Chapter 4 explores how the epics represent combat and its consequences. It discusses divine and human agents of war, battle strategies, and the material culture of fighting, from armor to weapons. It then turns to violence, trauma, and the memory of war, showing how Homeric poetry captures both the immediacy of battle and the longer psychological aftermath.

The final chapter of the study seeks to consider how the themes of divine presence and absence affect an understanding of the Gospel as a whole. To do so, I link John’s claims about the significance of Jesus’s presence and absence to the Gospel’s stated purpose in John 20:31. I then compare John to the Lindian Chronicle, an inscription set up on Lindos to provide evidence of Athena Lindia’s presence. The comparison illuminates how John leverages a history of prior epiphanies to provide corroborating evidence for his claims about Jesus, highlights Jesus’s care for his people to strengthen intra-community bonds among believers, and stresses the necessary human response of loving others in the community in order to maintain relationship with Jesus’s presence. Additionally, the comparison provides insights into scholarly debates about whether, and to what extent, the Gospel text itself might be understood to mediate Jesus’s presence.

This chapter shows how income-generating work gave women a new axis and language of self-evaluation and enabled them to form relationships beyond their kin and neighbourhoods. It analyses expressions of women’s attitudes to their employment in religious dedications. It examines the social lives and networks of women in the commercial textile economy and considers how women’s remunerated labour affected household dynamics. It highlights the commercial relationships entailed by women’s involvement in supply chains of Attic sanctuaries and considers women’s interactions with clients and colleagues in markets and shops. It uses curse tablets aimed at women retailers and joint dedications made by colleagues as evidence for women acting as workers within commercial networks rather than family members in kinship networks. It concludes with two monuments connected with the doctor Phanostrate which attest to the possibility that relationships arising from work could take on the character of and even displace kin relationships.

This chapter examines epiphany and its place in personal religion by focusing on narratives that feature Athena as the epiphanic deity across different periods, locales, and media. In all cases, Athena is construed as engaging closely with personal requests and concerns of particularly diverse nature from military excellence and political dominance to enhancement of socio-religious capital, and, perhaps more surprisingly, health. Athena’s epiphanies have thus been identified as particularly pertinent for our purposes, as they highlight the grey area that oscillates between personal and poliadic spheres of religious action, thus allowing us to witness the close and complex correlations between the two. Even if the two spheres draw from a common stock of religious schemata and behaviours, contrasting them reveals a wealth of useful information about how personal religious appropriation and innovation are situated in relation to more established forms or expressions of poliadic religious action. Above all, this contrast shows how even groundbreaking religious innovations needed to be anchored properly in easily recognisable, time-tested, and well-established religious schemata.

Freeze frame: It’s Boedromion 12, 403. With his troops, Thrasybulus is marching up the Acropolis to make a sacrifice to Athena, after several month of exile. At first sight, we can only distinguish men: On one side stand the people of the town, frightened spectators of this intimidating procession; on the other, the victorious democrats – citizens, foreigners, slaves and freedmen – who are already preparing to forgive. As the Athenian civil war comes to an end, women appear absent, as if erased from the picture. But their presence can be sensed in the background, not only among the anonymous crowd who has come to watch, but also on the Acropolis itself. In a majestic role, the priestess of Athena Polias was necessarily present at Thrasybulus’ side, since she was to help him accomplish his sacrifice in the honor of the goddess. In all likelihood, the priestess of Athena played a central role in this ritual sequence, embodying the very specific participation of Athenian women in the resolution of the conflict. Her name – Lysimache – is known to us thanks to an extraordinary piece of evidence: After her death a few decades later, the priestess was commemorated with a bronze statue erected on the Acropolis, the work of a famous sculptor. But how did he manage to flesh out this fleeting and evanescent figure? Erased from history as written by men, she was nevertheless a central figure of the community; it is only necessary to take the trouble to read the ancient sources between the lines, being as attentive to what they express as to what they conceal. By means of some inscriptions and, especially, thanks to a play by Aristophanes performed in 411, it is possible to give back to Lysimache her full human dimension and to restore her singular mode of action within the city that went against the clichéd view of Athenian women as passive and legally in the minority. Better still, if we listen carefully, we can give voice to all those who surrounded her – not only the women directly involved in the cult of Athena, but more widely all Athenian women, including the foreigners to whom the priestess served as a mouthpiece in these ‘dark times.’

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 sacralized warrior relationships, focusing on that of the epíkouroi ‘allies’ as they appear in the Linear B tablets and also in Homeric epic, where the term typically identifies Anatolian allies. In those few instances in the Iliad in which the epic poet uses epíkouros to characterize Greek alliances, the poet does so within a certain Aeolian framing – cataloguing Aeolian contingents participating in the siege of Troy and, inversely, describing the search for Achaean allies to offer warrior aid in an epic assault on a great Aeolian city.

The opening lines of Ajax are spoken by the goddess Athena, who addresses her favourite, Odysseus, as an adherent of Harm Enemies: he is tracking down an enemy as usual, in a manner worthy of his traditionally tricky persona. She is the dearest of gods to him, and they enjoy a solidarity inherited from the Odyssey. He places himself in her hands, as he has always done in the past. But despite the bond between them, a conflict of values emerges. When Odysseus is reluctant to view the mad Ajax Athena scolds him as a coward. She implies that any kind of fear or ’reluctance’ constitutes cowardice.

