The Gospel of Truth is an early Christian homily in which an anonymous and independent-minded teacher communicates his understanding of the core Christian message to his own immediate circle and a wider audience elsewhere. For this author, the gospel is the good news that in the person of Jesus, the divine Father has made himself known to his elect, calling them out of a nightmare-like existence in ignorance and illusion into the knowledge of himself. In this volume, Francis Watson provides a new and accessible translation of this text, along with a thorough analysis of it, both in its own terms and in its reception by later readers. He argues that its closest affinities lie with New Testament texts such as the Gospel of John and the Pauline letters. Watson also demonstrates how the Gospel of Truth is a work of literary quality and theological originality and why it deserves the attention of all students and scholars of early Christianity.

Chapter 6 shows how Irenaeus’ summary in Against Heresies 1.29.1–4 goes back to an earlier document (the Barbelo treatise), and not the Secret Book of John specifically. It shows how the Secret Book is different from the Barbelo treatise, and presents a theory of how the Secret Book emerged in both its shorter and longer versions.

Extant Greek tragedy contains several instances of choral division, scenes when the chorus appears either to split into individual performers (as in Aeschylus’ Agamemnon) or, more commonly, to divide into small groups (semichoruses). As these scenes involve the (always temporary) disintegration of tragedy’s emblematic collective, a collective that is customarily conceived of as a unified group, this chapter frames such scenes in terms of fragmentation. These various states of fragmentation illustrate not only the way in which tragedians play with the chorus’ ability to slide towards and away from uniform collectivity but also the assumptions about wholeness which have implicitly informed critical and editorial approaches to both tragedy and the chorus. In addition to examining these divisions in tragedy, the chapter analyses similar divisions in satyr play, comedy and Rhesus, the only surviving example of fourth-century tragedy, demonstrating how the divisions of the comic and satyric choruses are more readily accepted by critics.

Herodotean speeches serve the same basic functions (dramatization, characterization, and interpretation) as their Homeric counterparts, modified to address the wide-ranging concerns of Herodotean inquiry – foremost among them, the relationship between Greek and Persian cultures in their political, military, social, and religious institutions and behaviors. Homeric speech types adapted by Herodotus include the exemplary ainos that evokes past precedent at a moment of crisis; the warrior’s challenge of his opponent to battle; and the commander’s parainesis or speech of encouragement to his soldiers. This same adaptive procedure is visible in Herodotus’ treatment of speech scenes like the Persian crown council, which lays bare the nature of Persian court culture while exploring historical causation on both the human and divine levels. The many “wise advisor” scenes in the Histories also have deep roots in Homeric epic, especially the series of confrontational conversations between Hector and Polydamas in the Iliad.

A shortage of comparative evidence in both early Greek literature and Ionic inscriptions compromises our ability to assess with any precision the degree of Homeric influence on Herodotean language at the level of the individual word and phrase. Nonetheless it is possible to identify with confidence several passages in the Histories that recall and recast the language of specific passages from the Homeric epics (especially the Iliad), as well as episodes that evoke the Homeric representation of xenia (especially in the Odyssey). While these Homeric allusions may serve in a general way to enhance the status and solemnity of the events they describe, we have also observed a variety of more specific (and not always flattering) ways in which the Homeric world, so evoked, casts light on the events and characters portrayed by Herodotus, and even on developments in the Greek world since the defeat of Xerxes’ expedition.

This book explores Herodotus’ creative interaction with the Greek poetic tradition from early hexameter verse through fifth-century Attic tragedy. The poetic tradition informs the Histories in both positive and negative ways, since Herodotus adopts or adapts some poetic features while rejecting others as a means of defining the nature of his own project. The range of such features includes subject matter; diction and phraseology; narrative motifs, themes, patterns, and structure; speech types and speech complexes; the role of the narrator – his presence, functions, source(s), authority, and limitations; the manipulation of time (narrative order, rhythm, and frequency); conceptions of truth and falsehood; the construction of the human past and its relation to the present; the relationship between humanity and deity, and the role each plays in the causation of events. In these and other regards Herodotus may use poetic precedent as a model, a foil, or some combination of the two.

The differences between the primary Homeric and Herodotean narrators are manifest: the former is covert and omniscient (thanks to the Muses), the latter overt and limited by his human (re)sources in exploring the past and other foreign countries. Both authors use secondary narratorial surrogates in order to highlight their own achievement in preserving the kleos of remarkable deeds. While Homeric surrogates from the heroic past (e.g., the bard Demodocus and the bard-like storyteller Odysseus) model expertise and status that the human bard aspires to in his own performance, Herodotus casts a more critical eye on the post-heroic inquiries of his textual avatars, whether “professional” (Hecataeus and Aristagoras) or “amateur” (typically monarchic investigations of foreign cultures, undertaken for personal profit). In a metatextual move without Homeric precedent, the experiences of advisor figures who are assimilated to the Herodotean narrator shed light on the strengths and limitations of knowledge gained through historiē.

