Introduction: In this book, we evaluate the ancient testimonia; investigate production materials from Greek and Roman casting debris; look at bronzes inside and out; apply modern technology to reconstructing the ancient industry; and assess the impact of technique on the way in which we understand classical bronze statuary. Furthermore, recognizing post-antique features in restoration, patina, and display can help to correct long-held misconceptions.

Chapter 1: Notes from the Field. Homer and Hesiod describe how Hephaistos worked in his fabled smithy. Later texts from Athens to Rome to Byzantion cover myth, history, and technology and introduce Pliny, Pausanias, Christodoros, and many other writers. We shall consider how they responded to bronze statues from what was to them ancient Greece, and their interest in lifelikeness, alongside their fascination with production – from wax to alloy to surface detail – and the effects of corrosion. Authors faced the conundrum of statues that looked alive because they were made of bronze or that were prevented from living for the same reason. Some statues were protectors, others were threatening enough to be punished, and a few were even destroyed so as to remove their evil influence.

Chapter 7: Pausanias in Athens. Here we see what statues stood in Athens during the second century AD – those that Pausanias saw on his walk through the city, from the Piraeus to the Agora to the Akropolis. We can picture those portraits that he mentions that are today well-known types. But we can only imagine the appearance of many of the gods and heroes whose images he mentions. Sometimes his narrative matches reports by other writers. Sometimes surviving inscriptions can be linked to texts or to actual sculptures. Even where material evidence parallels what Pausanias remarks upon, almost no freestanding sculptures are visible in Athens today.

The epilogue explores how later Greeks understood the notable Mycenaean remains from the regions under study and probes why, during the post-Bronze Age, Tiryns was much celebrated while Mycenae’s reputation was deliberately suppressed.

The long-lasting impact of Pheidias, antiquity’s master of religious art, especially his Zeus at Olympia, is considered in the context of the theme of personal religion. The chapter adopts a broad chronological perspective and explores how the great master was perceived during the centuries following his lifetime, with a focus on his chryselephantine masterpiece, which he completed in the later decades of the fifth century BCE. It considers how later generations have conceived of his personal religious life, its relation to his famed artwork, and the position his figure has come to occupy within broader cult practices and devotional experiences. Close analysis of Pausanias’ Description of Greece alongside other evidentiary materials shows that by the second century CE, Pheidias was a figure of religious significance in his own right. Greco-Roman authors ascribed to him the qualities of a visionary endowed with unparallel access to Zeus. He left his detectable trademarks in his masterpiece, and his presence was felt in communal cult practices. Centuries after his departure from Olympia, his artmaking has come to be understood as a form of devotional practice.

Volume I offers a broad perspective on urban culture in the ancient European world. It begins with chronological overviews which paint in broad brushstrokes a picture that serves as a frame for the thematic chapters in the rest of the volume. Positioning ancient Europe within its wider context, it touches on Asia and Africa as regions that informed and were later influenced by urban development in Europe, with particular emphasis on the Mediterranean basin. Topics range from formal characteristics (including public space), water provision, waste disposal, urban maintenance, spaces for the dead, and border spaces; to ways of thinking about, visualising, and remembering cities in antiquity; to conflict within and between cities, economics, mobility and globalisation, intersectional urban experiences, slavery, political participation, and religion.

Many types of divination in the Graeco-Roman world relied on interventions of human technical knowledge. This chapter explores astragalomancy (knuckle bone divination) and catoptromancy (mirror divination) as two ‘technical’ modes of ancient divination which, through catoptric and mathematical knowledge respectively, reflected and shaped theological assumptions about how the gods intervened in the human realm, and how this connected to human knowledge. The chapter also considers how religious architecture was technologically enhanced for particular theological purposes. The oracle to Trophonios in Lebadeia is analysed through this lens where human technē was essential to achieving a connection with the divine in this artificially manufactured divinatory setting.

This chapter assesses the imperial presence of lyric in the form of the textual tradition of the nine canonical poets established by Alexandrian scholars. It reviews the evidence for the circulation of archaic and classical lyric texts among students of literature and readers from the late Hellenistic period onwards. Papyri preserving lyric texts and commentaries, treatises discussing literary and rhetorical education, as well as the diffusion of lyric quotations among Greek prose writers are all surveyed to define the place of lyric poetry in imperial paideia. Compared to mainstream classics, the genre thus emerges as a special, more niche and refined form of reading. The chapter then shows that by the imperial period, the reception of lyric subgenres followed a crystallised system of personas, where each poet activated specific thematic, local, ethical and aesthetic associations. This mental map shaped the reception of lyric poetry by imperial writers who, like Aristides, knew and chose to deploy it.

This final chapter summarises the book’s substantial contribution to our interpretation of Aristides’ works and figure, as well as to our picture of ancient lyric reception and imperial Greek culture more widely. Besides looking backwards, however, this conclusion also adds some reflections on how the approach developed and deployed in this study may be productively applied to other imperial genres and writers, both pagan and Christian, down to Late Antiquity.

Examination of the foundation traditions of Magnesia on the Maeander, an Aeolian polis of western Anatolia, and the various Aeolian mythic traditions attached to this city located within Caria.

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.

A synthetic, concluding discussion addressing the relationship between Ur-Aeolic and Special Mycenean and providing a historical framework for, especially, the introduction of Aeolic language and culture (pre-Thessalian/Boeotian) into European Greece following the Bronze-Age collapses and for the spread of pre-Aeolians (Iron-Age Ahhiyawans) eastward into Cilicia.

