We started out this investigation with the task of imagining what it would be like for the Corinthians to encounter Paul’s discourse about his god(s), to see what the appeal might have been and what might have caused the Corinthians to join the Christ movement as a result of Paul’s work. I argued along the way that the framework of practice of the Corinthians would have shaped their reception of Paul’s discourse around the father god, his son (Jesus, Christ, the lord) and the pneuma (for some Corinthians), meaning that they understood Paul’s god(s) as a chord of gods rather than as a singular god – a small group of gods that usually shared a common mythological/genealogical/historical connection, as well as a shared cultic life in a particular local context. These chords of gods were often envisioned as working together for and with their human adherents in a reciprocal relationship of mutual exchange for the betterment of all parties involved. Most of this book has involved imagining the picture from the Corinthians’ side rather than arguing for Pauline intention in the literary evidence of the Corinthian correspondence. This was done to show the likelihood that Paul’s discourse would have reasonably been understood within the framework of chord of gods practice so universally familiar to ancients in the Mediterranean world, including in Corinth.

Obviously, we cannot know with certainty what motivated the Corinthian gentiles to respond favourably to Paul and join the movement. If nothing else, the chord of gods scenario for which I have argued in this book gives us a reasonable, historically based context for the understandability of the group practices that Paul was advocating. As we saw in the Introduction, ‘monotheism’ and ‘polytheism’ are really unhelpful and inaccurate terms to describe the religious landscape of the ancient world because they artificially divide that world into two groups that had little in common and were therefore at odds with each other in every way – both false characterisations. So, transitioning from a polytheistic to a monotheistic religious worldview was not the dynamic at play between the Corinthians and Paul.

Traditionally, the Second Punic War has been conceptualised as the predictable collision between the two great powers of the Central Mediterranean, Rome and Carthage, whose competition for the same resources sucked them into escalating confrontations which would ultimately result in the disappearance of Carthage. There has therefore been a tendency to think in terms of a bipolar world, in which other local communities passively witnessed the conflagration between the two powers, ‘an outside war’ in which they found themselves ‘implicated more or less forcibly’.

In the last two decades, however, the development of postcolonial theory, firstly, and later the application to Ancient History of the theoretical paradigms of International Relations, have made it clear that the Mediterranean world of the time was a multipolar space, in which a myriad of political actors (state, but also individual) battled to pursue their own agendas. The confluence of some of these actors into the orbit of one or the other great power was what determined the balance of regional power. Hellenistic war, in fact, tended to have as an objective the erosion of the enemy power’s network of alliances and the conversion, as far as possible, of some of the adversary’s old allies into one’s own. In this respect, the Second Punic War was no exception.

Unilateral or reciprocal gift-giving is perhaps as old as society itself. The giving of presents involves, in the first instance, the valuation of certain goods for their tangible utility or their intrinsic value. Their donation, however, necessarily implies a transfer to the other, an initial loss which benefits the receiver. Gift-giving is intrinsically a connotative act, a symbolic initiative. The object becomes a present and, as such, constitutes a token. The codes of this sign, its ciphers and implications, are recognisable by both parties – the giver and the receiver – although they do not always have analogous meanings and inferences. The richness of the diplomatic gift derives, in the first place, from this polysemy. At the same time, however, the gift was also selected (or even created) without a primarily practical purpose or functionality, being oriented to a symbolic role as a material manifestation of a state of mind and a political climate. Both dimensions of the diplomatic gift, understood as an offering endowed with political significance, were often combined. Certain goods, characterised by their exceptional value, high opinion of their beauty or their practical utility were selected (and thus imbued with symbolic capital) for this higher mission, losing in this transaction their everyday use and instead being exhibited aspure status items. The study of the gift through a political prism also offers us a field rich in implications and nuances. Gift-giving can be interpreted as a voluntary mechanism that introduces or facilitates dialogue between interlocutors and, at a second stage, the attraction or alignment of wills, something especially pertinent in the context of ancient Mediterranean imperialism. It therefore plays an important strategic and symbolic role, constituting an instrument of historical (and anthropological) analysis of primary importance.

Rome’s victories, first in the Punic Wars and then against the kingdoms of the Hellenistic East, made it the focal point of the Mediterranean. Year after year embassies undertook the often arduous and dangerous journey to Rome to demonstrate their loyalty or make requests. Success was not guaranteed. Ambassadors had to navigate an unfamiliar political system, canvassing individual senators in advance of their appearance before the senate, drawing attention to past support for Rome or perhaps highlighting kinship between their two states. They could also bring gifts, an affirmation of friendship and allegiance. The most striking and most visible of the gifts brought by embassies from the Greek world was the gold crown. Such crowns in one form or another had been a feature of international relations since the late fifth century bc and stood on the borderline between diplomatic and honorific culture.

The first half of the second century bc offers a particular good opportunity to study the part played by crowns (stephanoi) in diplomacy. Not only was this a crucial time in the history of the eastern Mediterranean, during which cities and states had to come to terms with a new dominant power, but diplomatic activity is well represented in the evidence.

