The role of intertextual relations in cultural Tradition

The aim of the present paper is to analyse intertextual relations based on activation of textual codes in the famous chain of works by Virgil (The Aeneid 1990), Dante (The Divine Comedy) that continues through romanticists and up to the modernist literature (T. S. Eliot The Waste Land, Ash Wednesday, Four Quartets) taking T.S. Eliot`s essays on literature as the basis for our analysis. Homer`s Odyssey and Iliad serve as a hypertext for these works in which each author develops in his own way the thematic codes from the works of his predecessors thus affirming the continuity of a single cultural tradition -“from Homer and within it...”.