Chapter 4 is in part an examination of a Mycenaean divine Potnia, one affiliated with the “labyrinth,” the Potnia of the dabúrinthos (δαβύρινθος). The labyrinthine space with which she is associated is an Asian cult notion introduced from Anatolia to Balkan Hellas. This chapter also examines the Rājasūya, a Vedic rite of consecration by which a warrior is made a king and a likely cult counterpart to the Mycenaean initiation of the wanaks.

Chapter 2 examines the Vedic sacrificial post called the yūpa and its role in ritual performances. A Mycenaean Greek cognate term and comparable ritual implement lies behind the Linear B form spelled u-po – that is, hûpos (ὗπος). Among other topics treated in this chapter are the Mycenaean deity called the po-ti-ni-ja, a-si-wi-ja, the Asian Potnia, and the u-po-jo po-ti-ni-ja, the Potnia of the u-po (that is, húpoio Pótnia [ὕποιο Πότνια]), a term matched exactly by Sanskrit patnī-yūpá-.

Chapter 7 examines the sheep’s fleece filter used in the preparation of Soma. A cult ideology in which such an implement played an important role was preserved for some time in Iranian tradition in the Caucuses, ultimately giving expression to Greek ideas about the presence of fleecy filters impinged with gold in the vicinity of Dioscurias – rationalizing accounts of the Golden Fleece of Aeolian Argonautic tradition. Particular elements of the Golden Fleece myth find parallels in Indic poetic accounts of the performance of Soma cult. The common Hellenic and Indic elements constitute a shared nexus of ideas that earliest took shape in Bronze-Age communities of admixed Mycenaean and Luvian populations into which Mitanni Soma ideas had spread via Kizzuwatna. The Golden Fleece mythic tradition, with its geographic localization in Transcaucasia, is a Mycenaean Asianism that took shape in Asia Minor under Indic and Iranian influences and that continued to evolve among the Iron-Age Asian Greeks.

Chapter 5 considers the Indic divine twins, the Aśvins (Aśvínā), or Nāsatyas (Nā́satyā), their association with the Indic Dawn goddess Uṣas, and their place in the Indic Soma cult. Discussion then shifts to the kingdom of Mitanni in Syro-Mesopotamia, a place into which Indic culture was introduced as Indo-Iranian peoples migrated southward through Asia, as also at Nuzi. There is good lexical evidence for the presence of a Soma cult in Mitanni, and Soma-cult ideas appear to have spread out of Mitanni, through Kizzuwatna, into the Luvian milieu of western Asia Minor, where such ideas would almost certainly have been encountered by resident Mycenaean Greeks, intermingled biologically, socially, culturally, and linguistically with Luvian populations. With that spread certain elements of Soma-cult ideology were mapped onto Anatolian cult structures.

Chapter 1 examines Pylos tablet Tn 316 in depth, giving particular attention to the Linear B forms spelled po-re-na, po-re-si, and po-re-no-, and related Sanskrit forms, and to the especial closeness of post-Mycenaean Aeolic to ancestral Helleno-Indo-Iranian in regard to this matter.

Chapter 3 examines the Mycenaean wanaks and lāwāgetās, figures responsible for leading Mycenaean society in specific ways and who correspond notionally to figures implicit in Indic and Iranian social structures – figures who descend from still more ancient Indo-European antecedents charged with the task of leading society through the spaces of the Eurasian Steppes and in migrations southward out of the Steppes.

From this chapter, the discussion moves to Aristides’ lyric reception by focusing on his self-fashioning as a superior and divinely inspired speaker. Besides pointing to his knowledge of a super-elite genre, lyric shaped, and was shaped by, Aristides’ self-presentation agenda. Through a close reading of cornerstone texts of Aristidean self-fashioning (e.g. Platonic Orations, To Sarapis, Sacred Tales), this chapter offers the first comprehensive discussion of Pindar as the perfect lyric counterpart to Aristides’ superior persona. It reveals the role of epinician values and Pindaric metapoetics in Aristides’ negotiation of his rivalry with Plato and with poets of hymns, Pindar included. It also shows how discourses of divine inspiration and patronage fed into his self-positioning in relation to imperial power. Far from engaging only with Pindar, however, Aristides’ self-fashioning also built on other, very different lyric models, if only to reject their voices or to turn them on their heads so that they could fit his exceptional self-portrait.

