The heroic story of the only female Argonaut, told by Jennifer Saint, the bestselling author of ELEKTRA (UK, Sunday Times, May 2022) and ARIADNE (UK, Sunday Times, April 2021). 'A brilliant read' Women & Home | 'A spirited retelling' Times | 'Beautiful and absorbing' Fabulous | 'A vivid reimagining of Greek mythology' Harper's Bazaar | 'Jennifer Saint has done an incredible job' Red When a daughter is born to the King of Arcadia, she brings only disappointment. Left exposed on a mountainside, the defenceless infant Atalanta is left to the mercy of a passing mother bear and raised alongside the cubs under the protective eye of the goddess Artemis. Swearing that she will prove her worth alongside the famed heroes of Greece, Atalanta leaves her forest to join Jason's band of Argonauts. But can she carve out her own place in the legends in a world made for men? Praise for Jennifer Saint's books: 'A lyrical, insightful re-telling' Daily Mail 'Relevant and revelatory' Stylist 'Energetic and compelling' Times 'An illuminating read' Woman & Home 'A story that's impossible to forget' Culturefly

A Place at the Altar illuminates a previously underappreciated dimension of religion in ancient Rome: the role of priestesses in civic cult. Demonstrating that priestesses had a central place in public rituals and institutions, Meghan DiLuzio emphasizes the complex, gender-inclusive nature of Roman priesthood. In ancient Rome, priestly service was a cooperative endeavor, requiring men and women, husbands and wives, and elite Romans and slaves to work together to manage the community's relationship with its gods. Like their male colleagues, priestesses offered sacrifices on behalf of the Roman people, and prayed for the community's well-being. As they carried out their ritual obligations, they were assisted by female cult personnel, many of them slave women. DiLuzio explores the central role of the Vestal Virgins and shows that they occupied just one type of priestly office open to women. Some priestesses, including the flaminica Dialis, the regina sacrorum, and the wives of the curial priests, served as part of priestly couples. Others, such as the priestesses of Ceres and Fortuna Muliebris, were largely autonomous. A Place at the Altar offers a fresh understanding of how the women of ancient Rome played a leading role in public cult.

For more than one thousand years, people from every corner of the Greco-Roman world sought the hope for a blessed afterlife through initiation into the Mysteries of Demeter and Kore at Eleusis. In antiquity itself and in our memory of antiquity, the Eleusinian Mysteries stand out as the oldest and most venerable mystery cult. Despite the tremendous popularity of the Eleusinian Mysteries, their origins are unknown. Because they are lost in an era without written records, they can only be reconstructed with the help of archaeology. This book provides a much-needed synthesis of the archaeology of Eleusis during the Bronze Age and reconstructs the formation and early development of the Eleusinian Mysteries. The discussion of the origins of the Eleusinian Mysteries is complemented with discussions of the theology of Demeter and an update on the state of research in the archaeology of Eleusis from the Bronze Age to the end of antiquity.

The city of Constantinople was named New Rome or Second Rome very soon after its foundation in AD 324; over the next two hundred years it replaced the original Rome as the greatest city of the Mediterranean. In this unified essay collection, prominent international scholars examine the changing roles and perceptions of Rome and Constantinople in Late Antiquity from a range of different disciplines and scholarly perspectives. The seventeen chapters cover both the comparative development and the shifting status of the two cities. Developments in politics and urbanism are considered, along with the cities' changing relationships with imperial power, the church, and each other, and their evolving representations in both texts and images. These studies present important revisionist arguments and new interpretations of significant texts and events. This comparative perspective allows the neglected subject of the relationship between the two Romes to come into focus while avoiding the teleological distortions common in much past scholarship. An introductory section sets the cities, and their comparative development, in context. Part Two looks at topography, and includes the first English translation of the Notitia of Constantinople. The following section deals with politics proper, considering the role of emperors in the two Romes and how rulers interacted with their cities. Part Four then considers the cities through the prism of literature, in particular through the distinctively late antique genre of panegyric. The fifth group of essays considers a crucial aspect shared by the two cities: their role as Christian capitals. Lastly, a provocative epilogue looks at the enduring Roman identity of the post-Heraclian Byzantine state. Thus, Two Romes not only illuminates the study of both cities but also enriches our understanding of the late Roman world in its entirety.

Few thinkers have been as influential as Augustine of Hippo. His writings, such as Confessions and City of God, have left an indelible mark on Western Christianity. He has become so synonymous with Christianity in the West that we easily forget he was a man of two cultures: African and Greco-Roman. The mixture of African Christianity and Greco-Roman rhetoric and philosophy gave his theology and ministry a unique potency in the cultural ferment of the late Roman empire. Augustine experienced what Latino/a theology calls mestizaje, which means being of a mixed background. Cuban American historian and theologian Justo Gonzalez looks at the life and legacy of Augustine from the perspective of his own Latino heritage and finds in the bishop of Hippo a remarkable resource for the church today. The mestizo Augustine can serve as a lens by which to see afresh not only the history of Christianity but also our own culturally diverse world.

