Intertextuality in Early Greek Poetry: The Special Case of Epinician

Abstract

This paper offers a reappraisal of the role of intertextuality in fifth-century BCE epinician poetry by means of a comparison with the role of intertextuality in all of early Greek hexameter poetry, ‘lyric epic’, and fifth-century BCE tragedy and comedy. By considering the ways in which performance culture as well as the production of written texts affects the prospects for intertextuality, it challenges a scholarly view that would straightforwardly correlate intertextuality in early Greek poetry with an increasing use and dissemination of written texts. Rather, ‘performance rivalry’ (a term understood to encompass both intra- and intergeneric competition between poetic works that were performed either on the same occasion or on closely related occasions) is identified as a plausible catalyst of intertextuality in all of the poetic genres considered, from the eighth or seventh century to the fifth century BCE. It is argued that fifth-century epinician poetry displays frequent, fine-grained, and allusive intertextuality with a range of early hexameter poetry: the Iliad, the poems of the Epic Cycle, and various ‘Hesiodic’ poems – poetry that in all probability featured in the sixth-fifth century BCE rhapsodic repertoire. It is also argued that, contrary to what is maintained in some recent Pindaric scholarship, there is no comparable case to be made for a frequent, significant, and allusive intrageneric intertextuality between epinician poems: in this respect, the case of epinician makes a very striking contrast with epic, tragedy, and comedy – poetic genres to which intrageneric intertextuality was absolutely fundamental. It is suggested that the presence or absence of intrageneric intertextuality in the genres in question is likely to be associated with the presence or absence of performance rivalry. A further factor identified as having the potential to inhibit intrageneric intertextuality in epinician is the undesirability of having one poem appear to be ‘bettered’ by another in a genre were all poems were commissioned to exalt individual patrons. This, again, is a situation that did not arise for epic, tragedy, or comedy, where a kind of competitive or ‘zero-sum’ intertextuality could be (and was) unproblematically embraced. Intertextuality in epinician thus appears to present a special case vis-à-vis the other major poetic genres of early Greece, whose workings can both be illuminated by consideration of the workings of intertextuality in epic, tragedy, and comedy, and can in turn illuminate something of the workings of intertextuality in those genres.