It is fairly self-explanatory how Paul’s (father) god and (lord Jesus) Christ language would represent personified divine figures. It is not so clear whether his pneuma language would have similarly represented a personified divine figure to the Corinthians. What follows is a focus on the language of pneuma in the Corinthian correspondence to see whether it would fit with the general expectations of Paul’s audience when they heard such a term. Next, we need to get a sense of the constitution of Paul’s initial Corinthian audience to see how the range of possible understandings of pneuma might match up with the constituents of his group. Finally, I will address some of the language of pneuma in 1 and 2 Corinthians, assuming that Paul’s use of this language in the letters has some basic continuity with his unrecoverable initial conversations with the Corinthians.

Scholarly Approaches to Pneuma in Paul’s Writings

Greeks and Romans consistently personified their gods and depicted them in human, or partially human, form regardless of the nature of the god. While gentiles could easily imagine Paul’s (father) god and (lord Jesus) Christ as personified, anthropomorphised divine beings, it is unclear whether this was the case for the pneuma.

Horse hybrids reveal a wide range of meanings. Since riding requires control of an animal much more powerful than the rider, it was a psychologically charged experience that found expression in hybrid figures of riders fused to their horses. Pegasos, the horse with wings, is the hero Bellerophon’s companion and makes it possible for him to slay another hybrid, Chimaira. The best-known horse hybrid is the centaur, but centaurs come in different varieties. Some are human to their toes, with a horse’s rear end jutting out of the middle of the creature’s human back. Others exhibit a human head and torso rising from the horse’s withers. Since the centaur is frequently used as a symbol of unrestrained lust, the change in form forces the viewer to consider uncomfortable questions regarding sexuality and animality. Yet centaurs are more than the embodiment of rampant sex drives, since the opposite of licentious behaviour is embodied by another centaur: Cheiron, the tutor of heroes. The centaur expresses the kaleidoscopic nature of being and identity in the Archaic Greek world.

Human/snake hybrids played a significant role in the Athenian imagination: the snake’s connections with the earth expressed the Athenian claim to autochthony. This claim was complicated. For some aristocratic gene, autochthony marked them as superior to more recent arrivals, but the foundational myth of Athens, involving Hephaistos’ attempted rape of Athena, was tinged with incest and pollution, indicating some ambivalence towards autochthony. Traditions of snake-bodied kings reflected a conception of the past that was conceptually both near and far from the present. The hybridity of the snake-figured ancestor connected them to a deep past but also bridged the gap that separated the present and connected past from the plupast. This was a particular concern in the sixth century, as new notions of Athenian identity were taking shape. Bluebeard, the famous pedimental sculpture from the Archaic Akropolis, embodies this. Bluebeard can be identified as the Tritopatores, ancestral deities of the Athenians. These hybrids signify the continuous irruption of the deep past into the current world, a condition that produced a creative tension between order and chaos.

This chapter provides a discussion of the anxieties within (conventionally cisgendered) communities faced with the complex realities of transgender identities, sexual binarism and dysphoria. Ancient discourse tended to reduce this to a simple binary according to which conventional constructions of cisgendered bodies contrasted with a single representation of anomaly: the hermaphrodite. The story of Hermaphroditos, however, reveals that sexual hybridity and ethnic categorization (Karians and Greeks) operated in tandem and recursively: one group’s culture hero (as founder of marriage) become another’s intersex monstrosity. Hermaphroditos is only one example of a body undergoing sexual transformation, and other figures, such as Teiresias, Kaineus and even cross-dressing Achilles, illustrate that there existed a space for imagining alternatives to conventional categories. But an imaginative space is not a manifesto, and sexual anomaly (as it appears in ancient thinking) illustrates a trajectory of Greek culture: hybrids and anomalous bodies become partly decorative and, in literary works, interesting paradoxes, while their power to shock was largely relegated to the sphere of magic.

Chapter 5 begins with griffins and gorgons, exploring the connections between wondrous objects and hybrids. Gorgons also prompt a discussion of gender and hybridity. This chapter juxtaposes the gorgon and other female demons who threaten mothers and children with the satyr, an exaggerated figure of the man identified by and with his penis. These matched exaggerations, by turns horrific and comic, illustrate the function of the hybrid as a projection of certain human anxieties: what if the man were no more than his erection? What if the woman were as dangerous as she is beautiful? What if a mother devoured her children instead of protecting them? Each caricature exists as a counterpoint to the ordinary men and women encountered in our daily lives, but in recognizing these alternatives the Greeks are also using the contrafactual to ask what exactly it means to be human. For this reason, transformation is a recurring theme in early Greek culture, with a wide range of applications from the stage to ritual initiation. Here too the cosmos is a space of entanglement. If a human shares some characteristic with an animal, does the divine also partake of this mutability?

Hybrids were integral to the classificatory schemes that organized knowledge in the wake of Alexander’s conquests. Texts produced by Hanno, Ktesias and Megasthenes reveal the slippage whereby ethnographic description created hierarchies of territories and cultures exemplified by hybrid animals and exotic humans. In literary texts India played an especially significant role. It was a mirror image of the Mediterranean, yet far enough away to also generate anomalous wonders on its borders. It was not merely the exotic animals of distant lands, such as camels, leopards, and giraffes, that astonished the Greek subjects of Hellenistic kings, but also the descriptions of anomalous humans, such as Blemmyes, Dog-Heads and Skiapods, that confirmed an orderly Mediterranean world of properly recognizable humanity, the edges of which were populated by the monstrous, the ugly and the deformed. Ethnography and paradoxography were therefore highly conservative genres that provided hierarchies structured on normality and anomaly to reinforce order.