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This chapter explores how Greek tragedy evokes epinician poetry. The chapter begins with a discussion of epinician as a genre, drawing on both Pindar and Bacchylides. In particular, it explores how epinician was regarded in fifth‐century Athens: a society whose democratic values are frequently believed to be at odds with the aristocratic and individualistic values of epinician. The second part of the chapter explores how tragedy makes use of epinician motifs, using two case‐studies: Euripides' Heracles, and Electra. It is argued that in both these plays the clustering of epinician language is used to explore problematic values associated with epinician poetry: in particular, questions about what constitutes aretē (excellence), and the relationship between individual and community.

This chapter analyzes two Greek myths — the story of Iambe and Demeter, and that of Heracles and the Cercopes — as a reflection of how Greeks could conceptualize comic mockery as “performance”, mediated by form, context, and generic marking.

This chapter examines the portrayal of monsters, ogres, and demons in Sicilian and Attic comedy throughout the 5th century bc. In early comedy and mime (Epicharmus, Sophron, Cratinus, Crates) the monster was typically confronted and vanquished by a mythical hero (often Heracles), and this pattern reappeared in one lost early play of Aristophanes. In Acharnians, however, we meet the politician (Lamachus) as monster, and, far more spectacularly, Cleon a year later in Knights; by Wasps, Aristophanes himself has become the Heracles figure who defeats the giant. In Frogs, on the other hand, uniquely, a monster figure—Aeschylus—is victorious; and meanwhile Aristophanes' contemporary Phrynichus seems to have begun a process of demythologizing and humanizing the monster/demon which eventually led to the antisocial types depicted by Menander (Knemon, Smikrines).

The reaction to the Americanization of the Vietnam conflict posed serious political problems for the president. Like Heracles confronting the Hydra—the mythical beast that would grow two heads when one was severed—Johnson found himself dealing with opposition to his policies from both conservatives and liberals. He became a political juggling act of monumental proportions; the president battled a multiheaded opposition on Vietnam as the war evolved. As Johnson fought the forces advocating negotiations or withdrawal, he had to simultaneously fend off those who pushed for a more aggressive approach in Vietnam. This chapter focuses on Johnson's efforts to manage these countervailing forces from the 1966 midterm elections, which brought a number of influential GOP doves into office, to the eve of the 1968 presidential election.

This chapter applies spatial theory to the general themes of the poem. The Argo’s voyage involves a material, bodily experience of space, but it produces space by connecting the places on its itinerary as interrelated constituents of a spatial system. It defines that space also by tracing routes or “pathways” on the sea, and also because the Argonauts leave signs of their presence in places where they stop. These signs imply narratives of what they did, and these narratives explain landmarks or ritual and other cultural practices associated with the Argonauts and exemplary for later times. In these stories (called aitia by the Greeks), space and time fuse together, and space is a signifying system, as is the poem itself, which is self-reflexively identified with the voyage. The Argo is a mobile embodiment of Greek space, confronting the alterity of foreign places and peoples. Herakles’ random movement through space provides a contrast with the systematic production of it by Jason and the Argonauts.

The song to Hermias now takes center stage again, this time using its literary background to highlight the multiple generic stances adopted by the speaker. The song’s opening verses are examined in light of the rhetorical categories of ethos—the speaker’s character as projected by the poem—and pathos—the effects on the audience. A poem by Sappho and an Attic skolion are studied to show that Aristotle blended hymnic form with an old poetic game in which singers discoursed on what is “the finest thing” in life. This heritage suggests that the song’s ethos and pathos have much in common with contemporary protreptic literature. The traditional quality of such a poetic posture and the possibilities it offered for creative expansion and variation are brought out by comparing a very similar discourse on virtue in Sophocles’ Philoctetes.

This chapter examines the character of the Athenian panegyric in suppliant drama against the background of the development of Athens’ empire. Suppliant plays predominantly depicted Athens as a haven for suppliants and outsiders. Further probed, this fixed representation allowed the playwrights to represent Athens as a hegemonic city and to explore the character of her power. The ramifications of this reading are discussed in relation to Euripides’ Children of Heracles; the depiction of Athens as a free city in this play varies the coordinates of the shared pattern in response to the contingencies facing Athens at the beginning of the Peloponnesian War. In the course of the play, the negotiation of the suppliants’ reception demonstrates the effort expended in justifying the benefits Athens reaps from her ventures on behalf of mythical suppliants.

