Moving from the Camp Grant massacre, this chapter addresses the question of narratives on violent events such as wars, more specifically the Trojan War in the Homeric epic. Human and Divine names are part of a complex system of signs which guide the audience. The case study of Euryopa Zeus – that is, a god who has a ‘Vast Voice’ and an ‘Ample Sight’ – provide a divine portrait of the overarching authority in matters of war and destiny. The chapter also suggests a network of divine powers who share specific aptitudes, such as Athena, Hera and Hermes, between distance and proximity, control and empathy.

Having wandered through the gallery of portraits of ancient deities, with our noses in the air, our eyes and ears wide open to hear their names and the stories they tell, passing from Zeus to Yahweh, from Hecate to Isis, from Melqart to Bel, one may wonder whether we have lost our bearings? Like Brobdingnagians, those giants visited by Gulliver, we have spanned centuries and millennia, leapt from one shore of the Mediterranean to the other, and climbed to the heights of Olympus to scrutinise the gods, eye to eye. However, we have not been satisfied with looking, observing details, admiring colours, noting contrasts and underlining the nuances; our sound and light portraits resonated with 1,001 names. We have invited you to a concert of divine music: like Lilliputians, this time, sitting in a huge cave filled with many and varied sounds, we have listened to what might seem to be an incredible cacophony of names, a heterogeneous symphony of onomastic sequences, a labyrinth of sounds to make your head spin. Would naming the gods be a virtuoso game? Scholarly entertainment? Or a deluge, a random proliferation or chaos?

Giuseppe Arcimboldo was born in Milan around 1527 and after 1562–1563, having completed his training in Lombardy, he became a court artist in the service of the Habsburgs, successively under the emperors Ferdinand I, Maximilian II and Rudolf II, probably in Prague and then in Vienna. As the royal family’s portraitist, he assured his remuneration by producing completely classical canvases in the conventional style that reflected an official art form. At the same time, Arcimboldo produced some rather surprising works: composite heads and hybrid metamorphoses of the human face in which deception and illusion triumphed. With Arcimboldo blurring human perceptual reference points, his contemporaries referred to his canvases as scherzi, grilli and capricci, ‘jokes’, ‘caprices’ and ‘grotesques’, a marvellous and confusing mixture of genres. Still fascinated by these paradoxical, neither beautiful nor ugly, virtuoso and unusual portraits, our contemporaries call it ‘Mannerism’.

Rethinking the local horizon of Greek religion is a challenging but necessary endeavour. After two decades of fascination with Mediterranean connectivity and entangled worlds, it is worthwhile to remember that a significant part of the population in Antiquity, as well as in later periods up to the twentieth century, moved and functioned in a vital space that hardly exceeded a radius of 25 km from their home.1 This observation provides an image of a ‘small world’ that is quite different from the one recently explored by Irad Malkin. The attention paid to the local dimension is by no means a historiographical narrowing: works on globalisation and its early manifestations in Antiquity convincingly ascertained that the global–local binomial, with various variations and intermediate scales, was structurally inescapable. In other words, questioning the local dimension of Greek religion in no way means isolating idiosyncratic cultic realities and studying specific identities in restricted contexts. On the contrary, as all the contributions in this book show, it is a matter of articulating several levels of social reality, in which the local dimension fuels interactions, comparisons, differentiations, collaborations, representations, within individual and collective dynamics. In ancient Mediterranean contexts, distant in time and space, with variable unknowns and incomplete evidence, it is necessary and salutary to avoid optimistic generalisation and to carefully analyse each single situation as a social laboratory prone to elaborate creative social devices. Religion is a space of communication between people and superhuman entities, open to change and uncertainty. The local scale is, at the same time, the most evident, rich, and intricate layer for an archaeology of religious practices.

Rethinking the local horizon of Greek religion is a challenging but necessary endeavour. After two decades of fascination with Mediterranean connectivity and entangled worlds, it is worthwhile to remember that a significant part of the population in Antiquity, as well as in later periods up to the twentieth century, moved and functioned in a vital space that hardly exceeded a radius of 25 km from their home.1 This observation provides an image of a ‘small world’ that is quite different from the one recently explored by Irad Malkin. The attention paid to the local dimension is by no means a historiographical narrowing: works on globalisation and its early manifestations in Antiquity convincingly ascertained that the global–local binomial, with various variations and intermediate scales, was structurally inescapable. In other words, questioning the local dimension of Greek religion in no way means isolating idiosyncratic cultic realities and studying specific identities in restricted contexts. On the contrary, as all the contributions in this book show, it is a matter of articulating several levels of social reality, in which the local dimension fuels interactions, comparisons, differentiations, collaborations, representations, within individual and collective dynamics. In ancient Mediterranean contexts, distant in time and space, with variable unknowns and incomplete evidence, it is necessary and salutary to avoid optimistic generalisation and to carefully analyse each single situation as a social laboratory prone to elaborate creative social devices. Religion is a space of communication between people and superhuman entities, open to change and uncertainty. The local scale is, at the same time, the most evident, rich, and intricate layer for an archaeology of religious practices.