Originally published in 1903, this book traces the influence of the ancient pagan legends of Castor and Pollux, the Dioscuri, on later Christian hagiography. Rendel Harris charts how the Church not only displaced ancient religious practices centred around the Dioscuri with their own traditions, but also how Christians took pagan legends and reshaped them for their own purposes. This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in comparative religious history, the history of the early church and the influences of paganism on Christianity.

Originally published in 1934, this book contains the Cromer Greek Prize-winning essay for that year on the subject of the still little-understood Greek religion Orphism. Watmough examines Orpheus and Orphism through a distinctly Protestant lens, arguing that both were religions 'of reform' sharing similar views on asceticism and the wages of sin in the afterlife. This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in Greek mysticism and ancient religion.

Animal sacrifice has been critical to the study of ancient Mediterranean religions since the nineteenth century. Recently, two theories have dominated the subject of sacrifice: the psychological and ethological approach of Walter Burkert and the sociological and cultural approach of Jean-Pierre Vernant and Marcel Detienne. These writers have argued that sacrifice allays feelings of guilt at the slaughter of sacrificial animals and that it promotes solidarity. None of them leaves much room for the role of priests or gods, or compares animal sacrifice to other oblations offered to the gods. F. S. Naiden redresses the omission of these features to show that, far from being an attempt to assuage guilt or foster solidarity, animal sacrifice is an attempt to make contact with a divine being, and that it is so important-and perceived to be so risky-for the worshippers that it becomes subject to regulations of unequaled extent and complexity. Smoke Signals for the Gods addresses these regulations as well as literary texts, while drawing on recent archaeological work on faunal remains. It also seeks to explain how mistaken views of sacrifice arose, and traces them as far back as early Christianity. This many-sided study provides a new picture of ancient Greek animal sacrifice and of the religion of which sacrifice was a part.

Originally published in 1902, this book provides an extensive survey of the tradition of votive offerings in ancient Greece. Rouse details the various motives behind offerings, including propitiation, tithes, and domestic purposes, drawing on the evidence of inscriptions and ancient eyewitnesses, and also examines ancient votive formulae. Thirteen indices containing an exhaustive list of epigraphical references to votive offerings at various shrines are also included. This well-written and richly-illustrated book will be of value to anyone with an interest in ancient Greek religion and the history of votive offerings.

Longlisted for the RUNCIMAN AWARD, 2021 Medicine is one of the great fields of achievement of the Ancient Greeks. Hippocrates is celebrated worldwide as the father of medicine and the Hippocratic Oath is admired throughout the medical profession as a founding statement of ethics and ideals. In the fifth century BC, Greeks even wrote of medicine as a newly discovered craft they had invented. Robin Lane Fox's remarkable book puts their invention of medicine in a wider context, from the epic poems of Homer to the first doctors known to have been active in the Greek world. He examines what we do and do not know about Hippocrates and his Oath and the many writings that survive under his name. He then focuses on seven core texts which give the case histories of named individuals, showing that books 1 and 3 belong far earlier than previously recognised. Their re-dating has important consequences for the medical awareness of the great Greek dramatists and the historians Herodotus and Thucydides. Robin Lane Fox pieces together the doctor's thinking from his terse observations and relates it in a new way to the history of Greek prose and ideas. This original and compelling book opens windows onto many other aspects of the classical world, from women's medicine to street-life, empire, art, sport, sex and even botany. It fills a dark decade in a new way and carries readers along an extraordinary journey form Homer's epics to the grateful heirs of the Greek case histories, first in the Islamic world and then in early modern Europe.

This volume assembles fourteen highly influential articles written by Michael H. Jameson over a period of nearly fifty years, edited and updated by the author himself. They represent both the scope and the signature style of Jameson's engagement with the subject of ancient Greek religion. The collection complements the original publications in two ways: firstly, it makes the articles more accessible; and secondly, the volume offers readers a unique opportunity to observe that over almost five decades of scholarship Jameson developed a distinctive method, a signature style, a particular perspective, a way of looking that could perhaps be fittingly called a 'Jamesonian approach' to the study of Greek religion. This approach, recognizable in each article individually, becomes unmistakable through the concentration of papers collected here. The particulars of the Jamesonian approach are insightfully discussed in the five introductory essays written for this volume by leading world authorities on polis religion.

Myths are not simple narrative plots. In ancient Greece, as in other traditional societies, these tales existed only in the poetic or artistic forms in which they were set down. To read them from an anthropological point of view means to study their meaning according to their forms of expression - epic recitation, ritual celebration of the victory of an athlete, tragic performance, erudite Alexandrian poetry, antiquarian prose text; in other words, to study the functions of Greek myths in their permanent retelling and reshaping. Falling between social reality and cultural fiction, Greek myths were evolving creations, constantly adapting themselves to new conditions of performance. Using myths such as those of Persephone, Bellerophon, Helen and Teiresias, Claude Calame presents an overview of Greek mythology as a category inseparable from the literature in which so much of it is found. The French edition of this book was first published in 2000.

