Euhormos: Greco-Roman Studies in Anchoring Innovation – serie

The apostle Peter gradually became one of the most famous figures of the ancient world. His almost undisputed reputation made the disciple an exquisite anchor by which new practices within and outside the Church could be established, including innovations in fields as diverse as architecture, art, cult, epigraphy, liturgy, poetry and politics. This interdisciplinary volume inquires the way in which the figure of Peter functioned as an anchor for various people from different periods and geographical areas. The concept of Anchoring Innovation is used to investigate the history of the reception of the apostle Peter from the first century up to Charlemagne, revealing as much about Peter as about the context in which this reception took place.

Aetiologies seem to gratify the human desire to understand the origin of a phenomenon. However, as this book demonstrates, aetiologies do not exclusively explore origins. Rather, in inventing origin stories they authorise the present and try to shape the future. This book explores aetiology as a tool for thinking, and draws attention to the paradoxical structure of origin stories. Aetiologies reduce complex ambivalence and plurality to plainly causal and temporal relations, but at the same time, by casting an anchor into the past, they open doors to progress and innovation.

Canonisation is fundamental to the sustainability of cultures. This volume is meant as a (theoretical) exploration of the process, taking Eurasian societies from roughly the first millennium BCE (Babylonian, Assyrian, Persian, Greek, Egyptian, Jewish and Roman) as case studies. It focuses on canonisation as a form of cultural formation, asking why and how canonisation works in this particular way and explaining the importance of the first millennium BCE for these question and vice versa. As a result of this focus, notions like anchoring, cultural memory, embedding and innovation play an important role throughout the book.

Who or what makes innovation spread? Ten case-studies from Greco-Roman Antiquity and the early modern period address human and non-human agency in innovation. Was Erasmus the ‘superspreader’ of the use of New Ancient Greek? How did a special type of clamp contribute to architectural innovation in Delphi? What agents helped diffuse a new festival culture in the eastern parts of the Roman empire? How did a context of status competition between scholars and poets at the Ptolemaic court help deify a lock of hair? Examples from different societal domains illuminate different types of agency in historical innovation.

Plundering and taking home precious objects from a defeated enemy was a widespread activity in the Greek and Hellenistic-Roman world. In this volume literary critics, historians and archaeologists join forces in investigating this phenomenon in terms of appropriation and cultural change. In-depth interpretations of famous ancient spoliations, like that of the Greeks after Plataea or the Romans after the capture of Jerusalem, reveal a fascinating paradox: while the material record shows an eager incorporation of new objects, the texts display abhorrence of the negative effects they were thought to bring along. As this volume demonstrates, both reactions testify to the crucial innovative impact objects from abroad may have.

Scholarship surrounding the standard varieties of Ancient Greek (Attic, the Koine, and Atticistic Greek) focused from its beginnings until relatively recently on determining fixed uniformities or differences between them. This collection of essays advocates for understanding them as interconnected and continuously evolving and suggests viewing them as living organisms shaped by their speakers and texts. The authors propose approaches that integrate linguistics, sociolinguistics, and literary studies to explore how speakers navigate linguistic norms and social dynamics, leading to innovations and reshaping of standards. