During the tenth through the seventh centuries BCE, the Cypriot Iron Age city-kingdoms were established and Cyprus gradually emerged on the international stage of the ancient Near East within the sphere of the Phoenicians, Assyrians, and Egyptians. According to later tradition, Greek heroes (e.g., Teucros of Salamis) founded most of the city-kingdoms, there was an indigenous stronghold at Amathus, and Phoenicians founded a colony at Kition. Inscriptions support this picture of three distinct population groups resident on Cyprus, each preserving its individual language. Archaeological evidence reveals very little of the Cypriot way of life during these centuries within the settlements; we are chiefly dependent on funerary remains and the evidence from religious sanctuaries; however, the material culture from these sites sheds some light upon the concerns of the inhabitants and how they expressed their diverse identities. The funerary record also reveals the emergence of an elite group who buried their dead in elaborate built tombs – most spectacular are the wealthy so-called Royal Tombs of Salamis. This chapter examines changes in the geopolitical organization and how Cyprus was incorporated within the East Mediterranean during the Early Iron Age, namely through emerging trade with the Aegean and political relationships with the Assyrians.

This broad survey of select Aegean islands and the Greek-speaking coast of western Anatolia reviews the revival of settlements in these areas, after the collapse of Bronze Age civilization. Opening and closing with the imagined vision of this world in Homeric epic, the survey traces the evolution of regional styles in art and architecture, linked to independent polities that developed patterns in self-government that became the Greek polis. Early Iron Age sites, tombs, and artifacts from Euboea, the Cyclades, East Greek islands, the Dodecanese and the mainland areas of Aeolis, Ionia, and Caria are examined against the mythological paradigms of migration and Greek colonization; these regions demonstrate widespread continuity behind the later legends of a wave of Hellenism, and enjoyed close and fertile contacts with neighboring Anatolian cultures such as Phrygia and Lydia. Such relationships fostered innovations in the Archaic period such as the first monumental temples and sculptures in marble, and the evolution of poetic genres, among island and coastal entrepreneurs in collaboration (as well as conflict) with a succession of inland empires, until the Ionian revolt against Achaemenid Persia.

This chapter explores the role and construction of race in Plato and Aristotle’s political philosophy. Focusing especially on Plato’s noble lie and Aristotle’s theory of natural slavery, I argue that both philosophers appeal to racial difference in order to reinforce and justify the differential access of the members of the societies they consider to political power and even freedom. While Plato introduces race into the kallipolis in order to persuade the farmers, craftsmen, and soldiers to accept their political disenfranchisement, Aristotle draws on and racializes existing Greek stereotypes about non-Greeks in support of his theory of natural slavery. Despite the significant differences between their respective accounts of and attitudes towards race, I argue that Plato and Aristotle’s accounts cumulatively show that the classical philosophical tradition was already quite interested not only in existing racial stereotypes and classifications but also in the mechanics of racecraft and the political uses of race.

This chapter reflects on ancient schooling as a foundational institution for fiction pedagogy, arguing that the classroom served not only to transmit literary knowledge but to regulate the interpretive strategies through which fiction was read, written, and critiqued. It situates the classical curriculum as both a training ground and a target for the innovations of Imperial prose fiction. Revisiting the book’s central case studies, the chapter frames the novel as a genre defined by its playful but defiant engagement with the scholastic “rules of the game.” The chapter positions educators as early arbiters of fictionality whose influence extended beyond the classroom. Yet education was not the only institution shaping ancient fiction. The conclusion gestures toward future work on fiction in relation to philosophy, religion, law, and the visual arts, as well as in later Byzantine and medieval prose narratives. It closes by reaffirming the book’s core claim: that the complex relationship between fiction and paideia structured not only the form of Imperial prose fiction, but also broader cultural debates over imagination and the authority of the classical past.

