This chapter examines the various ways in which ancient tragic and comic playwrights constructed race on their stages. Inspired by Geraldine Heng’s articulation of race in the premodern past as an ‘essentialised difference’, I explore essentialised conceptions of ethnicity and descent featured in various plays and how these intersected with broader cultural and political discourses around identity in fifth-century Athens. I trace the discourses of alterity and inferiority that feature in various tragic plots centred on interactions between Greeks and barbarians from Aeschylus’ Suppliants to Euripides’ Medea, as well as notions of superiority that foreground the various myths of Athenian autochthony staged across the fifth-century BCE, most prominently in Euripides’ Erechtheus and Ion.

This chapter explores how from the nineteenth century onwards in particular anti-Semitism played a key role in the definition and practices of Classics as a discipline. It traces the roots of such prejudice to virulent Christian rhetoric and violent behaviour starting in late antiquity, and continuing through to modernity. It considers how such expressions have affected the historiography of ancient Israel. It also exposes the racial basis of philology itself, and the disavowal of racism by philologists. Finally, it outlines the role anti-Semitism played in the institutional formation of the subject of Classics in the universities of Europe.

This chapter looks at the relationship between papyrology and race from a historical and disciplinary perspective. European imperialism, from Napoleon’s expedition onwards, enabled the legal and illegal transfer of a hundred thousand papyrus fragments from Egypt to Europe and North America. The process was sustained by White race supremacy ideas, which most scholars embraced, according to which Egyptians and their Ottoman ruling elite were incapable of appreciating the real meaning of antiquities, including manuscripts, putting at risk their preservation. The accumulation and archival of papyri in European and North American collections went hand in hand with a programmatic exclusion of Egyptians from studying the material and was functional to the creation of a new academic field, papyrology, controlled by White classicists. The chapter’s conclusion opens question about future directions, regarding both colonial collections and institutional inequality.

This chapter is in two parts. The first offers a general overview of twentieth-century African adaptations of Greek tragedy. It discusses the selection and treatment of age-old cultural practice of the Yoruba in adaptations by playwrights such as Wole Soyinka (Bacchae) and Ola Rotimi (The Gods Are Not to Blame), and how these exemplify an engagement with and representation of other peoples and cultures. The second segment examines the complexities of culture and race in Femi Osofisan’s Tegonni, An African Antigone and MEDAAYE: A Re-reading of Euripides’ Medea, utilising the concept of ‘symbolic violence’, as developed by Pierre Bourdieu. Bourdieu’s concept is pertinent here for penetrating the means by which dominant groups assign identities and roles to the dominated, and also for identifying how the latter may then accept or reject the dominant construction depending on the resources of resistance that they command and can deploy. I argue that a similar struggle revolving around symbolic violence is visible in racial and gender constructions in Graeco-Roman culture, and that these two plays of Osofisan not only serve as intercultural dialogues for navigating these issues but also provide a thread for tracing the processes of these constructions.

Leveraging the late José Esteban Muñoz’s The Sense of Brown, this contribution proposes Brownness as a structuring concept for the study of racial affect in the Roman Mediterranean. Scholarship on race in the Roman Mediterranean has privileged somatic and/or phenotypic paradigms; approaches to race and racial formation that do not accord primacy to the inscription of race on the body are generally rare in the secondary literature, which has not systematically engaged with explorations of racialisation and affect in Black studies, Ethnic studies, and Queer studies. Moving in step with recent efforts to bring critical race theory to bear on the figuration of Blackness in ancient Greek texts, this chapter maps several interpretative strategies for tracking and evaluating Brownness in Roman texts – as a matrix of shame, anxiety, and melancholic subjection.

This chapter argues that the Alexander Romance mounts a subversive critique of rhetorical education in the Roman world. Though long dismissed as ahistorical fantasy, the novel draws extensively on the declamatory school tradition, only to parody its constraints and elevate Alexander as a master rhetorician beyond the reach of paideia. Through close readings of episodes involving Aristotle, the Attic orators, Darius, and the Theban flautist Ismenias, the chapter shows how the Romance reframes Alexander not as a pupil of canonical figures but as their superior and eventual replacement. By satirizing epistolary fiction, impersonation exercises, and the “travel advisories” suasoriae from chapter 4, the novel rewrites Classical history to suit Alexander’s anti-sophistic persona. His distinctive voice – described as “divinely inspired” – becomes the true marker of kingship and character, in contrast to the pedantry of rhetorical mimesis. Ultimately, the Romance envisions an alternative model of fiction mastery and learning that dethrones classical exempla and reconfigures the boundaries of elite education.

The chapter begins with the basic nomenclature of our periodization and asks the question: what is Protogeometric? From there it tackles the issue of where were mechanically drawn circles first invented – which is now clearly somewhere in the north Aegean – but stresses that determining the place where circles were first invented probably does not matter a great deal when formulating broader conclusions of political, social, economic, or ethnic importance, and it leaves open the possibility that although Athens was not the first place to invent mechanically drawn circles, it may have been the place that gave rise to the Protogeometric style of pottery. The conventional periodization of Protogeometric is reviewed, as is the issue of regional styles of Protogeometric pottery in the Greek world, before the thorny issue of the relative and absolute chronology of Protogeometric is tackled. The chapter ends by asking whether we can speak of a Protogemetric Aegean, and the conclusion is that this is not really possible. A coda discusses doing away with the highly problematic notion of a “dark age.”

