Chapter 2 tells the story of the conversion of the kings of Kongo. Nzinka a Nkuwu (King João) was baptised in 1491 but later apostatised and was succeeded by his son, King Afonso, who established an enduring Catholic dynasty in west central Africa. After acknowledging the significance of religious diplomacy, the chapter shows how the realm of immanent power was the most critical factor in the Kongo case. A close reading of the evidence indicates that the Portuguese or their ruler may have been considered to have a special association with the realm of the ancestors, while baptism was received as an initiation granting unusual powers, particularly in battle. This helps explain King João’s apostasy and is most apparent in the miraculous interpretation of the military victory that brought Afonso to the throne in 1506. However, it is also argued that conversion may have helped Afonso solidify his control of the religious field, as expressed in the iconoclastic sweeps that happened at several points in 1480–1530. The theme of cultural appeal is illustrated by a more general importation of the Portuguese culture by elites. Afonso is presented as a visionary with ambitions for societal recreation.

One of the most striking things about myth on Roman sarcophagi is that, after exiting the stage during the second half of the third century, it returns with a vengeance in the fourth – this time in Christian guise. How are we to conceive of the relation between the polytheistic myths that had long adorned Roman coffins and the Christian myths that succeeded them? What was their altered view of temporality, allegory, and the afterlife? And what is the relevance of sculptural technique and tooling to understanding this relationship? Such is the subject of this book’s closing chapter.

“Herakles Looks Back at the World,” argues that in Isthmian 4 and Nemeans 3 and 4 Pindar deploys Herakles’ biography as a framework for theological modeling by foregrounding the apotheosis as a salient feature of Herakles’ epinician identity. The motif of the pillars of Herakles informs the significance of the apotheosis, characterizing Herakles’ unparalleled passage from mortality to immortality as a break within the arc of his life, rather than as a reward analogous to the praise and exaltation enjoyed by the victor. This modeling emphasizes that the victor’s epinician exaltation belongs to the world of human experience, defined by mortality, a world that Herakles leaves behind with his apotheosis. The chapter emphasizes how Pindar’s theological modeling plays on the tensions and congruencies that develop between the depictions of Herakles within an ode and those already in play in the local landscape, demonstrating the distinct resonances evoked by the matrix of pillars and apotheosis at Thebes (Isth. 4) and at Aigina (Nems. 3 and 4).

The portrayal of Hercules in Virgil’s Aeneid is heavily indebted to his portrayal in the Argonautica of Apollonius of Rhodes. As a demi-god, he is a complex and ambivalent figure in both poems, not exactly a man and not exactly a god. The depiction of Aeneas is indebted to the Apollonian Heracles in his immense force and his loneliness.

Portrait statues and busts of Homer were made from the fifth century b.c. to the Hellenistic period and are known today in many Roman copies. In addition, he appears on coins, a marble relief from Pergamon, and in the minor arts into the Roman period and beyond.