Why did the invention of literary theatre take place in Greece and India long before anywhere else? After placing the emergence of Greek tragedy and Sanskrit theatre in their historical contexts (fifth-century bce Athens and likely second-century ce India) and considering the existing kinds of performance in each locale, this chapter looks to three specific societal conditions that made possible their independent inventions of literary theatre. First is the presence of a literate class. Second is the opening or expansion of a niche (brought on by generative societal disruptions) capable of supporting the new theatre form (for Athens, the institution of democracy and imperial wealth; for India, likely the Saka kingdom’s embrace of Sanskrit and its wealthy court). Third is an authoritative corpus of popular narratives (for Athens, the Homeric epics; for India, The Mahabharata and The Ramayana) along with authorial freedom to reimagine those narratives onstage.

Homer lived in Ionia, which he probably never left, around 700 BC. His birthplace and patronymic are unknown; he is associated with many legends. There were probably more than one poet and poems. Homer would have been the one who gave to the epics their final form. The Greeks of the historical period knew next to nothing about the Mycenaean era. Homer is the one who gave a ‘memory’ to their past. He described a country that did not exist, an idealized, heroic and aristocratic society with kings and walled palaces. When the poems were written down in the 6th century BC, all Greek cities wanted to be connected with a hero and acquire noble roots. The historicity of the poems is much debated. Homer is a precious source for Mycenaean studies, but he is a poet and oscillates between the poetic and the historical world and two eras, the prehistoric and the historical. The fact is that epic poems existed in Mycenaean times; they were transmitted orally; the core of Homeric epic could have been created around them.

Scholarship on ancient Greek prayer has almost always focused on its public instantiations: in sacrifice, oratory, sanctuary contexts, etc. This chapter explores the evidence for ancient Greek prayer in the liminal space where public and private clash, coalesce, and collapse. I argue that the prayers of ancient polytheists, though rarely – if ever – strictly private, routinely operated across and between different spheres such as the public and the private, the polis and the oikos, the intimate and the communal. I approach the study of ancient prayer afresh, not as a site of opposition between the individual and the polis, nor as a space in which the distinctions between these realms of praxis are erased or effaced. Rather, prayer here features as an occasion to reflect on the spectrum of possible intersections between personal piety (individual feelings towards and actions in service of the divine) and the wider superstructures of religion, politics, society, and culture within which its practitioners were imbricated and to which they sought to respond.

Reading was one of Debussy’s favourite occupations, without doubt one of the activities that nourished and sustained him the most. Still, any attempt to uncover greater detail about the kind of reader Debussy actually was, remains a complicated, almost archaeological task. Although the sale of scores, manuscripts and several books sent to Debussy offers some leads, it does not make it possible to reconstruct their precise importance or to show their full diversity. In order to understand Debussy’s literary inclinations as fully as possible, it is thus necessary to examine other sources, such as letters, books sent to him, testimonies of friends, as well as the diaries and notebooks that have been miraculously preserved – notably those in which he noted references to works likely to interest him and even specific sentences that he particularly liked. By cross-checking these various elements, I sketch a portrait of a composer through one of his most essential passions.

In his prologue Herodotus establishes a complex relationship with his poetic predecessors and contemporaries. He presents his narrative of the Greco-Persian Wars as simultaneously indebted and opposed to a network of poets, whose Panhellenic cultural prestige he challenges in the innovative medium of prose. Homeric epic is tacitly acknowledged as a model of primary importance: Herodotus adopts the martial subject matter of the Iliad and projects the persona of the peripatetic hero Odysseus. In perpetuating the kleos of fully human warriors rather than their heroic forebears, Herodotus implies that his own medium of prose historiē, committed to writing, will surpass poetry’s ability to perform its traditional function of public commemoration. Herodotus constructs the entire prologue as an ingenious prose priamel, a poetic rhetorical structure that enables him to emphasize important points of contact with and departure from Homeric epic, Sappho’s fragment 16, and the portrayal of Croesus in epinician poetry.

Herodotus’ numerous citations of poets and their work in the Histories demonstrate his deep, broad knowledge of the Greek song-culture, including epic, lyric, and tragic poetry. Herodotus displays extraordinary knowledge of the epic tradition in his critique of the Homeric version of the fall of Troy, which he rejects in favor of the (allegedly) ancient Egyptian tradition that Helen was detained by King Proteus and never reached Troy. The assertion that Homer rejected this version of the story as inappropriate for epic signals Herodotus’ awareness of the different generic constraints under which epic poets operate. The use that Herodotus makes of Aristeas’ hexameter poem the Arimaspeia is especially difficult to assess because of our limited knowledge of the poem. The strongest evidence for Aristean influence on Herodotus may lie in the latter’s exploration of cultural relativism, which includes critical assessments of Greek customs articulated by non-Greek characters in the Histories.

What sort of thing are the narratives of the life of Jesus, literarily speaking? (History? Biography? Fiction? Myth?) And what bearing does their genre have on the manner of interpretation proper to them? This chapter attends to Origen’s account of the Gospels’ genre, literary precedents, and relationship to other forms of ancient literature in order to establish why he believes the Gospels cannot be read as transparently historical narratives. Here, I propose that the kind of narratives Origen believes the Evangelists compose is directly comparable to the stories one finds throughout the scriptures of Israel. Furthermore, Origen also relates the Gospels’ literary similarity to Jewish biblical narrative to the way they both share a similarly complex relationship to facticity. The Gospels, in sum, all narrate the deeds, sufferings, and words of Jesus “under the form of history”; these historical narratives are of a mixed character, interweaving things that happened with things that didn’t and even couldn’t, with an eye toward presenting the events recorded to have happened to Jesus figuratively.

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.

I consider the position of Aeneid translations in the career patterns of a spectrum of poets and scholars in a range of languages, with attention to those who tackle other high-prestige texts, such as the Homeric epics, Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Dante’s Divine Comedy. I ask whether the Virgil translation was the chef d’œuvre or an apprenticeship, whether the sequence of translating had any impact on the translator’s other output, and what difference this makes to our reading of the Aeneid translations. After highlighting some of the issues via Harington, whose Ariosto translation influenced his Aeneid translation, I analyse the synergy between Dante and Virgil in Villena’s Castilian translations. Most of the chapter deals with Virgil translators who also translated Homer, including Mandelbaum, Fitzgerald, Lombardo and Fagles, with longer discussions of Ogilby, Dryden and Morris. I close with an examination of Day-Lewis who translated the Georgics first, then the Aeneid and finally the Eclogues.