This chapter investigates the role of Hellenistic kings and queens as victorious horse owners. It is asked to which degree the different dynasties of the period used equestrian victories as a means of representation. The fact that Philip II and his son Alexander had a different approach to agonistic competition gave leeway to their successors’ competitive behavior: Whereas the Antigonids and Seleucids refrained from equestrian competition, the Ptolemies became the most successful royal family in terms of athletics. They sponsored promising athletes, established a new category of contests, and were imitated by their courtiers with regard to their engagement in chariot races. In the agonistic context, the Ptolemies presented themselves as a victorious, Macedonian dynasty which integrated the female members of the family into an image of power. The Attalids, in contrast, labelled themselves a loving family of united brothers in which no disputes over the throne ever occurred.

In order to gain a better understanding of the organizational and infrastructural framework in which Hellenistic athletes operated, this chapter offers an overview on new developments in the field of athletics. Such new developments most notably included an enlargement of the agonistic landscape, important building programs in the athletic facilities of the major sanctuaries, and an expansion in the program of sporting events that were generally designed to become more spectacular and entertaining. The period also saw the heyday of the gymnasion and new forms of victory prizes. Fines against corruption were expanded and prospective talent promotion set in in the third century. What emerges is the picture of an innovative period in the history of ancient athletics.

The Introduction sketches the history of research on Hellenistic athletics. It shows that the topic has not achieved much scholarly attention in the past due to the old (and spurious) assumption that the period constituted a “dark age” of sport history. The chapter explains the book’s focus on athletic and equestrian victors and substantiates the study’s methodological approach: Based upon the compilation of a database that includes all the available, mostly epigraphic and literary, sources on Hellenistic athletes, victor epigrams are identified as the key medium for the presentation of agonistic fame in the Hellenistic period. Sixty-one pieces of agonistic poetry form the main evidence for the following case studies. They are grouped into (local, regional, or empire-wide) clusters of epigrams in order to identify characteristic features of the agonistic discourse of each political unit. The aim is to investigate the impact political structures had on the respective agonistic cultures.

The epigraphic documentation in the Phoenician language of the island of Cyprus makes it possible to approach the exploration of the semantic field of the force (’z) in the conceptual universe of the Phoenicians. Gods ‘of strength’ appear in inscriptions commemorating victories, both at Kition and at Larnaka-tis-Lapithou. Baal and Anat are discussed: the profession of war is not a male prerogative in the world of the gods. Strength is also present in the world of men: anthroponomy conceals a few names, albeit not many, constructed using the root ‘zz ‘to be strong’. At the same time Anat, Resheph, Baal and Mikal, gods present in the Phoenician context of Cyprus with also (but not only) warlike attributes, are implicated in the formation of anthroponyms, most of the time without reference to weapons and shields, if they are only those who serve their worshippers to face the daily battles from the delicate moment of birth onwards.

Abstract: From the systematic survey of the epiclesis of Athena and Artemis entered in the BDEG, this chapter aims define the common characters of the two goddesses and, above all, the qualities and functions, values and skills that characterise each, as goddess and in what men expect of them. Finally, the chapter considers how their portraits by epiclesis differ from those that we draw from all other sources.

Like names, the ‘physiognomy’ attributed to the gods by the Greeks helps to differentiate divine entities from one another or, conversely, to link them together, making explicit the nature and the scope of their powers. This chapter addresses the meaning of the adjective khruskomas, ‘with golden hair’, frequently attributed to Apollo: does it mean that the Greeks had in mind a blond god? The analysis of texts and images shows that it is much more complicated. First, onomastic attributes and iconographic attributes do not necessarily coincide. Depending on the media, craftsmen may represent a dark-haired Apollo without this being seen as a contradiction with the images conveyed by the poets. Immortals, unlike humans, take on any appearance they want. Second, the colour of gold is not exactly equivalent to blondness (for example, that of Demeter xanthe): the brilliance of the incorruptible metal expresses the radiance that emanates from the young god, notably through his eternally young hair. Khrusokomas thus expresses one of the manifold facets of Phoibos by summoning the image of his delphic sanctuary, where opulence reigns. The chapter thus shows that the colour of Apollo’s hair deserves to be taken seriously.

Moving from the Camp Grant massacre, this chapter addresses the question of narratives on violent events such as wars, more specifically the Trojan War in the Homeric epic. Human and Divine names are part of a complex system of signs which guide the audience. The case study of Euryopa Zeus – that is, a god who has a ‘Vast Voice’ and an ‘Ample Sight’ – provide a divine portrait of the overarching authority in matters of war and destiny. The chapter also suggests a network of divine powers who share specific aptitudes, such as Athena, Hera and Hermes, between distance and proximity, control and empathy.

