Herodotus adapts Homeric techniques for manipulating time as a means of structuring an extensive narrative. Like the poet, he uses anachronies (analepses and prolepses) to expand a chronologically focused main story – especially narratorial anachronies that address issues of geographical, ethnographical, and historical significance. The importance of epic precedent is especially visible in the open-ended closure of Herodotus’ narrative, and the sense that it creates of the Histories as being, like an epic poem, both a self-contained whole and part of a larger story to be continued. Herodotus also follows Homer’s lead with regard to narrative rhythm and narrative frequency. Like the epics, the Histories slow down markedly in the climactic stage of the story, and in both authors large-scale repeating narratives serve to juxtapose a character’s version of events with the primary narrator’s, or with another character’s, as a means of highlighting personality traits or thematic issues.

Varying degrees of tragic stylization are also visible in other stories of Persian and Hellenic monarchs. Tragic effects cluster at the beginning and end of Herodotus’ “biography” of Cyrus. The story of his birth has folktale roots enhanced by various tragic features (intra-familial violence, fated doom precipitated by preventive measures, a variation on the Atreusmahl myth); the story of his last campaign includes tragic vocabulary and a corrective reference to the Aeschylean law of “learning through suffering.” His successor Cambyses is portrayed as a tragic protagonist on his deathbed, when he learns “too late” the true meaning of divine communications he had previously misinterpreted, with disastrous personal and political consequences. Among Greek tyrants, Herodotus portrays the Samian Polycrates and the Corinthian Periander in tragic fashion, the latter in a narrative that bears several hallmarks of Sophoclean tragedy, including sibling conflict over devotion to a dead parent (cf. the playwright’s Electra).

Chapter 1 (the Introduction) provides the outline of the Secret Book of John, introduces its cast of characters, proposes a theory of its date and provenance, and discusses whether it was written by an individual in a communal setting. Some sort of communal background seems presupposed given the emphasis on ritual elements (e.g., baptism, hymn singing), and the Book’s ascetic rejection of sex.

This chapter examines secondary or subsidiary choruses in Greek tragedy, illustrating the manner in which ancient playwrights staged multiple choruses in conflict. I argue that secondary choruses complicate the standard model of the tragic chorus as a single and static entity by forcing spectators to confront various choral groups. My discussion focuses on the two modes enabled by these supplementary choruses across tragedy, comedy and satyr play: how these secondary collectives, when in the presence of the main chorus, create a ‘swarm’, and when they are not, act as ‘spectres’ that ‘haunt’ and inform audience perceptions of the main chorus. It offers extended readings of two plays which employ secondary choruses to achieve maximum dramatic effect: Aeschylus’ Suppliants, where the playwright uses the Danaids’ respective meetings with the secondary choruses of Egyptians and Argive soldiers to chart the women’s path to Greekness, and Euripides’ Phaethon, which uniquely brings together choral spectre and swarm in a remarkable scene in which the main chorus is forced to witness, silently, an alternative version of itself, as another chorus sings the song that they themselves had longed to sing.

Herodotus and the epinician poets alike commemorate extraordinary deeds, with an essential interest in the relationship between past and present events. Their divergent perspectives on the past are revealed by comparison of their accounts of the fall of Sardis and the colonization of Libyan Cyrene. Herodotus modifies Bacchylides’ version of the former (Ode 3) in characteristic ways, rationalizing Apollo’s rescue of Croesus, citing a Lydian source for the marvel, and focusing on the transience of human prosperity, the key to Herodotus’ view of history. This principle challenges the transgenerational stability of aristocratic excellence that informs the epinician perspective, demonstrated by Pindar’s presentation of Cyrene’s settlement (Pythians 4, 5, 9). Drawing upon family traditions, Pindar highlights the sacred origins and continuity of the Battiad dynasty. By contrast, Herodotus cites several communal sources in a less idealized narrative that downplays heroic antecedents and acknowledges the difficulties involved in such a colonial expedition.

