In his Res Gestae, the historian Ammianus Marcellinus describes the Egyptian city of Thebes and the obelisks that can be found there. There is an unusual passage in which he describes hieroglyphic writings. He goes on to show, through two examples, how hieroglyphs might seem bizarre, but in fact contain their own logic which can be explained (Amm. Marc. 17.4.10–11, translation mine):

In ancient literature and religion, Hercules—in common with many other deities—is frequently associated with particular trees or types of tree. There are tales connecting him with the wild olive, laurel and oak, but his most prominent and frequent arboreal link is with the poplar (populus Alcidae gratissima, ‘the poplar is most delightful to Hercules’, Verg. Ecl. 7.61), an association mentioned twice in the Hercules-heavy first half of Aeneid Book 8 (276, 286). The festival of Hercules celebrated by Evander and his people takes place just outside the city within a ‘great grove’ (Aen. 8.103–4) of unspecified species, in an area surrounded by less defined expanses of trees. Trees crowd the banks of the Tiber, leaning out for wonder as Aeneas’ fleet passes by (Aen. 8.91–2) and soon uariisque teguntur | arboribus, uiridisque secant placido aequore siluas (‘[the Trojans] are covered by different trees and cut their way through green woods on the calm water’, Aen. 8.95–6); looking up through the sacrificial smoke on the altars, Pallas and his friends are initially frightened ut celsas uidere rates atque inter opacum | adlabi nemus (‘as they saw the tall ships glide towards them through the dark grove’, Aen. 8.107–8). When Evander later shows Aeneas around, the emphasis on trees recurs, with the huge grove destined to become Romulus’ Asylum (Aen. 8.342), and the bramble- and god-haunted woods of the Capitol (Aen. 8.347–54). Later, Aeneas and his men camp in a vast grove of Silvanus, as Venus approaches to bring her son his new shield (Aen. 8.597–607).

An influential position in the scholarship on Longus is that the narrator of Daphnis and Chloe is dissociated from, and ironized by, the author. Two articles by John Morgan, in particular, have propounded this interpretation. Morgan argues that Longus’ narrator relates the story with simplicity and naivety, and in ignorance of the more complex subtleties to which only Longus and the more discerning reader have access: ‘Daphnis and Chloe is told by its narrator as if it were a simpler and more conventional story than it really is, and invites its reader to read it in the same way. One way to describe this textual duplicity is to think in terms of a surface “narrator's text” and a deeper “author's text”. We can conceive the narrator, as established by the prologue, as a distorting and simplifying lens between the story and us. As readers we effectively have the choice of accepting what we see through the lens (that is the “narrator's text” as the “narrator's narratee”) or of correcting it and reading around the narrator (that is reading the “author's text” as the “author's narratee”).’ This type of separation of author and narrator is identifiable in Petronius’ Satyrica, in which the first-person narrator Encolpius who tells his story in hindsight is ridiculed and his narration destabilized by the hidden author who ‘is also listening, along with the reader, to Encolpius’ narrative—and along with the reader is smiling at it’.

Similarities between ancient Greek philosophy and Indian philosophy have long been recognized and are usually ascribed to East-West contact. However, when similarities are recognized between Greek and Indian poetic diction or, more generally, between the myths and the poetry of the two cultures, they are often ascribed to Indo-European common origin; and one asks whether the same explanation could apply in philosophy. The two types of explanation are not incompatible, for a remote common origin could have been followed by one or more periods of interaction. Nevertheless, it is worth seeing how far an explanation of common origin can be pressed before falling back on the explanation of contact.

Ἠλ. ὑμᾶς δὲ κωκυτοῖς ἐπανθίζειν νόμος, 150
παιᾶνα τοῦ θανόντος ἐξαυδωμένας.
Χο. ἵετε δάκρυ καναχὲς ὀλόμενον
ὀλομένωι δεσπόται
πρὸς ῥεῦμα τόδε κεδνῶν κακῶν τ’
ἀπότροπον, ἄγος ἀπεύχετον 155
κεχυμένων χοᾶν.
κλύε δέ μοι σέβας, κλύ’, ὦ δέσποτ’, ἐξ
ἀμαυρᾶς φρενός.
ὀτοτοτοτοτοτοῖ⋅
ἴτω τις δορυσθενὴς ἀνὴρ 160
ἀναλυτὴρ δόμων †Σκυθιτά τ’ ἐν χεροῖν
παλίντον’ ἐν ἔργωι† βέλη ’πιπάλλων Ἄρης
σχέδιά τ’ αὐτόκωπα νωμῶν ξίφη.

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 centuries b.c. (CEG 177, 888). Scholarship on these epigrams celebrating the rule, achievements and outstanding qualities of the dynasts Gergis (Lycian Kheriga) 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.