DJ Lee and Aaron Oforlea’s chapter approaches Coleridge from a different angle, counterposing his vision of freedom with that of the Black Loyalists who supported the English during the American Revolution. Lee and Oforlea’s titular phrase “(not)Freedom” refers to “the fragmentation, resistance, and transgression with which Black Loyalists lived,” which is exemplified in the Loyalists’ linguistic practices. Whether by mimicking the language of white Europeans or by developing a distinctive lingo that infused poetry into the language of transactions, the Loyalists demonstrated a model of freedom – (not)freedom – that was local and transitory, contextually dependent, and always precarious.

While the Romantic vampire has often been read as disrupting heteropatriarchal norms, in reading Uriah Derick D’Arcy’s The Black Vampyre, Deanna Koretsky exposes how the supposedly liberatory figure of the vampire upholds the antiblackness at the heart of the Gothic tradition. Koretsky sharply and counterintuitively argues that there is in fact nothing more representative of the human than the figure of the vampire and that D’arcy’s black vampire thus threatens the modern sociopolitical order built on expelling blackness from the category of the human.

This chapter provides an account of epic katabases (journeys to the Underworld) and treats the Underworld as both a theme and a location in early hexameter poetry. Sekita presents an overview of Underworld scenes and motifs featuring in Homer and Hesiod, and as reconstructed in the Epic Cycle and other epic poets. She also summarises the main scholarly achievements and developments regarding the possible interpretations of this material, including its reception in the iconography of Attic and Apulian vase-painting and place in the broader Mediterranean tradition.

This chapter introduces social scientific perspectives and methods applicable to observing the relationship between artificial intelligence (AI) and religion. It discusses the contributions that anthropological and sociological approaches can make to this entanglement of two modern social phenomena while also drawing attention to the inherent biases and perspectives that both fields bring with them due to their histories. Examples of research on religion and AI are highlighted, especially when they demonstrate agile and new methodologies for engaging with AI in its many applications; including but not limited to online worlds, multimedia formats, games, social media and the new spaces made by technological innovation such as the innovations such as the platforms underpinning the gig economy. All these AI-enabled spaces can be entangled with religious and spiritual conceptions of the world. This chapter also aims to expand upon the relationship between AI and religion as it is perceived as a general concept or object within human society and civilisation. It explains how both anthropology and sociology can provide frameworks for conceptualising that relationship and give us ways to account for our narratives of secularisation – informed by AI development – that see religion as a remnant of a prior, less rational stage of human civilisation.

As every reader of Lucian knows, he always belongs to something without belonging to it wholly. His relationship to his own Greek identity is undoubtedly the most symbolic instance: although wholly mastering the Greek language, he emphasises his being a barbarian. Lucian’s foreignness is a typical mark of his protean authorial persona throughout his œuvre, producing a constant tension between an inside and an outside as Lucian emphasises his own paradoxical liminality. This chapter discusses six of his texts (True Histories, Scythian, The Hall, On Salaried Posts, Symposium, and Lexiphanes), suggesting that a movement towards the inside and then the outside marks Lucian’s textuality in disparate ways. Depending on the specific narrative context, this movement assumes different meanings (autobiographical, metaphorical, metapoetical, rhetorical) that are often combined with each other, but most importantly produces a fundamental tension between meaning itself and the absence of significance.

This chapter explores the intersection of Hindu philosophy and practice with the development of artificial intelligence (AI). The chapter first introduces aspects of technological growth in Hindu contexts, including the reception of ‘Western’ ideas about AI in Hindu communities before describing key elements of the Hindu traditions. It then shows how AI technologies can be conceived of from a Hindu perspective and moves from there to the philosophical contributions Hinduism offers for global reflection on AI. Specifically, the chapter describes openings and contentions for AI in Hindu rituals. The focus is the use of robotics and/or AI in Hindu pūjā (worship of gods) and the key practice of darśan (mutual seeing) with the divine. Subsequently, the chapter investigates how Hindu philosophers have engaged the distinctive qualities of human beings and their investigation into body, minds and consciousness/awareness. The chapter concludes by raising questions for future research.

