It is the physical representation of the divinity (i.e., the statue or the iconic representation) that become central for developing forms of religious beliefs among ancient Mesopotamian societies, because the deity was considered present through his/her iconic representation.

This chapter will therefore investigate the importance of the materiality of the divine essence through its representation in statues and other forms of visual depiction in ancient Mesopotamia.

In the summer of 323, the Athenian Assembly voted to embark on the Lamian War, a somewhat impromptu attempt to liberate Greece from the Macedonian hegemony following the ominous news of Alexander’s death. According to the historian Diodorus Siculus, however, this decision was not the result of a renewed desire for freedom, but rather a consequence of the large number of citizens in the Assembly that day who had become accustomed to make their livelihood through war.1 In effect, earlier that summer, 8,000 men are said to have gathered at Cape Taenarum in the southern Peloponnese, where they were awaiting military employment – soldiers, who would soon find themselves among the ranks of passing warlords for decades to come.2

These men and their search for employment typify the sweeping military and economic changes that engulfed the eastern Mediterranean from the rise of Macedonia onwards.

The introductory chapter is framed by the story of Ergoteles, a major Panhellenic victor and the only athlete whose epinikian ode and epigram have survived to the present day. The differences and similarities in the characterization of Ergoteles in each medium prompt the book’s main question: how does place, performance mode, and genre affect the representation of athletic identity? The bulk of the introduction outlines the angelia, the proclamation of victory by a herald at an athletic event. By stressing our – and ancient audiences – inability to access the actual speech-act, the chapter reinterprets the angelia as it persists in epinikian and epigram as an allusive representation, the modification and manipulation of which lies at the core of the verse celebration of athletic victory.

While the figure of herald and the actual angelia at the athletic site sit at the beginning of athletic praise, these real figures and actual proclamations are not the only heralds and messages that find their way into epinikian song and inscribed epigram. Rather, explicit and implicit references to the figure of the herald and the angelia are frequent in both genres. This chapter examines implicit and explicit heralds and messages across epinikian song and inscribed epigram. It focuses on the figure of the herald and the message and their ability to authenticate what are, in fact, secondary and elaborated speech-acts. By attaching themselves to the voice of the herald at the Games, epinikian songs and epigrams demand that audiences take their praise seriously, as if it were the voice of herald itself in the sacred landscape of a Panhellenic sanctuary.

For paid military service to constitute wage labour, soldiers’ labour power ought to be acquired on a labour market. Such a market develops when multiple employers compete over the labour of the same pool of workers and workers can negotiate their terms of service. As argued in this chapter, during the campaign of Alexander soldiers not only leveraged their collective voice to improve their conditions of service but were also promoted up the ranks when their skill set warranted it. These phenomena laid the foundations for the development of a market for labour during the Wars of the Successors, when multiple employers had to vie for the service of the same group of soldiers. Increasingly motivated by monetary gains and not restricted by political allegiance, these soldiers enlisted with the highest bidder, thereby driving the price of military labour upwards.

Divine spirits are embodied also by animals and natural phenomena. Thus, this chapter aims to investigate and interpret the role of deer in the practice of ceremonial and ritual activities as well as in the construction of religious beliefs by Bronze Age Anatolian societies.

From Homer to the Hellenistic period and beyond, one of the defining features of ancient Greek cultural history and its ongoing interpretation and adaptation is athletic competition. For the ancient Greeks, athletics, along with warfare, was a primary arena for the contestation of status and for the attainment of superiority and excellence. In antiquity, writers recognized the central role of athletics in Greek culture and identity: Thucydides’ Perikles stresses competitive festivals as one of the elements that make Athens an example for Greece (2.38–41); Herodotus includes common festivals in his famous definition of “Greekness” (8.144); moreover, the Persians marvel that οἳ οὐ περὶ χρημάτων τὸν ἀγῶνα ποιεῦνται ἀλλὰ περὶ ἀρετῆς (“[The Greeks] contend not for money but for arete,” Hdt. 8.26). Pindar, as frequently, puts it best: ὃς δ’ ἀμφ’ ἀέθλοις ἢ πολεμίζων ἄρηται κῦδος ἁβρόν / εὐαγορηθεὶς κέρδος ὕψιστον δέκεται, πολιατᾶν καὶ ξένων γλώσσας ἄωτον (“but he who wins luxurious glory in games or as a solider / by being praised gains the highest profit, the finest words from tongues of citizens and foreigners,” Isthm. 1.50–51).