As they were incorporated into mythological plots, the choruses of classical Athenian tragedy took on fictional identities that departed from their status as performers in a celebratory communal ritual. In ‘The Nostalgia of the Male Tragic Chorus’, Sheila Murnaghan discusses tragic choruses portraying groups of men. These choruses often interact with the protagonists in ways that reflect contested, politically charged relations between leaders and followers. Choruses with tyrannical, self-interested leaders are more fully displaced from their underlying identities as joyful singers and dancers and more thoroughly oppressed by the conditions of their fictional roles, especially the debilitating effects of absence from home and old age. Choruses with good leaders are brought safely back from adventures abroad and may undergo an experience of rejuvenation that Greek culture associated with dancing and the influence of Dionysus.

This chapter explores the theme of witnessing in Harrison’s later theatre works, especially the contrast between photographic and poetic records and accounts of trauma. It argues that Harrison’s choice of ancient plays to adapt and translate (Hippolytus, Medea, Hecuba, Iphigenia in Tauris, Trojan Women), and the central topics discussed in his original play FRAM, are closely related to his experience of the ancient Greek tragedian Euripides, especially to his messenger speeches, and above all to the messenger speech in his HERACLES. It also discusses his engagement with the figure of Gilbert Murray, whose pro-suffragette translations of Euripides were directed in Edwardian London by Harley Granville Barker, and who appears in FRAM, and describes the genesis of Harrison’s IPHIGENIA IN CRIMEA, in which Hall was closely involved.

Synchronic typology of Achilles loves (and transvestism), compared to the loves (and transvestism) of Heracles, another of the most invincible heroes of Greek mythology: Achilles and Heracles as boundary-breaking heroes. Diachrony of the fortune of Achilles' loves. After Homer's silence, the Epic Cycle must have narrated some of them to some extent, though not without developing a sort of debate, in the Aethiopis, on their epic propriety. Finally, tragedy indulged in (re-)constructing Achilles' erotic passions with no censorious stance at all. The negative viewpoint of Alessandra (Cassandra) in her re-writing of the Iliad in a anti-Greek perspective led Lycophron to elaborate a first summary of Achilles' erotic life. This perspective was totally reversed by the Latin erotic poets of the 1st cent. BC and AD. But reactions of indignation at Achilles' erotic debauchery and opposite attempts at a dignified restoration of his heroism never stopped, at least from the Hellenistic age onwards, at both the level of interpretation of existing texts and mythopoiesis of new texts.

The Beauty and Attractions of Philippopolis, named after Philip II, king of Macedonia, praised in this poetical manner by Lucian, were also celebrated on its coinage in Roman times. Hence the river Hebrus, navigable up to Philippopolis in antiquity, was often depicted on coins; on Hadrianic coins it was even named (pl. 8.1, 1). Its great importance for the city is further reflected in the common illustrations of the river-god and the city-goddess (pl. 8.1, 2). And one coin with the river-god also shows other sources of wealth for the city: little genii are depicted representing agriculture and mining (pl. 8.1, 3). While the AIMOΣ, depicted only on coins of Nicopolis ad Istrum, is shown as a male personification (in the form of a young hunter), the smaller mountains of Rhodope, situated near Philippopolis, are depicted as a charming female figure with an explanatory legend (ROΔOΠH) on coins of Philippopolis (pl. 8.1, 4). In addition, the three hills which formed the acropolis of the city (which, as a consequence, was called Trimontium in Roman times), and are known today as Nebet-, Džambaz-, and Taximtepe, were depicted (singly or all together) on coins of Philippopolis (pl. 8.1, 5). Sometimes even the other hills of the city (which are said to have been seven in all) can be seen on the coins. So a statue of Heracles, situated on a hill, supposedly represented the second highest elevation of the city, the Bundardžika (pl. 8.1, 6). The pictures of these hills are combined with appropriate buildings—temples, statues, aqueducts— on the coins (pl. 8.1, 7). It is clear that such illustrations conveyed a specific image of the city and the landscape, and were intended to show essential aspects of the common identity of the Philippopolites. As a consequence they give a good insight into the processes of acculturation which led to the formation or change of identities. They show how indigenous, local, or regional traditions, myths, and stories of origins were conserved or changed. They also inform us about the adaptation of foreign influences (for example, the taking over and/or integration of foreign deities in the local pantheon) or the resistance against such influences. Such central aspects of ‘Coinage and Identity’ will be studied in detail in this chapter, with special regard to Thrace and Moesia Inferior.

