The gods of ancient Rome were thought to possess a wide range of responsibilities towards their mortal worshippers. Soldiers might call upon Mars to protect them whilst on campaign, artisans laboured under the guidance of Minerva, and farmers looked to Ceres to ensure a bounteous crop.1 Some gods possessed many roles: Apollo was connected to poets, oracles and medicine, but not always alone: other gods also possessed oracular shrines, such as Zeus at Dodona, and Apollo also shared his medical knowledge with his son, Aesculapius.2 The Dioscuri also participated in this network of divine responsibilities. They were associated with the followers of their own athletic pursuits: horsemanship and boxing, as well as ensuring the safety of sailors and, owing to their own bond, serving as examples of fraternal piety.

Gods were often thought to affect the human world through their actions: responding to vows and oaths; sending signs through auguries and auspices; and, at times, drawing on their power over the mortal realm to ensure a desired outcome. Most chose these more subtle ways of communicating their will to their worshippers, but some took it a step further and manifested themselves in human form, as an epiphany. Castor and Pollux were unusual in the number of their epiphanies: no fewer than nine epiphanies are reported to have occurred in Italy or connected to Roman interests elsewhere in the Mediterranean. These epiphanies are not simply proof of the divine brothers’ power but are also closely bound to the political system of Rome: their first epiphany preserved the Republic at its very inception, while later epiphanies were used to claim the gods’ favour for prominent generals. Further consideration of these epiphanies therefore suggests the variety of perspectives and responses of different individuals regarding interactions between gods and humans.

Castor and Pollux have come a long way since their arrival in Rome at the start of the Republic. As traced in the preceding three chapters, they were linked to the preservation of the Republic and their Forum temple was a rallying point for popular action, but they had also been connected to the elite equites equo publico and prominent generals throughout the Republic. The Dioscuri thus appealed to a broad cross-section of the Roman populace. This final aspect of their cult is therefore perhaps not such a jarring change as it first might appear. Instead, it is a return to the foundation of their divinity: their fraternal harmony. They were the best of brothers, completely devoted to each other to the extent of sharing their immortality so both could live.

The city of Rome was filled with temples which would have often been the most obvious manifestation of the cults they housed. Roman temples were religious locations, containing the statues of the deities and their altars, where priests performed rituals, and where worshippers might come to beg a boon from the gods, to fulfil a vow and to give a dedication in thanks for their aid. However, this was not their exclusive purpose, as temples also possessed other functions from the political and cultural spheres.

On a Late Geometric krater from Argos (Fig. 3.0), two panels with lines of female dancers appear above a band of birds, likewise arranged in a linear and collective formation. Even as the birds’ design follows the conventions regularly used for portraying avians in Geometric art, their bent limbs simultaneously mirror the legs peeking out from the skirts of each dancer above, suggesting relations of equivalence between the flock and choral group, whose members also move from left to right around the body of the bowl. Among the abstract shapes used to depict the birds are the wavy lines that recur in the zigzag decorative motifs in the adjacent bands and panels. As stylized representations of bodies of water, these elements both position the choruses in the verdant landscape that, as noted in Chapter 2, typically supplies the backdrop for maiden dancers in the archaic visual and textual accounts and cohere with the artist’s portrayal of the birds: as their iconography makes clear, these are water birds, the ornithological species with whom our sources (as examples cited in this chapter illustrate) most regularly associate choral performers.

In a scene from the third book of Heliodorus’ Aethiopika, a work generally dated to the early third century C.E., Calasiris, a priest of Isis from Memphis, treats his youthful interlocutor Cnemon to a description of the grand procession of the Thessalian Ainianians to the tomb of Neoptolemos at Delphi.

A fragment of Pindar preserved and identified by Athenaeus as a hyporcheme (14.631c = fr. 112 S.-M.) describes a Spartan parthenaic troupe (if the text is sound) as an ἀγέλα or ‘herd’. The term recurs in a second Pindaric composition, fr. 122 S.-M., where it again refers to a troupe of maidens, these expressly figured as cows, who take part in a choral-style performance en route to a sacrifice. In a third usage of the expression in fr. 70b.22 S.-M., the Pindaric performers of this dithyramb apply it to the herd of wild beasts, their species undefined, whose collective dancing in a cacophonous chorus made up of gods, nymphs, animals and other sonorous objects is said to ‘enchant’ Dionysus (ὁ δὲ κηλεῖται χορευοίσαισι κα[ὶ θηρῶν ἀγέλαις); in this instance the scene imagined by the singers stands as the template and paradigm for their own more earth-bound choreia, similarly staged by way of tribute to the god as they participate in his signature choral genre.

Hesiod’s Theogony opens in a manner that sharply differentiates it from its Homeric counterparts: in place of the singular ‘goddess’ or ‘Muse’ whom the Iliad and Odyssey proems invoke, Hesiod’s divinities form a plurality. More than this, the opening vignette depicts the Muses engaged in a highly particularized and signature activity, performing a ring dance around a body of water and altar with the ‘tender feet’ distinctive of choral maidens in archaic epic and lyric poetry.

On the penultimate ring of Achilles’ shield, Hephaestus fashions an image of a chorus of youths and maidens, metallic bodies miraculously moving, whose appearance and dance figures the poet minutely describes (Il. 18.590–605, cited below). The making of the shield stands as the capstone in a concatenation of smaller episodes that begins with Thetis’ arrival at Hephaestus’ home at 18.369, and then moves from the reception room of the house to the god’s forge nearby. My primary purpose in singling out this segment of book 18 is to suggest a thematic logic and broader trajectory to its sequence of scenes, and more particularly to the triad of objects, tripods, golden girls and the armour for Achilles, selected by the poet for detailed description in each portion of Thetis’ visit.

Sometime in the late fifth century the comic poet Callias produced what would come to be known as the Letter Tragedy (Γραμματικὴ Τραγῳδία) or Letter Show (Γραμματικὴ Θεωρία). According to Athenaeus’ account of the drama at Deipn.

Among the artefacts distinct to Boeotia are a series of female terracotta figurines dressed in bell-shaped skirts, these fashioned on the potter’s wheel and flattened while still malleable; all are Late Geometric or sub-Geometric and were found in the graves of women and children from the tenth to the eighth century or in votive deposits associated with these. Designs evocative of weaving decorate many of their garments, and the most highly ornamented of the figurines, dated to the late eighth century, comes complete with locks of hair, a necklace, sandals and a frieze of dancing females circling around her richly patterned skirt; the dancers are similarly dressed in woven textiles (fig. 7.0).