Given its heightened local significance, lyric poetry could feed into Aristides’ orations addressed to individual imperial communities. This chapter focuses on Or. 46, a speech performed at the Isthmian festival in praise of Poseidon and Corinth. Precisely when it comes to celebrating Corinth, Aristides builds on the praise of this city already found in Pindar’s Ol. 13. Although this lyric precedent was locally relevant, however, the imperial city was as removed as possible from that of Ol. 13: as a result of its destruction and re-foundation by Rome, imperial Corinth was far from a traditionally Greek community. Against this political and cultural background, Aristides’ choice of recalling Pindar’s praise appears as a strategy to create a sense of continuity in response to the rupture caused by Rome. For this strategy to work, however, Aristides had to recast Pindar’s praise so that his own celebration could strike a fine balance between the Greek and Roman elements of New Corinth.

This chapter explores Or. 24, an emergency intervention concerning Rhodes. Internal strife had recently broken out in the community, which could prompt Roman rulers to deprive Rhodes of its status as civitas libera. To facilitate the end of stasis, Aristides mobilises the full spectrum of political lyric: canonical poets are recalled alongside mythical singers, while monodic and choral performances are brought into play to exalt harmonia over stasis. Through this discursive re-enactment of lyric, Aristides transfers to his prose appeal the political effectiveness of lyric poetry and music. This intermedial strategy culminates in the evocation of Alcaeus’ poetry on stasis. Together with stasis-plagued Lesbos, Alcaeus embodies the spectre of civic discord which an orderly Dorian community like Rhodes must reject at all costs. Lyric reception thus brings into focus Aristides’ approach to contemporary politics, especially his awareness of what it meant for a Greek community to live under the scrutiny of Roman rulers.

I have reserved for discussion here certain passages containing more than a single interaction. Not all combinations are significant, though. The significant combinations in the Greek corpus are of several kinds, of which the best attested and conceptually simplest comprises those instances with a broadly or cumulatively preparatory effect in favour of the vehicle.

This chapter explores Gerard Manley Hopkins’s relationship to the tradition of the ode, most especially in his poem ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’. It traces Hopkins’s scholarly interest in the odes of antiquity, particularly those of Pindar, and examines how this engagement with the classical tradition shaped ‘The Wreck’. ‘The Wreck’ is then contextualized within Romantic and Victorian approaches to the ode through comparisons with major odes by John Milton, William Wordsworth, and Lord Alfred Tennyson. Hopkins’s engagement with the ode embodies a Romantic concern with personal feeling but shares his fellow Victorians’ concern with the ode as a poem of public occasion while retaining the explicitly Christian orientation that animated Milton’s use of the form. The chapter closes with a brief consideration of Hopkins’s unrealized plans to write an ode on the life of the Jesuit martyr Edmund Campion.

This chapter explores the complex relationship between epic and the tricky genre of lyric. Spelman begins with brief historical orientation and then focuses on broader and more theoretical questions of genre, which have been given new impetus by Culler’s Theory of the Lyric. Taking ‘lyric’ in a broad sense to include iambos and elegy as well as melic poetry, Spelman considers some of the most famous and important lyric passages (especially drawing from Pindar and Sappho) that engage with Homeric epic, the Homeric Hymns and the Epic Cycle. Spelman ultimately examines how and whether lyric works out a definition for itself in contradistinction to epic—and whether such a definition can offer us a more nuanced understanding of what epic itself is.

