In the Apophthegmata Laconica, a collection of witty exchanges that highlight the shrewdness of Laconian brevity, we read the following story. An Argive once taunted a Spartan by pointing out the multitude of Spartan tombs in Argive territory. The Spartan retorted that, by contrast, not a single Argive tomb could be found in Sparta. The author of the Plutarchan tale comments that the Spartan insinuated that, while his people had repeatedly invaded Argos, the Argives had never set foot on Sparta (Mor. 233c; cf. Vit. Ages. 31.6). Besides attesting to the sharp wit of Laconian concision, the story is a good example of how easily a soldier's tomb can serve different national agendas. While the presence of Spartan dead in Argos is a source of pride for the Argives, from another point of view it can be read as a sign of Spartan military prowess. The Greek word σῆμα (‘tomb’) speaks for the crucial role of semiotics in interpreting the semantics of military monuments. The tomb is a sign that needs to be decoded; only more often than not there is more than one way of deciphering it.

The story of Alcestis and Admetus as dramatised in Euripides' Alcestis involves the exploration of prominent, as well as interconnected, moral values and cultural norms which affect or define all major parties. The most pertinent ones are those of friendship (φιλία) and guest-friendship (ξενία), goodwill and gratitude (χάρις), nobility (εὐγένεια, γενναιότης), shame or respect (αἰδώς), reverence towards the gods (εὐσέβεια), and honour (τιμή). The notion of ἐλευθερία (‘freedom’) in particular, though not featuring frequently in the play, proves to be a motif which itself works towards the definition or reassessment of the boundaries of friendship (and enmity) within a plot which blurs, complicates or even disturbs the terms of the most familiar and deep-rooted bonds (parentage, marriage, guest-friendship).

The 20 poems collected together as the lithika of Posidippus, the first surviving poems on a papyrus roll only published in 2001 and dating from the third century BCE, offer a range of spectacular new evidence for a series of issues in Hellenistic history, art and literature. The standard view is that Posidippus was probably author of all the epigrams in the roll known as P. Mil. Vogl. VIII 309, although this has been contested and by no means need certainly be the case. For my purposes here, I do assume that the interconnected poetics of the poems in the lithika do imply a single poet who is quite likely to be Posidippus, since poem 15—independently anthologised in antiquity and known through a manuscript tradition—was attributed to Posidippus in the twelfth century by the Byzantine poet and grammarian John Tzetzes. Historically speaking, the fact that so many of these poems focus on gems from the east gives remarkable insight into the interchange between Hellenistic and Achaemenid cultures: specifically, they signal the prestige of treasures from the east in the Hellenistic courts. In the history of collections, they represent a very early example of exoticism in elite collecting, of the accumulation of valuables in what we may assume was a royal and non-sacred Schatzkammer, of the need for an aesthetic response (in this case through short poems) to ‘label’ and valorise the precious items in the collection. In the history of ancient Wissenschaft, the poems’ use of late Classical gem-lore (exemplified in texts like the On Stones of Theophrastus) offers a vivid instance of the ways theoretical knowledge circulated at least in elite contexts around the royal circle.

Hellenistic and Roman Imperial prose fiction sprang from the ashes of the Haxāmanišiyan Empire (c.550-330 BCE). The multicultural autonomy that Iranian regents afforded their subject peoples laid the groundwork for social policy under Alexandros, the Diadokhoi, and Roman governance of the Near East. As literary fiction developed over the course of the ‘long’ Hellenistic period, the diversity of languages and cultures not only shaped the kinds of narratives produced: polyglossia became a subject of representation in and of itself, as did the possibilities of translation between one language and another.