Chapter 1 situates the reader within the landscape of Blackness in the twenty-first century. In addition to laying out the task at hand (untangling representations of blackness in Greek antiquity), this chapter underlines the dangerous consequences that occur when scholars conflate modern tropes with ancient material.

Animal remains, particularly skulls, have been interpreted as sacrificial ever since the beginnings of Minoan archaeology in the nineteenth century. This chapter argues that these remains can better be understood in terms of butchery and the consumption of animals at commensal feasts. Animal-head rhyta show that heads were used as trophies to commemorate such events.

As a result of its history of discovery, the archaeology of Bronze Age Crete is largely understood through a modernist view of nature and culture. This book provides an alternative framework derived from anthropology and human-animal studies. It introduces the ideas of animal practices, animal things and domestic/palatial collectives which will be used throughout the book.

Depictions of hunting are largely confined to sealstones in Bronze Age Crete and as a result the importance of hunting has been downplayed. This chapter argues that it was instead central to the organisation of territory in palatial Crete and was an animal practice which defined membership of the palatial collective. Large-scale depictions associated elaborately dressed women with hunted animals as a means to bring them into the palatial collective.

Marine-style pottery is emblematic of Bronze Age Crete but its origins in relations with marine animals have been downplayed by art historical approaches. This chapter revives Arthur Evans’s ideas of nature-moulding and nature-printing to broaden the definition of Marine style and link it to fishing and voyaging, and their importance to the palatial collective of Knossos.

Using John Berger’s famous essay ‘Why look at animals?’ as a starting point, this chapter sets out the theoretical basis for the book, replacing an art historical framework in which animal art reflects a love of nature with a relational approach focusing on the interactions between humans, animals and things. An ontological approach is used to identify modern ways of looking at animals/objects and opening up new ways of understanding them.

Chapter 6 continues to upend the limiting Greek–foreigner binary model. Heliodorus’s novel Aithiopika (c. fourth century CE) traces the peripatetic journey of Charicleia, an Aithiopian princess exposed at birth because of the dissonance between her white skin and her parents’ black skin. During Charicleia’s travels, skin color remains a volatile element: she exploits it as a disguise (Heliod. Aeth. 6.11.3–4), her companion Theagenes uses skin color as a marker of trustworthiness (7.7.6–7), and a prophecy destabilizes both perspectives (2.35.5). Throughout the novel, Heliodorus wields skin color as a negotiable ethnographic tool that does not necessarily correspond to identity. This flexibility underscores Charicleia’s own fluidity between several performative categories. She can be a beggar and a princess, a docile woman and the leader of her entourage, the daughter of a Greek man and an Aithiopian man. Readers are forced to be patient as Heliodorus masterfully manipulates time to create a gap between what his characters know and what his readers have already grasped.

Exotic animals arrived on Crete during the Bronze Age as depictions and then, in the case of some animals such as cats and deer, became a bodily presence on Crete. This chapter examines how these unfamiliar bodies were absorbed into the palatial collective and were used to demonstrate overseas connections.

Chapter 2 offers a visual paradigm for representations of black people in the ancient Greek world. It considers fifth-century BCE janiform cups that depict black and brown faces on opposite sides. Contemporary ideas are all the more pronounced when dealing with visual constructs of skin color in Greek antiquity and therefore require continual interrogation. Disputing the uncomfortable ease with which some art historians presume a fixed connection between black people and bumbling inferiority, this chapter argues that the black face serves as part of a repertoire of sympotic performance. Similar to masks, janiform cups enable drinkers in the symposium to adopt new identities. The discourse about the chromatics on janiform cups leads to a broader examination of black skin in ancient Greek art. Close scrutiny of museum displays reveals the temporal clash that can occur when audiences encounter iconography of black people in Greek antiquity. In particular, scrupulous inspection of the British Museum unearths a troubling tendency to privilege ancient Egypt as an indication of legitimacy and legibility, contrasted with Nubia.

Chapter 3 dissects the role of black skin color in Aeschylus’s Suppliants (c. 463 BCE). In this tragedy, Danaus’s black daughters, the Danaids, flee from Egypt to Argos to escape a forced marriage to their Egyptian cousins. Their knowledge of Greek religious rites convinces the Argive ruler, Pelasgus, that they are distant kin even though this Greek identity is seemingly contradicted by their black skin. This chapter asserts that the Danaids are sophisticated performers who successfully reduce the relevance of their physical alterity and declare their hybrid identity as black Egyptian Greeks. They are versatile and subtle ethnographers of the Argive Greeks to whom they supplicate. Conversely, their Argive audience – the intra-dramatic spectators of the Danaids’ difference – prove less able to comprehend their hybridized identity. An exploration of political resonances, particularly in relation to metics, draws the fifth-century BCE audience away from the distant mythical realm and towards their own political reality. Altogether, the drama speaks to the complicated exteriority of race in an ancient Greek tragedy.

In Chapter 5, Lucian (c. second century CE) presents a complicated model of difference that relies unevenly on skin color, attire, and language as determinants of identity. His trio of Scythian satires features characters who rework the relationships between race and identity within their specific contexts. The categories of “Greek” and “foreigner” become muddled as Greeks and Scythians share their impressions about black people in their midst: Greeks conflate blackness with Aithiopians or liken it to their own appearance with ease, while one Scythian man marvels at the sight of black Athenian athletes. These varied observations lead to a collective questioning of blackness in relation to Greek identity under the guise of humor.