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This chapter enriches the volume’s overall diachronic approach with an additional transmedial perspective as it compares cases of metalepsis in archaic and classical vase-painting with violations of levels of representation in epic and lyric poetry. It focuses, first, on how characters in texts and figures in painting address the recipients, either with apostrophe (in texts) or en face gaze (in pictures). It then considers cases in which the represented world of a painting seems to acknowledge its own representation, for instance when figures apparently lean against the edges of the vessel on which they are painted. The chapter argues that medial differences have a significant impact on metalepsis: not all textual metalepses have pictorial parallels, nor can we find equivalents to all pictorial metalepses in literature. However, it concludes that ancient literature and vase-painting nevertheless share traits that reveal a distinct tendency of ancient metalepsis: in both media the boundaries between the representation, the represented object, and the recipient were less clear-cut than in our modern view. The chapter concludes by suggesting a possible reason for this in the rootedness of ancient representations in specific contexts: specifically, performative settings for literature, and pragmatic utility for painted pots.

The Introduction provides an explanation of the concept of metapoetry applied in this book, and considers the associated terminology of intertextuality, metatheatricality, metafiction, metamythology, and Bloom’s anxiety of influence model, also discussing some important scholarship in these areas. It provides an outline of the book’s chapters and arguments, and addresses the issue of a reading public in the fifth century bc.

This chapter contextualizes the metapoetic strategies of Euripides more broadly within the poetics of fifth‐century drama. It is shown that Aeschylus and Sophocles used some of the same techniques as Euripides, implicitly in their tragedies, and explicitly in their satyr‐dramas. The importance of metapoetry in satyr‐drama is stressed, since this genre was much closer to comedy in its overt use of metapoetic strategies but was composed by the tragedians. Euripides shares some techniques with the old comedians, but there are others that do not cross the boundaries of genre. It is concluded that Euripides exploited both old and new metapoetic techniques in his dramas, and that he did so far more pervasively than Aeschylus and Sophocles, but that his strategies remained appropriate to the tragic genre.

This chapter analyzes Euripides’s Helen in terms of paracomedy and suggests that the structure of the play should be interpreted as staging a metaliterary conflict between tragedy and comedy. This conflict is expressed in the play through the characters of Helen, who represents tragedy, and Menelaus, who represents comedy. Euripides distinguishes the two characters by constantly characterizing Helen as tragic (through tragic themes, tragic beauty, and tragic piety) and Menelaus as paracomic (through comic jokes, comic alazoneia (“boastfulness”), comic ugliness, comic violence, and comic “knocking at the door” scenes). When Helen is finally established as superior to Menelaus, tragedy is established as superior to comedy. This chapter suggests that the structure, characterization, performance, and tone of the play are motivated by Euripides’s goals to assert dominance over comedy.

Both extant prefaces to De raptu Proserpinae are rich in allusion and metapoetical symbolism. The chapter suggests that the symbolic ship of poetry in the preface to De raptu 1, which represents a transition from encomiastic poems to traditional mythological narrative, marks an upward progression through the hexameter genres in the manner of Vergil and alludes in detail to similar Augustan and earlier metapoetical contexts. The reference to geographical locations linked with Homer suggests the Homeric ambition of the De raptu in both form and content. Similarly, the evocation of Orpheus in De raptu 2’s preface is integral to the poem’s plot rather than an alien insertion; presenting the poet’s self-characterization, it has clear links with the performance of prose rhetoric in the Roman Empire. Claudian’s poems play a full part in the revival of poetics in Late Antiquity and their metatextual and intertextual perspectives.