Using the example of the Corinthian bronzes, this chapter aims to investigate how the encyclopaedist and the epistolographer dealt with luxury items. It analyses two famous passages from the Naturalis Historia on the Corinthian bronzes (34.6-7 and 48), two references to the same material in Pliny the Younger’s third book (3.1 and 3.6) and discusses the treatment of the topic within the frame of the Roman debate on private and public luxury. Rocchi discusses possible intertextual references made by both authors to Cicero’s speech De Signis against Verres in order to show how Cicero’s moralistic remarks on dealing with luxury items such as bronze statues and vessels propound a model of behaviour to Pliny the Younger as a donor of a bronze figurine to his home town of Comum. Finally, Rocchi addresses Pliny’s knowledge and use of the Verrine Orations more generally. In an appendix, he adds some remarks on the Corinthium signum described in Ep. 3.6 and on its lost plinth, as well as on further Corinthian bronzes mentioned in Latin inscriptions.

The second chapter, closely aligned with the first chapter, continues the earlier discussion of cult and divine movement to further reflect on the visual depiction of divine arrival and absence in different media. A first section reviews key texts for reflecting on the visuality of Apollo's arrival from Hyperborea. The second section turns to relevant physical images of Apollo as the travelling god. The third section expands the discussion to assess what has often been read as stone epiphanies of Apollo's return on the metopes of late Archaic and Classical temples. The fourth section continues the reflection on stone epiphanies through focus on the single most prominent visual depiction of Apollo's return, and one of the most significant divine representations of the Greek world: the late-sixth century BCE East pediment of the Alcmaeonid temple at Delphi. The fifth section looks at Plutarch's reading of the pediments of the fourth-century BCE temple in De E apud Delphos (387f–389c), and his cosmographical reconfiguration of the theology of Delphic divine alternance between Apollo and Dionysus. The sixth section focuses on Pausanias' reading of the Galatian shields set up on the north and west metopes of the same fourth-century temple.