The Odyssey is a central text in any discussion of ’the poet’s voice’ in Greek poetry. Not only is Homer throughout the ancient world a figure of authority and poetic pre-eminence against whom writers establish their own authorial voice, but also the text of the Odyssey demonstrates a concern with the major topics that recur throughout this book. For the Odyssey highlights the role and functioning of language itself, both in its focus on the hero’s lying manipulations and in its marked interest in the bewitching power of poetic performance. It is in the Odyssey, too, that we read one of the most developed narratives of concealed identity, boasted names and claims of renown, and the earliest extended first-¬person narrative in Greek literature. Indeed, the Odyssey is centred on the representation of a man who is striving to achieve recognition in his society, a man, what’s more, who is repeatedly likened to a poet.

What is surprising about a return to a book I wrote thirty years ago is how fresh it feels in my mind, as if I have kept writing it ever since. In my later studies, I have explored many of the same themes that I first discussed in this book, such as ethnicity, networks, and the ’small world’ effect on the rise of Greek civilization, some Mediterranean issues, the impact of myth and quasi-historical accounts on history, the validation and legitimization of conquest and settlement, the evidence of nomima and their usefulness for the ancient historian, the historical and archaeological evidence of settlement, and even the role of drawing lots in ancient Greece.

The opening lines of Ajax are spoken by the goddess Athena, who addresses her favourite, Odysseus, as an adherent of Harm Enemies: he is tracking down an enemy as usual, in a manner worthy of his traditionally tricky persona. She is the dearest of gods to him, and they enjoy a solidarity inherited from the Odyssey. He places himself in her hands, as he has always done in the past. But despite the bond between them, a conflict of values emerges. When Odysseus is reluctant to view the mad Ajax Athena scolds him as a coward. She implies that any kind of fear or ’reluctance’ constitutes cowardice.

For intellectuals of the re-conquest generation, Prokopios became a helpful guide to the city they had lost and regained. George Pachymeres (1242–ca. 1308), a highly placed court historian, engaged in an intertextual dialogue with the lengthy account of the horseman written by Prokopios. Pachymeres set out to write an exemplary ekphrasis that would outperform Prokopios in vivid explication of Justinian’s monument. The narrative structure follows Prokopios, but emphasizes different points. Pachymeres created a narrative contrast between the Constantinople of his own days and the glorious Constantinople of earlier times by focusing on the horseman – the tangible imperial link that threaded together two eras. The narrative offered by Pachymeres provides a lens through which we can behold the experience of an intellectual returning from exile and a learned observer examining a monument of a glorious past. His extended description of the monument sought to reconstruct its creator’s reasoning by using his own powers of observation, thus addressing a failure of Prokopios. Pachymeres can therefore be considered an eager, early pioneer of the fertile terrain that is now known as "late antique studies."