When octavian-augustus gained control of Egypt in 30 bc he inherited the administration which had been installed by his Ptolemaic predecessors, but added the Praefectus Aegypti, a Roman Eques, as the new head of the government of Roman Egypt. Augustus retained the Egyptian closed currency system, and struck only bronze denominations (those early in the reign were a continuation of those from towards the end of the reign of Cleopatra VII). Regnal years appeared from year 28 (L KH = 3/2 BC) to year 42 (L MB = AD 12/13). After a gap of about fifty years new debased silver (billon) tetradrachms were issued by Tiberius in his seventh year (L Z = AD 20/1). The tetradrachm, normally called state´r in papyri, survived as a denomination, with a decrease in its weight and silver content, until the reform of Diocletian in Egypt in AD 296/7, when the new Latin nummus replaced the old ‘Greek’ system. The bronze coinage reached its peak in the first half of the second century when it consisted of a range of denominations of the drachma and its fractions, and when the output especially of bronze drachmas became very extensive; some last examples of bronze coins appear under Gallienus and Claudius II. The typology of this coinage includes a great variety of individual reverse designs. We find Greek, Roman, and Egyptian topics. As may be expected, Egyptian religious and cultural life is represented in a wide range of images; Roman ideas and types, like images of members of the imperial family, personifications, events in Rome and elsewhere in the empire, are copied or reflected by the Alexandrian mint; finally, Greek types occur in the form of representations of deities of the traditional Graeco-Roman pantheon, or as pictorial scenes from mythology. There are some remarkable series of bronze coins preserved; among them are the so-called nome coins (or coins of the nomes of Roman Egypt). Since pharaonic times Egypt had been divided into forty-two administrative districts, which the Greeks later called nomoí (singular nomós). Classical authors give different numbers of nomes and so do the coins in question.

Architectural symbolism explains monumentality for only a small number of religious or imperial buildings, in their representations of the divine and the cosmic, or their insinuation of the semi-divine nature of the emperor. But for the majority of patrons of public buildings under the Roman Empire monumentality was not tied to such concepts, but was expressed on a more human level. Architecture contributed to the public image of individual patrons in the same way as did other ‘status symbols’. A Roman aristocrat’s house was a public monument; by contrast, the house of a disgraced man was destroyed. In what follows, I shall argue that the forms of architecture used in public as well as private buildings played an important role in promoting an owner’s social identity, and that they did so because of the ideas they embodied. For Seneca, the squared stone construction of the villa of Scipio Africanus at Liternum, with ‘towers raised on all sides to defend it’, was a physical embodiment of the idea that ‘a man’s home is his castle’. In the same way, the frequent mosaic pattern in private houses at Pompeii and other Roman colonies, especially in southern Gaul and northern Italy, of a labyrinth set within a walled circuit (Fig. 72), had a metaphoric purpose: it signalled that the house was both exclusive and impregnable, the work of a Daedalus-like master architect, and, as the aedificatio of the owner, a statement of his social rank. Because such a mosaic pattern could only be fully comprehended from the top of the building, preferably a high one, it had an inherent association with monumental architecture. Cicero chose a portico on his estates for its ‘dignity’ and a vault for its honour, while the younger Pliny in his villas at Laurentum and Tusci relished forms that he had ‘begun [himself ] or, if already begun, brought to completion and thoroughly adorned’; they included a white marble stibadium, a ‘tetrastyle’ arbour of cipollino columns, and a topiary of box which, like a monumental inscription, spelled his name and that of his architect.

