Questions of the American founding are organized around debates about its republican, liberal, or religious heritage. I locate the founding not in a historical moment but in a mythology reenacted in the cultural imagination. In that narrative, which America shares with Rome, the community is continually reconstituted by ongoing refoundings of Strangers who are dislocated from their own place and past. Where foundings are usually placed in service to securing an identity, the Roman and American foundings unsettle identity.The Introduction provides an argument for how we can understand the tensions that lie in the formation of identity and narratives of belonging, and how we can, in turn, draw on Rome to explore these tensions in American culture and politics.

This chapter introduces the subject of prostheses, prosthesis use, and prosthesis users in classical antiquity. It compares contemporary, historical, and ancient historical prostheses and indentifies certain types of continuity across millennia. It undertakes a literature review of the current state of scholarship on impairment and disability in classical antiquity, highlighting how little attention has been paid to assistive technology by scholars to date. It explains the methodology that will be used in this monograph. It provides an overview of the different types of evidence that will be used (i.e. literary, documentary, archaeological, bioarchaeological). It outlines the contents of the monograph, chapter by chapter.

In March of 49, Cicero wrote to his friend Atticus with an update on the situation in Rome after Caesar had taken control of the capital. He described how life was getting back to normal and people settled in under the new regime. Personally, Cicero considered his options and asked, ‘What shall I do? Rush madly for Brundisium, appeal to the loyalty of the municipalities?’. The main obstacle he faced was, as he said, that the boni would not follow and neither would anyone else.1 His reference to a group of people called boni, who were apparently reluctant to come to the rescue of the old political order, is intriguing: who were they, and what lay behind their stance at this critical juncture in the life of the republic?

The introduction gives an overview of the book’s aim and the conceptual approach to its topic. The subject is the particular way in which the Greeks, in the context of their general project of understanding the world, have made sense of their past. That means it is about history as an element of Greek culture. The concept with which the subject is dealt with is that of intentional history, which is based on the theories of Maurice Halbwachs and Aleida and Jan Assmann on collective memory and social remembrance. With ‘intentional history’, I refer to that part of history that is relevant to the collective identity of social groups of all sizes. This concept allows statements to be made across cultures and epochs and thus makes it possible to draw a connection from antiquity to modernity.

Herodotus’ (fifth century BCE) famous assertion that Egyptians are the “opposite to other men in almost all matters” (2.83) has set the tone for analyses of Egypt ever since. On the one hand, Egypt’s incomparably rich documentary record, preserved in the papyri and other material remains, has attracted extraordinary scholarly attention. On the other hand, Egypt’s unusual geography and the specialized kinds of agricultural and social organization has given rise to it being seen as non-representative. Moreover, a scholarly view that tends to look from the imperial center outward sees Egypt on the margins, leading to a characterization of its historical developments – not always explicitly acknowledged – as at once exceptional and peripheral.

This chapter introduces the reader to some major themes and sources of evidence in the study of ancient Roman music, as well as surveying the history of scholarship in this field. It also provides an overview of the four main chapters and their contribution to the overall themes of the book.

The introduction provides an overview of certain recurring subjects of the study, including music’s role in fostering the “good cheer” of the banquet, the power of metasympotic representations, the use of music for communication and display, the social and political aspects of self- and class-display through social music, ways in which elite music-making at archaic and classical symposia influenced customs of later periods and their interpretation, and the interconnections between dining and the festival/theater in all periods.

Chapter 1 outlines the theoretical basis on which the following chapters build and defines adaptations of literature to cinema, television, and other screens as cinemetamorphoses, an allusion to the title of Ovid’s most famous work. Scholars distinguish between foreground and background Ovidianism: the former indicates intentional, the latter unconscious or not immediately obvious affinities between a work or passage by Ovid and allusions to, or echoes of, this source in later literature or the visual arts. Sergei Eisenstein, the great Russian filmmaker and theoretician of cinema, coined the expression montage of attractions for one of the creative principles of film editing; in the present book, his term is applied in an expanded sense: that of indicating the affinities, either close or loose, between Ovid’s works and films based on or taking up various topics, characters, plot situations, and additional aspects, primarily from famous myths in his Metamorphoses, to which Ovid has given definitive shape. A Roman marble relief showing Hermes, Orpheus, and Eurydice illustrates the close ties between text and image through a classical visual work of art. This chapter also provides a preview of the following chapters’ contents. Finally, Chapter 1 gives examples of the kind of background Ovidianism largely excluded from this book.