Chapter 3 looks at the way Sappho responds to material objects in Homer, and explores how plaiting becomes a metaphor for Sappho’s own poetic production. With readings of some of the lesser-known fragments (e.g., frr. 102V, 110V, and 22), as well as a re-examination of Aphrodite’s famed epithet (poikilothronos) in fr. 1, this chapter highlights Sappho’s generic range and poetic creativity, as well as her noncompetitive appropriation of the affects of fear, desire, and breathlessness that are associated with weaponry in the Iliad. In Sappho’s lyrics, similar emotions are produced by women’s garments, jewelry, and other forms of bodily adornment. The chapter ends with an interpretation of Alcaeus 140V, whose orientation towards Homeric weaponry, it is argued, is distinctly more aspirational than wily and playful.

Variety was the hallmark of miscellanism, and Clement draws attention to his participation in this miscellanistic aesthetic in programmatic passages on the literary form of his work. He privileges the vocabulary of poikilia,which not only captured the miscellanistic aesthetic of variety but was also a key term in reflection on the problems and possibilities of variety in aesthetic, ethical, theological and pedagogical spheres. Plato and Philo had also given it prominence in their own engagement with ethical and theological problems of variety. Clement addresses the challenge of variety in shaping his project: his three works, Protrepticus, Paedagogus and Stromateis,organise a pattern of Christian formation that cultivates ethical simplicity with a view ultimately to discerning God’s poikilic wisdom and even in the poikilia of Clement’s own text. Whereas previous studies of Clement have wrestled with the philosophical problem of the ‘many and the one’, this chapter shows that that problem also had a significant literary, aesthetic and ethical dimension, better captured by the terminology of poikilia.

This paper argues that hybrid and otherwise multiple or excessive bodies are central to the creation of Ennius’ persona in the Annals. My discussion focuses on three significant figures: the peacock in Book 1, Discordia in Book 7, and the poet’s failing body in Book 16. I argue that Ennius conspicuously associates himself with both Discordia and the peacock. These figures symbolize generic hybridity and stylistic multiplicity or poikilia, aspects of the Annals that later writers tend to suppress. The emphasis on the poet’s physical deterioration in Book 16 forms an important contrast: as Ennius’ body dissolves, his soul prepares to find a new home in the literary bodies of subsequent writers. We should read all of this Ennian multiplicity from a cultural perspective: to be Roman is always to be already a hybrid. Ennius embraces this reality at key moments in the Annals, which forces a reconsideration of the overall tone of the poem and the broader trajectory of Roman epic.