Chapter 6 explains the growth of the now Sant’Angelo district as a mixed use residential/commercial space from the eleventh to fourteenth centuries as Rome’s scattered population migrated to the Tiber’s bend and how the ancient space was remembered.

Chapter 7 examines music in various Jewish meal-settings: elite Jewish banquets, rabbinic dinners, wedding feasts, public festivals, and the communal meals of the Jewish sects. Music and social dining were occasions for self-definition, personal and corporate, as Jewish elites sought to place themselves along a continuum from resistance to assimilation in relation to the prevailing non-Jewish culture in the Diaspora and foreign rule in Palestine. The occasions included upper-class Jewish dinner parties, as well as Jewish festivals, where national music helped define Jewish identity in settings that included private dinner parties and mass public dining. The Jewish festival was also an occasion for social interaction between Jews and non-Jews. A smattering of non-Jews attended Jewish festivals, and there is reason to believe that many Jews attended the public banquets of the gentiles. Moreover, upper-class Jews such as Philo, who had Hellenic educations, were interested not only in cultivating relationships with upper-class Greeks by dining with them but also in believing that their own people had music just as fine as that of the Greeks and just as ancient in its foundations.

Chapter 5 looks at the music that elite men and women made at their banquets, including their singing and dancing, and the types of professional entertainments they provided as hosts of social affairs. Music of the concert stage and theater were sources of entertainment for upper-class banquets and included excerpts from plays, solo works by citharodes, various kinds of dance (including mime and pantomime), and occasionally even staged plays with music and all. Elites differed about which forms of entertainment were suitable for a dinner party and whether it was proper for an aristocrat to sing or dance at a dinner party. Where aristocrats of the classical era had performed music as a form of personal self-display, reflecting their educations, elites of the Roman era engaged in self-imaging through their choices in music and their talk about it.

Chapter 2 analyzes the attraction of the circus to republican generals as a site for construction of temples and porticos over the following two centuries.

“The Isolation of Amphiaraos,” argues that Pindar generates tensions between Amphiaraos’ contemporary status as a Theban oracle and his identity as the noble Argive seer portrayed in epic and tragedy, in order to establish Amphiaraos as a site of contestation between modes of human and divine exaltation. In Nemean 9, Pindar contrasts Amphiaraos as underdetermined oracle with two figures defined by types of immortality also potentially available to the victor: Adrastos, who enjoys immortality in cult and Hektor, who enjoys poetic immortality in epic song. In Pythian 8, Pindar localizes this modeling more explicitly in the exaltation of epinician praise by first setting up Amphiaraos as a disoriented oracular voice, removed from the reciprocal systems of epinician exaltation, then reestablishing his right to participate in those systems by assimilating him to the contemporary model of the Aiginetan pater laudandi, thus reorienting him to his humanity.

This chapter describes the music performed by upper-class diners at archaic/classical symposia as documented by literary evidence and red-figure pottery. Following a discussion of the rise of the aristocratic symposion and shifts in musical entertainment from the picture given in Homer to the period when upper-class men began singing a repertoire of elite poetry at drinking parties, the following topics are taken up: the group libation paean, scolia, elegiac verse and its performance mode, other types of sung poetry, and dance. The aim is to identify the musical rituals as precisely as possible. This prepares for a discussion in Chapter 2 of the social function of aristocratic lyrody at symposia and its historical development.

“Herakles Looks Back at the World,” argues that in Isthmian 4 and Nemeans 3 and 4 Pindar deploys Herakles’ biography as a framework for theological modeling by foregrounding the apotheosis as a salient feature of Herakles’ epinician identity. The motif of the pillars of Herakles informs the significance of the apotheosis, characterizing Herakles’ unparalleled passage from mortality to immortality as a break within the arc of his life, rather than as a reward analogous to the praise and exaltation enjoyed by the victor. This modeling emphasizes that the victor’s epinician exaltation belongs to the world of human experience, defined by mortality, a world that Herakles leaves behind with his apotheosis. The chapter emphasizes how Pindar’s theological modeling plays on the tensions and congruencies that develop between the depictions of Herakles within an ode and those already in play in the local landscape, demonstrating the distinct resonances evoked by the matrix of pillars and apotheosis at Thebes (Isth. 4) and at Aigina (Nems. 3 and 4).

To the west of the Theater of Marcellus, efforts to erase a neighborhood were only partially successful. Buildings were removed but not the cultural identity of the space nor the subtle but discernible topographical imprint of its prior life. The Jewish community that first arrived from Trastevere a millennium ago simply moved aside when the circus plaza was swept clean and then slipped back to reclaim its long-held space.

“Exaltation at Akragas: Herakles, the Dioskouroi, and Theron,” argues that in Olympian 3 Pindar’s theological modeling brings Herakles and the Dioskouroi together with the victor, Theron, tyrant of Akragas, ininto an intricate network of divine and mortal relationships. Theron’s place within this network, as established and celebrated by the ode, praises him for his exceptional privilege and his corresponding achievement in bathing his city in piety and exaltation. This is a differently flavored theology of mortality, cut to the needs of one of the most powerful men of the Greek world, but it ultimately articulates the same distinction between Theron’s mortality and the immortality of his patrons that is modeled elsewhere in the epinician corpus by demonstrating that his privileged closeness to Herakles and the Dioskouroi is only exceptional, and thus meaningful, in light of his mortality.