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This chapter gives a radically new account of the history of this festival. It is usually represented as a traditional ritual with origins in celebrations of new wine and an ancient All Souls’ Day. Here it is suggested that rites symbolizing renewal and new beginnings were constantly reinterpreted and modified as Athenian culture became more urban, attitudes to drunkenness changed, and Dionysus became more closely associated with the theatre. Because Athenians themselves saw the Anthesteria as ‘traditional’, the festival attracted learned speculation about culture history, the origins of drama, and the Flood as the beginning of human history. Some elements taken by modern scholars as part of age-old tradition may be late (return and expulsion of souls of the dead) or purely textual (the Aiora as a rite of swinging). The aim of this narrative is to startle readers into re-examining unquestioned assumptions.

In 6th century BC, the advanced Greek city-states were rapidly and pervasively monetized, largely through the introduction of coinage. It has been suggested that this monetization was a crucial factor in the genesis and in the preoccupations both of Presocratic philosophy and of Athenian tragedy. This chapter relates the monetization of Athens first to the development of polis festivals under the tyrants and then to the form and content of tragedy, which came into being in a polis festival of Dionysos.

An introduction and translation of Third Maccabees. It was not canonized as part of the Hebrew Bible or the Catholic Old Testament Apocrypha, but was contained in the Eastern Orthodox Old Testament. This satire of the Dionysos cult recounts an incidence of persecution of the Jews in Egypt, but pushes the limits of history; their escape comes through a series of miracles. It includes the motifs of prayer and the competition of ethnic groups.

This chapter develops the study of comic self-reference by looking at direct and indirect address and manipulation of the audience. Arguing that the audience's role is a construct of the fiction, audience address and related, but less explicit, devices consolidate the audience as the male citizen body of Athens and construct a coherent audience position with which audience members can identify. Such explicit and implicit intervention extends the social and inclusive dimension of laughter. Identification of individuals and groups within the audience is limited and further consolidates group identity, while Dionysiac and festive dimensions of the impossible worlds of comedy, such as Akharnians, Frogs, and Eupolis' Poleis also serve to intensify the political atmosphere of the plays.

This chapter argues that there was no traditional gentilicial connection between the genos Bakchiadai and the City Dionysia, and more generally the cult of Dionysos Eleuthereus. We cannot hope to know, without new evidence, whether the Bakchiadai were an old genos or, more likely, a new one, created in the context of the genē revival in the 2nd century bc. But there is a very strong case against the hypothesis that this genos had an ancestral association with the cult of Dionysos Eleuthereus and the City Dionysia comparable to the relationship between other genē and other cults. Nor did the genos of the Euneidai have a significant association with the City Dionysia; if the Euneidai always performed certain ritual duties such as kithara playing or providing a herald for the processions they would also have performed those at the City Dionysia, but this would not constitute a specific gentilicial connection with this particular festival and cult. There are also good reasons for thinking that no genos had a special connection with the City Dionysia and that the priesthood of Dionysos Eleuthereus was non-gentilicial and may have been the first major priesthood to have been open to all Athenians.

The richest body of evidence for perceptions of the gods in Apulia consists of local figure decorated pottery made between about 430 and 300 BC. Though Greek in style, the vast majority of the pots on which the images appear have been found in Italic (non-Greek) tombs rather than in the tomb of Taranto, the one Greek city in Apulia. Most of the gods in these vase-paintings appear as peripheral figures, almost like spectators in a gallery. The one exception is Dionysos who is central to the scenes in which he appears. He is always shown as a beardless youth, often naked, a form that replaces the traditional bearded Dionysos on Athenian vases at about the same time it appears in Apulia. In this new form he is not the theatre god nor is he the god of wine; rather, he is a champion of the dead and a guarantor of personal afterlife.

If we look, in the ‘ideal novel’, at the frequency of mention of significant named divinities (such as Aphrodite, Dionysos, Artemis, Zeus, Isis), as well as of theos and theoi in general, we find that novels are characteristically interested in only one or two of them – and for specific reasons. At an extreme, Heliodorus is not really interested in any god specifically. Yet there is a real sense of piety supported by the novel, even in the unlikely hands of Achilles Tatius, and the reader is, in some novels at least, meant to raise questions about the ‘hand of god’ in the action. The acid test is the efficacy of prayer in the text, where the divinity can sometimes respond in delayed and mysterious ways. The novel is a useful document for getting inside ancient piety.

The Greeks were polytheists who believed in a multitude of gods. In the modern discussion of Greek religion the gods take second place to ritual, and the study of individual gods is privileged over attempts to define their general characteristics qua gods. While studies of the functions and personalities of gods like Apollo, Demeter, Dionysos or Herakles abound, no comprehensive treatment of the generic properties of the Greek gods exists. The question “What is Greek god?” is considered too ‘theological’ and therefore shunned. This chapter examines four divine qualities that are shared by all the Greek gods—their immortality, anthropomorphism, foreknowledge, and finally their power.

