The introductory chapter to this study of Propertius 4 as a collection composed in the wake of Virgil’s death begins by highlighting some of the more obvious ways in which the elegist advertises his allusive engagement with the Eclogues, Georgics and, in particular, the Aeneid, and how the troping of this engagement as hospitality suggests a relationship that might be cooperative or antagonistic. From there it looks back to the only two Propertian elegies in which the name Vergilius features – 1.8 (ostensibly referring to the Pleiades constellation but, it is argued, punningly invoking the poet) and 2.34 (in a review of Virgil’s career to date), each constructing a relationship between elegiac and epic poetics that, as later chapters show, will be revisited in Book 4. After these preliminary case-studies the Introduction presents a history of approaches to poetic memory by way of a survey of the scholarly responses mobilized by Propertius 4 as a Virgilianizing collection. These approaches are then tested in the laboratory of elegy 4.9, a Virgilio-Propertian diptych on Hercules which, it is argued, is programmatic for allusion and intertextuality as enacted in this collection.

These concluding remarks offer a sideways look at some issues raised by this book, taking their cue from the surviving iconography of the monument at the centre of Propertius 4 – the Temple of Palatine Apollo – to address the ideological implications of the different handling by Propertius and Virgil of Augustan mythmaking. Ultimately the many traces of Virgilian sensibility in Propertius, and of Propertian sensibility in Virgil, are easier to identify than to interpret. Yet Propertius’ obsessive Virgilian intertextuality (here distilled into a multi-part typology), while showing that the elegist is haunted by his epic confrère, is also an exercise of control that transcends generic anxiety to recognize and enact Virgil’s status as a classic of the Roman literary canon. Propertius’ Virgilian intertextuality, extending as it does to structural and stichometric parallels, may also have implications for the textual criticism of both authors, at least insofar as a Virgilian reading of Book 4 obtains. These last reflections find their way to a comparison with Shostakowich’s Fourteenth Symphony, where uncanny thematic, political and structual parallels with Propertius 4 give pause for thought.

This chapter examines Clare’s place among the poets in his own lifetime and more recently. The first section considers his appeal to recent and contemporary poets such as Heaney and Paulin. It argues that they have been inspired by Clare’s commitment to the local and provincial, especially his use of local vernacular, and also by his aesthetic of the uncouth and rebarbative, which also influenced Thomas. It goes on to explore how Clare’s close sensory attention to the natural world influenced Thomas, Longley, Oswald, and Jamie.  The second section argues that Clare’s poetry developed in conversation with his wide reading. It focuses on a number of examples, including Collins, Cowper, and Thomson. Reading these poets alongside and through Clare we see new features of their writing emerge, giving us a richer, more dynamic sense of eighteenth-century verse, and of Clare’s poetry.

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.

The first section of this introduction sets the scene for the volume as a whole by briefly considering the history of intertextuality within modern classical scholarship, both Latin and Greek, and then highlighting the special methodological and historical challenges that attend on comparative approaches to early Greek literature. As scholars increasingly agree on the need to read early Greek literature in a comparative way, it is argued, this only makes more urgent the question of how best to do so. The second section of the introduction highlights some of the core methodological, historical, and literary preoccupations of this book by exploring in chronological order two contrastive and complementary case studies from early elegy, one from Tyrtaeus and one from Simonides. Rather than providing a set of definitive answers about how these texts relate to epic tradition and/or particular epics, this section aims to give a sense of the sort of questions at stake in the following chapters. The introduction then concludes by summarising each of those chapters and highlighting interconnections between them.

As scholars look increasingly for the traces of intertextuality and allusion in early Greek poetry, Homer remains the prime focus of interest, and the relationship between the Iliad and Odyssey especially so. This chapter suggests that, though direct allusion between texts should not be ruled out a priori, an intertextual dynamic which stems from the traditionality of the texts is a more reliable and rewarding first interpretative step. The discussion reviews two examples which have served as important planks in the case that the Odyssey explicitly refers to the Iliad, and finds wanting the allusive arguments normally used to make that case, before suggesting a more methodologically and historically sound form of interaction. Interpretation, meaning, and appreciation all remain possible, and are indeed much richer in their appreciation of the poetry.

This final chapter shifts to look to Herodotus’ reception in the early fourth century in the Dissoi Logoi. What questions does Herodotus raise for subsequent philosophers? How does allusion to the Histories in a treatise that is explicitly philosophical expand our understanding of his project? What is the consequence of this for Herodotus’ generic positionality? The Dissoi Logoi offers a case study in the reception of the Histories as an example of its prominence in intellectual culture. The second half of the chapter reprises the conclusions of the book and reexamines the value of reading what will become early Greek "historiography" alongside philosophy.

