The Introduction sketches the content of the book’s forty-six chapters in varying degrees of detail and relates them to the author’s developing interests and, in the case of imperial Greek poetry and the Greek novels, to the increasing scholarly attention given to these subjects over the last thirty-five years.

Similes in Apollonius’ Argonautica tell two contrasting tales. On the one hand, humans with skilled expertise can exert an exhilarating amount of control over the world around them. The power of knowledge reflects the contemporary culture of Hellenistic Alexandria where new forms of knowledge were sprouting up everywhere. But such skills are largely useless for women, and they fail in the face of human passions. While characters in the simile world of the Argonautica use strategy to overcome danger in a way that is largely out of reach in the Homeric simile world, similes also highlight the intractable power of erotic desire as powerful and deadly as the battlefield of the Iliad. The Argonautica represents the first post-Homeric chapter in the story of epic similes. Simile structures take on a range and variety that previously was found only in the content of the similes. These new forms bring forward simile features that are peripheral in Homeric to reshape the epic genre in ways that reflect the ideas of the Hellenistic period. At moments of powerful emotion in the Argonautica, similes weave “erudition” and “emotion” inextricably together.

The epilogue draws out some broader conclusions from this study, encouraging us to rethink traditional narratives of ancient literary history. Archaic poets already participated in a sophisticated and well-developed allusive system, and Hellenistic/Roman poets’ ‘footnoting’ habits are not as novel, bookish or scholarly as we might think. The epilogue further asks why these indices have not been identified or studied at such length before; it explores variation in indexical practice across genres and time; and it highlights further avenues for further research.

This chapter explores two strategies for preserving the memory of live music in early Ptolemaic Egypt by reading Posidippus’ epigram (37 AB) on Arion’s lyre next to Hedylus’ epigram (4 GP) on an automated rhyton in the shape of the Egyptian god Bes. While Arion’s lyre captures the essence of a classic but long-dead virtuoso in amber, the rhyton performs its song on endless repeat. I suggest that the automated rhyton, as interpreted by Hedylus, represents an attempt to create an eternal first performance of a type of song that could represent the Graeco-Egyptian Ptolemaic empire: a hymn to the Nile.

Chapter 20 of The Cambridge Companion to Sappho looks at Sappho’s significance for the rich poetic culture of the Hellenistic world, including Apollonius, Theocritus, and Posidippus, as a parallel development to the scholarly discourse surrounding the editing of her work during this period.