This article advances three readings in the story of the Argonauts’ encounter with the boxer-giant Amycus in Valerius Flaccus, Argonautica Book 4. In reworking the Hellenistic accounts of Apollonius and Theocritus, Valerius gave the adventure a new first half based chiefly on elements inspired by Odyssey Book 9 and the Thrace and Cyclops episodes of Aeneid Book 3. The first section of the article argues that this arrangement prompts the question of the Argonauts’ valour through an indirect intertextual comparison with the Trojans, who, unlike the Argonauts, ultimately fled Thrace and the Cyclops. Moreover, it suggests that this use of allusion can be linked to the theme of the Argonauts’ heroism developing after Hercules’ exit from the group in Book 3. The second half of the article addresses two challenging elements in the episode. When Amycus makes his appearance, it is said of him that ‘nowhere do mortal signs remain’, thus implying that he has somehow been transformed. To account for this change, scholars have proposed different interpretations, including metapoetic ones. The article’s second part, in contrast, reads this transformation through an allusion to Theocritus’ Idyll 22. In its last section, the article addresses the question of to whom ore renidenti of Arg. 4.234 belongs. Based on observations of Valerius’ stylistic practices, it argues against the majority view and suggests that this ‘smiling look’ must belong to Pollux, not Amycus. All in all, the article enhances our understanding of the Amycus episode and sheds additional light on Valerius’ densely allusive and sometimes difficult poetic style.

Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot has spawned several unauthorized sequel plays, which see Godot arrive on stage in 1960s Yugoslavia, 1980s Ireland, 1990s North America, and early 2000s Japan. The sequel play is a largely ignored phenomenon in literary scholarship, with the sequel form itself routinely dismissed as a derivative and inevitably disappointing text. Yet the sequel also re-situates and re-evaluates the original text, and its reiterative nature aptly parallels the paradox of non-ending in Beckett’s original Waiting for Godot. Focusing on four unauthorized stage sequels to Beckett’s play – Miodrag Bulatović’s Godo je došao (Godot Has Arrived, 1966), Alan Titley’s Tagann Godot (Godot Arrives, 1987), Daniel Curzon’s Godot Arrives (1999), and Minoru Betsuyaku’s Yattekita Godot (Godot Has Come, 2007) – this article examines how these sequels rework the cultural logic of Godot’s arrival to their own critical and political ends. These playwrights draw on the very recursive, even frustrating, nature of the sequel form itself as an exegetic framework, reproducing the trope of non-ending that characterizes Beckett’s own work. Hannah Simpson is the Rosemary Pountney Junior Research Fellow in British and European Drama at St Anne’s College, University of Oxford. She is currently working on two forthcoming Beckett-related monographs: Witnessing Pain: Samuel Beckett and Post-War Francophone Theatre and Samuel Beckett and Disability Performance.