This chapter introduces the book’s two major claims: that learning to read and write fiction was integral to literate education in the Roman world, and that Imperial prose fiction emerged in response to this pedagogy. Drawing on a wide range of literary, philosophical, and educational sources, it argues that the acquisition of “fiction competence” – the trained ability to identify, interpret, and evaluate fictional narratives – was central to the curriculum from early childhood through rhetorical education. It then proposes an “institutional theory of fiction” for classical antiquity, arguing that ancient fictionality be defined not by genre or authorial intent but by culturally embedded conventions taught through schooling. Tracing the roots of these conventions to Greek philosophical and sophistic traditions, the chapter reconstructs four pedagogical principles that structured how students learned to engage with fiction. These principles centered on deception (apate), enigmatic speech (ainigma), and evaluative criticism. The chapter demonstrates that educational texts and practices shaped ancient readers’ expectations of fiction and that literary fiction, in turn, reflected and contested its institutional training. Fiction in antiquity, the chapter contends, must be understood as a socially regulated practice, embedded in and shaped by systems of education.

Race, racism, and ethno-racial factors have shaped histories of ancient Greece and Rome from at least the nineteenth century. Historians of the ancient world show the influence of Hegel and race science on their writings. Notable examples include Droysen’s comments on Persian civilisation and Mommsen’s on the Celtic. Historians are troubled by racial mingling in the Roman empire, and some explain the decline and fall of Rome as the result of racial mingling. Racialising attitudes and analyses can be found in the early twentieth century as well and continue into the years of the Second World War. Not all historians are straightforwardly racist, and many show complicated and contradictory attitudes towards race. They make clear that a liberal outlook on life is not incompatible with racist beliefs in some areas. This is the context in which to appreciate Frank Snowden’s writings on Blacks in antiquity and Martin Bernal’s attempt to rewrite the history of Graeco-Roman antiquity and classical scholarship.

What marks out Athens in the Early Iron Age (EIA) is not only clear continuity from the Bronze Age but a steady rise of population through the EIA into the Archaic period. Following a brief topographical overview and a summary of Athens before 1200 BCE, this chapter focuses on the evidence of tombs, including an account of five and a half Athenians: a putative warrior aged 35–45 years at death, an old man aged 70, a young woman in her early 20s accompanied by terracotta model boots, a slightly older woman with her unborn child, and a social outcast. This is followed by what evidence there exists for the settlement of Athens. A major theme is the resilience of the population from the Bronze Age into the EIA and Archaic period. Whether it is cast as a village or town, the urban nucleus of the settlement was the Athenian Acropolis. What played out in the EIA in Athens was the formation of what was to become one of the largest and most successful city-states of the ancient Greek world.

Study of the material remains of Greek and Roman antiquity played a key role in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century emergence of the modern disciplinary formation of Classics as the comprehensive study of the ancient Mediterranean world. Over the same period, it was also central to the development of racial thought in the spheres of aesthetics, ethnology, and historical anthropology. After articulating a conception of race that, following Stuart Hall and Noémie Ndiaye, treats it as a ‘sliding signifier’ drawing upon an archive or repertoire of racial tropes, this chapter discusses how, in studying Greek and Roman monuments under the sign of ‘art’, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century scholarship attended to material antiquity in a manner that was both formed by and formative of constructions of race emerging between the ‘Age of Discovery’ and the European ‘Enlightenment’. It explores the relation of classical art historiography to other racializing discourses of difference along three key axes: ‘Culture’, ‘Differentiation’, and ‘Beauty’, attending to the role of environmental or climate theory, heredity, and physiognomy in emerging theories that sought to explain the diversity of ancient and modern peoples as evidenced by their visual and material productions.

This chapter reflects on modern and contemporary narratives surrounding the modern ‘racing’ of the inhabitants of Hellenistic and Roman Egypt by focusing on two cases, each of which pertains to a local woman. Both of these women’s bodies have become, two millennia or so after their death, a racial canvas at best, and a battlefield at worst. The first woman is the one portrayed on a funerary portrait on display at the Louvre Museum in Paris. The second woman needs no introduction: She was Cleopatra VII, the last pharaoh of Macedonian-ruled Egypt.

During the Geometric period (ca. 900–700 BCE), the sociopolitical structure of Big Men became collaborative aristocratic rule. Most Geometric buildings had fieldstone foundations, mudbrick walls, and pitched thatch roofs, or, in the Cyclades and Crete, fieldstone walls and flat roofs. Larger dwellings were usually apsidal or rectangular, smaller dwellings often oval. In the eighth century, a large household could include separate buildings and areas inside an enclosure (Oropos, Eretria). By 700, multi-room rectangular houses with a courtyard appear (Zagora). Sanctuaries in settlements were usually open-air. Sanctuaries outside settlements proliferated in Late Geometric as sites of elite display and competition; rituals included animal sacrifice, communal feasting, and votive offerings. Monumental temples were built 725–700 at Eretria, Amarynthos, Naxos, Samos, Kalapodi, and Ano Mazaraki, all extra-urban except Eretria. Geometric burials were generally inhumations, though cremation was common in Athens/Attica. On pottery, angular geometric motifs replaced Protogeometric circular designs. Figured scenes (funerals, battles) appear in the mid-eighth century and possibly mythological scenes in the late eighth century. Greeks, probably Euboeans, borrowed the Phoenician alphabet ca. 800 BCE; early inscriptions were scratched on pottery, some in poetic meter. By ca. 700, many settlements had developed into the politically organized community called a polis.