‘Black Athena/Black Athenians’? At the dawning of the Age of ‘European supremacy’, intellectuals preceding Martin Bernal engaged in the reclamation of Africa and its role in the world. This argument takes up these concerns in four sections. Section 14.2 considers Bernal and the work of his predecessors who engaged questions of a diverse and inclusive antiquity that included peoples of African descent. Section 14.3 focuses on Phillis Wheatley and her genius in harnessing classical allusion as a poetic device and revolutionary speech. Section 14.4 focuses on the redefinition and reframing of Egypt and Egyptians, and Ethiopia and Ethiopians in relation to classical discourses and their employment in Black revolutionary conceptualisations from the beginnings of the American Republic through the post-Reconstruction period. In Section 14.5, the overlooked scholarship on antiquity of historically Black colleges and universities is engaged as a marker of the long history of challenges to White supremacy.

This chapter uses the theoretical frameworks of racial formations, racecraft, and intersectionality to analyse the racial dimensions of the two accounts of the massacre of the Pelasgian men of Lemnos and their enslaved Thracian concubines by the Pelasgian women of Lemnos in Apollonius’ Argonautica. The chapter argues that the epic presents the Lemnian women’s actions as driven by their sense that the Pelasgian men had overturned the racial hierarchy of the island that had previously benefitted them. The Lemnian women’s violent resistance to their change of status is presented by the narrator as an overreaction prompted by sexual jealousy new sentence. But it is presented by Hypsipyle as the restoration of the ‘proper’ racial order. Intersectionality helps to tease out the different racial destinies of the two groups of non-Greek women on Lemnos. The free Pelasgian women are to be the mothers of racially superior sons, whereas the Thracian girls, as mothers of the racially inferior sons of the Pelasgians, are to be exterminated with them so that that Lemnos can fulfil its destiny to become the source of the Greek founders of Cyrene.

Current thinking views the ancient cultures of the Mediterranean as highly interconnected. This contrasts with late twentieth-century ideas of either geographically separate regions or more developed centers that dominated less complex peripheral societies. A major inspiration for the present approach is a post-processual understanding of the complex dimensions of consumption. Elite burial goods at Lefkandi ca. 1100–825 BCE illustrate how imports were used in status strategies. In the eighth century BCE, there is a decrease in valuable grave goods as dedications of imported luxury items in public sanctuaries became the preferred means of elite display. Current views also reflect postcolonial understanding of non-indigenous settlements as sites of hybridity and inbetweenness, not the imposition of a colonizing ethnicity on local identities but new cultural syntheses. Examples include a large number of the early so-called Greek colonies. A recently excavated example is L’Amastuola in Apulia, an indigenous settlement of the late eighth century where Greeks came to live in the early seventh century.

This chapter starts from the premise that the Homeric epics are essentially products of the time in which they are conventionally supposed to have been created – very roughly sometime in the late eighth century BCE. The extent to which they might be recognizable as the Iliad and Odyssey we have inherited, having passed through processes like the Pisistratid "recension" and the hands of Alexandrian editors, is certainly debatable, but there is enough evidence of both a relatively direct and more circumstantial nature to suggest that cycles of epic song, including elements that we can associate with the specifically Homeric epics, were already in circulation in Greece in the decades around 700 BCE. The wider historical and ideological contexts in which this development took place are of particular interest for the questions of why it took place when it did and what its purpose might have been. The archaeological record of the later eighth century can shed light on other important developments in various parts of the Greek world, which together may have some bearing on these questions. At the same time, the epics themselves contain various elements which may provide clues to the ideological context which informed them.

This chapter provides a survey of iconographic themes found in the pottery, figurines, fibulas, terracotta, metalwork, jewelry, and seals produced across Greek-speaking communities. Rejecting a traditional assumption of close ties with the Homeric epics, the study combines two approaches to offer a more socially embedded understanding of image-making in early Greece. Examining the iconography within multiple contexts, from the types of objects on which imagery appears to their archaeological contexts and the material behavior associated with their use, reveals that not just politics but also social reproduction lay behind artistic development. Second, it demonstrates how expanding the discussion to the larger world of representations adds further dimensions to the ways in which the Greeks projected an imagined ideal society. Themes discussed include mourning, warriors and weapons, battle, hunting, horse culture, dance, abduction, divinities and religious iconography, animals, hybrid monsters, and mythic narrative. The developments of Geometric art can be understood as responses to the new complexities of social hierarchy and gender, access to the wider world, the growing integration of religious institutions into community life, and political alliances that constituted the experience of the city-state.

