Lucian of Samosata emerges as a complex character through his writings, showcasing a deliberate engagement with ambiguity and boundary transgressions. From his caustic and comedic attitude towards Olympian deities to later categorisations as an enemy of Christianity in the tenth-century Suda lexicon, Lucian remains elusive in his spiritual allegiances as well. Similarly, the diverse reception of his theocentric writings prompts a valid inquiry into the best approach to understanding his work. Situating Lucian within the context of the Greco-Roman author’s perceptions of the divine and scholarly inquiries into Greco-Roman religion, this chapter considers his stance regarding religion in general and Christianity in particular. The chapter suggests viewing Lucian as a social anthropologist studying human perceptions of the divine. By delving into the socio-pragmatics of religious practices, Lucian verbalises long-standing debates, shedding light on the realities of belief and disbelief in the contemporary pagan and Christian divine systems.

Chapter 3 turns to the medieval Venetian ritual of the Festa delle Marie, a multiday celebration that began on the eve of the Feast of Saint Mark’s Translation (31 January) and ended on the Feast of the Purification (2 February). The feast centered around twelve wooden effigies of the Virgin Mary, each sumptuously dressed, adorned with gemstones and pearls, and crowned with a golden headpiece. From around 1267 until 1379, when the feast was abolished, the state threw all its financial backing behind a new facet of the celebration: a procession made on 31 January to the church of Santa Maria Formosa, where a sung Annunciation exchange, unique within the medieval dramatic corpus, was performed. This chapter provides the first in-depth musical study of this unique Annunciation drama and its sung ceremonial context. Using previously lost sources, I reconstruct the dialogue’s melodies, all based on the antiphonal repertory of San Marco, and show how this preexisting repertory was refashioned into a version of the Annunciation story that helped aligned the Festa delle Marie celebration with the interests of the state and its empire. Central to this chapter is a concern with the ways song worked in tandem with the plastic arts (effigies, thrones, costumes) to create the ceremony’s special representational effects.

This chapter starts by exploring the familiar scene at the end of Iliad 18, where the Homeric poet describes a sequence of artefacts that Hephaestus has manufactured: first the self-moving twenty golden tripods that he is in the process of completing, now fitting them out with ‘ears’, then the golden girls, automata, who are filled with ‘voice and strength’, then twenty self-blowing bellows that keep the fire strong, and finally Achilles’ wondrous shield, filled with individuals, animals and other elements that move, speak, sing and grow before our eyes for all (as the poet takes pains to remind us) that they are metal-forged. The Odyssey introduces another set of Hephaestus-forged animated metal goods, the guard dogs standing on the threshold of Alcinous and described in book 7.91–4. The second part of the chapter explores some of the vivified objects that populate archaic hexameter poetry, hybrids that stand at the interstices between the living and inanimate and among which the Hesiodic Pandora claims a place together with several other Hesiodic beings. The discussion’s second half focuses on the late archaic and early classical period, and on a number of figures that appear in Pindaric poetry.

‘Cancel culture’ is a new variant of an old phenomenon. The growth or spread that we associate with the contagion of cancellation has ‘making’ at its heart. The initial judgment plants the germ in Inventive mode. Causing the judgment to increase in consequence and extent makes it grow in Creative mode. Giving the judgment the air of publicity makes something new of it in Productive and co-Productive mode. Making a mistake triggers a whole series of making processes, and our language reflects this. The dominance of ‘making’ language in relation to individual errors and collective responses to those errors indicates that in social contexts an individual’s fracture of the social fabric is more than made up for by the fabricating impulses of society at large. The clustering of criticism operates in this sense almost like the cells of a body that rush to heal cuts in skin and breakages of bone – sometimes leaving the re-created tissue stronger than it was to begin with. On the other hand, where judgments are made hypocritically, too quickly, or with an inadequate grasp of the materials, the Product can be as shoddy as the original infraction.

Early explorers and excavators knew only biblical and classical accounts, some of them garbled and confusing. They were unaware that Babylon had an advanced literate culture. Mud-brick ruins contrasted unfavourably with marble, and the sprawling site of Babylon had many separate mounds, with the Tower of Babel indistinguishable amid the rubble. As Babylon’s power grew, quarters of the citadel were named after more ancient cities, and branches of temples to deities in other cities became established there. Early travellers from the twelfth century onwards brought back to the west their accounts of what they saw. In the seventeenth century, cuneiform writing on stone was identified at Persepolis. In the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries, cuneiform inscriptions from Mesopotamia increasingly arrived in Europe and a few national museums were soon built to house the items discovered by travellers, dilettante collectors, and informal excavators. Decipherment then began to excite public interest, but literal understanding gave way only slowly to appreciation of symbolism and rhetoric. Official excavations in Babylon took place under German leadership between 1899 and 1917. A chronological sequence for the history still has a few unsolved problems. Cuneiform writing unexpectedly lasted into Roman times.

