The Apamea peace conference after Magnesia included Roman demands for Hannibal’s extradition; he forestalled this by going on his travels again. These are poorly documented. A Cretan visit is probably historical but hard to explain. It was unconnected with attested contemporary Roman official visits. A Polybius fragment may allude to a financial ploy by which he kept his savings intact. He moved to Armenia, where inscriptions attest familiarity with Greek poetry; his stay is attested mainly by Plutarch’s Lucullus. He helped King Artaxias to found Artaxata, but moved on again, for reasons unknown. His next choice, King Prusias’ Bithynia, is puzzling (closer to Italy), but Prusias was at war with Rome’s friend Eumenes of Pergamum. Hannibal won a sea battle for Prusias, but weird details are suspect. Here too he helped a king found a city: Prusa. But Prusias succumbed to Roman vindictiveness and Hannibal took poison. His tomb site is unknown.

Already by the late thirteenth century, the laudes ceremony had become a weekly feature of civic life on the island, performed each Tuesday in the capital city of Candia in a ritual that symbolized interfaith relations on the island. It was folded into the veneration of icons and encounters with the miraculous, became a site for resolving personal disputes, and was referenced and represented deep within the rugged interior of the island in the decorative programs of rural chapels. Each of these configurations, explored in Chapter 2, reveals a different facet of a political imagination that gave music the power to represent the state in all its members, local and far-flung, visible and invisible, human and divine. Studying the performance of laudes in all its variety gives us glimpses into the chaotic reality out of which Venice’s project of empire was forged in the early years. Both Latin and Greek populations on the island adopted the laudes as a space to negotiate and contest colonial identity. Far from expressing unanimous agreement, the laudes had, by the fourteenth century, become a spectacular arena of dispute on the island.

Chapter 1 focuses on the practices and policies of music instituted in the earliest days of Venice’s empire in the eastern Mediterranean, and on the wide-reaching ramifications of music’s use as a technology of political representation on the island of Crete, the largest, longest-held, and most commercially profitable of Venice’s maritime colonies. Records from the first century of Venetian rule in Crete document the use of song as a bureaucratic tool, in which the singing of laudes—a genre with ambivalently political and liturgical usage—legitimized state contracts of taxation, transfer of property, and vassalage. The starting point of this chapter is a document known as the Concessio insulae Cretensis, drawn up by Doge Pietro Ziani in September 1211, one of the earliest records of Venice’s investment in music as an element of statecraft, and the origin of the laudes ritual on the island. This chapter uncovers the enormous and long-lasting importance of the laudes within the Venetian imperial enterprise, arguing that it served as the sounding image of the state’s claim to romanitas on which its legitimacy as an empire depended.

The relation between the opening section of Plato’s Laws and Xenophon’s Constitution of the Lacedaemonians usually goes unnoticed. I draw attention to its importance for understanding Plato’s project in the dialogue. Section 1 shows that the view proposed by Plato’s Athenian Visitor that Lycurgus made virtue in its entirety the goal of his statecraft was anticipated in Xenophon’s treatise. It has to be treated as an interpretation of the Spartan politeia alternative to that advanced by the Athenian’s interlocutors, which Plato could hope to be taken seriously as such. The second section focuses on the legislative programme the Athenian says he had hoped to hear ascribed to the Cretan and Spartan lawgivers. Plato can expect recognition by the reader that the programme is properly Spartan and Cretan by virtue of its echoes of the programme attributed to Lycurgus by Xenophon. The third section argues that in making law primarily concerned with fostering the proper development, conduct, and treatment of human beings at every stage of the life cycle, above all by provision for sound customary practices and the like, Plato adopts the approach to law making taken by Xenophon’s Lycurgus.

Reference in the Linear B record to deities of the later pantheon, for instance Poseidon, Zeus, and Hera, among others, vividly attests to the Mycenaean pedigree of Greek religion. This chapter suggests that the resonance with local place, so foundational a characteristic of Hellenic belief in later times, also derived from Mycenaean origins. To this end, Susan Lupack decodes the complicated helix of Minoan and Mycenaean religion, illustrating that Mycenaean religion evolved through appropriations from the Minoans. The artefacts retrieved from the tomb of the Griffin Warrior in Pylos showcase the creative Minoan–Mycenaean mix. Tracing the movement of Mycenaean peoples to Crete, the linguistic examination of the famous Room of the Chariot-Tablets from Knossos demonstrates how the first wave of arrivals predominantly practised the religion they had brought with them from their mainland homes. A second assemblage from Knossos from only ca. sixty years later shows that the Mycenaeans now not only made an effort to worship Minoan deities, but also lent a new guise to their gods and goddesses, relating them to, and embedding them in, the land of the Minoans.

Reference in the Linear B record to deities of the later pantheon, for instance Poseidon, Zeus, and Hera, among others, vividly attests to the Mycenaean pedigree of Greek religion. This chapter suggests that the resonance with local place, so foundational a characteristic of Hellenic belief in later times, also derived from Mycenaean origins. To this end, Susan Lupack decodes the complicated helix of Minoan and Mycenaean religion, illustrating that Mycenaean religion evolved through appropriations from the Minoans. The artefacts retrieved from the tomb of the Griffin Warrior in Pylos showcase the creative Minoan–Mycenaean mix. Tracing the movement of Mycenaean peoples to Crete, the linguistic examination of the famous Room of the Chariot-Tablets from Knossos demonstrates how the first wave of arrivals predominantly practised the religion they had brought with them from their mainland homes. A second assemblage from Knossos from only ca. sixty years later shows that the Mycenaeans now not only made an effort to worship Minoan deities, but also lent a new guise to their gods and goddesses, relating them to, and embedding them in, the land of the Minoans.

Languages are constantly changing. The reasons for the changes can be both internal (i.e., when monolingual speakers adopt new ways of saying things according to social factors like age, gender, and class) and external (e.g., language contact). Although toponyms are ‘linguistic fossils’ that tend to retain older linguistic features and can withstand violent population shifts more so than the general lexicon, they are also affected by the process of language change. This is explored through several examples from around the world. It is only through analysing language change – with an approach that incorporates historical-linguistic methodologies like the comparative method and dialectological interpretations – that a toponymist can reconstruct the original (and most remote) toponymic root of a place name. The latter half of the chapter demonstrates how toponyms can be used to ‘crack’ hitherto undeciphered languages, the most notable being Linear B (a syllabic writing system transcribing Mycenaean Greek, an archaic form of Ancient Greek). The authors also apply an experimental methodology, using toponyms, to provide a possible interpretation of place names possibly transcribed through Linear A (the grammatological ancestor of the Linear B writing system).

This chapter traces a path across the Mediterranean in locating the sites where Greek, Semitic (in particular Phoenician) and native populations interacted, the author’s premise being that ‘the literary and mythological entanglements, for the most part, followed the human entanglements’. Starting from the same Mount Hazzi or Jebel al-Aqra (here called Mount Saphon, by its Semitic name) and crossing first to Crete and from there to Iberia, López-Ruiz draws attention to Near Eastern Storm God narratives that are less well-known than the Song of Emergence but that similarly shaped Greek mythological and cultic conceptions of Zeus: these historically less successful narratives tend to furnish the Storm God with a fuller life cycle, including birth, journeys in maturity, and even death.

This chapter deals with the peripheral regions of Axis-occupied territory, as opposed to the core of Greater Germany. These regions formed a strategic ‘ring’ to be closed around the Axis, and some Allied leaders hoped that the Nazi regime could be brought down by strategic encirclement rather than by a bloody direct ground assault on the Reich. Unsuccessful Italian offensives against Britain in in Egypt. British naval superiority in the Mediterranean. The German invasion of Greece succeeds despite the dispatch of British troops. Crete abandoned and serious Royal Navy losses suffered. The German Afrika Korps arrives in Libya to bolster the Italian contingent. Value of German central strategic position, fighting on interior lines and with the ability to move ships and aircraft between fronts. Could Hitler have adopted a ‘Mediterranean’ strategy, attacking British external positions rather than Russia? Conflicting objectives among Hitler’s ‘allies’ and collaborators, and resulting weakness of the Third Reich in northwestern Africa. Allied decision to mount indirect Operation TORCH invasion in North Africa in November 1942, rather than a direct landing across the English Channel. Invasion of Sicily and the overthrow of Mussolini in July 1943, followed by Allied landing on mainland Italy in October. Guerrilla war in Yugoslavia. Defection of Romania followed by rapid Russian advance to the west and into Hungary. German evacuation of Greece followed by political crisis in Athens. Norway and Finland as another part of the Axis periphery; the Finns change sides in September 1944.