither did it ever play an important role. After presenting evidence for the familiarity of fictionality in antiquity, I reconsider two authors who often appear as cornerstones in histories of fictionality, Gorgias and Aristotle. A closer look at their reflections draws our attention to two dimensions of ancient narrative that were deemed far more important than its referentiality, namely its immersive quality and its moral thrust.

This chapter serves as an introduction to the polemical dismissal of Epicurean teachings as sub-masculine and morally suspect. Epicureans are shown to figured as sexually receptive and effeminate by their ideological opponents. I argue that Lucretius accepts these criticisms and turns them around to show that Roman men are equally effeminate and penetrable. Objective, empirical observation of nature and physics proves that everyone, regardless of biological sex and sociological gender, is rendered penetrable and vulnerable by the constant issue and reception of atoms.

Perhaps the most prominent cognitivist concept in recent narratology is the Theory of Mind. Alan Palmer, Lisa Zunshine and others have been highly influential with their claim that mind reading is at the core of our engagement with narrative in general. However, these scholars have not only ignored how controversial the idea of the Theory of Mind is in psychology – ancient literature, I believe, also belies their argument about narrative at large. Mind reading is certainly central to our responses to modern realist novels, but ancient narratives, as my test case, Heliodorus’ Ethiopica, illustrates, were more invested in the reconfiguration of time than in individualized minds. Plot was crucial for the experiential quality of narrative hailed by critics, as shown in Chapter 2. This prominence of plot is reflected in Aristotle’s Poetics and other critical works. In order not to play off plot against character, I propose experience as a category that integrates cognitive processes as well as matters of plot.

This chapter explores the indexical potential of time in three ways: chronological perspective, the use of temporal adverbs and adjectives to situate an episode within a larger span of literary history; marked iteration, the self-reflexive replay or foreshadowing of other events; and epigonal self-consciousness, the direct or indirect appeal to poetic predecessors. All three tropes are active in archaic epic and lyric, but with differing accents. In epic, references to time and iteration mark intratextual and intertextual cross-references and doublets, while epic heroes’ epigonal relationships with their πρότεροι figure the tensions of the poet’s relationship with his predecessors. In lyric poetry, temporal references similarly index tradition; δηὖτε marks both generic and intertextual repetition; and direct appeals to πρότεροι follow and challenge both whole genres and specific texts. Indexical temporality was deeply embedded in archaic Greek poetics from the very start.

After acknowledging the important contribution of structuralist narratology to the study of ancient literature in the past decades, the first chapter highlights its price: forged mostly in the reading of modern novels, narratological taxonomies have occluded peculiarities of ancient narrative and its understanding of narrative. I discuss various alternative approaches to ancient narrative and then introduce the one chosen in this book: I take key concepts of modern narrative theory and explore how ancient texts relate to it. Instead of striving to prove the existence or prefiguration of these concepts in antiquity and thereby to prove ancient literature as modern avant la lettre, I will zero in on the fault lines, where the ancient sense of narrative does not map onto our categories.

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.