Hard times for Babylon followed the end of the First Dynasty; but records of two Sealand kings, and the account of magnificent rebuilding of Marduk’s temple by a Kassite king imply wealth and energy. Glass production brought a new source of wealth, and horses were bred for chariots. Marduk was still the supreme god. The top status of the Kassite kings in Babylon was recognized by the pharaohs in Egypt. There cuneiform was used for international correspondence and Babylonian literature used to train local scribes. Foreign wives were taken from Elamite, Assyrian, and Hittite royalty. A top scribe from Babylon served in Assyria, and literature flourished. Boulders recording donations of land were carved with texts and celestial motifs. The office of eunuch is discussed. The Assyrian king raided Babylon, looting literary tablets among other valuables. He took over rule of Bahrain to access Gulf trade. The Kassite kings soon resumed the dynasty but the Elamite king raided and in turn took huge amounts of booty. In the next dynasty, the great Nebuchadnezzar I defeated Elam and wrote a heroic account. As a result of tribal incursions by Arameans, the Aramaic language began to spread, and camels trained for transport opened up desert trade. A library already existed in Babylon.

This chapter uses monuments as heritage, and a means to create new symbols to cement an oppressive regime. As these regimes fall, these symbols are erased or replaced. Monuments are known in cultural heritage jargon as movable cultural heritage or cultural objects. The chapter focuses primarily on efforts to remove or relocate statues and other monuments that are associated with oppressive periods in a nation’s history. It examines tensions around monuments and symbols in the controversies around statue removals in the United States (US Civil War), and Eastern Europe (Soviet Regime). Particularly with respect to the latter, it also investigates in-depth the creation of Memento Park in Budapest, a park that houses Soviet monuments removed from Hungary’s capital after the end of the Soviet regime.

This chapter investigates the dynamics of material and symbolic exchange between Roman emperors and Greek cities, and the role of the emperor in the ideology and practice of civic euergetism in the Greek East, in the middle Roman empire (c. 98–180 CE). It begins by documenting the absence of demonstrable correlations between (1) an imperial visit and an imperial benefaction to a city and (2) an imperial visit and the erection of an honorific statue for the reigning emperor. On this basis it is argued that an imperial visit was not the critical moment for generating reciprocal exchanges between emperor and city, as is normally thought, and that local honours for the emperor were not usually triggered by the provision or even the prospect of specific imperial benefactions to the city. The bulk of the chapter then draws out the implications – both ideological and practical – of this peculiar form of ‘abstract reciprocity’ between Roman emperors and Greek cities, arguing that this type of idealized benefaction and local honorific practice defines this phase in the long history of civic euergetism in the Greek polis.

A body of law is currently being developed in response to algorithms which are designed to control increasingly smart machines, to replace humans in the decision-making loops of systems, or to account for the actions of algorithms that make decisions which affect the legal rights of people. Such algorithms are ubiquitous; they are being used to guide commercial transactions, evaluate credit and housing applications, by courts in the criminal justice system, and to control self-driving cars and robotic surgeons. However, while the automation of decisions typically made by humans has resulted in numerous benefits to society, the use of algorithms has also resulted in challenges to established areas of law. For example, algorithms may exhibit the same human biases in decision-making that have led to violations of people’s constitutional rights, and algorithms may collectively collude to price fix, thus violating antitrust law.

This chapter looks at the ways in which Hellenisms are constructed, specifically with reference to the language of religion and divinity. It poses the question: how Christian is the determinedly nostalgic late-ancient Hellenism of the emperor known as Julian the Apostate (ruled 361-363)? If the emperor continued to be considered as a god, how did that inflect the understanding of Christ’s incarnation—and vice versa? The very language of the divine becomes fraught with ambiguity, and the distinctions imposed by interpreters between philology and theology seem increasingly tendentious. Ultimately it shows show how the dynamic interaction of theology and classical antiquity can produce an almost unthinkable collocation of ideas: that an ensouled statue of the emperor should provide some sort of model for comprehending the incarnation of Christ.

Images of the gods were omnipresent in the Roman world. Cult images served many functions, but some were the focal point of ritual activity in temples and are termed ‘idols’ in this book. After exploring both the ancient and modern terminology of cult images, this chapter turns to evidence for belief in the divinity of idols. Many ancient writers, including Arnobius of Sicca, give a sense that many Romans perceived idols to be divine, or at least endowed with agency. It is suggested that this aspect of Roman religion can be understood through cross-cultural comparisons and anthropological theories of agency in religious art. To help us build a complete picture of the place of Roman cult images in Roman religion, and to avoid the problem of the so-called museum effect, the book adopts a biographical approach, exploring the births, lives, and death of cult images. It focuses on cult images and temples in the western Roman Empire, including Rome, Gaul, and Germany, from the Roman Republican period, or the pre-Roman Celtic and Germanic Iron Age, to late antiquity and the early medieval period.

Chapter 3 explores the material world of the nuns as part of the intense rebuilding and architectural remodelling programmes embarked upon in mainland Europe after the Council of Trent. Again, the English convents sought to engage with the wider secular world, in this instance using the decoration of their public churches, as well as the vessels and fabrics used in the celebration of the liturgy, to convey how they wished to be viewed by the surrounding populace. Though they used their outward liturgical faces to support their national identity, far more stress was placed on their strong identification with their Order, emphasising their role as part of the universal Church. Material culture in each institution was aimed at developing the nuns’ spiritual lives in adherence with Tridentine rules on behaviour and management. The second half of the chapter focuses on the more private spaces in which the enclosed inhabitants lived their daily lives, yet, as was the case in other early modern European convents, the secular permeated enclosure through various material reminders. It is argued that exile did not mean poverty of material culture.