The Introduction lays out connections between Parables unique to Luke and stories about Israel’s founding families. Like Jesus who looked to stories of Israel’s origins when explaining matters relating to himself, Luke reworked well-known Genesis texts to convey ideas.

In the previous chapters I have reviewed the archaeological evidence for the Romanization of Britain within its historical context and in relation to the social organization of the population. This exercise has inevitably ranged widely and raised a series of sometimes contentious interpretations, but it has shown that there is a set of coherent strands which allows a reasonably consistent interpretation of the archaeology as a reflection of the competition between and within the societies in the province. Romanization has thus been seen not as a passive reflection of change, but rather as an active ingredient used by people to assert, project and maintain their social status. Furthermore, Romanization has been seen as largely indigenous in its motivation, with emulation of Roman ways and styles being first a means of obtaining or retaining social dominance, then being used to express and define it while its manifestations evolved.

This chapter examines the interplay and boundaries between ancient heroic and didactic epic poetry, particularly in the Hellenistic and imperial periods, treating didactic poets such as Aratus, Nicander, Dionysius the Periegete, Oppian, ps.-Oppian, and ps.-Manetho, whose poems are rooted in the early didactic epic tradition associated with Hesiod. Emphasising that didactic poetry was widely deemed a subset of the epic genre by ancient literary critics, the chapter examines didactic epic as both a controversial form of verse and a perceived vehicle for cultural prestige and wider cosmic truths in the ancient world. Setting didactic poetry against prose literature, heroic epic poems and allegorical readings of the Homeric epics, Kneebone draws attention to the rich and assimilative traditions of post-classical didactic epics.

Hellenistic Antioch remains poorly known. Yet the later city’s visual repertoire, whether through emblemata, entire tessellated surfaces, or sculpture in the round is a recursive celebration of a shared Hellenistic past.

The materiality of Hellenistic Antioch is confined to a few highly weathered monuments. Nevertheless, the early city plan and urban décor enable the understanding of the urban topography in the following centuries.

Chapter 3 shifts discussion to the broader political landscape of the kingdom and to the nature of Hieron’s relationship with the cities of southeastern Sicily that recognized his political authority as a king.

Chapter 2 places Hieron’s kingship in conversation with the Hellenistic monarchies of the eastern Mediterranean and goes on to explore the qualities of his rule that set Hieron’s basileia ahead of its time – as, for example, in his diplomatic dealings with Rome.

In the opening lines of the twenty-third book of his universal history, Diodorus Siculus praises his native Sicily as “the fairest of all islands, since it can contribute greatly to the growth of an empire.”1 Sitting at the intersection of prevailing maritime routes, the island served as a natural landing for ships plying their way between the Mediterranean’s Eastern and Western Basins. Its broad coastal plains supported large urban centers and entrepôts that opened onto the Tyrrhenian Sea to the north, the Ionian Sea to the east, and the vast Libyan Sea to the south and west, inviting contacts from the Italian Peninsula, the Greek mainland, and North Africa. Indeed, located at the heart of the Mediterranean basin, Sicily has occupied an equally central place in the geopolitics of the region across much of the last three millennia.

Chapter 1 sketches the events that transpired in eastern Sicily during the turbulent years leading up to Hieron’s ascension to power, as would-be tyrants and bellicose kings grappled for political and military control of the island.

Chapter 7 examines the ways in which coinage was employed by Hieron to bolster his rule. The chapter begins with an introductory survey of the coins struck by the royal mint over the course of Hieron’s reign. It then addresses how variations in the style and types of coins struck at different points in his reign elucidate how Hieron employed coinage to promote an ideology of legitimate kingship and the orderly succession of power.

Chapter 5 builds the case that, in order to better facilitate the collection of agricultural taxes, the Hieronian state brought about the standardization of volumetric measurement throughout southeastern Sicily during the course of the third century BCE.

In the chapters that form the first part of the book, I asked the reader to view the monarchy of Hieron II as one fundamentally akin, in both principle and practice, to the forms of autocratic rule familiar to us from the Successor kingdoms of the eastern Mediterranean. The surviving evidence – both literary and material – offers clear witness to the flexible approach taken by Hieron and his court in service of legitimating his political authority over the cities of southeastern Sicily. Moreover, it reveals that the modes of communication and display emanating from the royal capital at Syracuse were fashioned in a manner receptive to contemporary trends taking place in the courts of the Successor kings. We see this, for instance, in Hieron’s early efforts to wrap his claims of legitimate political authority in the cloak of military power, grounded in demonstrable success on the battlefield.

