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A graffito discovered in the temple of Hercules Curinus at Sulmo allows us to explore the ritual logic of the Roman vow, undoubtedly one of the most characteristic rites in Roman religion, with its specific vocabulary and timing, unlike, for example, the Christian vow. In most cases, vows — whether they are modest such as the one from the temple at Sulmo, or grand such as those we find on offerings in metal or marble — recall one aspect or phase of the rite. The text from Sulmo is one of the rare votive texts that gives us the two principal phases of the vow, announcement and fulfilment.

This chapter discusses the first surviving part of Velleius Paterculus' history (1.1-8), which covers the period from the Trojan War to the reign of Romulus, with particular reference to the foundations of cities and colonies, and the succession of monarchical power (imperium) in Greece and Asia. The discussion concentrates on Velleius' interest in Hercules, whose apotheosis he even uses as a dating marker like the Trojan War or the foundation of Rome. Comparison with Diodorus's narrative of Hercules' deeds, and with the first Nemean Ode of Pindar (written for a Sicilian patron), suggests that Velleius may have been following a western tradition in which Hercules became a god after the defeat of the Giants in Campania. Velleius himself was Campanian, as was his patron M. Vinicius, whose family's presence there can be traced back to the 5th century BC.

This chapter offers readings of seven of the ancient Virgilian centos that relate traditional mythological stories. The aim is to show that each text contains elements that permit and indeed demand differentiated assessments, and therefore each is a distinct literary work, rather than just one in an undifferentiated mass of curiosities. How the centos in different ways speak to issues in Virgil's reception and literary studies is also explored.

This chapter discusses why Gratian changed his policy toward Roman paganism, Gratian's repudiation of the ancient pagan title of pontifex maximus, Theodosius and the cults of Rome, Theodosius's anti-pagan legislation, Eugenius and the state cults, and Proiectus and the “temple of Hercules”. It argues that there is no serious evidence that Eugenius revoked or modified in any way the anti-pagan measures of either Gratian or Theodosius.

In the contemporary histories of the Late Republic written by non-Romans, we can find preserved the attitudes of those dispossessed of their power by the establishment of Roman hegemony. The historical texts themselves, like any intellectual product, have a distinctive form. The genre employed by each author and the structural choices made reflect the nature of the historian's objectives and political position. Choices regarding the integration of Rome into the narrative structure are of particular significance. Two categories have been recognized in Hellenistic historical writing: universal history and local chronicles.

In Seneca's Hercules, the tragic protagonist has been displaced into a form of space which no one else shares. His time is not their time, either, for his act endures impervious to the motions of change and decay which are the rhythms of the ordinary world. The case of Hercules exemplifies a mode of estrangement which seems to be characteristic of tragedy, a movement of translation and of decomposition. This book explores the ways in which tragedy effects radical forms of estrangement by translating the protagonist into modes of time, space, and language which are alienated from those forms of time, space, and language which, in the different imaginations of different societies, constitute the human home. In this new world, metaphor, tense, and syntax forget their habitual ways of establishing identity or likeness, the sequence of cause and effect, and the distinction between agent and patient. The plays chosen for discussion range from Aeschylus' Agamemnon to Jean Racine's Phèdre, from classical Greek drama to its reworking in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

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.

This section of the book contains the English translation of the text. It contains the following sections: Introduction; Europe: Antion to Iapygia; the Adriatic; Epeiros; continuous Hellas; Peloponnese with Crete and southern Cyclades; Macedonia to the Tanaïs; the Black Sea; length of Europe; Asia: Tanaïs to Propontis; Mysia to Kilikia; Cyprus; Syria-Phoenicia to Egypt; length of Asia; Libyē: Non-Carthaginian Libyē; Carthaginian territory; length of Libyē; Beyond the Pillars of Hercules; end matter.

