This chapter challenges the supposed transformation “from Baal Hammon to Saturn” in North Africa one of the chief grounds upon which narratives of cultural continuity are predicated. It argues that instead of simple syncretism or the persistence of a god, the material signs used to construct and identify the deity to whom stelae were dedicated underwent important transformations in the second and third centuries CE, changes closely tied to the experiences and practices of empire. Stelae of the third and second centuries BCE made a god present indexically; stelae of the imperial period embraced iconicity in ways that were entangled with empire, including new divine epithets tied to imperial authority and new road systems in the province. And by the end of the second century CE, this iconic system could even work to perpetuate clear social hierarchies.

In contrast with the emphasis put on pietas and providentia by Flavian discourse, the Thebaid is the only Flavian poem that begins and ends without gods, much like Lucan’s Bellum Civile. However, Statius’ gods are described in Ovidian terms and use thought-provoking allusions to the Metamorphoses to challenge the readers’ poetic memory with distorted versions of their literary past. The ways in which Statius and his gods allude to and manipulate the Metamorphoses’ divine narratives, reworking Ovid’s coded use of celestial geographies, both mark a significant distance from Lucan’s epic universe and highlight the Roman significance of the Thebaid’s divine world. The gods’ attempts to legitimise their morally dubious actions by manipulating the readers’ understanding of the Metamorphoses not only shows the Thebaid’s sophisticated engagement with the former literary tradition but also exploits the traditional analogy between heavenly and Roman power to reflect on the Flavian emperors’ progressive sacralisation of the imperial institution and selective renegotiation of Augustan legacy in the tense religious atmosphere of post–civil-war Rome.

The introduction establishes the characteristics of divine music. Noting the discrepancies between the visual and literary accounts of the gods and the variability in the instruments with which they choose to perform, Laferrière argues that the gods’ active use of their instruments lends a sonic quality to their representation. In demarcating divine music-making as distinct from human musical practices, she shows that these images require a correspondingly distinct mode of interpretation and analysis, since the scenes feature musical performances that are undertaken outside the human world.

This final chapter wraps up the study as a whole, assessing how this argument about gentile incorporation into Israel and the role of Torah in Paul’s thought fits into the larger context of Paul’s thought and why, if Paul believes gentile men are being transformed into Israelites, he argues against requiring physical circumcision of non-Jewish men who receive the spirit. The chapter closes with an assessment of how this model accounts for the development of Pauline thought in early Christianity as the movement became more gentile-dominated.

For Aristotle, the main thing to grasp about a child is what it is not – a creature that has not yet reached the age of reason: childish. But Heraclitus had exploited that ‘deficit’ view of childhood to create characteristic paradoxes in which he exhibits children as however also wiser and sharper than adults. In one of his most enigmatic aphorisms (Fr. 52), he represents the dynamism that propels and sustains us right through life as that of a child at play. After analysis of that paradox and other Heraclitean sayings about children, the chapter turns to Plato’s interest in children and their play, and to his no less paradoxical thesis in the Laws that what, if anything, is truly serious in human life is playful activity, conceived as participation in the ordered play of the gods. We see here an anticipation of Huizinga’s thesis (in Homo Ludens) that in application of the concept of play lies the route to understanding not only children’s games and the place of sport in the lives of adults, but all of what may be regarded as the higher forms of culture, not least law and religious ritual.

The nature of the cosmos and its maintenance are central issues in Mesoamerican philosophy. The correlative metaphysical systems of Mesoamerica, with their focus on interdependence, transformation, and continual creation, rely on particular views about the nature of the world and its operation that are covered in this chapter. The chapter covers the development of key concepts connected to creation and change, as well as the particular ways these are developed in creation stories across Mesoamerica. Creation stories serve an important purpose in Mesoamerican thought. They should not be thought of as only myth grounding the overall tradition and system, but also as discussions of the nature of being, change, and continual creation.

This chapter argues that Longus highlights important features of his work that contrast with tragedy. The preface’s intertexts with Antigone and Hippolytus are crucial. The latter focuses attention on how to manage ἔρως, alerting us to differences in its presentation by Longus and by tragedians. The inset tales’ myths – divine lust leading to a young woman’s destruction or metamorphosis – present a story-type drawn upon by Attic tragedy and more generally by Greek narrative poetry. In confining destructive ἔρως to his inset tales, explicitly called μῦθοι, ‘myths’, Longus contrasts gods’ actions and mortals’ sufferings in traditional myths with their handling in his own story. Tragedy neither explores stories of mutual and symmetrical desire, nor presents positive images of female desire, both of which are crucial to the discourse of the novels. Longus plants a clue to this verdict on tragedy at 4.17.2, where Astylus, expressing surprise at Gnathon’s wish to have sex with a goatherd, ὑπεκρίνετο τὴν τραγικὴν δυσωδίαν μυσάττεσθαι, ‘acted out revulsion at the foul smell of goats’: the dramatic term ὑπεκρίνετο alerts the reader to the double entendre in τραγικὴν δυσωδίαν, which with the addition of the iota subscript often omitted in imperial Greek epigraphic and papyrus texts becomes τραγικὴν δυσωιδίαν, ‘the unpleasant singing of tragedy’.

