Herodotus adapts Homeric techniques for manipulating time as a means of structuring an extensive narrative. Like the poet, he uses anachronies (analepses and prolepses) to expand a chronologically focused main story – especially narratorial anachronies that address issues of geographical, ethnographical, and historical significance. The importance of epic precedent is especially visible in the open-ended closure of Herodotus’ narrative, and the sense that it creates of the Histories as being, like an epic poem, both a self-contained whole and part of a larger story to be continued. Herodotus also follows Homer’s lead with regard to narrative rhythm and narrative frequency. Like the epics, the Histories slow down markedly in the climactic stage of the story, and in both authors large-scale repeating narratives serve to juxtapose a character’s version of events with the primary narrator’s, or with another character’s, as a means of highlighting personality traits or thematic issues.

Varying degrees of tragic stylization are also visible in other stories of Persian and Hellenic monarchs. Tragic effects cluster at the beginning and end of Herodotus’ “biography” of Cyrus. The story of his birth has folktale roots enhanced by various tragic features (intra-familial violence, fated doom precipitated by preventive measures, a variation on the Atreusmahl myth); the story of his last campaign includes tragic vocabulary and a corrective reference to the Aeschylean law of “learning through suffering.” His successor Cambyses is portrayed as a tragic protagonist on his deathbed, when he learns “too late” the true meaning of divine communications he had previously misinterpreted, with disastrous personal and political consequences. Among Greek tyrants, Herodotus portrays the Samian Polycrates and the Corinthian Periander in tragic fashion, the latter in a narrative that bears several hallmarks of Sophoclean tragedy, including sibling conflict over devotion to a dead parent (cf. the playwright’s Electra).

Chapter 1 (the Introduction) provides the outline of the Secret Book of John, introduces its cast of characters, proposes a theory of its date and provenance, and discusses whether it was written by an individual in a communal setting. Some sort of communal background seems presupposed given the emphasis on ritual elements (e.g., baptism, hymn singing), and the Book’s ascetic rejection of sex.

This chapter examines secondary or subsidiary choruses in Greek tragedy, illustrating the manner in which ancient playwrights staged multiple choruses in conflict. I argue that secondary choruses complicate the standard model of the tragic chorus as a single and static entity by forcing spectators to confront various choral groups. My discussion focuses on the two modes enabled by these supplementary choruses across tragedy, comedy and satyr play: how these secondary collectives, when in the presence of the main chorus, create a ‘swarm’, and when they are not, act as ‘spectres’ that ‘haunt’ and inform audience perceptions of the main chorus. It offers extended readings of two plays which employ secondary choruses to achieve maximum dramatic effect: Aeschylus’ Suppliants, where the playwright uses the Danaids’ respective meetings with the secondary choruses of Egyptians and Argive soldiers to chart the women’s path to Greekness, and Euripides’ Phaethon, which uniquely brings together choral spectre and swarm in a remarkable scene in which the main chorus is forced to witness, silently, an alternative version of itself, as another chorus sings the song that they themselves had longed to sing.

Herodotus and the epinician poets alike commemorate extraordinary deeds, with an essential interest in the relationship between past and present events. Their divergent perspectives on the past are revealed by comparison of their accounts of the fall of Sardis and the colonization of Libyan Cyrene. Herodotus modifies Bacchylides’ version of the former (Ode 3) in characteristic ways, rationalizing Apollo’s rescue of Croesus, citing a Lydian source for the marvel, and focusing on the transience of human prosperity, the key to Herodotus’ view of history. This principle challenges the transgenerational stability of aristocratic excellence that informs the epinician perspective, demonstrated by Pindar’s presentation of Cyrene’s settlement (Pythians 4, 5, 9). Drawing upon family traditions, Pindar highlights the sacred origins and continuity of the Battiad dynasty. By contrast, Herodotus cites several communal sources in a less idealized narrative that downplays heroic antecedents and acknowledges the difficulties involved in such a colonial expedition.

This coda concludes with a reflection on some of the wider political implications and affordances of the choreographies that were presented in this book. It discusses how choral fragmentations and augmentations might model the politics of group formation in and against the city. It also suggests that the chorus’ spoken and sung contributions explored in the accounts of interruption and interaction likewise reflect the chorus’ capacity to embody political concerns.

This chapter seeks to demonstrate that the Nag Hammadi text is indeed the text referred to by Irenaeus, thus establishing its relatively early date. While confirming Irenaeus’s claim that this work was popular within the Valentinian tradition he regards as heretical, it is argued that Valentinian usage of this text does not imply a Valentinian origin.

It is striking that while ancient writers described the Cyclades largely in negative terms relating to their image of remoteness, the islands’ sanctuaries and churches were commonly ascribed as ‘worth seeing’. This suggests that religious places were successfully maintaining their own reputations irrespective of the impression of the islands’ declines as we have seen already in Strabo’s description of a lack of significant urban space on Tenos but having a well-visited sanctuary (Strabo (Geography, 10.5.11)). Study of the religious places of the Cyclades enables a range of insights into behaviours on a community level as well as within the wider Mediterranean world. Religion is persistent and permeates private and public life. It is cross-cultural while being a fundamental element of group identity. As such, it is an ideal aspect of society by which to understand the impact of socio-economic and political variations as well as resilience in the islands as a result of becoming part of the Roman Empire and later Christianization. The spread and establishment of cult, as well as the evidence of visitors through their offerings and dedications, is indicative of the vitality of the sanctuaries and the range of network connections the islands had over the diachronic period under discussion.

This chapter presents the chorus’ ability to interact and participate directly in dramatic action and dialogue as an overlooked aspect of the chorus’ polyphony. The chapter begins by tackling modern assumptions about ancient tragic performance, including the myth of the tragic coryphaeus, the chorus leader figure who allegedly spoke on behalf of the collective, to whom modern editors assign all choral speech. It then analyses the various lyric dialogues that are found in the surviving corpus of each of the three major tragedians, illustrating how the chorus’ extensive range across the various modes of delivery (sung, recitative and spoken) maps onto tensions of exchange and violence that are typical of Greek drama. The chapter ends with an extended examination of the dynamic interplay between actors and chorus that Sophocles stages in Electra, Philoctetes and Antigone. In the case of Antigone, Sophocles features a silent chorus who refuse to engage with Antigone’s and Creon’s mourning, a silence which reflects the creative ways in which tragedians can direct the chorus’ lyric interactions with actors.