Paradiso I and II present, in compressed form, the procession of All from the Highest, and the soul’s ascent back to the perfection of the First Cause. Yet Dante also highlights the valley between the peaks, our world of multitude, difference, and limit. Like the Bible, Paradiso has two beginnings: Canto I from the divine perspective, Canto II from the human.

The latter reflects the inequality that follows from the “power to swerve” with which reason endows us. It grants broad latitude regarding how to live, making us differ from one another more than other beings – a difference so significant as to question whether Dante’s happiness could be shared by all.

These Cantos depict, in counterpoint to difference overcome, the multiplicity, error, and cognitive limits that make the Comedy possible. The “matter” of Dante’s “song” points beyond terrestrial existence, but the Comedy’s charm binds readers to it; Dante’s deed conflicts with his words. He thus introduces alternative views of happiness, inviting us to weigh the transhumanizing good, secured only by “The glory of him who moves all things,” against that “perfection of our nature,” achievable in this world by a relative few. This choice provides Paradiso a fitting “prologue.”

Chapter 4 is in part an examination of a Mycenaean divine Potnia, one affiliated with the “labyrinth,” the Potnia of the dabúrinthos (δαβύρινθος). The labyrinthine space with which she is associated is an Asian cult notion introduced from Anatolia to Balkan Hellas. This chapter also examines the Rājasūya, a Vedic rite of consecration by which a warrior is made a king and a likely cult counterpart to the Mycenaean initiation of the wanaks.

Chapter 2 examines the Vedic sacrificial post called the yūpa and its role in ritual performances. A Mycenaean Greek cognate term and comparable ritual implement lies behind the Linear B form spelled u-po – that is, hûpos (ὗπος). Among other topics treated in this chapter are the Mycenaean deity called the po-ti-ni-ja, a-si-wi-ja, the Asian Potnia, and the u-po-jo po-ti-ni-ja, the Potnia of the u-po (that is, húpoio Pótnia [ὕποιο Πότνια]), a term matched exactly by Sanskrit patnī-yūpá-.

Chapter 6 examines Iranian cult and myth as evidenced in the Nart sagas of Transcaucasia, but also among Scythians as well as in Zoroastrian tradition, including the psychotropic cult substances Haoma (Iranian) and Soma (Indic). The Greek polis of Dioscurias in the Caucasus is explored as a place where Hellenic and Indo-Iranian divine-twin myth and cult affiliation meet, as indeed they do in the Pontic polis of Sinope. Aeolian connections are conspicuous at both locales.

Chapter 7 examines the sheep’s fleece filter used in the preparation of Soma. A cult ideology in which such an implement played an important role was preserved for some time in Iranian tradition in the Caucuses, ultimately giving expression to Greek ideas about the presence of fleecy filters impinged with gold in the vicinity of Dioscurias – rationalizing accounts of the Golden Fleece of Aeolian Argonautic tradition. Particular elements of the Golden Fleece myth find parallels in Indic poetic accounts of the performance of Soma cult. The common Hellenic and Indic elements constitute a shared nexus of ideas that earliest took shape in Bronze-Age communities of admixed Mycenaean and Luvian populations into which Mitanni Soma ideas had spread via Kizzuwatna. The Golden Fleece mythic tradition, with its geographic localization in Transcaucasia, is a Mycenaean Asianism that took shape in Asia Minor under Indic and Iranian influences and that continued to evolve among the Iron-Age Asian Greeks.

Chapter 5 considers the Indic divine twins, the Aśvins (Aśvínā), or Nāsatyas (Nā́satyā), their association with the Indic Dawn goddess Uṣas, and their place in the Indic Soma cult. Discussion then shifts to the kingdom of Mitanni in Syro-Mesopotamia, a place into which Indic culture was introduced as Indo-Iranian peoples migrated southward through Asia, as also at Nuzi. There is good lexical evidence for the presence of a Soma cult in Mitanni, and Soma-cult ideas appear to have spread out of Mitanni, through Kizzuwatna, into the Luvian milieu of western Asia Minor, where such ideas would almost certainly have been encountered by resident Mycenaean Greeks, intermingled biologically, socially, culturally, and linguistically with Luvian populations. With that spread certain elements of Soma-cult ideology were mapped onto Anatolian cult structures.

Chapter 1 examines Pylos tablet Tn 316 in depth, giving particular attention to the Linear B forms spelled po-re-na, po-re-si, and po-re-no-, and related Sanskrit forms, and to the especial closeness of post-Mycenaean Aeolic to ancestral Helleno-Indo-Iranian in regard to this matter.