This coda concludes with a reflection on some of the wider political implications and affordances of the choreographies that were presented in this book. It discusses how choral fragmentations and augmentations might model the politics of group formation in and against the city. It also suggests that the chorus’ spoken and sung contributions explored in the accounts of interruption and interaction likewise reflect the chorus’ capacity to embody political concerns.

This chapter seeks to demonstrate that the Nag Hammadi text is indeed the text referred to by Irenaeus, thus establishing its relatively early date. While confirming Irenaeus’s claim that this work was popular within the Valentinian tradition he regards as heretical, it is argued that Valentinian usage of this text does not imply a Valentinian origin.

This chapter presents the chorus’ ability to interact and participate directly in dramatic action and dialogue as an overlooked aspect of the chorus’ polyphony. The chapter begins by tackling modern assumptions about ancient tragic performance, including the myth of the tragic coryphaeus, the chorus leader figure who allegedly spoke on behalf of the collective, to whom modern editors assign all choral speech. It then analyses the various lyric dialogues that are found in the surviving corpus of each of the three major tragedians, illustrating how the chorus’ extensive range across the various modes of delivery (sung, recitative and spoken) maps onto tensions of exchange and violence that are typical of Greek drama. The chapter ends with an extended examination of the dynamic interplay between actors and chorus that Sophocles stages in Electra, Philoctetes and Antigone. In the case of Antigone, Sophocles features a silent chorus who refuse to engage with Antigone’s and Creon’s mourning, a silence which reflects the creative ways in which tragedians can direct the chorus’ lyric interactions with actors.

First made available to scholars in the late 1950s, early interest in the Gospel of Truth has not been sustained. The purpose of this chapter is to identify methodological errors in the early scholarly reception of GTruth that may have contributed to its unjustified recent neglect, and to indicate ways in which those errors may be rectified.

Chapter 5 shows how the Secret Book of John employs and adapts Greek philosophical ideas from (Middle) Platonism, Stoicism, and Aristotelian thought. It discusses, among other things, the concepts of the One (or Monad), Plato’s Timaeus as philosophical background, Stoic notions of fate, and how evil is involuntary.

In addition to Homeric phrasing, Herodotus also adapts Homeric episodes and narrative themes in ways that invite the reader to ponder the relationship between the heroic past, the recent past of Greco-Persian conflict, and the postwar experiences of Herodotus’ contemporary audience. Episodes manifesting such intertextuality include the fall of Sardis, where the rapprochement between Cyrus and Croesus recalls that between Achilles and Priam in Iliad 24; the speech delivered by the Corinthian Soclees before Spartan allies, which prevents the re-institution of tyranny in Athens; and above all the narrative of Xerxes’ Greek expedition, which includes his propagandistic visit to Troy and battles with varying degrees of Homeric stylization. Most conspicuous among these is Herodotus’ staging of the fighting at Thermopylae, where Leonidas sacrifices his life to secure kleos for Sparta alone – a goal that evokes both the world of Homeric heroism and a post-Homeric world characterized by fierce inter-polis competition.

Although he criticizes poetic fictions as antithetical to the nature of his own inquiry, Herodotus often qualifies the truth claims of traditions he transmits by means of distancing devices (e.g., indirect discourse). Like Odysseus and the Hesiodic Muses, Herodotus often narrates “falsehoods that resemble true things,” while using rhetorical markers that alert his audience to implausibilities in stories attributed to others. Moreover, analysis of the Helen logos and the story of Cyrus’ upbringing demonstrates that accounts advertised as true may yet include material that is either of Herodotus’ own invention or indebted to traditional (mythical or folkloric) narrative tropes. Finally, the tension between truth and falsehood that Herodotus recognizes as primary narrator is also manifested in such Odyssean characters as Darius (whose lying enables him to overthrow the false Smerdis and seize the throne for himself) and Themistocles (a master of verbal deception and self-aggrandizing cupidity).

The author’s exposition of the gospel message takes the form of a homily addressed in part to an audience located elsewhere, suggesting a comparison with early Christian letters. The author is clearly influenced by the letters of Paul, while comparison with the letters of Ignatius and the fragments of Valentinus’s letters bring to light significant contrasts that help to locate the Gospel of Truth more accurately within the early Christian literary landscape.