This chapter is devoted to On Regimen, the longest and by far most complex work by a cosmological doctor to have survived from the Classical period. Topics discussed include the “self-sufficiency” (autarkeia) of fire and water, the pendular movement of various cycles, the two-way “resemblance” (apomimesis) between the body and the cosmos, and the use of both cosmological principles and “prodiagnosis” as a solution to the problem of individualization. This chapter also considers On Regimen’s theories about the soul, which is concentrated in the sun and separates off into other, smaller souls to give movement, life, intelligence, and divinity to everything it inhabits.

Seneca’s treatise On Benefits is the sole surviving representative of a long tradition of Stoic thought on the act of kindness (euergēsia), that is, gift-giving or the supererogatory favor. The work is rich in philosophical content. Favors (beneficia or benefits) are defined strictly in terms of intent, in such a way that the will of the giver becomes interdependent with the receiver’s willingness to reciprocate. In unpacking this definition, the Stoic author finds it necessary to speak not only about the theory of action but also about the observable effects of action, since enacted benefits impose different obligations on the recipient. Moreover, the assessment of motives and the expectation of gratitude create an intersubjectivity of giver and receiver that is revealing for Stoic ideas of friendship. Finally, Seneca takes a strong position on the autonomy even of benefactors who are unable to act otherwise, such as divine givers and entirely virtuous human agents, with implications for questions of volition and freedom.

Hal Incandenza, early in Infinite Jest, has a dream of a tennis court that is dauntingly “complex,” with “lines going every which way, and they run oblique or meet and form relationships and boxes and rivers and tributaries and systems inside systems.” Among other meanings, this court is an image of Wallace’s complex narratives themselves, landscapes that juxtapose the regulating and other effects of systems of information, computing, government, ecology and more. This essay attempts to ground Wallace’s corpus in the systems novel, a category applied by critic Tom LeClair to the postmodern novelists that most inspired him, including Thomas Pynchon, Joseph McElroy and William Gaddis. The essay will focus its readings on Wallace’s last two novels, Infinite Jest and The Pale King, and draw briefly on archival evidence at the Ransom Center that Wallace learned much about the systems novel’s grand ambitions from not just Don DeLillo’s works but the discussion of Gregory Bateson and other systems theorists in LeClair’s In the Loop: Don DeLillo and the Systems Novel.

Chapter 6 begins with ballad talk (the ballad convention of narration through conversation) as it was adopted by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English poets in verses both popular and literary in response to revived interest in the print mediation of traditional Anglo-Scottish ballads. The chapter pays particular attention to Christina Rossetti’s and Hardy’s ironic reworkings of ballad conventions. Their reliance on the expectations aroused by traditional ballads, the chapter argues, especially in the much harder cases of imagining intimate conversational relations with the silent dead or with God, prepares the depictions of failed intimacy in Hardy’s elegies for his wife Emma and in Rossetti’s devotional colloquies and roundels. There talking with ghosts or with God becomes all too often a disappointed hope of resuming conversations that failed in life (Hardy) or painfully anticipating a silent harmony with God and the saints in paradise through the imperfect approximations of poetry (Rossetti).

Paul-Alain Beaulieu examines Mesopotamian Wisdom. While acknowledging that there is no native category of ‘Wisdom Literature’ in Mesopotamia, Beaulieu nonetheless finds it a helpful classification. Within this category are texts of several genres: we find disputations, which begin with a mythological introduction, progress to a verbal contest between non-human combatants, and conclude with the victor pronounced by a god. There are proverbs, found in collections and quoted in letters, as well as fables, often about animals. Instructions and admonitions transmit antediluvian wisdom to postdiluvian generations. Some texts reflect on the problem of theodicy, ruminating on the human-divine relationship and individual divine retribution, while others lament the futility of life and advocate a carpe diem attitude. School debates centralise learning and the scribal arts. These texts are linked by intertextual references and shared features, such as their frequent ascription to individual wise figures, assumption of the absolute and inscrutable power of the gods, and reflection on the human predicament.

An exploration of brecht's most overtly tragic play .

The fifth chapter provides a synoptic chapter about the objects of theoria, both as they relate to traditional theoria and to philosophical theoria. The objects of the former kind of theoria, namely, festival- and sanctuary-attendance, are the images of the gods on temples or the gods themselves. In the case of philosophical theoria, or contemplation, the objects are more abstract entities, namely, forms, that Plato and Aristotle take to comprise the highest objects of philosophical study, or contemplation. The philiosophers consider that when we apprehend these objects, we are in possession of scientific knowledge that they compare to divine activity. In both kinds, the apprehension of the objects of theoria is reached through an activity that is directly perceptual or mediated by perceptual experience.

Cicero’s De natura deorum, De divinatione, De fato, and Timaeus offer a coherent development of some of the questions first raised in De republica and De legibus. In the specific context of the mid-first-century bce debate between Stoics and Epicureans, Cicero raises three far-reaching issues: can a rational discourse on religion be developed without a solid cosmological and theological foundation? What use can be made of historical and anthropological observations of cultual practices? Is it possible to reach a universal definition of the psychological process which accounts for human attitudes towards the gods? Cicero’s authorial strategies frame skeptical arguments so as to suggest constructive answers and preserve human freedom and moral responsibility. A mythopoetical discourse on the universe offers sufficient background as “provisional physics.” Historical enquiries help define precise limits for political thinking on religion. Philosophy explains psychologically how the admiration for the beauty of the world leads to ethical accomplishment.

This concluding epilogue consists of three diverse case studies which both sum up many of the main continuities and differences in the treatment of wonder in Greek literature and culture from Homer to the early Hellenistic period and simultaneously point towards some further directions for the study of wonder in antiquity and beyond.