This study examines the allusive technique employed by the Roman poet Martial in Epigram 11.69 regarding the Argos episode in Homer's Odyssey and its implicit literary critical significance. This epitaph, composed in the first-person voice of the deceased puppy Lydia, constructs a complex intertextual network by enumerating three famous dogs from mythological tradition: Maera, the faithful hound of Erigone; Laelaps, the hunting dog of Cephalus; and Argos, the old dog of Odysseus.

The poet adopts a markedly uneven treatment of the three allusions: Maera and Laelaps are mentioned only briefly, while Argos is introduced with particular emphasis during the description of Lydia's death, creating a direct comparison between the fates of the two dogs. Notably, Lydia emphasizes her superiority to Argos not in terms of loyalty or hunting skill, but in manner of death—she perished in the heroic moment of hunting a boar in her prime, rather than dying of old age like Argos. This comparison reveals a fundamental difference between ancient and modern readers in their reception of Homeric epic: modern readers tend to regard Argos as an anthropomorphized literary figure, focusing on its symbolic significance and emotional tension; whereas ancient readers more commonly treated epic as factual record, preoccupied with "factual" questions such as the dog's breed and lifespan.

The author employs "markedness theory" from linguistics to analyze this phenomenon in reception history, noting that Argos was already a "marked" special presence in Homeric epic—possessing a name, a unique story, and anthropomorphized qualities, forming a sharp contrast with ordinary dogs depicted as collective images in the epic. Martial's emphasis on Argos's lifespan, while seemingly continuing the ancient readerly tradition of focusing on "facts," actually accomplishes a self-conscious but implicit literary critique of the Homeric text through the juxtapositional comparison of Lydia, a fictional hunting dog, with the most famous dog in literary history, within a playful contrast. This allusive technique not only demonstrates the literariness of the epigram genre, but also reveals the complex mechanism of allusion in Roman poetry—poets did not simply repeat tradition, but through selective emphasis and dislocated comparison, opened up richer interpretive spaces for readers.