The messianic religions of late antiquity are obsessed with getting the time right, to know the right time – both at the level of daily, weekly, monthly or annual rituals, and at the level of world history. Where the prophet Cassandra can say for herself, ‘the day has come’, the Gospels will insist that everyone must be anxiously aware that ‘the hour is coming and is now here’. The desire to be certain about one’s place in time produces an extended, competitive and argumentative scholarly literature, which is never simply about the correct calibration of time. Rabbinical writing, first of all, is exemplary of these temporal obsessions.

“I am distressed and indignant,” declared T. S. Eliot (1888–1965).1 “[D]iscreet investigations” were warranted, he told Sylvia Beach (1887–1962), for a “conspiracy” against James Joyce’s newly published novel, Ulysses, seemed to be afoot in England.2 In the months since the book’s 1922 printing in Paris, a number of English literary critics had come forward seeking press copies, but few actual reviews of the novel had appeared in British magazines and journals. Disheartened, Joyce himself explained to Harriet Shaw Weaver (1876–1961) that “certain critics” seemed keen to obtain the novel if only to then “boycott the book.”

This is the first question that Augustine asks about himself in the Confessions, and it begins with a stumbling into speech. He does not know where he comes from. This is the question which stalls Sophocles’ Oedipus in his domineering argument with Teiresias, starts his search for his parentage, and thus begins his downfall into knowledge and self-destruction. Oedipus does not know where he comes from, an ignorance displayed even and especially when, with multiply-layered ironies, he calls himself ‘the know-nothing Oedipus’. It is also the foundational question for Freud, reader of Oedipus, who insists that for all the productive work of analysis of the self we can never fully and properly know our own self, and certainly not the answer to where the self comes from. Augustine specifies huc ‘to here’, which he immediately glosses as ‘this life that dies or death that lives’. The horizon of expectation is defined – in a way that is alien to Sophocles or Freud – by this definition of a life-time as a hesitation between a journey towards death, or an already living death: a theologically defined time shaped between the already and the not yet.

The messianic religions that came to dominate this lived life of late antiquity made waiting central to their sense of temporality, as we have seen. As the poets of erotics have always known, there is certain headiness in the combination of fervour and deferral. Waiting, however, structures the sense of the present – the now – with a question of its value, its temporariness. ‘Who would deny that the present has no duration?’, asked Augustine. In the nineteenth century, William James tried to answer this anxiety about the duration and thus evaluation of the ‘nowness’ of the now with an empirical, experimentally tested answer: ‘the practically cognized present is no knife-edge’, he concluded, ‘but a saddle-back, with a certain breadth of its own on which we sit perched and from which we look in two directions into time’. It was possible to count in seconds, and then in fractions of seconds, a human experience of now, a breadth measured ‘from one five-hundreth of a second to twelve seconds’.

Gregory of Nazianzus also had stars in his eyes. Some seventy years before Nonnus depicted Demeter having a horoscope cast for Persephone, in both sermons and theological poetry Gregory was setting the agenda for a Christian understanding of astrology. It was a project that deeply influenced the discourse of Nonnus’ epics, not just on the stars but also on temporality. For, in Gregory’s hands, astrology opened a broad vista onto the theological conflicts of the post-Nicaean era, and the active heritage of Greek learning in Christian culture. The collection of hexameter poems known as the Aporrhēta in Greek (and Poemeta Arcana in Latin) – the ‘ineffable’, or ‘secret’ matters – takes on astrology as a subject for debate along with such weighty topics as the Cosmos or the Soul, which gives an immediate indication of astrology’s importance in Gregory’s thinking; but it is first in one of his Theological Orations, the sermons which were one primary cause of Gregory being known in Byzantium simply as ‘The Theologian’, that we will trace the significance of looking at the heavens for Gregory’s understanding of how a Christian inhabits time.

How eternity grounds early Greek thinking about death and human achievement is articulated vividly by Plato, especially in his response to Homer’s paradigms.

There is an extraordinary moment in the history of the translation of the Bible, that opens a vista not just on to the cultural politics of translation but also on to the way that theories of time-frame scripture’s narratives of God.

For any discussion of the politics of history evoked thus by typology it is basic to ask how a community – a city, a nation, a sect – curates its memory.

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.

This chapter analyses the narrative traditions of the archaic period and assesses some of the later echoes and survivals of these traditions. In this material Hera appears in her complex role as wife, queen, and angry goddess against the backdrop of her constitutive relation to Zeus, the divine sovereign. By analysing the connections between these three elements, it attempts to gain an inside understanding of the goddess’s wrath and its implications. Questions of rank and legitimacy, the theme of childbirth, and that of filiation are also an integral part of her prerogatives as Olympian queen. Hera is the ultimate spouse but also the intimate enemy of the king of the gods. These aspects are indissociable, and it is significant that the Greeks chose for Zeus not a submissive spouse but a genuine partner endowed with a strong sense of competitiveness and a rank comparable to his. Their preferred image is of a sovereign couple bound together in a dynamic of conflict in which disagreements and reconciliations, separations and reunions alternate. That Hera defies Zeus and sets traps for him shows how close she is to her royal husband and that she knows him better than anyone else.

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.