This chapter discusses the crises Alexander faced leading up to his succession to his father, Philip II: his dispute with Attalus at Philip’s wedding to Cleopatra, its causes, significance and aftermath; and the Pixodarus affair. It then turns to the crisis of the succession itself: the circumstances of Philip’s assassination at the hands of Pausanias, Alexander’s movements at the time of it, and the steps by which he secured the throne himself and legitimated himself as Philip’s successor.

A look at the latter part of the Peloponnesian War, especially the commemoration of figures like Gylippus and Lysander.

This chapter surveys Greek writing of 31 BC–AD 270 that might have impinged on the novels, or been somehow influenced by them. In 31 BC–AD 50, before any known novels, little that might have impacted a novelist writing in AD 50 can be seen in Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Nicolaus of Damascus or Strabo, or in hexameter poetry: but erotic epigrams, especially those of Rufinus (writing ca. AD 40–60, apparently in Asia Minor near the novels’ birthplace), may have caught novelists’ eyes. In AD 50–160 sophistic rhetoric’s explosion encouraged fictionality in declamation and in the imaginative scenarios of Dio’s Euboean, Trojan and Borysthenitic speeches. An erotic theme was central to the Araspas, lover of Pantheia, by Dionysius of Miletus or Caninius Celer. Plutarch comes near to a mini-novel in his story of young Bacchon’s kidnapping in his Ἐρωτικός, and many Lives have novelistic cliff-hanging incidents. Achilles Tatius’ ‘scientific’ digressions chime with the popularity of paradoxography (Pamphila, Phlegon, and Favorinus). Between 160–220 Iamblichus’ Babyloniaca and Aelian’s Histories show paradoxography’s continued popularity; Lucian plays games with fictionality and himself wrote a novel. Pausanias, Athenaeus and Philostratus present tales of desire in a way improbable in a world without novels. Discussion of Heliodorus’ relation to other literature dominates assessment of AD 220–270.

This chapter alerts readers of the shortcomings of a mining approach to Pausanias’ Periegesis as a prime evidence for the study of local religion in ancient Greece. The question of where local specificities are discussed in the narrative is as critical as the actual information conveyed. The chapter speaks to the analytical challenge of interpreting a narrative that is, on the one hand, reflective of the non-linear and essentially decentralised nature of the local, yet on the other filters this nature through the linear rigours of writing. Starting from fleeting experiences of the local, highly subjective to the individual that makes them, Hawes turns to an exemplary discussion of Argos, Thebes, and Messenia that exposes the mechanics of a scripted localism, a literary approximation to place. The discussion of Pausanias’ localistic perspective extends to the narrative technique of cross references and to instances where such connections were deliberately denied: the case in point being Pausanias’ treatment of the notorious problem of the location of Homeric Pylos.

This chapter embarks from the observation that ancient Greek settlements occupied three categorically separate yet interwoven landscapes: the natural, the human, and the imagined environment. It traces their presence at Hermione in the south-eastern Argolid to disclose multiple levels and layers of localisation and steers the investigation to places where all of these vectors combined. In the highly inclusive cult of Demeter Chthonia, the blend included communal preference, local vegetation, and a deliberately local variant of underworld conceptions. The cult of Demeter Chthonia at Hermione involved the killing of a frisky cow with sickles by four old women. It appears impossible to explain why the cow ritual took the idiosyncratic form that it did. Yet the comparison with cults of Demeter Chthonia elsewhere suggests the close interplay between agricultural and eschatological aspects. Although united with other Demeter cults under the same epiclesis and in accordance with the polymorphous nature of Greek religion, the cult in Hermione attests to lively conversations with the specific features of the local landscape, and the desire of the community to make sense of it.

This chapter alerts readers of the shortcomings of a mining approach to Pausanias’ Periegesis as a prime evidence for the study of local religion in ancient Greece. The question of where local specificities are discussed in the narrative is as critical as the actual information conveyed. The chapter speaks to the analytical challenge of interpreting a narrative that is, on the one hand, reflective of the non-linear and essentially decentralised nature of the local, yet on the other filters this nature through the linear rigours of writing. Starting from fleeting experiences of the local, highly subjective to the individual that makes them, Hawes turns to an exemplary discussion of Argos, Thebes, and Messenia that exposes the mechanics of a scripted localism, a literary approximation to place. The discussion of Pausanias’ localistic perspective extends to the narrative technique of cross references and to instances where such connections were deliberately denied: the case in point being Pausanias’ treatment of the notorious problem of the location of Homeric Pylos.

This chapter embarks from the observation that ancient Greek settlements occupied three categorically separate yet interwoven landscapes: the natural, the human, and the imagined environment. It traces their presence at Hermione in the south-eastern Argolid to disclose multiple levels and layers of localisation and steers the investigation to places where all of these vectors combined. In the highly inclusive cult of Demeter Chthonia, the blend included communal preference, local vegetation, and a deliberately local variant of underworld conceptions. The cult of Demeter Chthonia at Hermione involved the killing of a frisky cow with sickles by four old women. It appears impossible to explain why the cow ritual took the idiosyncratic form that it did. Yet the comparison with cults of Demeter Chthonia elsewhere suggests the close interplay between agricultural and eschatological aspects. Although united with other Demeter cults under the same epiclesis and in accordance with the polymorphous nature of Greek religion, the cult in Hermione attests to lively conversations with the specific features of the local landscape, and the desire of the community to make sense of it.