A Greek hymn is selected among other examples in the corpus of Greek ‘magical’ papyri written in Egypt during the Roman Imperial time. Addressed to the Moon goddess in a plurality of forms and names, it draws a complex portrait of a powerful divinity for love affairs. The incantation weaves innovative denominations together with a poetic and ritual tradition in order to enact power. The poet realised a technical ‘tour de main’ to picture a many-faced goddess, tying heavenly and shining traits to the gloomiest and the deadliest, and entangling anthropomorphic characteristics to a patchwork of animal features. The poetic mastery over names and figures offers tools for the making of the divine inside the ritual performance, with the effect of rendering a vivid perception of the Moon goddess encompassing all her aspects.

Having wandered through the gallery of portraits of ancient deities, with our noses in the air, our eyes and ears wide open to hear their names and the stories they tell, passing from Zeus to Yahweh, from Hecate to Isis, from Melqart to Bel, one may wonder whether we have lost our bearings? Like Brobdingnagians, those giants visited by Gulliver, we have spanned centuries and millennia, leapt from one shore of the Mediterranean to the other, and climbed to the heights of Olympus to scrutinise the gods, eye to eye. However, we have not been satisfied with looking, observing details, admiring colours, noting contrasts and underlining the nuances; our sound and light portraits resonated with 1,001 names. We have invited you to a concert of divine music: like Lilliputians, this time, sitting in a huge cave filled with many and varied sounds, we have listened to what might seem to be an incredible cacophony of names, a heterogeneous symphony of onomastic sequences, a labyrinth of sounds to make your head spin. Would naming the gods be a virtuoso game? Scholarly entertainment? Or a deluge, a random proliferation or chaos?

This chapter copes with the challenge of portraying a divinity which is supposed to be nameless and imageless, and evoked by ‘abstract’ notions such as the ‘God’, the ‘Lord’, the ‘Name’ or even the ‘Place’. The bans on pronouncing his name and depicting his image are two faces of the same coin: to explore in a new and unpredictable way his identity. Starting from the role played by names in ancient Near Eastern traditions and in the Hebrew Bible, this chapter explores the onomastic puzzle of the biblical god, who holds many names, but whose name YHWH is the only one regarded as a proper name and revealed by himself to Moses. Such a central and enigmatic name is interpreted as a promise of presence and assistance to the people god chose on earth (Israel). The onomastic connection between YHWH and the Jews never ceased to strike external observers and produced many misunderstandings, and even mystifications, in the history of the research of the biblical divine names.

Giuseppe Arcimboldo was born in Milan around 1527 and after 1562–1563, having completed his training in Lombardy, he became a court artist in the service of the Habsburgs, successively under the emperors Ferdinand I, Maximilian II and Rudolf II, probably in Prague and then in Vienna. As the royal family’s portraitist, he assured his remuneration by producing completely classical canvases in the conventional style that reflected an official art form. At the same time, Arcimboldo produced some rather surprising works: composite heads and hybrid metamorphoses of the human face in which deception and illusion triumphed. With Arcimboldo blurring human perceptual reference points, his contemporaries referred to his canvases as scherzi, grilli and capricci, ‘jokes’, ‘caprices’ and ‘grotesques’, a marvellous and confusing mixture of genres. Still fascinated by these paradoxical, neither beautiful nor ugly, virtuoso and unusual portraits, our contemporaries call it ‘Mannerism’.

Let’s go and meet Melqart, the protector of Tyre, so attached to his rock and yet a tireless traveller. He travelled all the shores of the Mediterranean region with the Phoenicians from rock to rock. We will see why he adorned himself with the attributes of Heracles and what he shares with his Greek companion. We will also discuss his association with other deities in the Western Mediterranean. Finally, we will see why, long after the Phoenician expansion, he remains a reference point of the Phoenician world and of Tyre, the rock par excellence.

As early as the Hellenistic period but more widely in the imperial age throughout the Roman Empire, we observe consecrations and dedications both to deities known by other theonyms and to a power in its own right, named Panthe(i)os in Greek and Pantheus in Latin. Faced with this formulation, scholars have emphasised the ‘quantitative’ force of the Greek pas, pasa, pan (translated as ‘total, universal’), interpreting this god as reflecting a process of gradual translation from the multitude of gods of Greco-Roman paganism to a ‘total’ and thus ‘universal’ god, which would thereby pave the way for Christian monotheism. The analysis of this term and its contextual applications shows that Panthe(i)os/Pantheus does not portray an abstractly ‘total’ and therefore ‘unique’ god, but a ‘super-god’ with exceptional powers called upon for the sake of pragmatic efficiency, on a religious horizon still fully perceived as plural. By choosing this name, the worshippers thus displayed their privileged relationship with the deity from whom they expected protection in a particularly effective manner.