This chapter samples ads of three types: commercials, classified ads, and the so-called ‘small ads’. Ads can appeal to senses of good value, tradition and authenticity, novelty and popularity. To attract attention, they often employ rhetorical devices such as punning, parallelism, allusions to shared cultural knowledge, and unexpected juxtaposition for humorous effect.

Since Kristeva invented the term in the late 1960s, intertextuality has become a dominant concern in Latin literature, despite the fact that Latinists often use the term in a narrow sense. A brief history of intertextuality enables this chapter to model different understandings of intertextuality across different genres and periods. Consideration begins with a passage of Virgil long recognised as a calque of Homer, and moves to other maximal cases of intertextuality in Plautus and Terence. Awareness of the dynamics and ideological power of intertextuality enables fuller consideration of the metaphors with which such passages as these comment on their situation in wider networks of text. The importance of historical context is discussed through several phenomena prevalent in late antiquity, namely cento poetry, compilation and typological interpretation. Developments across these periods in the technology of text focus attention on the cognitive and material dimensions of memory. The chapter closes by putting intertextual memory in Latin literature into dialogue with emerging methods of reading enabled by digital corpora, search algorithms, hypertext and linked data.

The Magic Flute stands out for its eclectic blend of musical styles. While only one scene – the duet of the Armored Men in Act 2 – includes a confirmed musical quotation, some scholars have posited that the opera contains a multitude of musical borrowings and allusions. Flute’s referential character owes much to Mozart’s ingenious use of musical topics. However, allusions to specific works have also been proposed throughout the opera’s history. In 1950, A. Hyatt King assembled an inventory of Flute’s “sources and affinities,” suggesting many plausible but largely unsubstantiated melodic precedents in works by Mozart and others. Scholars have particularly disagreed about the “source” from which Mozart allegedly derived Papageno’s aria “Ein Mädchen oder Weibchen.” As in the case of the duet of the Armored Men (which quotes a Lutheran chorale), the desire to link Mozart and J. S. Bach has led to divergent claims about the melody’s provenance.

The chapter explores the anxious cultural construction of women as intergenerational mediators that emerges from several epistles in Pliny’s collection (3.3 and 4.19; 4.2 and 4.7; 2.7 and 3.10). At once expected to be bearers of their father’s imprint and vehicle for the transmission of their husband’s identity, Roman women were the object of a discourse in which notions of biological filiation significantly intersected with issues of artistic reproduction and literary allusion. Building a typology of intra-, inter-, extra-, and alter-textual relations which connect Pliny’s topic and diction to relevant passages in Martial (6.37 and 38) and Tacitus (Dial. 28-29), my argument illuminates some crucial, common semiotic practices in his age.

This chapter investigates a poem in its markedly different 1811 and 1842 versions: the epistle to Sir George Beaumont, a verse-missive addressed from the Cumbrian coast, where Wordsworth had gone with his family to benefit his children’s health. Supplementing the prose letters that Wordsworth and Beaumont exchanged, it continues a dialogue with his friend and patron. Colloquial and yet structured, it reveals Wordsworth forging verse conditions to reshape the country-house poems developed by Ben Jonson, in which the address of patron by poet had modelled a virtuous sociability exemplified in the moral community of the landed estate. Wordsworth transforms the Jonsonian model so that exemplary community takes the form of intimate, domestic sociability based on the dales family rather than the country house. Modelling chatty friendship and describing family life, his epistle is an alternative to the blank-verse celebration of rustic society that had stalled in ‘Home at Grasmere’ and to the rustic speech that, had formerly narrated the troubles of rural folk. It is a prime example of the ‘new’ later Wordsworth experimenting with a traditional form, and with the comic rather than the egotistical sublime, as he turned away from the solitary communion with nature he had explored in The Prelude.

After 1805, Wordsworth’s ‘breach’ consisted of a turn from autobiographical poetry, and from nature as a recuperative power. Eschewing the personal confessions of grief typified by the Lucy poems, and the recuperations of private loss characteristic of The Prelude, he braced himself by writing poetry that bears with loss by embracing the permanence of art. In the ‘Elegiac Stanzas Suggested by a Picture of Peele Castle in a Storm’ (1807), the disruptive power of grief, arising from a disturbingly violent nature, is stilled only by contemplation of the unchanging formal perfection that painting and poetry are capable of realising. This poem was far from Wordsworth’s final word on the matter of loss; if it signalled a turn from autobiographical nature lyrics, that turn led to a further forty years of experimentation with various kinds of elegiac poetry in which the formal order achievable by the reformulation of tradition – epitomizing endurance beyond any single temporal loss – is preferred to exploration of subjectivity in the face of grief. Some of these kinds of elegy are explored in this chapter.

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.

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.