a connection between two or more authors

We have to wonder what form this connection took, so as to be discerned by our Author here: were these connections merely references within newer texts to persons or events narrated in older ones? Or did they take a more sophisticated form than a mere mention in one text to some passage in another?

We know that, from the time of Egderus, at least scriptors and the officials they served employed links between texts, but in the present circumstance, reading in a ruin, is it conceivable that this Author had recourse to such an affordance? If so, how was the bridging of two texts contrived and then enacted?

Or is 'linking between texts' even the proper way to think about such an association...?