The Iliad and Odyssey are replete with single speeches or exchanges of speech which are described by the noun νεῖκος (‘quarrel’, ‘strife’) or its derived verb νεικέω. Some time ago, A.W.H. Adkins showed that νεῖκος and νεικείω are used in Homer to designate various kinds of agonistic discourse: threats, rebukes, insults, quarrels and judicial disputes. Critics often now describe νεῖκος-speeches and νεῖκος-exchanges in the Iliad as examples of ‘flyting’. This term, shared by the languages of Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse and the dialect of Old Scots, is transferred to the combination of boasting, invective and threats which Homeric heroes hurl at each other. This is because Iliadic νεῖκος has affinities with the traditional and highly stylised verbal exchanges which take place in the feasting halls and battles depicted in Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Germanic heroic poetry.

In his book The Language of Heroes Richard Martin has argued persuasively that the flyting νεῖκος is a significant speech-act genre performed by Homeric characters and that its competitive mode is analogous to the Homeric poet's poetic project tout court. Just as Homer produces a monumental epic whose focus on Achilles may well be competitive with other renderings of epic tradition and is certainly derived through the manipulation of memory, Homeric heroes and gods flyte by manipulating and contesting the resources of memory. The best Homeric flyting is creatively poetic within existing conventions or strategies and is thereby rhetorically devastating. And Martin sees Achilles as the best flyter because he rhetorically manipulates memory better than any other hero. Thus, the hero is like his poet and the poet is like his hero. Achilles' competitive way with words is unique in (and to) the Iliad and is emblematic of Homer's overpowering competitive poetic achievement.

Catullus' Carmen 64 unfurls a narrative tapestry rich in meaning and allusion. Its account of the marriage of Thetis and Peleus recalls the Trojan cycle, the Iliad and the Cypria in particular, and offers a response to and program for epic. Although Catullus' Alexandrian poem revels in its own retrospection and nostalgia, Carmen 64 expresses the futility of attempting to achieve any true νόστος (‘return’) to the dominating yet foreclosed world of Homeric epic. Carmen 64 reveals new perspectives in which traditional epic elements are reversed, reordered or juxtaposed in unexpected ways; these challenge received notions such as the admissible constituents of epic background, foreground, narrative and digression; the definitions of heroic deeds; and the implications of speech and writing.

In the course of this revisionary project Carmen 64 avails itself of a systematic imagery involving cloths, clothes and textiles that are viewed and accessed by the poem's characters throughout to convey or receive knowledge: messages that are ‘written’ or ‘read’ or even ‘missed’ (as in the case of Aegeus seeing the forgetful Theseus' sails) in a variety of textile mediums: the uestis uariata of the central ekphrasis, Ariadne's clothes, her thread in the labyrinth, Theseus' sails, the threads of the Parcae, the thread to measure the neck of the newlywed Thetis—all these inform a text that is unified from Carmen 64's textiles. Recollection and representation are central to much fiction—μνῆσαι (‘remember’) is Priam's first word to Achilles at Iliad 24.486—and Carmen 64 reaches far back into memory to cull myths from the epic repertoire to weave into its fabric.

My purpose in this article is straightforward, to counter some misconceptions about two of Statius' poems, Silu. 2.1, his consolatory poem for the death of the twelve-year old Glaucias, and Silu. 2.7, his consolatory poem for the death of the poet Lucan. These are the first and last poems of Book 2. Poems of lament and consolation constitute the majority of the poems of Statius' Siluae. Yet these poems have been generally dismissed as wearisomely rhetorical and have been largely overlooked in the critical literature about consolationes as they endorse lamentation, elaborate upon it, and thus run counter to philosophical strictures against overt grief. Issues of class also surely play a role in their dismissal as trivial poems. Unlike Augustan poems of lament—for instance Ovid's poem on the death of Tibullus—two of the poems in Book 2 mourn a child of low birth and a young slave (Silu. 2.1 and Silu. 2.6). A proper understanding of the social occasions and circumstances in which Silu. 2.1 and Silu. 2.7 are embedded, however, will show that they can offer valuable insight into contemporary Flavian society. Such an understanding moreover can point the way to a fresh literary appreciation of these poems, although that is not the chief aim of this article.

Iamblichus' Babylonian Tales, whose extravagant adventures of female homoeroticism, extreme violence and mistaken identity sit uneasily alongside those told in the so-called ‘ideal’ Greek novels, is a work largely ignored by scholars of the ancient novel, or relegated to discussions of ‘fringe literature’ We are not helped by the fact that the novel survives only in fragments and through the critical summary by the Byzantine scholar Photius, in his collection of epitomes called Bibliotheca. This article attempts a fresh analysis of Babylonian Tales, taking as its starting point the sexual relationship between two of its female characters and moving on to discuss the politics of the novel and its self-positioning in relation to Rome and Roman conquest. It argues that Babylonian Tales challenges some of the rather neat stories that are currently told about the Greek novels, and that moving it from the ‘fringe’ to the centre might radically alter how we think about the genre.