A plethora of archaeological evidence retrieved from regional and panhellenic sanctuaries in Greece suggests that from the eighth century BCE and throughout the Archaic period sanctuaries functioned as seminal nodes of cultural interaction between Etruria and Anatolia. This chapter discusses evidence from Greek sanctuaries that functioned as arenas of actual physical contact and tangible or intangible exchanges between visitors from the Italic peninsula and visitors from Anatolia and proposes a heuristic classification of two major categories of sanctuaries: transactional, in which exchanges of an economic nature would have taken place, and heterotopic, in which some transactional exchanges may have been arranged or taken place but which mainly configured themselves as wondrous places only for very few and exclusive visitors seeking to enhance their prestige by simply being there. Contacts between Italics and Anatolians would have taken place in both transactional and heterotopic sanctuaries, while only the high, exclusive elites would have frequented the heterotopic sanctuaries.

“Exaltation at Akragas: Herakles, the Dioskouroi, and Theron,” argues that in Olympian 3 Pindar’s theological modeling brings Herakles and the Dioskouroi together with the victor, Theron, tyrant of Akragas, ininto an intricate network of divine and mortal relationships. Theron’s place within this network, as established and celebrated by the ode, praises him for his exceptional privilege and his corresponding achievement in bathing his city in piety and exaltation. This is a differently flavored theology of mortality, cut to the needs of one of the most powerful men of the Greek world, but it ultimately articulates the same distinction between Theron’s mortality and the immortality of his patrons that is modeled elsewhere in the epinician corpus by demonstrating that his privileged closeness to Herakles and the Dioskouroi is only exceptional, and thus meaningful, in light of his mortality.

This chapter deals with local narrative traditions and the ritual acts associated with local sanctuaries (to the extent to which these can be fruitfully investigated) of Hera, whose cult titles Teleia and Basileia echo how she is portrayed in the archaic epic poetry. This is notably the case at Argos, Samos, and Perachora, where important sanctuaries of the goddess are located outside the city centre, but also in Olympia, ‘the Olympus on earth’, where the first monumental temple of the Panhellenic sanctuary of Zeus is associated with her. Her cults in Plataia, Delos, Lesbos, Corinth, Athens, and western Greece shows how her roles of spouse and sovereign overlap and to some extent come to be confused because of her complex relation to Zeus. This relation is crucial to understanding the expectations of Hera’s worshippers, although in a certain number of places the connection with Zeus is not made fully explicit.