Propertius’ self-proclamation as the ‘Roman Callimachus’ in elegy 4.1 is something of a provocation in a poem and book of Vigilian epicizing ambition – a provocation staged in Horos’ immediate reassertion of a doctrinaire interpretation of Callimachean programmatics. This chapter unpacks these apparent tensions chiefly through exploration of Propertius’ attention to Virgil’s prior programme of Callimachean allusion: thus elegies 4.3, 4.6 and 4.11 recycle Virgil’s use of the Coma Berenices to mediate Caesar’s catasterism; 4.6 reconstitutes the Callimachean hymns that lie behind the shield of Aeneas; 4.9 identifies the rival Callimachean and Apollonian models that Virgil unites in Aeneas’ visit to the future site of Rome; and the book as a whole is peppered with scholarly readings of Virgil’s learnedness. In this way Propertius 4 shows that Callimachus was always already a patriotic poet (despite the tendentiousness of the Roman recusatio), that Virgil had his own claim to Callimachean (and so to Propertian) refinement, and that genre does not preclude an elegist from Virgilian themes (hence Propertius’ obsessive matching of Virgilian and Callimachean stichometries and line-counts).

The investigation of Aeolian foundation myths continues in this chapter, with examination of traditions of the founding of Boeotian Thebes. Ancestral Indo-European tradition is again evident, as is an Anatolian stratum, one which foregrounds technological expertise of Asian origin.

Further investigation of the foundation traditions of Metapontium, focusing on the persistence of much more ancient Indo-European mythic traditions and time-reckoning traditions and the presence of those elements in the bricolage that constitutes the Aeolian mythic system of Metapontium foundation narratives and their relationship to Anatolian Aeolian tradition.

A synthetic, concluding discussion addressing the relationship between Ur-Aeolic and Special Mycenean and providing a historical framework for, especially, the introduction of Aeolic language and culture (pre-Thessalian/Boeotian) into European Greece following the Bronze-Age collapses and for the spread of pre-Aeolians (Iron-Age Ahhiyawans) eastward into Cilicia.

Discussion of Mycenaean Greek dialect variation as evidenced in the Linear B tablets, as well as an examination of the Attic-Ionic lexeme des-pótēs ‘house(hold)-master’ beside Normal Mycenean dos-pótās and Special Mycenaean da-koros ‘sweeper of the sacred-space’, matching Aeolic zda-kóros.

Investigation of the Bee-nymphs of Mt. Parnassus and the ancestral Indo-European strain and Anatolian strains of divination introduced into European Hellas by migrant pre-Aeolian communities.

Chapter three turns to scenes of Apollo Kitharoidos, the god most associated in contemporary scholarship with musical performance. In order to analyze how the surviving representations make visible Apollo’s music to the ancient viewer and how the god’s music is shown to have an effect on both his human and divine audience, Laferrière examines black- and red-figure vase-paintings that depict the god playing his lyre. Apollo’s powerfully affective music informs the scene’s composition, whether it is through the physical position of the figures, who direct their attention to the god’s music, or through the repetition of similar lines and forms among Apollo, his instrument, his audience, and the plants and animals that accompany him. She argues that the formal aspects of the composition can be discussed in terms of rhythmoi, symmetria, and harmonia, which are all integral concepts within ancient discussions of music and art theory. In making the sounds of Apollo’s music visible in this way, Laferrière shows that Apollo’s music has a unifying and harmonizing effect on those who listen to it, so that the music he plays both embodies and creates the harmonia with which he is associated.

Chapter two explores how we might develop a vocabulary for describing the appearance and effect of visual music by examining red-figure vases that depict Apollo simultaneously playing his lyre and pouring a libation. This synchronicity between the god’s two actions, one musical and the other ritual, demonstrates that his movements are rhythmic in a similar way to, or are even conditioned by, the sounds of his music, so that the images draw an implicit connection between divine music, rhythm, and ritual. Laferrière argues that the slow music that Apollo creates with one hand establishes a visual rhythm and musical pattern that are derived from the god’s body as well as the forms of the musical and ritual objects that he holds. For the ancient viewer, each image acts as an invitation to engage with its visualized musical rhythm, to hear imaginatively the sounds of the god’s music. In this interplay between visual image and imagined sound, and in one’s own participation in animating the god’s ritual, the viewer could experience the presence of Apollo in a moment of coordinated musical rhythm and harmony.