The 'Orphic' gold tablets, tiny scraps of gold foil found in graves throughout the ancient Greek world, are some of the most fascinating and baffling pieces of evidence for ancient Greek religion. This collection brings together a number of previously published and unpublished studies from scholars around the world, making accessible to a wider audience some of the new methodologies being applied to the study of these tablets. The volume also contains an updated edition of the tablet texts, reflecting the most recent discoveries and accompanied by English translations and critical apparatus. This survey of trends in the scholarship, with an up-to-date bibliography, not only provides an introduction to the serious study of the tablets, but also illuminates their place within scholarship on ancient Greek religion.

First published in 1900, this book contains the text of two lectures delivered at the Royal Institution of Great Britain on the subject of the temples of Asklepios found in Athens and Epidauros. The text is accompanied by photographs of statuary and buildings from both sites, as well as drawings with suggested reproductions of how the temples would have looked in antiquity. This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in ancient religion.

This book tackles the topic of religion, a broad subject exciting renewed interest across the social and historical sciences. The volume is tightly focused on the early farming village of Catalhoeyuk, which has generated much interest both within and outside of archaeology, especially for its contributions to the understanding of early religion. The volume discusses contemporary themes such as materiality, animism, object vitality, and material dimensions of spirituality while at the same time exploring broad evolutionary changes in the ways in which religion has influenced society. The volume results from a unique collaboration between an archaeological team and a range of specialists in ritual and religion.

This book tackles the topic of religion, a broad subject exciting renewed interest across the social and historical sciences. The volume is tightly focused on the early farming village of Catalhoeyuk, which has generated much interest both within and outside of archaeology, especially for its contributions to the understanding of early religion. The volume discusses contemporary themes such as materiality, animism, object vitality, and material dimensions of spirituality while at the same time exploring broad evolutionary changes in the ways in which religion has influenced society. The volume results from a unique collaboration between an archaeological team and a range of specialists in ritual and religion.

This book examines the fragmentary and contradictory evidence for Orpheus as the author of rites and poems to redefine Orphism as a label applied polemically to extra-ordinary religious phenomena. Replacing older models of an Orphic religion, this richer and more complex model provides insight into the boundaries of normal and abnormal Greek religion. The study traces the construction of the category of 'Orphic' from its first appearances in the Classical period, through the centuries of philosophical and religious polemics, especially in the formation of early Christianity and again in the debates over the origins of Christianity in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. A paradigm shift in the study of Greek religion, this study provides scholars of classics, early Christianity, ancient religion and philosophy with a new model for understanding the nature of ancient Orphism, including ideas of afterlife, cosmogony, sacred scriptures, rituals of purification and initiation, and exotic mythology.

Originally published in 1926, this book contains the ancient Greek text of the fourth-century treatise Concerning the Gods and the Universe by Sallustius. Nock provides an English translation on each facing page, as well as a critical apparatus and a detailed set of prolegomena on the historical background, sources, style and transmission of the philosophical essay. This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in late Roman philosophy and in the pagan response to early Christianity.

The revived cult of Pan recognizes him as the god of fields, groves and wooded glens. This connects him to fertility and the season of spring, with his entourage of fauns and satyrs pursuing and copulating with woodland nymphs.The word panic also ultimately derives from the god's name. He is the eponymous Piper at the Gates of Dawn in The Wind in the Willows. In the late 19th century Pan became an increasingly common figure in literature and art. and there was an astonishing resurgence of interest in the Pan motif. He appears in poetry, in novels and children's books, and is referenced in the name of the character Peter Pan.The conception of Pan has continued to evolve. He is now seen by many as an eco-guardian, a protector of the landscape and natural resources from human depredations. He remains a relevant and vital figure.

Stories about dragons, serpents, and their slayers make up a rich and varied tradition within ancient mythology and folklore. In this sourcebook, Daniel Ogden presents a comprehensive and easily accessible collection of dragon myths from Greek, Roman, and early Christian sources. Some of the dragons featured are well known: the Hydra, slain by Heracles; the Dragon of Colchis, the guardian of the golden fleece overcome by Jason and Medea; and the great sea-serpent from which Perseus rescues Andromeda. But the less well known dragons are often equally enthralling, like the Dragon of Thespiae, which Menestratus slays by feeding himself to it in armor covered in fish-hooks, or the lamias of Libya, who entice young men into their striking-range by wiggling their tails, shaped like beautiful women, at them. The texts are arranged in such a way as to allow readers to witness the continuity of and evolution in dragon stories between the Classical and Christian worlds, and to understand the genesis of saintly dragon-slaying stories of the sort now characteristically associated with St George, whose earliest dragon-fight concludes the volume. All texts, a considerable number of which have not previously been available in English, are offered in new translations and accompanied by lucid commentaries that place the source-passages into their mythical, folkloric, literary, and cultural contexts. A sampling of the ancient iconography of dragons and an appendix on dragon slaying myths from the ancient Near East and India, particularly those with a bearing upon the Greco-Roman material, are also included. This volume promises to be the most authoritative sourcebook on this perennially fascinating and influential body of ancient myth.