Discussion of the transfer of cult knowledge from Anatolia to European Hellas in both the Bronze Age and Iron Age, with a close examination of Ephesian Artemis and other Asian Mother-goddess figures with consideration of Ur-Aeolian (= Ahhiyawan) and Aeolian involvement in the process.

The investigation of Aeolian foundation myths continues in this chapter, with examination of traditions of the founding of Boeotian Thebes. Ancestral Indo-European tradition is again evident, as is an Anatolian stratum, one which foregrounds technological expertise of Asian origin.

Further investigation of the foundation traditions of Metapontium, focusing on the persistence of much more ancient Indo-European mythic traditions and time-reckoning traditions and the presence of those elements in the bricolage that constitutes the Aeolian mythic system of Metapontium foundation narratives and their relationship to Anatolian Aeolian tradition.

An examination of the Anatolian sources of Greek theogonic traditions, syncretistic myths that took shape in admixed Ur-Aeolian–Luvian communities in the Late Bronze Age, and descendent Aeolian assemblages of mythic and cult elements that persist into the Iron Age. Essential to many of these traditions is the presence of honey, especially honey having psychotropic properties of a sort that occurs naturally along the southern and eastern shores of the Black Sea.

Moving from the Camp Grant massacre, this chapter addresses the question of narratives on violent events such as wars, more specifically the Trojan War in the Homeric epic. Human and Divine names are part of a complex system of signs which guide the audience. The case study of Euryopa Zeus – that is, a god who has a ‘Vast Voice’ and an ‘Ample Sight’ – provide a divine portrait of the overarching authority in matters of war and destiny. The chapter also suggests a network of divine powers who share specific aptitudes, such as Athena, Hera and Hermes, between distance and proximity, control and empathy.

The first occurrences of the onomastic formula ‘Zeus Helios great Sarapis’ belongs to the reign of Trajan. Appearing in the military and economic context of the quarries of the Egyptian eastern desert, this divine name associates, in a single henotheistic entity, the great gods of Egypt (Amon-Ra-Helios), the Greco-Roman world (Zeus-Iuppiter) and Alexandria (Sarapis), giving pre-eminence to the latter. The iconographic translation of this theological evolution can be found in the provincial coinage of Alexandria during the Antonine period.

The epilogue charts a return to the earliest Greek poets on record, Homer and Hesiod, and a discussion of how these poets used monumentality to depict matter shaping time.

This chapter examines the Derveni papyrus and compares its hermeneutics to exegetic techniques found in cuneiform texts. The analysis shows that the anonymous author of the papyrus operates with semantic and theological models that align with ideas expressed in Akkadian texts, particularly those ideas relating to theonyms and the evolution of the cosmos. As in some Assyrian and Babylonian texts, the author makes use of hermeneutic techniques that heavily rely on morphological analysis aiming to prove that divine names have a unified referent. This referent is a polyonymous cosmic god, Nous (Mind), which has the same characteristics of the Babylonian gods Ninurta and Marduk when represented as universalizing divinities of multiple names.

“The Dioskouroi in Existential Crisis,” deals with Nemean 10 and its extended mythical narrative. That myth is an aitiology of the entry of Kastor and Polydeukes into immortality, framed as a choice made by Polydeukes between claiming immortality for himself or sharing both mortality and immortality with his brother. I argue that Pindar’s epinician aitiology intervenes in and revalues enduring ambiguities surrounding the relationship of the Dioskouroi to mortality and immortality by valorizing Polyedeukes’ perspective, which privileges the parameters of mortal experience. This case study emphasizes the resonances evoked by the structure of the ode itself between the disorientation of the Dioskouroi from mortal experience and from the surrounding contexts of the ode.

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.

Chapter Three: Imperial Transitions (129 BCE–31 BCE) clarifies that it was the civic body that outlasted the fall of the Seleucid Empire and weathered Roman annexation. For much of this transitional period, the dysfunction of the final Seleucid kings and the subsequent hands-off attitude of the Roman generals and governors present within the city and Levant allowed or forced the Antiochians into managing their own internal affairs. In the early years of Roman rule in particular, it is difficult to claim that Antioch served as a provincial capital, because so much of the city was defined by the far more restricted authority of the citizens themselves.

This chapter traces a path across the Mediterranean in locating the sites where Greek, Semitic (in particular Phoenician) and native populations interacted, the author’s premise being that ‘the literary and mythological entanglements, for the most part, followed the human entanglements’. Starting from the same Mount Hazzi or Jebel al-Aqra (here called Mount Saphon, by its Semitic name) and crossing first to Crete and from there to Iberia, López-Ruiz draws attention to Near Eastern Storm God narratives that are less well-known than the Song of Emergence but that similarly shaped Greek mythological and cultic conceptions of Zeus: these historically less successful narratives tend to furnish the Storm God with a fuller life cycle, including birth, journeys in maturity, and even death.

In the seventh and last chapter of De mundo, the author discusses the many names of God, which reflect the various effects God produces in the world (401a12–27). In line with the predominantly Aristotelian background of the author, it is claimed that these effects are not caused by God directly, but by his power (dunamis). This approach helps explain various traditional names, epithets and functions assigned to Zeus in Greek religion and mythology, including names which refer to meteorological phenomena and epithets related to cosmology, but also, perhaps more surprisingly, to human affairs. In this respect, as a detailed comparison shows, the chapter is clearly inspired by various Stoic authors. The central place of the chapter is occupied by the famous Orphic hymn to Zeus. A detailed interpretation of the hymn shows that it is in many ways compatible with the philosophical outlook of De mundo. However, the hymn also features parallels with the Orphic theogony commented upon in the Derveni Papyrus and its later version, which was quoted by late Neoplatonists. The comparison reveals various similarities and differences between these three texts and supports a hypothesis according to which the author of De mundo omitted some parts of the original Orphic theogony. Traces of the missing verses, however, can be seen in the subsequent section (401b8–29), where Fate is discussed. This interconnection helps us to better understand both De mundo and the Derveni Papyrus.

Chapter Two is the first of four chapters on Athenian drama, and it takes as its focal point Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound. In this chapter, I observe that the representation of the maiden Io as a wild and erratic dancer engages with images of female choreia and the precarious position of the outstanding maiden soloist that originate in Archaic poetry but develop a special force within Athenian tragedy. Building on arguments developed in Chapter One, I explore how the image of the maiden chorus creates space for the female soloist to relate positively to her choral group, and then demonstrate that Io disrupts that paradigm by appearing utterly unmoored from any sense of chorality. I argue that Io embodies the play’s vision of mortal life and offers an image of resistance to the authority of Zeus distinct from the static suffering of Prometheus himself – a resistance that is grounded in the twin forces of mobility and maternity.

Homeric supplication is a customary type of earnest entreaty associated with Zeus, Hikesios, and other gods and occurring either between individuals or at altars that give the suppliant access to a household or community.

Chapter 3 describes how there is in the earliest texts of both cultures (Rigveda, Homer, Hesiod) a variety of anthropomorphic deities whose good will is to be elicited by offerings and praise, against a background combination of pastoralism and agriculture, with no money and very little commerce.