Chapter 2 expands on the alertness of Christian intellectuals to the question of cultural prestige by reading the orations composed by Julian as Caesar (355–60) in the context of the rhetorical and cultural discourse at the imperial court. Drawing on the current re-assessment of Constantius II as pursuing a reputation as a patron of culture and philosophy, the first section argues that Julian’s early panegyrics reinforce this self-image by celebrating the intellectual synergy between the Augustus and his (famously highly cultivated) new Caesar. I further show that Constantius’ imperial propaganda relied on the assumption that allegiance to Christianity was a key factor in establishing his intellectual authority. The second section considers the writings Julian composed during his Gallic campaign (Second Panegyric to Constantius; Consolation to Himself), when his relationship with Constantius was deteriorating. As Julian increasingly exploits philosophical rhetoric to challenge rather than celebrate the Augustus, the identification of Christianity with intellectual authority becomes a polemical target in his writings, marking Julian’s first expressed disagreements with the idea of Christianity as highest philosophy.

Chapter 1 draws on Julian’s earliest surviving oration – the Letter to Themistius – to illustrate the interaction between Julian’s early rhetoric and the political discourse developed at the court of Constantius II. The first section challenges scholarly readings of the Letter as voicing a rejection of the late antique ideal of the sovereign as ensouled law. It argues that Julian’s primary intent in this text lies rather in a desire to advertise his exegetical skills at the expense of his interlocutor, the famous philosopher Themistius. The second sectio contextualises Julian’s ambition in the context of third- and fourth-century debates on the relationship between leadership and culture. It shows that this theme was invested with particular significance by Christian authors – such as Lactantius and Eusebius – who used it in claiming Christianity’s intellectual dominance over pagan thinking. This testifies to the existence of a shared perception that cultural authority legitimised political authority but also signals the ambitions of Christian intellectuals to negotiate Christianity’s cultural prestige in conversation with the Roman elites.

Chapter 3 addresses the writings Julian composed during his sole rule (361–63) following Constantius’ sudden death. I suggest here that Julian’s mature output was grounded in the intuition that the challenge to Christian power had to be channelled into an attack on its identity as a superior interpretive system. The first section draws on a reading of key texts by Constantine and his supporters to contextualise Constantius’ intellectual self-image in the legacy of his father’s cultural policy. Constantine legitimised his subversive status as Christian emperor by projecting himself as the sublime exegete of divine providence. The second section illustrates the strategies Julian devised to deny the validity of Christianity’s hermeneutical claims, which he envisaged as prepared by Greek philosophical achievements and as being therefore derivative and unauthoritative. Julian’s critique was articulated through an attack on Christian exegesis (Against the Galileans) and on what Julian perceived as Christianity’s exploitative relationship with paideia (the School Ban). At the same time, Julian attempted to competitively rethink Greek allegoresis by renouncing the status of Homer as divine, enigmatic text and by composing hymns and writings constructing Greek religion as a ‘cult of culture’.

Several of the gold leaves relate the initiate’s underworld journey to obtain a drink from the waters of memory (mnemosyne). Against the influential interpretation of Jean-Pierre Vernant, who argued that memory in the tablets was a departure from early Greek poetry, I contend that mnemosyne in these texts reflects concerns and ideas from early Greek poetry. Focusing especially on texts from Hipponion and Entella, which were unknown to Vernant, I argue that the ambiguous theme of memory was variously adapted by different ritual performers. Two texts reveal developments of communicative memory from poetic diction (with parallels in Hesiod). At other times, memory designates the mystic community as the group that assures postmortem salvation: in this respect, mnemosyne has a significance like that in lyric poetry (Theognis, Sappho). Pindar, whose afterlife imagery parallels the tablets, shows that positive eschatology can be incorporated with other strategies of memory. The treatment of the name and gender show finally that the tablets can be understood as a practice of memory, in which the identity of the deceased was reshaped and remembered according to the priorities of the group.

Scholars since the nineteenth century have debated whether the gold leaves are “amulets.” This and other magical labels have distorted discussion among scholars about the materiality of the tablets. Instead, I approach the gold leaves through the analytical approach of Material Religion, which examines religious practices primarily in terms of their material expressions rather than their supposed belief content. Viewed through this lens, the tablets and their texts find three useful comparisons: first, the genre of hexameter incantations (epoidai), which points to analogies in performance practice between medicine and private mysteries; second, the inscribed Ephesia Grammata, which articulate a logic of materialization comparable to that of the gold leaves; and third, inscribed lead curses, which supply a material infrastructure for communication with the powers of the underworld. The material approach suggests that the materiality of the tablets constituted an aspect of their poetic performance.

Greek poetic tradition, including practices of live performance, played a key role in shaping Bacchic mysteries. Ritual officiants seized on language, images, and concepts from a traditional poetic repertoire, selecting, combining, and reinterpreting them to suit both the ritual occasion (initiation, burial) and the specific preferences of individual clients. The gold leaves are products of this dynamic. They develop the theme of memory in several different directions, often echoing the language and thought patterns of early epic and lyric; they share fictions of commemoration with funerary epigrams, even using such devices in similar ways; their physical form shows the influence of verse incantations; and even their material points toward metal symbolisms of epic. In all these aspects, the tablets reflect an engagement with the themes and vocabulary of early Greek poetry and its multifaceted performance culture.

In Book 7 of his famous Historíai, the Greek historian Herodotus wrote about Xerxes I, the king who in 480 BCE was mounting the second Persian invasion of Greece and would shortly fight the famous Battle of Thermopylae. But first, in an exceedingly odd footnote to history, Xerxes apparently needed to count his men, so when he came to a vast coastal plain in Thrace, a region that today overlaps the modern countries of Bulgaria, Turkey, and Greece, he halted his army.

Chapter 6 looks at some of the roles played by the domestic buildings of the wealthier and more powerful members of society in Greek communities, particularly during the fourth and third centuries BCE. Over time there was a dramatic growth in the size and opulence of the largest houses. It seems to be the case that the symbolic role of the house began to shift, with owners using their properties as statements of personal power and wealth to an extent which had not been acceptable before. Such changes are most obvious in the late Classical and Hellenistic periods at royal cities such as Vergina and Pella (Greek Macedonia), where monumental palatial buildings covered thousands of square metres. It is argued that, to some extent, their emergence can be viewed as the continuation of a trend already visible by the earlier fourth century BCE in cities like Olynthos and Priene.

Chapter 2 explores archaeological evidence for housing in mainland Greece, the eastern Aegean islands, and Greek settlements on the west coast of Asia Minor. The period covered runs from around 950 BCE to about 600 BCE. The Chapter highlights the fact that a growth in the scale and complexity of the communities themselves during this period was accompanied by the creation of a broader variety of buildings with more specialised roles, as well as by an increase in the size and segmentation of residential buildings. While the exact reason for this change in domestic architecture cannot be pinpointed (and may have been different in different settlements) social factors are suggested as playing a significant role. The Chapter discusses how to interpret the archaeological remains at a number of sites including: Nichoria (Peloponnese), Eretria (Euboia), Lefkandi Toumba (Euboia), Skala Oropou (Attica) and Zagora (Andros). Emphasis is placed on the diversity of house forms in different locations and on differences in the ways in which houses changed through time.