This chapter examines a form of racialization at Rome that declared certain non-Romans to be innately suitable to enslavement. In an instance of racecraft through stagecraft, Roman comedy contributed to the naturalisation of this noxious ideology by presenting a cast of characters whose visual appearance and social or legal status corresponds directly to predictable sets of character traits. At the same time, the enslaved and freed themselves wrote and performed Roman comedies, so the fabula palliata also pushes back in important respects against their times’ racial formations. The discussion concludes with an analysis of the life of the comic playwright Terence whose authorship of his plays was called into question because he allegedly lacked the innate ability for impressive literary production.

Race-making is an inherently embodied activity, rooted in the senses and predicated on corporeality. As a result, visuality and materiality are central to processes of race-making, and studies of ancient visual and material culture therefore have much to contribute to modern scholarship on ancient race-making. This chapter explores what can be learned from visual and material culture about processes of race-making in the ancient Greek world, considering a series of examples. Although neither comprehensive nor representative, these examples demonstrate a variety of potential approaches, as well as highlighting some of the key challenges and limitations of working with visual and material culture.

This chapter considers different metaphors for racial encounters in American Classics departments, and how they interact globally. Beginning with the APA ‘Minority Scholarship’ in the early 2000s, the chapter traces different approaches to diversifying the demographics of traditional Classics departments in the United States, and how the field has developed in new regions. How might the proliferation of Classics programs in Southeast Asia be read as diaspora, or be distinguished from a form of neo-colonialism? How do Classics programs in Asia or the Global South interact with local histories of race and colonisation? Combining historical and contemporary case studies, this chapter reflects on different potential models of ‘diversifying’ Classics in a variety of global contexts.

The cultural discontinuities following the collapse of the Late Bronze Age Mycenaean kingdoms include the abandonment of major centers and smaller settlements accompanied by loss of social structures, literacy, quarried stone architecture, and figured representations. Archaeological evidence from four centuries later, in the eighth century BCE, shows that there were also important continuities, e.g., the Greek language, names of divinities, a warrior ethos, and communal feasting. Greek commerce both eastwards and westwards increased, and Greeks began to settle in the West Mediterranean and North Africa. This volume examines the Greek Iron Age, ca. 1200–700 BCE, between the Mycenaean collapse and the beginning of the Archaic period. The relative chronology of this period, based on carefully constructed sequences of pottery styles, provides a stable framework. However, recent radiocarbon dates have suggested that the absolute dating of the pottery styles should be revised upwards.

This chapter analyzes historical declamation as an advanced stage of fiction training in the Roman rhetorical curriculum. It argues that rhetorical exercises, especially controversiae and suasoriae, fostered the skills of fictionalization through revisionist reimaginings of the Greek past. Exploring a wide corpus of exercises about Alexander the Great, the chapter demonstrates how students were trained to compose plausible fictions within recognizable historical frameworks. Drawing on rhetorical handbooks, school papyri, and declamations, it reconstructs four dominant themes: impersonations of Alexander and his circle; inter-polis disputes in the shadow of Macedonian conquest; “travel advisories” debating the limits of Alexander’s empire; and “postmortem” scenarios reflecting Alexander’s legacy. These exercises strengthened students’ command over the techniques of impersonation, pseudo-documentarism, and meta-exemplarity. The chapter also shows how historical declamations modelled indirect reflection on imperial power. Rather than transmitting historical truth, revisionist fictions taught students how to manipulate exempla and construct immersive alternatives to the Roman present.

A brief introduction surveys current thinking on how to subdivide the period into phases of broadly similar durations spanning roughly a century and a half in absolute years. The remainder of the chapter focuses on three distinct topics: ceramic pictorialism in post-palatial Mycenaean art; an update on scholarship dealing with the dark-surfaced, handmade, and burnished ceramic classes that have been recognized as significant novelties in Aegean container assemblages from the end of the thirteenth through the eleventh centuries BCE, along with their spread eastward in some cases to Cyprus and southwestern Syria during the twelfth century; and the noteworthy spatial expansion of production centers of Mycenaeanizing decorated fine wares during the twelfth century to multiple locations on Cyprus, in Macedonia, and at various sites along the Levantine mainland from Cilicia in the north to Philistia in the south.

This chapter opens the second half of the book by exploring how Imperial prose fiction responds to Roman education. Starting with Lucian’s True Story as a case in point, the chapter argues that ancient novels stage an irreverent critique of literary paideia and the learned readers it produces. Novels embrace the aesthetics of riddling (ainigma) and deception (apate) to satirize the curriculum of canonical fiction taught in schools. Through scenes of “fiction incompetence” and erotic or exotic alternatives to traditional learning, novelists expose the precarity of elite educational ideologies. The chapter surveys a wide range of Greek and Latin novels, showing how they subvert the moral and hermeneutic expectations of “good” fiction. It concludes by introducing the case studies for the remaining chapters (Life of Aesop, Story of Apollonius, and the Alexander Romance) which parody scholastic models of fictionality while promoting their heroes as masters of riddle-reading and alternative education. These works challenge ancient views of fiction as a vehicle for moral instruction, reimagining narrative pleasure as a rebellion against the institutional authority of paideia.

The Syro-Anatolian Culture Complex, or SACC, a collection of city-states that surrounded the northeastern corner of the Mediterranean Sea during the early first millennium BCE, is traditionally understudied by researchers interested in contacts between the Aegean and the Near East. In part this is due to the interest garnered by the Phoenicians and their far-flung colonies, but it is also because the complicated ethnolinguistic composition of the city-states themselves defies easy categorization. This chapter presents an overview of the material evidence for the robust exchange between the Aegean and SACC during the early first millennium BCE. Syro-Anatolian finds in the Aegean, especially luxury items including worked ivory and bronze objects, couple with Aegean ceramics in the Levant and southeastern Anatolia to index a surprisingly robust exchange between the two spheres. Although the mechanisms of this exchange remain unclear, it is now apparent that SACC was a major component of Iron Age eastern Mediterranean cultural and economic networks.

The Spanish missionary Bartolomé de Las Casas wrote his ‘Defense of the Indians’ in response to the theologian and philosopher Juan Ginés De Sepúlveda’s ‘On the Just Causes of War against the Indians’. Both Casas and Sepúlveda point to Aristotle as a source for their arguments. This chapter approaches the debate as a way to think through the relationships between race and Indigeneity. First, I introduce the concept of Indigeneity and the ways it has been negotiated between Indigenous peoples and settler-colonialists. I then move to critically analysing Casas’ arguments, showing how his understanding of Aristotle’s notion of ‘barbarians’ has had a lasting legacy on the definition of Indigeneity. Finally, I turn to the absence of Indigenous voices in Casas’ account as a broader moment to consider Indigenous future(s) in Classics and possible areas for re-negotiating reception and Indigenous scholars’ agency in those negotiations.

After briefly surveying the state of the field of classical reception studies in Asian and diasporic Asian contexts, this chapter focuses on the possibilities and implications of Asian American classical reception. This chapter argues that to refer to works as Asian American classical reception is to imbue them with a historical consciousness rooted in Asian American identity formation, which emphasises not only the political, but also the intersectional and the coalitional. Drawing on critical classical reception and Asian American studies, this chapter theorises Asian American classical reception as a critical site in which to break down imagined geographies, racialised hierarchies, and other axes of domination that continue to prop up the false binary of East and West, and with it, the idea of an exclusively White and Western inheritance of Graeco-Roman antiquity. It concludes by applying this theory to a case study, Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior.