The fifth chapter is chiefly concerned with the creative instantiations of Hyperborea in the Hellenistic and later periods, studied there as examples of a more thoroughly textualised, literary process of worlding. It looks at changing strategies of composing worlds through an archive of libraries and canons. The first section of the chapter starts with an overview of the transformations of the Hyperborean material in geographical literature after Herodotus, from Eratosthenes and Strabo to Pliny the Elder. The second section examines two equally productive, creative strategies of appropriation of the Hyperborean nexus in the post-Classical archive: Solinus' De mirabilibus mundi and the Philippica of Theopompus. The third section is concerned with the distinctive cosmographical usages of Hyperborea in early Hellenistic utopias, and their deep engagement with the archive: Hecataeus of Abdera's On the Hyperboreans, Callimachus' Hymn to Delos, and Simias of Rhodes' Apollo. All support the wider considerations of the chapter on the continued relevance of Hyperborea for thinking the worlds of the Ptolemaic and Seleucid kingdoms. The fourth section brings us back to Athens, with detailed study of two cosmographical texts written over and through the archive: the Delian Oration of Lycurgus and the pseudo-Platonic Axiochos.

This chapter turns to our evidence for ritual practice at the site, in particular activity centred on the three hot springs. Rather than being curative in nature, the water is understood as primarily a medium for enabling ritual relinquishment of objects lost through theft or decay. The chthonic importance of the water is emphasized and linked to other aspects of ritual at the site, in particular reports from the ancient author Solinus that coal was burned on Sulis’s altars. Depositional practice at Aquae Sulis is compared to other watery sites in Britain and Gaul, and the Bath corpus of ‘curse tablets’ is placed into a wider context, with the sanctuary at Uley serving as a particularly important counterpoint to Bath.