Chapter one argues for the significance of visualized divine music by situating ancient viewers’ experience of representations of divine music within their ancient contexts, thereby establishing a well-defined space in which divine music could have been seen, imaginatively heard, and experienced. Laferrière takes as her focus a corpus of fourth-century BCE votive reliefs that depict Pan playing his syrinx and the Nymphs dancing; dedicated to these same gods, the reliefs were consistently deposited in cave shrines throughout Attica. Since the clear archaeological record allows for a reconstruction of the worshipper’s religious experience, Laferrière draws attention to the ways the reliefs provoked specific sensory experiences in the ancient worshippers. Within the cave shrines, worshippers could have gazed upon votive reliefs that were visually similar to the physical cave, so that the distinction between image and reality blurred and collapsed. As a result, these reliefs allowed for a fully embodied experience of the Nymphs: by imaginatively listening to the music that Pan plays, and perhaps even contributing their own music, worshippers are invited to join in the Nymphs’ dance.

This chapter argues that in Longus, Daphnis and Chloe, the depictions in the inset tales of male self-assertion and sexual violence are offered not as models which we may expect Daphnis to imitate (as suggested e.g. by Winkler) but as contrasts to his reciprocal and considerate relationship with Chloe.

This chapter turns to the social matrix of the local. Beyond spatial connotations, local communities are aggregations of people first and foremost who cultivate a particular identity of place. Since Greek communities typically included people from other locations, the social texture of the local was subject to varying degrees of cultural diversity. In the field of religion, corresponding negotiations between individual and communal practices were complicated by charged perceptions of what constituted the social core of the local, that is, who was part of it – and who was not. The chapter sets out to disentangle the threads of personal and communal agency. Polinskaya begins her discussion with examples that attest to cultic initiatives undertaken by individual citizens and foreign residents. Beyond well-known practices of turning private endeavours into communal ones (for instance by decree of the polis), Polinskaya unravels more hidden, non-linear processes of communal opting in and staying in. She traces the ways in which personal agency gradually inspired and received communal resonance and meaning.

This chapter turns to the social matrix of the local. Beyond spatial connotations, local communities are aggregations of people first and foremost who cultivate a particular identity of place. Since Greek communities typically included people from other locations, the social texture of the local was subject to varying degrees of cultural diversity. In the field of religion, corresponding negotiations between individual and communal practices were complicated by charged perceptions of what constituted the social core of the local, that is, who was part of it – and who was not. The chapter sets out to disentangle the threads of personal and communal agency. Polinskaya begins her discussion with examples that attest to cultic initiatives undertaken by individual citizens and foreign residents. Beyond well-known practices of turning private endeavours into communal ones (for instance by decree of the polis), Polinskaya unravels more hidden, non-linear processes of communal opting in and staying in. She traces the ways in which personal agency gradually inspired and received communal resonance and meaning.

Chapter 7 studies the case of Mexico, whose security situation has deteriorated dramatically over the last decade. It shows that, although a crisis-driven explanation would predict elites’ investment in strengthening the state, the federal government has not adopted – or even entertained – security taxes. Instead, this chapter shows how Mexican elites have been relatively less affected than their counterparts elsewhere in the region because of the geographic concentration of crime outside of Mexico City. This has translated into much less pressure on the federal government to address the public-safety situation. Consequently, elites’ impetus to invest in the fiscal strengthening of the state has been subdued at the national level and has taken place instead at the state level.

Chapter 5 considers texts in which music acts upon queer bodies to subject them to temporal flux or dislocation. Reading such texts through the lens of both Victorian evolutionary accounts of music’s origins and contemporary theory’s concern with ‘queer temporalities’ makes it possible to better articulate the tropes of backwardness and retrogression that attach to those queer desires awakened by music. In Browning’s ‘Charles Avison’ music’s association with both the evolutionary primitive and sexually abject presents a challenge to the teleological impetus underpinning Victorian ideals of progressive time. Similar motifs also emerge with particular prominence in stories relating to the figure of Pan by Machen, Forster and Benson. Here, the music of Pan unleashes queer desires that act upon bodies to subject them to the reverse flow of evolutionary time. In Forster’s text, Pan’s queerness is also made evident in the narrator’s paranoid fixation with masturbation, revealed in the text’s obsessive patterning of images invoking tactile contact. For Benson, Pan’s music leads his protagonist towards a queer sexual encounter that is simultaneously alluring and horrific.