This chapter discusses two plays that present readings of masculinity and femininity. It first studies a reading of The Madness of Hercules that is concerned with the centrality of male-to-male philia, both to Euripides's rereading of the Hercules myth, and to the overall proposed aesthetics. The chapter suggests that The Madness of Hercules demonstrates some aspects of male hysteria. The next play examined in the chapter is Euripides' Helen, which is traditionally received as a light comedy. It shows that Helen can be included in any discussion about aesthetic theory and tragic form in general.

This chapter discusses the ambiguities of self-representation in a world of moral and physical disorder. Particularly in the bare paradoxes exchanged as sententiae it becomes difficult to distinguish the polar opposites of vice and virtue, the inhuman alienation of the maniac from the autonomy of the Stoic sage. Seneca's distinctively artificial style — his presentation of reality and fate as mere constructions — poses distinctive moral challenges for his characters. There are discussions of Medea's knowledge of her own myth, Lycus' statement (in Hercules Furens) that the victors write the histories, and the intervention of the second chorus in Troades which dismisses the reality of Achilles' ghost as empty words, and a play like a bad dream.

In this first chapter investigating the golden ages of heroes, Tomasso examines how nostalgia for the mid-twentieth century golden age of peplum (“sword and sandal”) films, which inspired the heroic “golden age” world of Hercules: The Legendary Journeys (1995–9), is redoubled in “Once a Hero” (Episode 2.14, 1996). In staging a second voyage to re-claim the Golden Fleece, the episode presents Hercules as a guide for the demoralized Jason’s recuperation of his masculinity and status as the titular hero, in the wake of his ex-wife Medea’s killing of their two children and the mysterious disappearance of the Golden Fleece. In defining heroism within the scope of the series’ interpretation of the classical golden age, the episode highlights the challenge of reconciling the regressive sexual politics inherent in the peplum genre with the “girl power” Zeitgeist of 1990s American society and culture. On the one hand, the episode leans into the traditional villainization of Medea as a femme fatale; on the other, it also presents an invented character, Phoebe, who earns her own place as a hero among the Argonauts.

The rise of print culture in tandem with a resurgent interest in Ptolemy’s Geography prompted a radical transformation of the imagining of Europe’s continental boundaries. Geoffroy Tory, France’s first royal printer and typographer and the first editor of Enea Silvio Piccolomini’s De Europa, powerfully seized these new tools to conceptualize Europe’s borders with Asia. His groundbreaking Champ fleury (1529) links diverse spatial imageries to the question of the origin and transformation of European and non-European languages. It investigates Europe’s shifting image from a landmass intimately connected with the oikoumene to an isolated entity detached from its shared heritage with Asia in the context of the formation and circulation of alphabets. The Champ fleury constitutes an astounding cartographic surface, a vibrant map upon which letters, as graphic, somatic, and numeric signs, form a new cartographic language in constant transformation and translation. In Tory’s hand, the “flowery field” of its title becomes a platform for the generation of complex cartographic signs that this chapter, following Ján Pravda, calls “cartographemes.”

This chapter places the two recent 2014 Hercules films, The Legend of Hercules and Hercules, including the lesser known “mockbuster” Hercules Reborn (2014), in dialogue with the Hercules display of Russian president Vladimir Putin. It focuses particularly on aesthetic elements: the visual presentation of their central figure – his costume, his accoutrements, and the type of action shots that showcase the heroic body – and the settings against which the heroic action occurs. The chapter shows more broadly the importance of examining the place of Hercules and classical mythology in modern political discourse.

This chapter focuses on Documents, a magazine cofounded by Carl Einstein with Georges Bataille and Michel Leiris. It examines how, as his purview broadened under Documents' all-inclusive masthead, Einstein began to probe art history on the lookout for congenial personas. He discovered one in the seventeenth-century printmaker Hercules Segers, whose etchings prompted Einstein to compose a text that, written from a point of indifference, opened itself onto their bottomless vertigo. In turn, Einstein was drawn to central Asian art because of the way in which certain ritual objects became both the map and the territory of nomad art. This chapter also considers Einstein's writings on the work of Pablo Picasso in the later 1920s, with particular emphasis on his argument that Picasso's oeuvre was riven by a “double style” and how he tracked that doubleness both visually and theoretically.

