The panoramic reception of various literary genres in Aristophanic drama is discussed with reference to a specific play, Peace. Thematic and textual allusions to tragedy and earlier comedy are interwoven in connection to the central themes of this play: war and peace. The earlier part of the play, set in a world dominated by armed conflict, revolves around the parody of a quasi ‘trilogy’ of Euripidean tragedies (Aeolus, Stheneboea, and Bellerophontes) and contains further references to tragic passages or motifs of tragic dramaturgy. The latter part, which consists in the celebrations for the regained peace, parades a sequence of routines borrowed from rudimentary forms of comic entertainment, together with reminiscences of iambic poetry. The joys of peace are thus illustrated through a genealogy of the comic genre. The transition from the former to the latter world, through the pivotal scene of Peace’s liberation, is marked by a recast of the themes and stagecraft of satyr play. With its sequence of tragic trilogy, satyr play and assortment of comic materials, the Peace offers virtually the experience of a full festival of the Dionysia within the limits of a single dramatic script.

This chapter explores the reception strategies of metrical inscriptions on statues and other monuments from the turn of the fifth to the fourth cent. BCE found at Xanthos in Lycia – and recently in Caria. They offer a insights into the practice of composing encomia for powerful dynasts and prominent addressees through the medium of hexameters, elegiac couplets, and trochaic tetrameters. In that respect, they call for close comparison with the lyric encomiastic poetry composed in the late archaic and early classical period by poets such as Ibycus, Pindar, and Bacchylides for powerful military and political rulers and patrons. Four of these inscriptional texts display a feature which is extremely rare in archaic poetry and is not found in all the other extant metrical inscriptions down to the 4th century BCE: the signature bearing the name of the poet. This chapter interprets the poet’s signature as a way of stressing the bond between poet and patron/addressee in a different way from the lyric practice, and stresses the new strategy of praise entailed by these inscriptions, by combining the visual power of the monuments with the power of the poet’s words.

In this chapter, the reception of Greek tragedy in Hellenistic poetry is studied in connection with intertextuality, which is here considered a specific form of reception by which later authors recognize the importance and relevance of earlier texts by alluding to them. There is a particular focus on the fragmentary plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides. It shows that Callimachus, Apollonius and Theocritus used many Greek plays that are now lost. They referred to the plays’ plots or subjects, with an apparent preference for plays with Trojan, Argonautic and Argive myths, but also alluded to striking tragic imagery. Issues to which the allusions draw attention include literary criticism, generic matters, aspects of the mythological tradition and Ptolemaic ideology. All this suggests that the Alexandrian poets were familiar with the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, particularly, but not exclusively those which were of thematic interest for their own poetry. Clearly the plays which were not included in the later canon of tragedies were still an object of active reception and consulted with eagerness in the Hellenistic period.

This paper explores the category of neighbor from a literary-critical perspective. Hesiod’s depiction in Works and Days of the relationships between neighbors as characterized by random proximity and uncertain ethical status is adopted as a frame for understanding the stylistic approach of the epic poet and the affinities that Pindar’s epinicians show to his work. A case is made for the interpretive utility of the lateral and arbitrary structure of neighboring, and the desirability of such a model alongside the more common idea of genealogical inheritance within the modern scholarly treatment of ancient receptions.

This paper examines three different receptions of Plato’s Charmides – Oscar Wilde’s Charmides, Cavafy’s In a Town of Osroene, and Plutarch’s Life of Alcibiades. It focuses on their responses to the erotic and philosophical element in the Charmides. Wilde provides an example of minimal textual engagement: the name Charmides is invoked solely for its connotations of young, male beauty. In Cavafy explicit allusion to ‘the Platonic Charmides’ recasts the poem an expression of homoerotic desire, and endows its group of young men with the prestige of a Platonic gathering and Platonic love. In contrast, Plutarch’s engagement with the Charmides is implicit, and depends entirely on the reader’s ability to recognise a series of detailed verbal echoes. Plutarch denies that Socrates’ motivation was sexual, and integrates allusion to the Charmides into a broader network of allusions to other passages in which Plato describes Socrates’ encounters with beautiful young men, or the ideal relationship of a mature man with a younger beloved, in which the sexual element is entirely absent. In so doing, Plutarch “corrects” Plato with Plato, and removes what had become an embarrassment in his period.