Richard Buxton discuss five examples of narratives which relate in some way to divine metamorphosis, whether as animals or humans, for the purpose of presenting themselves to mortals. The narratives studied are the following: Athena’s encounter with Telemachos in the Odyssey, Apollo in the Hymn to Apollo, Thetis’ relationship with Achilles, Dionysos in the Bacchae and Zeus’ serial metamorphoses in pursuit of his erotic ambitions. After drawing conclusions about each of these metamorphoses and epiphanies, Buxton concludes by considering what light this material might shed on the old problem of how far Greek religion was essentially anthropomorphic.

When Caesar reached Alexandria on 2 October 48 bc, he certainly did not expect to be greeted by the embalmed head of Pompey, but even less did he expect to be bogged down for all of nine months in a local conflict that almost cost him his life, until 28 June 47 bc, when he finally sailed from Alexandria for Syria. Suetonius writes that in that lengthy period Caesar found himself fighting a war in truth of great difficulty, convenient neither in time or place, but carried on during the winter season, within the walls of a well-provisioned and crafty foeman, while Caesar himself was without supplies of any kind and ill-prepared. The background to the Egyptian dynastic crisis in which Caesar became entangled in the middle of the civil war was the operation managed by Pompey, but also supported by Caesar, which, thanks to the ‘protection’ of Aulus Gabinius, had restored Ptolemy XII Neos Dionysos, popularly known as Auletes, on the throne in 55 bc.

The anthropologist Mary Helms has argued that in traditional societies access to exotic items is often a source of prestige (1988: chs. 3 and 4). So is knowledge of the appropriate ways in which to use them. This idea plays a central role in a new study of the European Bronze Age which postulates long-distance links between Scandinavia and the East Mediterranean and suggests that they were a source of political power (Kristiansen and Larsson 2005: ch. 5). Similar attitudes can also be found in studies of the Iron Age. In the graves and hillforts of Hallstatt C and D there are Mediterranean amphorae, Greek and Etruscan bronze vessels and Attic (Athenian) pottery, some of which were most probably acquired through the port of Massalia. Their distribution extends over a large area north of the Alps and has been discussed by Barry Cunliffe on several occasions. As he says ‘It is difficult to resist the conclusion that the presence of the Greek trading port created a demand for commodities from the north and that this led to the emergence of powerful chiefdoms in the core of the barbarian area, able to command the flow of luxury objects from the south’ (1988: 24–5). Such interpretations emphasize the significance for Iron Age people of access to imported goods. Individual artefacts travelled even greater distances, with a major concentration of Etruscan beaked flagons in the Middle Rhine (Kimmig 1982: Abb. 32), but much further to the north and west the distribution of imports virtually runs out. That raises a serious problem. What are archaeologists to make of the few examples which have been found beyond the areas that were in regular contact with the Mediterranean? Here it is important to consider questions of context. There have been a number of reviews of the evidence for Mediterranean imports in Iron Age Britain, but they have all had one feature in common. They have catalogued a series of artefacts which were made in the Mediterranean.

In late spring or early summer of 327, Alexander the Great once more crossed the Hindu Kush—his Caucasus—and passed into India. He was congratulated by a number of kinglets from the neighborhood as the third son of Zeus, after Dionysos and Herakles. Herakles freed Prometheus from his shackles somewhere on the Hindu Kush, but for Alexander that was a recent discovery. Dionysos had visited Baktria, as everyone knew from Euripides, but the playwright never suggested that the God had also visited India. Still in the northernmost parts of India, Alexander came to the rock Aornos. He also reached the land of the Siboi (or Sibai), at the confluence of the Hydaspes and the Akesines. Early in 325, two years after the invasion of India, Alexander celebrated the successful conclusion to the campaign against the Malloi and Oxydrakai. The “battle of the Gods” marks the last appearance of Herakles in the historical accounts of Alexander's campaign.

This chapter discusses the processes of identity formation and stereotyping on the sub-polis level in Athens. Recent research into the processes of identity formation in the ancient world has focused mainly upon how such processes functioned between and within very large ethnic or social groups, but the same practices were concurrently at work amongst much smaller groups. Through a close reading of the ancient literary sources, it becomes clear that the Acharnians were distinguished from inhabitants of other demes and stereotyped as possessing particular characteristics. Alongside Aristophanes’ Acharnians, other sources from the classical period, such as Thucydides and Pindar, support the picture presented in Old Comedy of the deme’s inhabitants. Moreover, an examination of the post-classical sources reveals a wholesale shift in later periods as to how the Acharnians were regarded, a response to the changing demographics of rural Attica and the different scope of geopolitics in the Hellenistic and early Roman periods.