The Aims of this Chapter are to Provide a brief introduction to Roman provincial coinage as background to the book as a whole, and to outline the key developments in Roman provincial coin iconography from a chronological perspective. Geographical diversity will only be touched on here, but emerges strongly from the regional studies within this volume. It is also the main theme of Burnett’s paper which compares the Roman East with the Roman West. This chapter is based mainly on the material contained in the first two volumes of the Roman Provincial Coinage (RPC) series, which cover the Julio- Claudian and Flavian periods from 44 BC to AD 96, and the database of the RPC IV project. The latter embraces the Antonine period, the time from the accession of Antoninus Pius in ad 138 to the death of Commodus in AD 192. Provincial coins from the reigns of Nerva to Hadrian (ad 96–138) and the third century AD have not yet been catalogued systematically. Consequently, their treatment within this chapter can only be impressionistic, and will require refinement and revision once the RPC series has been completed. Readers in search of a more extended, but still impressionistic, treatment of key themes in the iconography of the period from ad 180 onwards are referred to Harl 1987. Finally, many of the examples given in this chapter are deliberately drawn from the rich material from the Roman province of Asia, as this region is not the subject of a dedicated chapter in this book. Types of Roman Provincial Coins and their Characteristics During the three and a half centuries from 44 BC the Roman empire embraced different categories of coinage. Scholars have divided the material into two main groups: ‘Roman imperial coins’ on the one hand and ‘Roman provincial coins’—also known as ‘Greek imperial coins’—on the other. Roman imperial mints produced coins in gold, silver, and ‘bronze’. Roman imperial gold coins (aurei) circulated throughout the empire, with the possible exception of Egypt. Imperial silver coins (denarii) and—from the reign of Caracalla onwards—also radiates or antoniniani increasingly circulated alongside provincial silver in the east.

In their Kind Invitation to Contribute to this book the editors assigned me the topic of ‘Authority/control’. The authors of RPC devoted an intensive discussion to the subject, with many facets and displaying an extraordinary knowledge of the material. This is in many respects a difficult field, and it is obvious how wide and heterogeneous is the material, how different the presuppositions were in the various parts of the Roman empire, and with what a broad timespan one has to deal: some three centuries, in which there were many developments and several changes. Despite its gigantic bulk, the coinage affords far fewer unambiguous indications permitting a clear conception of how minting came about and was controlled than one would wish. Epigraphy, which in other cases provides an enormous fund of information, here by contrast leaves us almost entirely in the lurch. It follows that many differences of opinion exist, and in many matters, even on points of central importance, our vision is still clouded. The topic is too complex to permit a thorough discussion of all the questions before us in this narrow space. For that reason I have undertaken a limited evaluation. In what follows, I am concerned only with coins pertaining to the cities. Attention is therefore not paid, for example, to the cistophori in Asia, the coins of Alexandria in Egypt, or of Caesarea in Cappadocia, or to the provincial coinage of Syria. I shall first consider the question of Roman control, but only in the form of some basic observations and reflections. Much must here remain unresolved. My central concern will therefore be the following set of questions: How did the cities organize their monetary production? How were responsibilities apportioned, and who was directly involved? What range of possibilities was there? How in this context are we to interpret the numerous names and functional titles on the coins of many Roman cities, especially in the west, down to Julio-Claudian times, and above all, in continuity with Hellenistic practice, on very many coins from the Greek poleis in Provincia Asia?

The similarities between the myths of Hermes (especially as presented in the Homeric Hymn to Hermes) and certain elements of the Heracles myths are substantial enough to indicate a relationship. Specifically, the myth of the struggle for Apollo’s tripod has to do with Heracles’ progress toward acceptance as an Olympian god. The composer of the Homeric Hymn was reacting in some degree to the Heracles myth.

This chapter explores the emphasis of femininity as shown by Sophocles in his tragedy the Women of Trachis. This tragedy shows that Deianeira has expressed a powerful feminine characterization, reflecting Greek women's prospects of getting married and also getting anxious over the safety of the husband and children. The tragedy also shows the feminine sensitivity and empathy, through Deianeira's concern over her husband's, Heracles, captives. The Greek tragedy also illustrates the feminine insecurity over beauty, by showing Deianeira's anxiety over the beauty of Iole, who was taken by Heracles as his lover.

The chapter argues that Archilochus’ elegy of which P.Oxy. 4708 (2005) offers a substantial fragment was a self-standing narrative, not (as generally taken) a narrative exemplum related to a contemporary military event. It is suggested the poem was composed for first performance in a festival, probably in Thasos’ important Herakleion, where by the fifth century there was a broad flight of steps with a balustrade at its foot seemingly indicating use for viewing. A later inscription attests contests involving a winning taxis. Archilochus’ subject, Telephus, both honoured Herakles and could be related by his Thasian audience to their struggles, especially with Naxians, for control of the Thracian peraea. In support it is argued that Simonides’ Plataea elegy, opening with an extended hymn to Achilles, was first performed where he had a cult, probably his sanctuary on the road leading north from Sparta, and that cultic contexts also suit Mimnermus’ Smyrneis and Callinus’ Address to Zeus.