This chapter investigates Archilochus’ relationship to the tradition of wisdom literature, using the poet as a case study for how we can think about inter-generic and intertextual relationships so early in the Greek literary tradition. Having established that Archilochus is familiar with (and expects his audience also to know) the conventions of didactic moralising, the chapter discusses the case for a stronger proposition: that his poetry demonstrates a specific relationship with the poems of Hesiod. The chapter examines some fragments which demonstrate the best case for an intertextual relationship (frr. 196a, 195, 177) and discusses how reading these through a Hesiodic lens enhances our understanding of what the poems aim to do and how they fit into Archilochus’ broader rhetorical strategy.

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 final chapter explores the reception of songs lost and then recovered in papyri finds within their own fraught material context, focusing on Archilochus’ Cologne Epode and Timotheus’ Persae. How does the experience and narrative of loss, discovery, and recovery inform our sense of the bodies in these poems, so concerned themselves with the loss of limb and grasping touch?

The first chapter looks at one half of song, namely rhythm. It seeks to understand how the idea of rhythm relates to the movements of the body, and particularly the heartbeat, starting with the earliest uses of the word rhythmos in poems of Archilochus of Theognis, moving back again to Homer and then forward to Aristophanes and Plato to understand the shifting ways that rhythm was understood to connect poems and bodies.

This chapter investigates the links between the Akkadian poem Etana, the fragmentary Lykambes epode of the archaic Greek poet Archilochus, and the Aesopic fable of The Eagle and the Fox, carefully assessing both similarities and differences in these sources as well as in further, related Greek material, and also considering the possibility of further versions of Etana in India, Egypt and the folklore of the Baltic region. Taken together, these reflections lead to a distinction, in particular, between a floating motif model and a fixed text model of transmission, both of which may be discernible in the various manifestations of Etana in Greece and beyond.

Chapter 6 of The Cambridge Companion to Sappho ponders Sappho’s relationship with her other archaic poets and contemporary poetic traditions, including iambic poetry (Archilochus and Hipponax) and choral poetry (Alcman and Bacchylides).