The chapter provides a reconsideration of a section in Martianus Capella’s Book 1, dedicated to the ‘failure of the oracles’ and culminating in a quotation of a prophylactic Apollinean oracle, attributed to Alexander of Abonouteichos. The author tries to reconstruct some possible lines of transmission of this oracle, at the same time highlighting how its allegorical framework helps to shed light on some aspects of the ongoing controversy between pagans and Christians, which took into account the thaumaturgical and therapeutic capabilities of the gods.

In the Metamorphoses, Ovid’s simile world becomes a more fragmented and less cohesive place where simile characters from the past may appear rarely or not at all, similes are so short that they often do not achieve the immersive effects typical of the simile worlds of earlier epics, and they do not work hand in hand with the story to bring forward key themes. Some conventional simile features take on different functions in the Metamorphoses, such as the chase similes that describe erotic pursuits instead of battle scenes. Main roles become cameo appearances while minor characters from earlier epics may find themselves at center stage. Yet similes retain many of their familiar qualities, and some of the poem’s most memorable moments are achieved in part with heart-pounding scenes familiar from earlier epics of predators chasing their prey, raging fires, battle scenes, and sailing. Similes help the Metamorphoses both to claim the epic genre for itself and to take that genre to new places it had never been before. The story and the similes tell a tale of constancy and change, of passion rather than battle as the most important arena for human conflict, and of storytelling itself.

In the last two centuries BC, with the Republic limping towards its end, the cultivated ruling elite began to lose its moral and political authority.1 Its members not only held themselves responsible for the so-called crisis of tradition, but at the same time also conveyed the impression of a loss of memory, as if all Romans were suffering from some kind of amnesia or identity crisis.2 In particular, institutional figures such as pontiffs and augurs, who had preserved Rome’s memory throughout its history, were accused of neglecting their duties and, by extension, of allowing ancient practices and values to slowly disappear.3 Accordingly, Cicero and Varro, both perfect representatives of this elite, employed recurrent terms such as neglect (neglegentia/neglegere), involuntary abandon (amittere), oblivion (oblivio), vanishing of institutions (evanescere), and ignorance (ignoratio/ignorare) to describe this critical loss of information; they depicted the citizenry of Rome (civitas) as disoriented and estranged, incapable of sharing any common knowledge or values.

Chapter 3 focusses on the temple of Hera at Foce del Sele north of the Greek colony of Poseidonia-Paestum in southern Italy. New archaeometric analysis on the metopes from the Hera sanctuary near the mouth of the river Sele has made it possible to propose a new reconstruction of the oldest Hera temple on the site, which belongs to the first generation of Doric stone temples. The study of the architectural elements confirms the decorative nature of the first Doric friezes. Moreover, by analyzing the mythological subjects on the frieze and comparing them with other early Doric temples in Selinous, Delphi, and Athens, it can be shown that the tendency to choose Panhellenic themes over local traditions is a general feature of early Doric temples. Because of the detachment of the imagery from local traditions, the Doric temple is described as a “non-place” according to the definition of the French anthropologist Marc Augé. Conceiving temples as standardized “non-places” that could be set up in any given local environment was crucial to the agendas of Greek elites, who needed to reorganize agricultural and urban landscapes to regulate population pressure and social tensions – both in the colonies and in homeland Greece.

By analyzing the topography of Selinous, a colonial foundation of the late seventh century BC, the chapter explores the way in which temple building and sacred architecture became subordinated to urban design. From the sixth century BC onward, Greek cult places and temples were increasingly seen as an expression of the urban rather than the natural landscape. This holds true for altars and temples at the center of cult places, but also for fountain houses that replaced or were built over natural fountains. The sacredness of a place was increasingly represented and communicated through monumental stone architecture. At the same time, the novel use of man-made images in Greek sanctuaries contributed to a radical change in which the presence of the gods was imagined and experienced. All this went along with a shift of power and agency from local groups to urban elites, who had the means to control the restructuring and reorganization of sacred landscapes. The violence of this shift is reflected in the iconography that tends to rationalize and sublimize violence against the non-Greek, non-urban, and non-male.