Chapter 8 considers how the consolidation of royal authority impacted the agricultural and economic landscapes of southeastern Sicily, paying particular attention to the ways in which the tithe administration may have fostered trade and economic prosperity for the cities of the kingdom.

Chapter 6 takes as its focus the remains of two aboveground granaries that once stood in the agora of Morgantina, one of the cities that recognized Hieron’s authority as king. After a brief discussion of the buildings’ architectural form and function, the chapter explores where the Morgantina granaries fit within the corpus of known Hellenistic granary buildings and goes on to argue they played a central role in the projection of Hieron’s royal authority at the western edges of his kingdom.

Chapter 4 focuses on an institution central to the administration of the Hieronian state: the agricultural tithe collected annually from the cities subject to Hieron’s authority.

This chapter documents the differences in the five novelists’ representation of the Greek past – mythical, archaic, classical and Hellenistic. I distinguished two groups: Xenophon and Longus each offer very little myth or history before the period of the events they narrate; Chariton, Achilles Tatius and Heliodorus, on the other hand, not only use much circumstantial detail to build up a classical or (in Achilles Tatius’ case) Hellenistic world in which their story is set, but also give that world temporal depth by exploitation of mythology, and occasionally by introducing events or persons from earlier Greek history. Xenophon’s and Achilles Tatius’ worlds are such that their similarity with that of readers can almost be taken for granted, with little incentive to ask in what way and to what effect these worlds are to any degree different from their own. Chariton and Heliodorus are different: the more or less determinable historical setting combines with a decidedly contemporary σφραγίς to give readers both a strong sense of Greek cultural continuity and the opportunity to identify features where their contemporary Greek world might be significantly different: the most important such difference is Roman control of the Greek world, which is also strongly hinted at by Longus despite his choice of a timeless, predominantly rural context.

Plutarch considered content infinitely more important than style. He deprecated excessive attention to words by writers or by readers and believed that the right way to read classical poetry was to concentrate on its moral lessons and not so much on information (historia) or brilliance of language. Nevertheless, he was himself a master of the formal prose (Kunstprosa, in the idiom of German philology) of his day, and had enough versatility to vary his style not only according to genre but sometimes even within a work, especially in dialogue. At the same time, his writing always shows two very marked characteristics: abundance, and richness of imagery and allusion.

One of the most common tenets of royal and messianic ideologies is the notion that the king ruled by divine favor. This ideology was variously signaled, very often by way of omens, dream visions, as well as other predictive mechanisms, epithets, and even the direct intervention of the gods. Chapter 1 explores the way that this ideology takes shape in non-Jewish kingship treatises as well as various early Jewish texts, focusing especially on messianic figures which serve as archetypes for Revelation’s Christ, including King David and the Danielic and Enochic Son of Man.

We then explore Revelation’s appropriation of this ideology, including especially the preponderance of messianic titles as well as the investiture scene in Revelation 5, where the Lamb’s reception of the scroll from the right hand of God signals divine favor and his right to rule on God’s behalf. These strategies for designating Jesus as God’s chosen vicegerent are viewed in light of similar tropes in other early Christian texts.

One of the most common tenets of royal and messianic ideologies is the notion that the king ruled by divine favor. This ideology was variously signaled, very often by way of omens, dream visions, as well as other predictive mechanisms, epithets, and even the direct intervention of the gods. Chapter 1 explores the way that this ideology takes shape in non-Jewish kingship treatises as well as various early Jewish texts, focusing especially on messianic figures which serve as archetypes for Revelation’s Christ, including King David and the Danielic and Enochic Son of Man.

We then explore Revelation’s appropriation of this ideology, including especially the preponderance of messianic titles as well as the investiture scene in Revelation 5, where the Lamb’s reception of the scroll from the right hand of God signals divine favor and his right to rule on God’s behalf. These strategies for designating Jesus as God’s chosen vicegerent are viewed in light of similar tropes in other early Christian texts.