Discussion of the transfer of cult knowledge from Anatolia to European Hellas in both the Bronze Age and Iron Age, with a close examination of Ephesian Artemis and other Asian Mother-goddess figures with consideration of Ur-Aeolian (= Ahhiyawan) and Aeolian involvement in the process.

This chapter argues for and interprets allusions to the invocation before the Catalogue of Ships (Il. 2.484-93) in Ibycus’ ’Polycrates Ode’, Pindar’s Paean 6 and Paean 7b, and Simonides’ ’Plataea Elegy’. It then considers these four poems together as a unique case study for the early reception of Homer. For no other passage from the Iliad or the Odyssey can we trace an equally extensive afterlife in early Greek lyric. The author argues that the unusual prominence of the narrator’s personality and the exceptionally emphatic claim to objective truth in Il. 2.484–93 made these lines a privileged point of reference for subsequent explorations of the nature of poetic authority.

Examination of Luvian patronymic adjectives and their diffusion into the Mycenaean dialect of Anatolia – that is, Ur-Aeolic – and their distinctive use in post-Mycenaean Aeolic. Also, discussion of hekwetai ‘warrior allies’ that appear in the Linear B documents, whose names are commonly identified by the use of the Aeolic patronymic formation of Luvian origin, and discussion of other sacralized warrior relationships with Anatolian ties.

This chapter examines how Pindar and Bacchylides make use of early epic (esp. Homer) in their victory odes, from an explicitly ’intertextualist’ perspective. It discusses (inter alia) the meaning of ’Homer’ in the fifth century BC to the earliest audiences of Pindar and Bacchylides and adverts to the complexity and multiplicity of the audiences of their victory odes. It argues furthermore for the critical importance and benefits of intertextual analysis of Pindar and Bacchylides, especially the ways in which interaction with texts such as those of archaic epic should prompt a wider openness to intertextual investigation of victory odes.

Exploration of Aeolian foundation traditions and the localizing of such traditions in both the eastern Aegean and Magna Graecia, and of the reflexivity and reciprocality of Aeolian ethnic identity that these mythic traditions entail.

This chapter discusses Plutarch’s On the Oracles at Delphi, and in particular the account of the grammarian Theon as to how prose came to replace verse, not just in the delivery of the Delphic oracle, but in literary discourse as a whole. Theon’s account of the history of Greek literate culture is an important document of how learned Greeks in the Roman empire imagined how their world had changed, along with the literature in which it was represented. The first part of the chapter considers another Plutarchan account of cultural and intellectual change, namely the opening of On the Obsolescence of Oracles, which tells the foundation story of Delphi. Both texts lay weight upon the fact of change itself, rather than on any detailed plotting of that change, let alone a chronology for it; so too, both illustrate a tendency to see recurrent patterns of change, by which the outlines of Greek literary history are found already adumbrated in classical literature itself. Among the classical texts which are central to this appropriation of past models are the programmatic chapters of Thucydides and Aristotle’s account of the development of poetic language.

This chapter considers the nature and development of Greek literary history before Aristotle, a generally acknowledged watershed. It covers all sorts of reflections on the literary past and studies the assumptions and paradigms at work in our earliest sources. While highlighting the continuity of tropes and stock narratives, it also seeks to understand the development of literary history in relation to the technology of writing and in relation to an emergent ideology of classicism, which literary historical thinking both reacted to and further strengthened. The first section briefly surveys immanent literary history in poetry from Homer to Aristophanes, typologising tropes which would endure through the ages and suggesting a skeletal metahistory of early literary history. The second and third sections then move forward in time and shift from poetry to prose in order to consider in greater detail two specific work. Glaucus of Rhegium’s On the Archaic Poets and Musicians and the Mouseion of the sophist Alcidamas, early instantiations of, respectively, a macroscopic narrative of progress and a literary biography, prefigure many core characteristics of later ancient literary history. A conclusion returns to the bigger picture to consider the distinctive value of studying ancient literary history on its own terms.