Intertextuality without Texts in Archaic Greek Verse and the Plan of Zeus

Abstract

Correspondences between the proems of the Iliad and the Cypria as well as between them and other places in archaic hexameter verse raise the question, in the first place, of the conditions that made them possible. Three different models for these conditions are now in contention. One is the nexus of author, date, and work; a second is multiple parallel oral traditions; a third is a revived and revised neoanalytical one. This last model, with its idea of one poem alluding to another, serves well to explain the set of correspondences that are considered. It is not a matter, as in "classical" neoanalysis, of the one-way borrowing of large "themes" but of small-scale allusion, which is going on across epic and catalogue hexameter verse. This kind of allusion need not presuppose written texts and in fact is better explained as the product of mutually aware oral traditions. Thus intertextuality without texts.