In fact, the very idea of the classical author is intricately connected to the idea of the poet as maker, a concept directly relevant to the emergence of the medium of writing that is responsible for the transmission of Homeric poetry in later times. Conversely, in an ancient song-culture the person who weaves the song, the bard or the singer, does not have complete control of the various pathways opened by unraveling the mythical fabric he uses. Like internet-oriented browsing on the web, ancient listeners are able to exercise their control over the multiple paths emerging as the song is expressed. This result stems from the very nature of the web of myth, whose decentralization and multifariousness invites the audience to create their own referential avenues, beyond the control of the singer. Such an evaluative process is an inherent part of the very performance of epic song, since there is no almighty author but an omnipotent song-tradition weaving its own nexus of associations, evoking other traditions or versions at will, immersing its listeners to an intertext of mythical cross-references.

By exploring intertextuality, I attempt to map out and discuss (a) relations between recognizable song-traditions, (b) epic self-reflexive tendencies, i.e. meta-traditional intertextuality, (c) diachronically diffused associations between ‘Homer’ and non-identifiable traditions reconstructed by the exploration of older Indo-European strata, and (d) intertextual allusions which explain intratextual ‘sequences’, i.e. combinations of interacting parts acquiring their full meaning only when placed within a wider intertext.

In Part One of this book, I engage in an examination of intertextual relations between recognizable song-traditions. All four chapters of this first part focus on female figures in both the Iliad and Odyssey. The search for a general female reading of Homer is bound to bear all the interpretive extremities its analogous male-centered approach has reached in the past. Instead of suggesting an alternative female-based pattern for an overall analysis of the poems, I explore one of the ways the Homeric tradition uses principal female characters—to conjure up other rival traditions whose vagaries it overcomes by interweaving them into its own song. Bearing the mythological armature of the male protagonists but not necessarily their epic Weltanschauung, women allow the epic to complete, enrich, and even redetermine its cross-textual relations with other song-traditions. They open intertextual windows by which bard and audience can temporarily glance at other mythical versions, whose varied fabrics have been stitched up by the poikilia of Homeric song-making. In this light, the Iliadic and Odyssean song-traditions have surpassed an initial gender-based scissiparity between male and female heroes based on plot-requirements, only to turn it into a sophisticated mechanism of inter-textual ‘play’.

To ascertain its poetic supremacy over rival ‘Return-songs’, the Odyssey skillfully invents an intertextual metalanguage. To this end, Agamemnon, hero of the Nostoi, ironically becomes the very mouthpiece of the Odyssey’s declaration of its poetic status. Here, as in the aforementioned cases, the process of reconstructing the whole mythical nexus is effectuated by understanding that the Iliad is using female figures not only as plot agents but also as intertextual pathways leading to the retrieval of necessary information. Using a suitable analogy from the field of textual criticism and transposing it to the field of the study of myth in an oral tradition, we can see how epic poetry encapsulates material from other mythical traditions. Deprived of the means available to a modern editor (the printed page, the footnoted text, the character and font variations), oral epic traditions create their own referential avenues. Under this scope, Penelope’s positive evaluation through her loyalty to Odysseus is emphatically opposed to Clytaemestra’s negative coloring through her paragonal betrayal of Agamemnon. These two female figures emblematize the sophisticated vocabulary of the Odyssean intertextual metalanguage, which is further strengthened by heavy-loaded metapoetic terminology such as ‘pleasing song’ (χαρίεσσα ἀοιδή) and ‘hateful song’ (στυγερὴ ἀοιδή). In this way, intertextual cross-referencing becomes the metonymical vehicle through which the Odyssey bolsters its self-referential encomium.

In Chapter Three, I apply this approach to the Nausicaa-Odysseus episode in Odyssey vi and show how the Odyssean visualization of their meeting in Scheria reflects the poem’s ‘treatment’ of a rival poetic tradition, reflected later on in the epic poem Cypria. When Odysseus compares Nausicaa to a shoot (ἔρνος) he had seen in Delos (Odyssey vi 163), the Odyssey is alluding to the episode of his visit to Apollo’s sacred island, in order to bring to Troy the daughters of Anius. These are called Oinotropoi, since they have received from their ancestor Dionysus the gift of producing olive-oil (Elais), wine (Oino), and seed (Spermo). By scrutinizing the entire mythical intertext upon which this cross-reference is based, I suggest that we should rethink the function of mythical allusion and broaden the range of its application. Under the light of these observations, I attempt (a) to explore how the Odyssey might not have erased all traces of the version offered by the Cypria-tradition and (b) to show how the Nausicaa-Odysseus episode represents a fusion of the Cypria-oriented episode of the Oinotropoi with features pertaining to an Odyssean visualization of Odysseus.

