Archaic Greek poets experimented with allusion and intertextuality and actively signalled these activities through metapoetic signposting. Hardly the innovation of Hellenistic and Roman scholar-poets, as it is commonly taken to be, such allusive signalling was an essential component of Homer’s and his archaic contemporaries’ toolkits and a key mechanism by which they showcased their (often agonistic) interactions with both broader mythological traditions and, increasingly, specific texts. To attend to these markers, or indexes, of allusion is to reveal a sprawling grid of connections between individual poems and larger traditions and to illuminate the ways in which those interactions work together to produce meaning. That is one attempt to summarise N.’s central contributions in the volume under review, although distilling the project in this way does not do justice to the wide-ranging scope of the undertaking: to read through N.’s book is to be exposed to a rare generosity of detail and a careful, expert synthesis of a staggering amount of material.
N. terms the marking of allusion ‘indexicality’ (see pp. 21–3 for his considered justification of the need for a new term) and homes in on three categories of this phenomenon: hearsay, memory and time. N. selects these three categories because they are the ones scholars most often credit as the innovations, or at least the purview, of post-classical literature. As it turns out, the indexical potential of hearsay, memory and time are prevalent in archaic Greek poetry too.
Chapter 1 serves as the book’s introduction. To consider allusion in archaic Greek poetry is necessarily to wade into controversial and well-worn areas of inquiry, including the relationship between orality and literacy and, perhaps most fraught of all, the textualization of Homeric epic. For N., J. Burgess’ model of oral, intertextual neo-analysis emerges as the ‘default paradigm’ for the understanding of how allusion operates in the archaic period: ‘the framework of fabula-based allusion and mythological intertextuality best accounts for the fluid and flexible nature of oral traditions’ (p. 42). At the same time the chapter is a stand-alone resource for anyone seeking a diplomatic, thorough and up-to-date survey of the major debates surrounding the nature of archaic, especially Homeric, poetry.
The introduction is followed by three substantive chapters that address in turn each of N.’s three categories of marking allusion (hearsay, memory and time). A subsequent short epilogue provides a clear summation of the project as well as a brief discussion of why archaic iambus, out of all the lyric sub-genres addressed in the book, appears to be the one least committed to the use of indexicality. N.’s choice of attending to (only) three categories of indexing, while seemingly restricted in focus, allows his study to encompass a much larger chronological and generic range of material than other comparable studies. Each chapter first examines examples from epic before turning to survey lyric instances of the same phenomenon.
I outline the merits of Chapter 2 in the greatest detail since, to my mind, it offers an especially productive and important contribution, but this more thorough summary should give readers a good sense of the methods and conclusions of the subsequent chapters as well. In Chapter 2 N. tackles the most well-known and common type of allusion in Roman poetry, the so-called Alexandrian footnote. The Alexandrian footnote is a literary device by means of which allusion to literary predecessors and rivals masquerades as the circulation of general, anonymous hearsay (as in, e.g., ferunt/phasi, ‘they say’, or ut fama est, ‘as the story goes’). As the title of this chapter indicates, ‘The Pre-Alexandrian Footnote’, N. dismantles the Hellenistic and Roman chronological restrictions on the indexical use of hearsay and reveals its allusive potential as a technique already operative in archaic epic and lyric.
N. tracks how the device consistently points to the poet’s encyclopaedic knowledge of traditions (and, eventually, texts) and, accordingly, calls attention to the ease with which the poet can move around within that vast archive of traditional myth. But more than showcasing the masterful breadth and expertise of a poet’s repertoire, hearsay – that is, the poet’s or characters’ gesturing towards what people say – can perform other roles as well, including that of an agonistic foil for setting the poet apart from his competitors.
In the case of Homer especially indexical hearsay can trigger an allusive engagement with another epic poem or tradition, functioning as the opening salvo of an ongoing and programmatic dialogue with alternate versions of a given myth. For instance, N. demonstrates how phasi (‘they say’) at Iliad 2.783, attached to a simile of Typhoeus, initiates the poem’s recurring interest in theogonic myth, alludes to competing accounts of Typhoeus and, crucially, becomes paradigmatic of the ways in which the Iliad as a whole asserts the cosmic stakes of the Trojan War.
In the case of lyric indexical footnoting is more often used to help audiences ‘fill in the blanks’ of what gets left unsaid due to generic constraints of scope. But footnoting in lyric, more so than in epic, can also be used to authorise a new spin on traditional material: ‘tradition is creatively reworked but legitimised through appeal to hearsay’ (p. 173). N. concludes of the Alexandrian footnote that ‘there was nothing distinctively Alexandrian or scholarly about indexical appeals to hearsay’ (p. 175).
Complementing hearsay, memory also functioned as an important index of allusion in archaic Greek poetry, as N. demonstrates in Chapter 3. Homeric epic especially enlists the allusive capacity of memory: numerous characters encourage their addressees to remember past events. Such injunctions by characters also prompt the poems’ external audiences to engage in the same acts of recall. These ‘memories’ turn out to be indexical: N. calculates that all such recollections by characters comprise events that either occurred previously in the same poem (intratextual allusion) or are outside the narrative scope of the poem itself but recognisable as part of the epic tradition (intertextual allusion). Indexical memory, then, contributes to epic’s claim that ‘everything is familiar and traditional’ (p. 213). At the same time, like indexical hearsay, indexical memory could be recruited to assert the authority of one competing mythic variant over another. This ‘discourse of recollection’ and the use of memory as an allusive marker operate differently and appear less frequently in lyric poetry. With their relative lack of character speech, lyric genres deploy this device instead to signpost the poet’s personal memories, including memories of their own poems, and to enjoin their audiences to recall their own knowledge of traditional myths and poetry.
Chapter 4, like the two preceding chapters, again demonstrates that what scholars have long claimed as a signature trope of Hellenistic and Roman poets is already at work in a variety of ways in the earliest Greek poetry. This final chapter considers the indexicality of time by tracing how this form of allusion interacts with three main conceptual categories: ‘broad, chronological perspective’; ‘marked iteration’; and ‘epigonal self-consciousness’.
For this last category N. resorts to analogy to make a case for Homer’s sense of epigonality: through his epic characters’ voicing of their (often contested) status within intergenerational familial relationships, Homer implicitly grapples with his own position vis-à-vis his poetic predecessors. The argument is compelling, especially in the close readings N. brings to bear, although not all readers may be convinced by this interpretative move. The temporal direction of epigonal self-consciousness is, by definition, backward-looking. One wonders what the Bakhtinian concept of anticipatory intertextuality, productively deployed by several Classicists (N. Nicholson, The Poetics of Victory in the Greek West [2016]; J. Ready, Orality, Textuality, and the Homeric Epics [2019]; M. Mueller, Sappho and Homer: A Reparative Reading [2023]), would reveal about the indexicality of time in archaic Greek poetry.