Lucian’s position as a commentator on religion has been debated intensely since late antiquity: for most of the last two millennia, it has been the main focus for commentators. This is primarily due to Lucian teasing Christians in a couple of places (although in fact they get off relatively lightly); but he is also, and indeed much more insistently, scathing about aspects of Greco-Roman ‘paganism’. This chapter begin by unpicking some of this reception history, and showing how modern scholarly perspectives remain locked into nineteenth-century cultural-historical narratives (which were designed to play ‘Hellenism’ off against ‘Christianity’, in various forms). It then argues that we should set aside the construct of Lucian’s status as a religious ‘outsider’— a legacy of nineteenth-century thinking — and consider Lucian instead as an agent operating within the field of Greek religion, and contributing richly (albeit satirically) to ongoing, vital questions over humans’ relationship with the divine. He should be ranged, that is to say, alongside figures like Aristides, Pausanias, and Apuleius as keen observers of the religious culture of the time.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is presented as a portal to more liberative realities, but its broad implications for society and certain groups in particular require more critical examination. This chapter takes a specifically Black theological perspective to consider the scepticism within Black communities around narrow applications of AI as well as the more speculative ideas about these technologies, for example general AI. Black theology’s perpetual push towards Black liberation, combined with womanism’s invitation to participate in processes that reconstitute Black quality of life, have perfectly situated Black theological thought for discourse around artificial intelligence. Moreover, there are four particular categories where Black theologians and religious scholars have already broken ground and might be helpful to religious discourse concerning Blackness and AI. Those areas are: white supremacy, surveillance and policing, consciousness and God. This chapter encounters several scholars and perspectives within the field of Black theology and points to potential avenues for future theological areas of concern and exploration.

Focusing on Menippus’ description of his celestial journey and the great cosmic distances he has travelled, I argue that Icaromenippus is a playful point of reception for mathematical astronomy. Through his acerbic satire, Lucian intervenes in the traditions of cosmology and astronomy to expose how the authority of the most technical of scientific hypotheses can be every bit as precarious as the assertions of philosophy, historiography, or even fiction itself. Provocatively, he draws mathematical astronomy – the work of practitioners such as Archimedes and Aristarchus – into the realm of discourse analysis and pits the authority of science against myth. Icaromenippus therefore warrants a place alongside Plutarch’s On the Face of the Moon and the Aetna poem, other works of the imperial era that explore scientific and mythical explanations in differing ways, and Apuleius’ Apology, which examines the relationship between science and magic. More particularly, Icaromenippus reveals how astronomy could ignite the literary imagination, and how literary works can, in turn, enrich our understanding of scientific thought, inviting us to think about scientific method and communication, the scientific viewpoint, and the role of the body in the domain of perhaps the most incorporeal of the natural sciences, astronomy itself.

Defending the indefensible and praising the unpraiseworthy were staples of Greek declamation in the Roman imperial period. Lucian’s Phalaris I and II have generally been considered as undemanding rhetorical exercises, inverting the standard tropes of anti-tyrant invective to produce a paradoxical encomium of the proverbially wicked tyrant Phalaris of Akragas. This paper argues that Phalaris I and II are in fact considerably more sophisticated and caustic texts then they appear at first sight. Phalaris’ letter to the Delphians in Phalaris I is carefully crafted to show that Phalaris is indeed, despite his protestations, a self-deluding psychopath; he now wishes to dedicate his notorious bronze bull to the Delphic Apollo in order to whitewash his terrible reputation. The speech of the anonymous Delphian in Phalaris II makes a radically cynical case for welcoming the gift of the bull with no questions asked, in full knowledge that Phalaris may be just as wicked as he is reputed to be. The texts are an ironic commentary on the murky ethics of Delphic patronage in the second century CE, and the venality of oracular shrines more generally; Lucian may specifically have in mind the lavish Delphic patronage of the Roman emperor Domitian.

This chapter traces the publication history and animating ideas of Luciani Opuscula, a set of translations of Lucian begun as a collaboration between Thomas More and Desiderius Erasmus. I examine the volume’s contents, which grew over time as Erasmus kept adding to them, and the letters with which both translators prefaced their own selections, explaining to fellow humanists how the works are to be read. These interpretive letters tell us much about how the two great northern humanists understood Lucian and what role he played in their own evolution as the foremost ‘Lucianists’ of their age.