Chapter Four is a study of a different kind of cross-reference. After the meeting between Odysseus and Penelope at the end of the Odyssey, Odysseus informs his wife about his desire to leave her once more, in order to fulfill a prophecy given to him by Teiresias. Given that ancient audiences would have been familiar with Odysseus’ ‘post-Odyssean’ adventures, I suggest that the song-tradition of the Odyssey, at a point when its song has almost been completed, avails its main hero, the very trademark of Odyssean poetics, of a rather ‘provocative’ statement threatening the very tradition he typically emblematizes. By alluding to another song-tradition where Odysseus travels to foreign lands and is married again, the Odyssey engages its audience in a profound intertextual game, allowing Odysseus to ‘menace’ the very tradition that has made him the great hero of Return. At this crucial juncture, a female figure, Penelope, takes the floor and becomes the mouthpiece of Odyssean poetics. Odysseus may well ‘entertain’ the thought of extending his poetic life to another tradition, but he is fooling himself if he thinks that he will remain in that tradition, Odyssey-like, the great hero of Return. Penelope’s ironical coda is both a covert cross-reference to a rival song-tradition, later reflected in the Telegony, and an expression of the Odyssey’s ultimate ruse: this time, its ‘victim’ will be Odysseus himself, and Penelope the very means for her husband’s ‘duping’.

Part Three focuses attention on the intertextual pathways created by the formula, an exclusive trademark of Homeric diction standing at the very heart of epic song-making. The formula is not an external characteristic of epic language but a symbiotic feature operating on multiple levels and guiding us into a labyrinthine path of associations and interconnections. Formulaic diction is a mechanism whose surviving traces in Homeric epic cannot be attributed to recognizable traditions but to a diachronically diffused set of relations going back to Indo-European strata. The reconstruction of this framework helps us explore the deep structure of the epics by looking beyond the elliptical shape into which originally complex imagery has been crystallized during the process of shaping epic song.

In Part Four, I argue that intertextuality is stimulated not only by associations with extra-Homeric complementary material but also by the activation of intratextual sequences. In this form of intertextuality, the referential character of Homeric epic entails a renegotiation of alternative versions or possibilities generated or at least enhanced by ‘Homeric’ (Iliadic or Odyssean) thematic arrangement. Fragmented parts or disiecta membra are subsequently organized by the Homeric tradition into chains representing or reflecting aberrant intertextual variants. Under this scope, one can see that Homeric epic gives interpretive clues or hints to its audience, for whom foreknowledge of alternative and complementary versions must be taken for granted, by turning allusions into intratextual series, whether proximal (Thetis’ two consecutive appeals to Zeus in Iliad I) or distal (personal laments scattered throughout the entire poem). In this type of intertextuality, the important notion is that of thematically associated parts forming a chain and emphasizing performance sequences. This form of intertextuality is effectuated between orderly combinations of interacting parts creating a meaningful whole. These syntagmatic relations stress the sequential associations between traditions. They may at times have to do with a recognizable tradition, but the emphasis is on the revelation of rules or conventions underlying the production of an epic scene.

Thetis’ appeal to Zeus has another, figurative dimension. Achilles’ proximity to the divine culminates in a second, this time dramatic, paradox: his immortal mother (Thetis) asks Zeus to grant her mortal son time (honor), the one thing that will lead to his death. By requesting Zeus to ‘kill’ Achilles in terms of mortality, she figuratively asks him to make Achilles the hero of the Iliad, to allow the poem to create its own subject-matter. It is clear that the Iliad is using Thetis as a poetic vehicle in order not to sidestep the vexed paradox of her request but to tailor it to its needs. By creating a profound narrative tease, the epic renegotiates its audience’s familiarity with rival epic traditions through abbreviated mythical tatters creeping up in the plot. Thetis is thus rebaptized in the Iliadic narrative pool, concocting, in fact, an Achillean plan. The divine ruse of Zeus will be devised upon female connivance, harking back to an earlier mythical phase which the Iliad will narratively exploit through a masterful analeptical ploy.

In Chapter Twelve, I explore the extended Homeric simile as a form of imagery performed on a special rhythmic register. The interpretation of similes stands at the crossroads between two conflicting approaches. On the one hand, the singer or storyteller aims at guiding his listeners to a specific interpretation of the similes according to his narrative blueprint. He, therefore, creates a ‘narrative indexing’ of the similes by such means as intratextual sequencing. On the other hand, since similes refer to the physical world and not to the epic past, they conjure up, in the listeners’ minds, multiple mental image-mappings. The condensed or abbreviated form of Homeric similes engages the audience in an active interplay, since the mental template of each listener will allow him to visualize the simile’s short story according to his own experiential storage. Similes reactivate mental images in such a vivid manner that they enable listeners to explore a deeper meaning, especially a meaning in the making, located not just within the simile’s framework but also in connection to their own mental world. Under this scope, similes function on a hypertextual level, directing the audience to multiple conceptual strata from which they can easily ‘return’ to the main narrative. It is exactly at the juncture between the mental multiformity of the audience’s image-mappings on the one hand, and the storyteller’s attempt to help his listeners visualize similes in a way consonant to his narrative blueprint on the other that the special nature of the Homeric simile lies. To this extent, similes are imbued with an endless intertextuality, which is neither tradition-dependent nor diachronically activated. In fact, this form of hypertextuality leads Homeric listeners through conceptual pathways to the mentally reconstructed hyper-world of image-mappings and, once the simile is completed, back again to the main narrative.