This chapter examines the religious role of Alexander as king and military commander in the Greek world and the territory of the Achaemenid empire. It explores how he used sanctuaries of the gods to develop his relationship with the Greek cities, as locations for the meetings of associations of Greek cities, and as sites for making dedications. It considers the honours offered to Alexander by the Greek cities, arguing that these were offered spontaneously, and were not a response to any request from Alexander. It discusses his use of diviners and other religious experts while on campaign. It considers the extent to which Alexander engaged with the religious practices and expectations of the territories he conquered, including in particular Egypt and Babylon. It discusses the evidence that Alexander consciously attempted to emulate Heracles and Dionysus, and suggests that this is unlikely to reflect any historical reality. It then explores the story of Alexander’s visit to the oracle of Ammon/Amun at the Siwah oasis, suggesting that while Alexander was aware of the significance of his pharaonic titulary, including the phrase ‘son of Amun’, this did not lead to claims of divine filiation beyond Egypt.

The Introduction first sets the stage by inviting the reader to consider a few Roman sarcophagi in depth. Serving as an introduction to these compelling objects, this also reveals just how odd it was that deities and mythic heroes came to be expelled from their surface decoration in the third century. It then contextualizes that oddity through an overview of main developments within Roman sarcophagus production from the second through the fourth centuries. The book’s scope and terms are then addressed, and its structure laid out.

This chapter focuses on the relationship between Augustus/Octavian and Apollo’s incarnation as citharoedus (lyre-player). The main contention of the chapter is that the Augustan period fostered a revival of music which resonated with, and to some degree embodied, a restorative political message. Not only did Augustus integrate images of Apollo Citharoedus into his own imagery (both in Rome and in the commemorative monuments around the gulf of Actium), but he also exploited harmonia as a metaphor for his newly established regime, imbuing musical rituals like the Ludi Saeculares of 17 BCE with powerful symbolic resonances. The chapter also makes a case for seeing Mark Antony’s use of music as a key part of a project to present himself through the symbolic language of Hellenistic kingship, against which Octavian in turn defined his own musical ‘programme’.

Tantalizing similarities between Euripides’ Bacchae and the historical ritual of the oreibasia— – a mountainside dance performed for Dionysus – have fascinated and polarized scholars for over a century. The wild women of myth are depicted as ecstatic devotees of the Dionysian cult, or as raging, murderous avatars of the god’s vengeance. But in the tightly regulated civic cult, ritual practitioners were respectable women who honoured Dionysus by imitating his mythological entourage.<break/>The question of whether ritual participants could have experienced ecstasy and epiphanic visions has stimulated a long-running debate encompassing hysteria, belief, and the interplay between cult and myth. Lacking first-hand accounts, historians have struggled with reconciling the ecstatic ‘madwomen’ of myth with the prestige of the civic cult performance, but the apparent gap between ritual performers and mythical exemplars may not be so wide. Inspired by Jan Bremmer’s 1984 paper on the physiological effects of the oreibasia, I revisit the ancient evidence with a cognitive interpretative framework, looking at ritual experience in the embodied mind. Incorporating theories of agency detection and predictive processing, I explore how an interdisciplinary approach can integrate artistic and historical narratives, and better understand the lived experience and religious identity of historical maenads.

The cholos which is one of the constitutive features of Hera is at the heart of this chapter, which treats the narratives and traditions which recount conflicts involving the Hera of Zeus and certain of Zeus’s sons (e.g. Herakles, Dionysos, Hephaistos), and where her wrath is decisive for the definition of their divine prerogatives and their full integration into the Olympian order. By challenging some of Zeus’s illegitimate children, Hera works as a power of legitimation, redefining the divine family. In the world of heroes, the angry Hera is an agent of legitimation as well, but also of delegitimation, especially in cases of human sovereignty: her intervention contributes to identifying rulers whose sovereignty is rotten, as is the case with the royal family of Thebes under Oedipus, and that of Iolkos, in the epic of the Argonauts. Her interventions are nothing but actions that take charge of and realise the boulai of all the gods collectively and of her husband in particular. She does this, to be sure, in her own way, as a goddess whose characteristic is constructive opposition, but her anger remains, in the final analysis, at the service of an order guaranteed by Zeus.

