This article proposes that Horace's Epodes and Ovid's Metamorphoses open with significant acrostics that comprise the first two letters, in some cases forming syllables, of successive lines: IB-AM/IAMB (Epod. 1.1–2) and IN-CO-(H)AS (Met. 1.1–3). Each acrostic, it will be argued, tees up programmatic concerns vital to the work it opens: generic identity and the interrelation of form and content (Epodes), etymology and monumentality (Metamorphoses). Moreover, as befits their placement at the head of collections, both acrostics negotiate the challenge of literary (...) commencement. The introduction reviews recent developments in acrostic studies and discusses important predecessors and parallels for Horace's and Ovid's ‘two-letter’ and syllabic acrostics. Two subsequent sections examine the acrostics singly, and a conclusion compares the dialogues that these acrostics open between author and reader, underscoring the welcome challenge which Ovid's acrostic offers to the prevailing scholarly view that this form of wordplay is a strictly visual affair. (shrink)

At Aeschylus Agamemnon 985 the manuscript reading ψαμμίας ἀκάτα is corrupt, giving neither meter nor sense. Wilamowitz’ conjecture ψάμμος ἄμπτα has met with some editorial approval, but its sense is dubious and should be rejected. I propose instead ψάλλον ἀκταῖς, “they were plucking on the shore”, referring to the performance of a paean on the lyre by the Greek fleet departing for, or, less likely, arriving at, Troy. The fleet’s departure would be an appropriate time for the soldiers to perform (...) a paean, for which the lyre was a common accompaniment. Plucking a lyre without strumming, however, as ψάλλον implies, seems to have been a less common performance technique, sometimes culturally marked as ‘Asian’. While there is evidence that a paean with plucked accompaniment might have seemed unexceptional to a Greek audience, if Aeschylus did intend an Asian connotation, I suggest that the Chorus, having just witnessed Agamemnon tread on the purple cloths, would thereby portray the Greek army as already tainted by tryphe on their departure for Troy. Whether ‘Greek’ or ‘Trojan’, the conjectured army’s paean would form an effective counterpoint to the lyre-less threnos in the Chorus’ heart that dominates the ode. (shrink)

This article examines allusions to Greek poetry in two Greek verse inscriptions carved on public monuments for Lycian dynasts of the late fifth and early fourth centuriesb.c.(CEG177, 888). Scholarship on these epigrams celebrating the rule, achievements and outstanding qualities of the dynasts Gergis (LycianKheriga) and Arbinas (Erbinna) has largely focussed on the evidence they provide for Lycian history, dynastic ideology and Lycia's relationship to Greece. Less attention has been paid to the possible significance of their long-noted echoes of Greek poetry. (...) Literary analysis of these epigrams has been sidelined, it seems, owing to a prevailing assumption that they were composed and inscribed primarily for Greeks visiting or resident in Xanthus, the Lycian ‘capital’ where they were inscribed, and so their literariness, unheard by Lycian ears, cannot add to our understanding of Lycia and Lycians. Yet, a recent observation of Peter Thonemann suggests that the appropriation and manipulation of Greek poetry is in fact central to the dynastic intent of the epigrams: to assert Lycia's non-Greek, ‘Asiatic’ identity. (shrink)