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.

Chapter 3 focusses on the temple of Hera at Foce del Sele north of the Greek colony of Poseidonia-Paestum in southern Italy. New archaeometric analysis on the metopes from the Hera sanctuary near the mouth of the river Sele has made it possible to propose a new reconstruction of the oldest Hera temple on the site, which belongs to the first generation of Doric stone temples. The study of the architectural elements confirms the decorative nature of the first Doric friezes. Moreover, by analyzing the mythological subjects on the frieze and comparing them with other early Doric temples in Selinous, Delphi, and Athens, it can be shown that the tendency to choose Panhellenic themes over local traditions is a general feature of early Doric temples. Because of the detachment of the imagery from local traditions, the Doric temple is described as a “non-place” according to the definition of the French anthropologist Marc Augé. Conceiving temples as standardized “non-places” that could be set up in any given local environment was crucial to the agendas of Greek elites, who needed to reorganize agricultural and urban landscapes to regulate population pressure and social tensions – both in the colonies and in homeland Greece.

By analyzing the topography of Selinous, a colonial foundation of the late seventh century BC, the chapter explores the way in which temple building and sacred architecture became subordinated to urban design. From the sixth century BC onward, Greek cult places and temples were increasingly seen as an expression of the urban rather than the natural landscape. This holds true for altars and temples at the center of cult places, but also for fountain houses that replaced or were built over natural fountains. The sacredness of a place was increasingly represented and communicated through monumental stone architecture. At the same time, the novel use of man-made images in Greek sanctuaries contributed to a radical change in which the presence of the gods was imagined and experienced. All this went along with a shift of power and agency from local groups to urban elites, who had the means to control the restructuring and reorganization of sacred landscapes. The violence of this shift is reflected in the iconography that tends to rationalize and sublimize violence against the non-Greek, non-urban, and non-male.

The sanctuary of Artemis on the island of Korkyra, modern Corfu, is presented as a case study of the relationship between the changing environment and the monumentalization of Greek sanctuaries through Doric stone architecture. Although the sculptural decoration of the Artemis temple, which is one of the earliest Doric temples known so far, is relatively well preserved, modern scholars disagree on the interpretation of the sculptures. The question of how the representations of Medusa and other mythological figures on the pediments and metopes related to the divinity worshipped in the sanctuary and to the local context are particularly controversial. However, as the chapter argues, the builders of the temple had no interest in highlighting this relationship in the first place. The temple and its sculptural decoration were meant to express Panhellenic values and standards rather than local traditions. Thus, the local elite of Korkyra presented themselves as part of a Panhellenic elite network. At the same time, the elite showed the local population that they were taking care of the religious landscape in an unstable and radically transformative situation.

The Eumenides contains one of the earliest descriptions anywhere of Hades as a universal judge. The Erinyes threaten Orestes with a continuation of his punishment after death by “the great assessor of mortals beneath the earth.” This passage contains the first extant catalogue of Hades’ ethical concerns: he is said to punish human–divine, parent–child, and guest–host transgressions. Although he “sees all things,” the name Hades derives from a-idein, literally the “unseen,” a moniker that exemplifies the human inability to confront this nonpolitical, absolute judge. By differentiating Hades from the Erinyes, this chapter draws out the dynamics of his character and ethical law. Like them, Hades’ connection with blood and punishment entails pollution, but unlike them, he is never subordinated to Athens. The analysis then contrasts Hades’ law to the “new law” that Athena creates. It argues that Hades represents an alternate, yet still valid ethical code that can be used to critique the jingoistic and bellicose politics of the trilogy’s ending.

Both worker bargaining power and political democracy have been gripped by a mutually reinforcing crisis that has worsened for decades, harming working people (especially communities of color) and undermining our social fabric. This chapter argues that this crisis had become existential by 2020 as the pandemic, policing, privatization, financialization, growing monopoly, and rising unemployment exacerbated inequality, sparked social unrest, and threatened democracy.  It contends that our response must link the defense of political democracy to the fight for bargaining power for workers in the twenty-first century economy through innovative movement campaigns and new alliances that tie together the degradation of the environment, the upending of democratic oversight, and the more general degradation of the political economy to the exploitation of the workforce by rent-seeking corporate power.

This chapter examines the festival’s stories, which explained why it was being held, who its multiple founders were and why a new cult was added at the end of the sixth century. These stories focus on the gods’ victory over the Giants as the reason for the festivities and on the founders Erichthonios and Theseus. They also explain the importance of the pyrrhiche and the apobatic contest, while another important narrative concerns the cult of Harmodios and Aristogeiton, the two men identified by Athenians as the slayers of the tyrant and the bringers of democracy. Collectively, these narratives make the Panathenaia a unified occasion as a victory celebration commemorating the gods’ martial success against the Giants, and they also bring out the importance of autochthony, democracy and what being an Athenian entailed; what narrative was told at what moment depended in part on what aspect was being emphasised. Together, these stories mark the Panathenaia as the most important occasion for working out and displaying Athenian identities.

The ancient Athenians held two major Panhellenic festivals: the Great Panathenaia in celebration of the goddess Athena and the Great Mysteries in honor of Demeter. This chapter compares and contrasts the rituals of these two festivals in relation to the topography and monuments of Athens, focusing on how the celebrations drew together different parts of the community of Athens.