Chapter 11 studies rituals of entry. The main question that is addressed, is how ritual was used to accommodate imperial monarchy within the values and practices of the city state. It is argued that Hellenistic rituals of entry were sometimes modelled on religious rites of divine epiphany, at least in Greek poleis. In all cities, independent of their ethno-cultural identity, Hellenistic kings performed a sacrifice, usually in the city’s principal sanctuary. By participating in local, civic cults upon entering cities, the king became a citizen. And because within that local cult almost the king personally performed the crucial act of offering the sacrificial animal on the altar, he became the most highly honoured citizen. So although especially in the Seleukid Empire rulers gave the impression to respect local ‘traditions’, the pattern of consistent patronage and manipulation of local religious cults probably could actually enhance the integration of cities and civic elites into the empire.

Chapter 12 takes a closer look at royal processions that took place at the imperial centre. The focus is on the symbolic communication of imperial ideology through ritual enactment and iconography. In capital cities, new monarchical-religious festivals were introduced to create extra opportunities to attract representatives of subject polities to the centre, and to create a unifying image of kingship. It will be argued that the pivotal messages conveyed by the ritual performances enacted during these festivals pertained to the king’s heroic, victorious charisma and the ideal of a peaceful and prosperous world empire, and that these two aspects were two sides of the same coin. Hence the central role of the image of Dionysos as victorious warrior and bringer of good fortune in especially Ptolemaic royal ritual. Attention will also be given to the function of ritual performance as a means to create social cohesion among the participants, viz., the philoi.

References to Nietzsche in Strauss’s work take two inter-connected forms. First, Strauss praises Nietzsche as a diagnostician. Nietzsche, he believes, has understood the crisis of our times, nihilism. Secondly, Strauss admires Nietzsche’s understanding of the origins of this crisis in the exclusive authority granted in modernity to the theoretical attitude in modern natural science and modern philosophy. These enterprises cultivate a value neutral, objective perspective. This prevents them from understanding “life,” which is unintelligible (as lived) without “commitment.” If life is to be possible, Nietzsche is thus left with the options of esotericism about theoretical results (Plato’s option), or the denial of the possibility of theory, understanding it as a product of life, or fate. The task of this chapter is to explore whether the options suggested by Strauss are Nietzsche’s options, but more importantly, whether Strauss actually believes that they are. The thesis is that the answer to both of these questions is No.

This chapter treats Strauss’s late essay “Note on the Plan of Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil.” It emphasizes Strauss’s great achievement of showing how philosophy and religion belong together in Nietzsche’s work, or how Nietzsche as philosopher gained the fundamental insight into beings as such, his “doctrine of will to power,” and then moved necessarily to the theological political program that was true to that insight, the teaching of eternal return or what Strauss called the new “ideal belonging to the religion of the future.” Because Strauss refused to set out Nietzsche’s religion of the future, the chapter shows why Nietzsche took both Dionysos and Ariadne with the greatest seriousness. The chapter ends showing why Nietzsche thought a new post-Christian religion was necessary and how that new religion could be ecological or true to the earth.

This chapter focuses on Percival Everett’s novel Frenzy, a postmodern revision of the story of the god of wine, madness, fertility, and ecstasy, Dionysos. The narrator of the novel informs the reader that in the midst of the “frenzied Bakkhanal,” the story of Dionysos is told through Vlepo, “an unfrenzied observer” without form that manifests only at the command of Dionysos. Vlepo without form serves as chronicler of bacchic unfolding. As a governing definition for this analysis, that which is bacchic is connoted as the attempt on the part of a people in an uprooted environment to balance emotion and intellect, which encompasses growth patterns bound in the rhythms of organic life and all its integral variations.

Building on the discussions of previous chapters, this chapter investigates the positive and negative paradigms of manliness and courage found in Aeschylus’ Agamemnon and Euripides’ Andromache, Trojan Women, and Heracles. The Athenians’ tragic theater was a theater of self-knowledge, one in which questions of life and death and of courage and cowardice were put onto the dramatic stage in order to invite reflection, inspire well-deserved pride, and force the audience to think again about its practices of warfare and its sense of justice. Although these plays did not directly affect the demos’ decision-making processes, they did educate the Athenians’ emotions and judgments, rendering the citizens more capable of understanding both the opportunities and limits of their political practices.

The first chapter reviews current understandings of the symposium, the andron, and pebble mosaics, including the possible origins and development of each, the iconographic themes introduced by the mosaics, and relevant previous scholarship. Emphasis is placed on the circulation of a single wine cup around the andron. Moreover, the chapter describes the symposium as a commensal gathering of equals that involved competition, conversation, entertainment, and drinking. It then situates this event in the andron, characterizing that setting, its development, and the archaeological evidence pointing to the specialized function of this room. The chapter also provides an overview of the literature on pebble mosaic floors.