In our present-day secular society, which regards religion as an optional extra for those who like that sort of thing, it is trumpeted as a great discovery that, in classical Greece, religion was not an optional extra detached from the rest of society's working but was ‘embedded’ in the various workings of society. It is of course our society that is exceptional: religion has been embedded in most societies through most of human history. Christianity was far more effectively embedded in western societies in the past than it is now; there are still some links in England between the Church of England and the state, and there are rather stronger links in Norway between the Lutheran church and the state; some Christian festivals are still widely observed as public holidays; and, in other parts of the world (for instance, many countries in which Islam is the predominant religion), the links between religion and state are still much stronger.

Ancient history and modern thought interact in multifarious ways. While modern concepts can help us to understand, or serve to obscure, ancient reality, the remote past can also be used as a point of reference for contemporary debates about political issues and strategies. In fact, pundits and politicians alike are used to invoking the lessons of (ancient) history in order to justify their recommendations and decisions. This is often done in a most arbitrary and selective way, without regard for the fact that the interpretation of history is too complex a task to yield uncontroversial and straightforward answers to contemporary problems. Nevertheless, it would be rash to dismiss this kind of analysis as unsuitable for academic research; for it should not be overlooked that it can help to broaden the understanding of structural patterns and give a sense of the variety of options available to decision-makers.

Book nine of Ovid's Metamorphoses begins with Achelous telling Theseus and his companions the reason behind the lack of one of his horns. It turns out that the river god has lost it during a fight against Hercules, while they were both wooing Oeneus' daughter, Deianira. The other suitors, realizing that they would not stand a chance against such rivals as Hercules and Achelous, left the contest. While the whole competition seems initially to have depended on the ability to convince Oeneus through self-praise, Hercules' intolerance of the river god's sophisms causes the verbal duel to become a hand-to-hand fight. This fight results in Achelous' defeat and loss of both Deianira and his horn.

There are seventy-four catalogued examples of figured art painted on Pompeian façades, almost all of a religious or talismanic nature. This street art appeared near compital altars and entrances to shops and houses, and contributed to a vibrant street aesthetic. Exterior figured paintings have not received a great deal of scholarly attention, however, with studies tending to focus on iconography rather than considering how street art may have functioned in its original setting. The potential value of painted façades as evidence for religious, commercial, and civic values, for which there are scant literary sources, has consequently been overlooked.

There is an abundance ‘to eat’ in the pages of Roman literature, where lavish and exotic dishes crowd the tables at banquets that flatter and fortify indulgent and insatiable appetites in unrestrained festivals of eating and drinking. As Emily Gowers explains, ‘Imperium had turned Rome into the world's emporium: its alimentary choices are presented as almost infinite, from the turnips of Romulus to the larks' tongues of Elagabalus’. Nevertheless, in Roman society, where the food a person ate (its quality, quantity, and presentation) reflected their station in life and where large numbers of the population struggled at subsistence levels, these literary banquets are neither reliable, nor even factual, accounts of a Roman meal. In fact, food or events of consumption appear to have occupied an ambivalent, even undistinguished, place in Roman literature, which typically saw their inclusion in comedy, satire, epigram, and the epistle but not the serious genres of epic, tragedy, elegy, or lyric. Generic considerations could possibly therefore influence an author's inclusion of culinary description in ancient literature, although food details did not merely satisfy these expectations and were typically shaped by the attitudes, social values, or artistic insights of an individual author.