The sanctuary of Apollo at Delphi offers an example of how an ancient cult site was transformed into a Panhellenic sanctuary as a result of political and military conflicts involving some of the leading city-states of the region. After the so-called First Sacred War in the 590s/80s BC, Delphi was launched as the center of the Greek world with its oracle and its Panhellenic games. The Doric style of the Apollo temple and other buildings on the site helped to communicate the ambitions and values of the amphictyony that was in charge of the administration of the sanctuary after the war. The standardization of architecture and sculpture was an important feature in the elite competition that took place in Panhellenic sanctuaries like Delphi, where cities from all over Greece set up costly treasuries and votive statues. Ionic monuments such as the sphinx of the Naxians alternated with Doric buildings. On the basis of recent scholarship, the Ionic order can be interpreted as a regional variation of the “Panhellenic” Doric order. As can be shown, the Ionic order corresponds with cultural values such as abundance, variety, multilingualism, and openness toward Near-Eastern and Egyptian influences that are also characteristic of Ionian poetry, philosophy, and culture.

The title of this chapter is an adaptation of the title of an important book about linguistic structures and processes of early Indo-European as they experienced transformed expression in the evolved, and evolving, linguistic structures of ancient Greek.1 Like that work, this study is concerned with the diachronic and synchronic intersection of structures. But while that work chiefly and expansively addresses morpho-phonological matters of dialect development, this one is a much more modest lexical study (a set of fairly fine-grained lexical analyses) of specific elements of Greek divination, one that finds particular inspiration in Benveniste’s (1969) Le vocabulaire des institutions indo-européennes. What follows is a study of linguistic and cultural structures in which I hypothesize (1) that deliberate intellectual or cognitive engagement is the expected response to the production of Greek prophetic signs and (2) that this state of affairs continues, at least in part, idealized practices of ancestral Indo-European cult. Given that the idea that oracles are puzzles in search of a solution is fundamental to the ancient literary presentation of Greek divination, the first half of this hypothesis may appear trivial; however, what I hope to show is that intellectual engagement with an oracle is a cult act of a more “requisite” nature and attitude than perhaps typically imagined – it is the religiously right response – and that this is so (part two of the hypothesis) for reasons having to do with inherited religious structures (the appearance of the forest may not be substantially changed, but some new understanding of the trees may possibly present itself). I begin with Roman Jakobson, a master analyst of linguistic and cultural structures.

Thus speaks Prometheus, as he was most likely staged by Aeschylus in mid-fifth century BC Athens. Portrayed in chains in the outer reaches of the inhabited world, in the far and desert North, the hero addresses the chorus of Oceanids, singing from the orchestra to the public gathered in the theater dedicated to Dionysos Eleuthereus at the foot of the Acropolis. In this famous monologue, Prometheus enumerates and boasts about the different technical arts he has invented for the mortals. Among these tékhnai (τέχναι) he mentions various divinatory practices (mantikḗ [μαντική], line 484): namely (1) the interpretation of dreams, of omens, or of connections and coincidences (sumbóloi [συμβόλοι], line 487) as may happen along the way; (2) the observation of different species of rapacious birds in flight; (3) the examination of the shape and glint of a sacrificed animal’s viscera and liver; and finally (4) the reading of smoke and flames emanating from the sacrificial portion offered to the gods. All these divinatory practices belong to a long list of gifts bestowed by Prometheus: from the invention of numbers and of the alphabet (μνήμην ἁπάντων, μουσομήτορ’ ἐργάνην ‘the tool that enables all things to be remembered and is mother of the Muses’, line 461),3 to the beneficial remedies of medicine, mentioning also the yoke and harness that enable the use of animals, especially for plowing, the reading of the rising and setting of the stars for the sake of agricultural labor, the sailing for navigation, and the working of metals ‘hidden beneath the earth’ (lines 500–501), namely copper, iron, silver, and gold.

This chapter examines the reign of the notorious musician-emperor Nero. It offers a comprehensive survey of the ancient material relating to Nero’s performances, stressing also his important role behind the scenes as producer, composer and choreographer. Building on the recent ‘performative turn’ in Neronian studies, the chapter argues that Nero used music not to satisfy some narcissistic or tyrannical bent, as has traditionally been maintained, but rather as part of a self-conscious strategy for the negotiation and representation of imperial power. Nero’s music-making responded to, and drew energy from, the cultural interests of both the ordinary Roman people and the young metropolitan elite. In this way, Nero succeeded in creating and disseminating an original musical language, which repackaged elements of Greek culture into a distinctly Roman product optimised for popular consumption.