Chapter 3 examines the Mycenaean wanaks and lāwāgetās, figures responsible for leading Mycenaean society in specific ways and who correspond notionally to figures implicit in Indic and Iranian social structures – figures who descend from still more ancient Indo-European antecedents charged with the task of leading society through the spaces of the Eurasian Steppes and in migrations southward out of the Steppes.

Propertius’ self-proclamation as the ‘Roman Callimachus’ in elegy 4.1 is something of a provocation in a poem and book of Vigilian epicizing ambition – a provocation staged in Horos’ immediate reassertion of a doctrinaire interpretation of Callimachean programmatics. This chapter unpacks these apparent tensions chiefly through exploration of Propertius’ attention to Virgil’s prior programme of Callimachean allusion: thus elegies 4.3, 4.6 and 4.11 recycle Virgil’s use of the Coma Berenices to mediate Caesar’s catasterism; 4.6 reconstitutes the Callimachean hymns that lie behind the shield of Aeneas; 4.9 identifies the rival Callimachean and Apollonian models that Virgil unites in Aeneas’ visit to the future site of Rome; and the book as a whole is peppered with scholarly readings of Virgil’s learnedness. In this way Propertius 4 shows that Callimachus was always already a patriotic poet (despite the tendentiousness of the Roman recusatio), that Virgil had his own claim to Callimachean (and so to Propertian) refinement, and that genre does not preclude an elegist from Virgilian themes (hence Propertius’ obsessive matching of Virgilian and Callimachean stichometries and line-counts).

The investigation of Aeolian foundation myths continues in this chapter, with examination of traditions of the founding of Boeotian Thebes. Ancestral Indo-European tradition is again evident, as is an Anatolian stratum, one which foregrounds technological expertise of Asian origin.

Further investigation of the foundation traditions of Metapontium, focusing on the persistence of much more ancient Indo-European mythic traditions and time-reckoning traditions and the presence of those elements in the bricolage that constitutes the Aeolian mythic system of Metapontium foundation narratives and their relationship to Anatolian Aeolian tradition.

A synthetic, concluding discussion addressing the relationship between Ur-Aeolic and Special Mycenean and providing a historical framework for, especially, the introduction of Aeolic language and culture (pre-Thessalian/Boeotian) into European Greece following the Bronze-Age collapses and for the spread of pre-Aeolians (Iron-Age Ahhiyawans) eastward into Cilicia.

Discussion of Mycenaean Greek dialect variation as evidenced in the Linear B tablets, as well as an examination of the Attic-Ionic lexeme des-pótēs ‘house(hold)-master’ beside Normal Mycenean dos-pótās and Special Mycenaean da-koros ‘sweeper of the sacred-space’, matching Aeolic zda-kóros.

Investigation of the Bee-nymphs of Mt. Parnassus and the ancestral Indo-European strain and Anatolian strains of divination introduced into European Hellas by migrant pre-Aeolian communities.

Chapter three turns to scenes of Apollo Kitharoidos, the god most associated in contemporary scholarship with musical performance. In order to analyze how the surviving representations make visible Apollo’s music to the ancient viewer and how the god’s music is shown to have an effect on both his human and divine audience, Laferrière examines black- and red-figure vase-paintings that depict the god playing his lyre. Apollo’s powerfully affective music informs the scene’s composition, whether it is through the physical position of the figures, who direct their attention to the god’s music, or through the repetition of similar lines and forms among Apollo, his instrument, his audience, and the plants and animals that accompany him. She argues that the formal aspects of the composition can be discussed in terms of rhythmoi, symmetria, and harmonia, which are all integral concepts within ancient discussions of music and art theory. In making the sounds of Apollo’s music visible in this way, Laferrière shows that Apollo’s music has a unifying and harmonizing effect on those who listen to it, so that the music he plays both embodies and creates the harmonia with which he is associated.

Chapter two explores how we might develop a vocabulary for describing the appearance and effect of visual music by examining red-figure vases that depict Apollo simultaneously playing his lyre and pouring a libation. This synchronicity between the god’s two actions, one musical and the other ritual, demonstrates that his movements are rhythmic in a similar way to, or are even conditioned by, the sounds of his music, so that the images draw an implicit connection between divine music, rhythm, and ritual. Laferrière argues that the slow music that Apollo creates with one hand establishes a visual rhythm and musical pattern that are derived from the god’s body as well as the forms of the musical and ritual objects that he holds. For the ancient viewer, each image acts as an invitation to engage with its visualized musical rhythm, to hear imaginatively the sounds of the god’s music. In this interplay between visual image and imagined sound, and in one’s own participation in animating the god’s ritual, the viewer could experience the presence of Apollo in a moment of coordinated musical rhythm and harmony.