This chapter examines the reception of two Platonic texts, the Protagoras and the Statesman, in Diogenes Laertius’ Lives of the Eminent Philosophers and Plutarch’s Gryllus. It argues that part of the reason for the success of this reception lies in the way that Plato’s texts are embedded in insolvable problems such as what constitutes nudity and how one distinguishes between animal and human. Embedding a text in a wicked problem is an effective way to ensure it afterlife. In the case of Plato, the difficulty of this problem is exacerbated by his decision to ground his distinction between animal and human in the presence or absence of body-hair. Diogenes Laertius and Plutarch, in different ways, draw attention to the simultaneous complexity, instability, and capaciousness of body-hair as a signifier. They are attracted to explore its potential, but are ultimately forced to reject it and the systems of thought that it supports as unsatisfactory.

In this paper D’Alessio explores the reception of the ideology of choral performance in Horace’s Carmen Saeculare arguing that, contrary to current scholarly consensus, it is profoundly indebted to Hellenistic choral theory and practice, and, more particularly, to its crucial, but often overlooked configuration in Callimachus. D’Alessio’s interpretation starts from an analysis of the relationship between divine ‘presence’, political power, and the ‘present’ of poetry in the Epistle to Augustus, moving to the centrality of choral performance as the site for recognizing and legitimizing divine presence and staging political power relations in Hellenistic choral poetry and in Callimachus’ Hymns, where, as he argues in detail, this theme finds one of its most fully articulated formulations. In the following section the author shows how important features of the Carmen Saeculare should be read against the lively tradition of post-classical, Hellenistic and later Greek public cultic poetry, as well as through intertextual Callimachean links, and finally draws attention to Horace’s peculiar re-configuration of the ideological background provided by his models.

Beginning with a striking passage in which the Sibylline narrator asserts her intellectual ownership of Homer’s work, I point out its Theogonic framing, before surveying other thematic and stylistic invocations of Hesiod across the Sibylline corpus. I argue that Hesiod, without being named, is given programmatic importance as a Classicizing alternative to Homeric authority and wisdom. I then distinguish three strategies of Sibylline transformation of Biblical material in Homeric colouring into apocalyptic visions: amplification of scenes of destruction, cosmic revision of individual action, and the countering of heroic epic values with monotheistic principles. In each of these, ideas of ‘the Hesiodic’ generated by its ancient reception provide a cipher for the critique of the Homeric cosmos implied by Sibylline rewriting of Jewish and Christian scriptures in the direction of universal history. I conclude by offering comparanda for future studies.

The naming of poetic predecessors within one’s own composition, often associated with a so-called Hellenistic aesthetic, has a less explored heritage going back to the sixth century BCE. This chapter traces the strategy in its earliest phases, especially as we find it within lyric poetry, from the reported statement by Stesichorus [fr. 168 Finglass] that the Shield of Heracles was indeed composed by Hesiod, to the Simonidean allusion to Homer as his forerunner in praise-poetry (fr.11.15–18), and on to Pindar’s complex and varied namings of Archilochus, Terpander, and the masters of hexameter verse. It offers a typology of three main functions of such naming (approbation, criticism, or the representation of conversational interaction), and then an in-depth analysis of two problematic issues: the generic affiliations of Stesichorean art, and the difficulties related to the Pindaric naming of Homer, in particular at Nemean 7.20–7. The device of naming a predecessor emerges as a sort of reception degree-zero, whereby previous verbal art is highlighted, distilled, and set up as a foil, while a new performative space is opened up for the presentation of one’s own innovative productions.