At a time when the social authority of the poets was being contested in the revolutionary medium of prose, it is remarkable that in the opening chapters of the Histories Herodotus asserts his commitment to the commemorative function of the poetic tradition, and his affiliation with the Homeric epics; that in the Lydian logos to follow, he chooses the poet Solon to articulate human and divine causes of the fundamental principle of Herodotean historiography, the transience of human prosperity; and that he elaborates the programmatic story of Croesus’ rise and fall with elements drawn from Homeric, lyric, and tragic poetry. In this way Herodotus establishes from the outset the hybrid nature of his work, in which he uses the artistic resources of the poets to channel and challenge their authority, and to engage the emotions and intellect of a broad Hellenic audience steeped in the traditions of poetic performance.

The Cyclades positively benefitted from the economic and religious successes of Delos (Figures A.7–A.8), enabling wider business opportunities across the islands due to phase transition, as evidenced by the names of Italian bankers and traders on islands such as Tenos (S27) and Melos (S16) (Mendoni and Zoumbaki, 2008, 36; 41–2). Additionally, individual islands exploited their own resources for marketing: for example, Parian and Naxian marble and Siphnian and Seriphian ores. The civil wars, attacks on and eventual collapse of Delos in the mid first century bce resulted in a significant depletion of visitors to the archipelago, with a resonating impact on the islands of the Cyclades. The result was a direct economic crash and an indirect one due to the break in religious traffic, which had brought with it its own income stream. These problems were further exacerbated by pirates, who took their opportunities to profit from a troubled region. As noted in Chapter 1, piracy was enough to create stress on the economy, as is evidenced by the island of Tenos, which was in debt to the banker L. Aufidius Bassus (IG XII 5, 860) (de Souza, 2002, 163) (TEN 6).

Chapter 4 tackles how the Secret Book of John interprets the book of Genesis. It shows how the writer(s) of the Secret Book interpreted Genesis twice: once for the upper world and once for the lower world. It shows how, even with oppositional statements against Moses, the Secret Book continually depends on Genesis for its content and storyline. A brief section on how the Secret Book employs other parts of the Bible (in particular, the Gospel of John) is included.

The Cycladic islands, which lie scattered in the centre of the Aegean (Map 1.1), have had periods of outstanding achievements, as in the Bronze Age and Hellenistic periods, which have put into sharp relief the supposed dispiriting lows in the Roman and Late Antique periods. Investigating the veracity of these assumed low periods is made challenging by a dearth of historical or literary evidence pertaining to the islands during these periods. When they are mentioned, it is largely in terms of their insularity – as havens for pirates, places of exile or targets for invasions. Islands are often the first to experience change and, while this can be both positive and negative, the positives tend to be overshadowed by the negatives. Furthermore, scholarship on the islands has commonly taken a top-down approach, in which they are viewed through a lens of passiveness and as pawns in wider machinations rather than as decision-making entities in themselves. However, as Baldacchino (2008) warned, it is important not to overcompensate in attempting to move away from the top-down approach to the islands and place too much emphasis on their roles and importance in the broader context of study.

The poetry of the historical Solon plays an important role in Herodotus’ portrayal of the Athenian in the Histories. Herodotus adapts prominent themes from Solon’s poetry to reflect issues of historical, ethnographical, and historiographical interest. Like his poetic predecessor, the Herodotean Solon redefines the nature of prosperity, but in a new context (his visit to Croesus’ Lydian court) that highlights a significant ethnographical difference between Eastern and Western values, and anticipates the recurrent historical scenario whereby more luxurious “soft” peoples tend to be overthrown by more primitive “hard” peoples. The unpredictable outcome of human endeavors is another poetic theme that Herodotus mines for its historical and metahistorical resonance: Croesus’ inability to foresee the end of his prosperity results in the expansion of Persian rule throughout Asia, while the Solonian admonition to “look to the end” informs Herodotus’ own choice of the recent past as the subject of his inquiry.

Chapter 7 focuses on the reception history of the Secret Book of John, discussing the significance of the expansion of the shorter version into the longer, and treating how the Secret Book was received or at least echoed in other Nag Hammadi and gnostic texts.