A great deal of figurative decoration on Greek painted pottery relates to mythology. But what made particular painters choose to paint particular scenes at particular times? This chapter assembles the evidence for what was painted on Athenian painted pottery from the seventh to the fourth century, showing how different scenes peaked in popularity at different periods, and how although some scenes were perennial favourites, others attracted interest only briefly. The chapter then explores the implications of the patterns both for changing degrees of engagement with one particular set of texts, the Homeric epics, and for the way in which changing values affected the myths, and the literary instantiations of those myths, that were in vogue at any one time. While the questions of what it is to be human, how men relate to women, and how to behave at a party are of lasting interest to users of pottery, engaging with issues of divine power is popular in the sixth century, with issues of sexual relations and extreme situations arising from war popular around 500, and issues about decision-making as popular in the fifth century.

Martial Poirson foregrounds France’s greatest writer of comedy and the most widely read, performed and translated French-language playwright in the world, Molière. Highlighting the myths that have thrived around this national treasure, Poirson notes that almost nothing is known about the biography and history of this national treasure. Inseparable from the nation’s narration of itself and of its status at the centre of colonial empire, Molière has been celebrated for his supposedly republican values, and his language – ‘la langue de Molière’ – has become foundational in France and exported, sometimes aggressively, across la francophonie, or the French-speaking world. Notably, Poirson provides insights into how Molière’s language and oeuvre fared in colonized Indochina. With astonishing constancy and unparalleled resilience, Molière has persisted in the French and international cultural subconscious for over four centuries.

Country music is one of Australia’s oldest popular music forms, stretching from the 1920s (when it was known as hillbilly) to today. It also shows a remarkable continuity of tradition. Despite country music’s reputation as being politically conservative and white, in Australia country has often pursued a progressive agenda and has featured many Aboriginal and women artists. Songwriters have used country music’s robust musical forms to tell richly detailed and diverse stories about life in Australia, from rural labour, to urbanization, to sexual and racial double standards, to economic woes, to familial bonds, to the ravages of the climate. Despite this rich history, and the genre’s rootedness in place, there remain many anxieties surrounding country music to do with its perceived ‘Americanness’, itself symptomatic of larger anxieties around national identity. While hillbilly music originated in America, musically, lyrically and culturally it has developed in new and fascinating ways in Australia.

The Poet’s Voice is an intervention in the field of classics and is committed to the slow, close reading of Greek texts. The testing of how critical activity could be transformed by theoretical reflection is to be found in how the texts of antiquity were opened to a transformative exploration of their meaning. The practice of the discipline – how texts are read and understood, what questions are authorized, what sorts of answers countenanced – is what is at stake in such an enterprise. The Poet’s Voice is written from within the discipline of classics, to transform it from within, and hence its focus is on critically reading the texts of the discipline, both the ancient literature and its modern critics. That is how its theoretical commitment is embodied and enacted.

Historical revivalism has proved to be an ever-constant thread in the reception of Vaughan Williams and his contemporaries. Question of cultural heritage and national history were pressing ones during Vaughan Williams’s lifetime, both as topics of academic study and subjects of popular appeal. England in this period drew enormous pride from its literary and artistic history, and this history in turn fuelled a national image that helped create a sense of a unique national destiny. For the period’s perceived musical ‘renaissance’, similarly, the important influence of English heritage and the nation’s historical musical canon on new English works was a persistent trope.

It is important, however, to create more nuanced accounts of how historical revivalism figured in English musical modernism. In this chapter, I focus on three main elements in English musical revivalism during Vaughan Williams’s lifetime. First, I explore contemporary attitudes towards history, English musicological writing during the period, and new attitudes towards manuscripts and archival research. I then outline how the products of music historians and archival researchers created actual performances of early music via editions and concerts. Finally, I note the expansion of this ‘sounding’ early music into spaces where historical music could be marketed as an element of mass culture.

In Chapter 5, the focus is on the development of arithmetical operations. I review empirical literature and argue that addition has plausibly developed as a direct continuation of counting procedures, which in turn made it possible to develop other arithmetical operations (multiplication, subtraction, and division). After that, reviewing literature on different cultures, I show the importance of arithmetical applications for the development of arithmetic – or the lack of it. While arithmetical operations have developed in similar ways in different cultures (when arithmetic was indeed developed), in the final section I show how some aspects of Western arithmetic – for example, proofs, axiomatisations and infinity – are more culturally specific.

In Chapter 6, I discuss the way knowledge and skills evolve culturally. Starting from the notion of cumulative cultural evolution, I show how the emergence of arithmetical knowledge and skills can be understood as the product of trans-generational cultural evolution. Cumulative cultural evolution, however, requires a particular type of social learning, called cultural learning in the literature. To make sense of this problematic notion, I propose the non-circular characterisation of cultural learning as learning that takes place through processes of passing information that are clearer, less ambiguous and more enduring than other forms of social learning. I also present an account of how innovation of new contents is possible in the framework of cultural learning and cumulative cultural evolution. Finally, I evaluate the five predictions made in Chapter 3 from the perspective of phylogeny and cultural history.

In Chapter 4, I move the focus from ontogeny (the level of the individual) to phylogeny and cultural history (the level of communities). Starting from the question of which came first, numerals or number concepts, I review literature (e.g., Overmann) applying the material engagement theory of Malafouris, according to which numeral systems developed as the result of interactions with our environment. Following the work of dos Santos and Wiese, I then demonstrate how the most plausible explanation of the development of number concepts is that they co-evolved alongside numeral word systems. Therefore, I show how number concepts can be explained as cultural developments, which goes against nativist accounts of numbers.

This chapter considers the impact of Greek on Latin Literature. Unlike the expectations of modern post-colonial theory, the imperial Romans were captured by Greek culture. Latin literature’s relation to Greek becomes a key moment in the cultural self-definition of Rome. This cultural history is explored first through Cato the Elder as a figure who publicly was scornful of the impact of Greek culture on Rome, and who became thus for later Romans an icon of conservative opposition to cultural change. The chapter then considers how much Latin Greek writers might be presumed to know and, conversely, how Romans explicitly paraded their adaption and adaption of Greek material and Greek language in their writings. Third, the chapter considers the politics of code-switching between Greek and Latin. Fourth, the chapter looks at how this cultural conflict becomes a matter of Christian ideology as part of a politics of translation between Hebrew, Greek and Latin: what changes when God’s word is transformed between languages? Finally, the chapter asks what is known by Latin literature that Greek does not know (and vice versa)? What boundaries should we place between Greek and Latin literature?