The beginning of iron technology in Greece represents the earliest known phase of iron production and use in Europe. Traditionally, scholars have attributed the emergence of iron technology in Greece to the diffusion of knowledge from the eastern Mediterranean. Over the past twenty years, numerous excavations have brought to light objects and industrial waste that allow us to reconsider how iron working started, how it developed, and its broader impact on the sociocultural changes in ancient Greece. This chapter proposes an alternative interpretation based on a novel interdisciplinary methodology that combines the archaeological examination of style and context with metallographic and chemical analysis to fingerprint the local characteristics of iron technology. The chapter concludes that iron technology appeared as a local, most probably accidental, innovation and was not the result of diffusion. It further argues that the localized technological traditions in both smelting and manufacturing that emerged in Iron Age Greece continued and solidified in the following periods.

This chapter evaluates the Life of Aesop as a fictional biography that traces Aesop’s rise from mute slave to celebrated orator, dramatizing a subversive educational trajectory. Through contests with slaveowners and sophists, Aesop acquires the rhetorical authority associated with elite paideia—yet weaponizes elementary techniques like gnome, chreia, and fable to challenge the prestige of rhetorical schooling. Special focus is given to Aesop’s divine acquisition of speech, his parody of the Platonic Phaedrus, and his schooling under the philosopher Xanthus. The chapter argues that the Life inverts the structure of the rhetorical curriculum: whereas fables were taught as preliminary exercises, Aesop reserves them for the height of his intellectual ascent, delivering animal tales before public assemblies as political counsel. In this way, the Life not only reclaims muthos as a legitimate form of public speech but also reimagines "fiction competence" as the true test of education.

The end of the Bronze Age and the beginning of the Early Iron Age (ca. 1200–1050 BCE) on Crete is known in ceramic terms as the Late Minoan (LM) IIIC period. The LM IIIC period is often considered to represent the start of the Early Iron Age as iron was present, though objects of that material were extremely rare on the island before the eleventh century. The period was characterized by a dramatic shift in settlement patterns and in many aspects of material culture, including settlement organization and architecture, burial and cult practices, and sociopolitical structures. Although these changes mark a clear break from the previous period of Mycenaean influence, there are also elements of continuity. In addition, the island was defined by a high degree of regionalism in LM IIIC (and throughout the EIA), perhaps most visible in variations in settlement patterns, cult activity, burial practices, and ceramic styles. This regionalism was probably influenced by geography, previous traditions, sociopolitical organization, population size, and cultural identity.

In 1988, Congolese philosopher Valentin-Yves Mudimbe called for a study of the influence of Graeco-Roman literature on the European invention of Africa. Whether or not Graeco-Roman literature presents a coherent picture of Africa as a geography and ethnography of alterity, early modern European writings made use of these descriptions to justify European superiority and colonial expansion into African territories. While the aims and contexts of the ancient texts differed widely from their later instrumentalisations, this chapter asks whether Roman representations of African territories and people already show traces of dehumanisation and cultural hierarchies that can be productively analysed with the tools of race and critical race theories.

This chapter explores the challenge of teaching Homer and Vergil in the Roman Empire, focusing on the pleasures of fiction in epic poetry. Using the Phaeacian books of the Odyssey (6–13) and Carthaginian books of the Aeneid (1–4) as case studies, it shows how educators reckoned with the poetic seduction that threatened to derail heroic virtue and integrity. Drawing on philosophical critiques of these canonical poets, the chapter traces evolving responses to the nexus of “Phaeacian pleasures” in their episodes. In the second half, it analyzes how four educators – Plutarch, the anonymous author of the Essay on Homer, Tiberius Claudius Donatus, and Augustine – developed distinctive approaches to epic pleasure. While Plutarch disciplines poetic deception into a propaedeutic for philosophy, the Essay embraces Homeric fiction as a new pedagogy of pleasure. Donatus treats the Aeneid as rhetorical panegyric, while Augustine transforms the affective power of Aeneas and Dido into a new Christian grammar. Together, these authors reveal the centrality of epic pleasure to Imperial education and the divergent strategies by which students learned to navigate literary enchantment