The theoretical background of the “Hercules” Mass has rarely been subjected to close scrutiny. This chapter distinguishes three levels of consideration: the systematic, the conventional, and the individual. By “systematic”, it means the basic tone-system of the period, as expounded by the best-informed and most authoritative theorists of Josquin’s time, especially Tinctoris. By “conventional”, it means particularly those features of design it shares with other polyphonic Mass settings, or with certain branches of the Mass literature with which it has most in common. There is also ample evidence that the “Hercules” Mass was recognized as being a distinctive type of glorification. What had originally been a fusion of the Mass as liturgy and as political celebration had become a tradition.

Religious buildings, altars, and cult statues are often conceived of as complementary, if not indivisible, elements of Roman republican and imperial cult sites. The design and function of religious architecture have been ascribed to their interaction, with the result that it is not uncommon for one to be used to explain the presence of the others: buildings were constructed to shelter cult statues, which were aligned with external altars to provide sightlines between the gods and their worshippers. Together the three components shaped ritual space and made communication with the divine intelligible and tangible. Yet these three elements were not inherent parts of all ancient religious rituals and venues. There is no evidence of dedicated religious buildings, altars, or cult statues at the water sources that received some of the earliest votive deposits in central Italy, such as the spring at Campoverde, and the arrangement of accumulated votive offerings and statuettes in caves such as the closed deposit of the Caverna della Stipe similarly suggests that no image was accorded particular prominence or accompanied by a permanent altar. Proposals that some Iron Age residences hosted ritual meals do not theorize the complementary presence of cult statues and open-air altars, nor do suggestions that Greco- Roman temples developed from aristocratic banqueting halls. If the resulting impression of an era without cult statues and prominent altars is correct, then histories of religious architecture should consider the evidence for the introduction of such features and their influence on the form and function of relevant cult buildings. This chapter will accordingly examine the archaeological evidence for pre-republican altars and cult statues in Latium and Etruria. It will explore the problematic identification of these religious accessories, and identify the quantity and nature of those that can be connected with cult buildings. The significance of altars and cult statues as religious markers, or potential means of distinguishing cult buildings from other structures, will also be considered. Finally, it will evaluate the theory that the introduction of altars and anthropomorphic cult statues stimulated the construction of monumental temples.

The construction of monumental temples and sanctuaries during the sixth century BC changed the appearance of cult sites and settlements in Archaic Tyrrhenian Italy. The relationship between monumental cult buildings and their settings, however, is not well understood. As will be discussed below, scholars have argued that the placement and orientation of Archaic temples was influenced by the terrain, pre-existing cult sites, ritual geography, and the requirements of those within settlements. It has also been unclear whether religious monumentalization followed recognizable topographical patterns, particular to each region, culture, or religion, or alternatively varied according to local needs and customs. Thus, although the archaeology of landscapes and settlements has become an increasingly common element of Latial and Etruscan studies, the religious dimension of these landscapes and cityscapes may benefit from further analysis. This chapter accordingly examines the topography of early monumental temples in Latium and Etruria both in terms of their position in the landscape and in relation to features such as votive deposits, roads, and other buildings. The first part of the chapter presents an overview of the organization and characteristics of settlements in central Italy in the seventh and sixth centuries BC to establish the context for the introduction of the first monumental temples. The second and third parts test hypotheses about the location of Archaic cult buildings against the archaeological evidence. It will be suggested that what at first appears to be great diversity may actually represent a variety of responses to the same concern, namely a desire to be accessible to visitors, travellers, and an increasingly mobile population. The fourth and final part uses these findings to argue that it may be timely to review traditional typologies for cult sites that are based upon topographical relationships with urban centres. The incorporation of landscape archaeology into Etruscan and Latial studies over the last five decades has generated new data and models for reconstructing regional settlement hierarchies, population densities, and relationships with the physical environment. It is now possible to recognize broad, if complex, patterns in the location and organization of settlements as well as changes to those patterns over time.