Allusive Modes and Intertextualities in Archaic and Classical Greek Epic and Elegy. Some Case Studies

Abstract

Among the archaic and classical Greek literary genres, epic and elegy always
seem to share many characteristics both from a formal and from a thematic point of
view. In order to better highlight this articulated and multi-layered relationship, it
can be useful to apply the lens of intertextuality to a reading of significant passages
of epic and elegiac poetry. In fact, the interpretative tool of the intertextuality – already
known in ancient scholarship and recently reused by some of the most advanced
contemporary critics – can be considered, within the framework of the various original
communicative systems, as a flexible phenomenon that tends to undergo both
synchronic and diachronic developments, and, as such, can provide the instruments
for revealing interconnections between texts of epic and elegiac poetry, both welltransmitted
and ‘submerged’.