Chapter Five brings tragedy and comedy together to explore the links between female solo dance and madness in Euripides and Aristophanes. I begin by considering two instances of female dance that are described – but not performed – on the Athenian stage: Agave’s movement surrounding the murder of Pentheus in Euripides’ Bacchae and the dance of Demostratus’ wife in Aristophanes’ Lysistrata. I argue that the projection of these dances outside the theatrical space itself exposes anxieties about the unruliness of female bodies engaged in ritual performance – especially the singular dancer separated from the chorus. I conclude with a contrasting example, exploring how Cassandra’s performance in Euripides’ Trojan Women brings mad female dancing onstage, and, like Io’s dance in Prometheus Bound (Ch. 2), tests the bounds of tragic theatricality.

The introduction explores the genesis of Dionysus and the Greeks in Nietzsche’s thought, from their initial appearance at the publication of The Birth of Tragedy in 1872 until his breakdown in Turin at the dawn of 1889. It argues that one of the central elements of their appeal to later authors is that Nietzsche used the Greeks to develop an innovative way of speaking about modernity. It was this explosive mixture of the archaic and the present that encouraged authors to consider the way that the example of classical antiquity could help them think through the rapidly changing conditions of their contemporary era. By examining different approaches to the temporality of antiquity and to ancient works of art, the chapter argues that Kracauer and Bloch’s idea of the ‘contemporaneity of the uncontemporaneous’ captures the way that classical antiquity exists in the present, as one obtrusion among many within a confusing fabric of competing times and experiences. This is also linked to the aesthetic and literary movement of modernism and to the vogue for tragedy that sprang up in the twentieth century.

This chapter explores the postcolonial resonances of Nietzsche’s Greeks by focusing on their appearance in the writings of the Nigerian political activist and Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka. Soyinka encountered Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy as a student of G. Wilson Knight at Leeds in the 1950s; this experience was part of the syncretic vision of dramatic traditions that he developed and which he later theorised in his essay ‘The Fourth Stage’ (1969). In this essay Soyinka argues for a globalised understanding of tragedy that does not rely solely on an exclusivist narrative of its ancient Greek origins, such as can be found in Nietzsche’s invocations of Aryanism in The Birth of Tragedy, and which can incorporate his own Yoruba identity. Soyinka draws links between Dionysus and the Yoruba god Ogun, and he later weaves these into his adaptation of ancient Greek tragedy, The Bacchae of Euripides: A Communion Rite (1973). The postcolonial ambivalence that Soyinka writes into this adaptation is the subject of the final section of this chapter, as is his amalgamation of contemporary discourses of heroic black nationalism such as négritude in the character of the Slave Leader.

The ‘transnational turn’ has cycled from its establishment within the social sciences in the 1990s, its dissemination across the humanities in the 2000s, to its reassessment in our present decade. It is the contention of this chapter that to reread Ezra Pound’s comparatist aesthetic and political labours within this presently contested framework demonstrates anew the significance of Pound’s methods of literary and cultural appraisal – and that this exercise can illuminate, too, the critical affordances and limitations of the transnational turn itself.

Nietzsche presents a number of different conceptions of philosophy in his oeuvre. Thus, we cannot simply speak of Nietzsche’s metaphilosophy. Instead, we must speak of his metaphilosophies. This paper canvases the different conceptions of philosophy that appear in Nietzsche’s works and tries to make sense of the shifts that take place therein. Specifically, it tries to explain why Nietzsche rejects a traditional conception of philosophy as truth-seeking in both his earlier and later works and yet adopts this very conception of philosophy in Human, All Too Human, a work typically placed in his so-called middle period. To answer this question, it is argued that Nietzsche consciously adopts a traditional conception of philosophy in Human in order to show, in subsequent works of the free spirit, how that conception of philosophy undergoes a Selbstaufhebung or self-overcoming that makes possible a new conception of philosophy, one which is a form of Dionysian art, in his post-Zarathustra writings. In this way, we can speak of the dialectics of Nietzsche’s metaphilosophies.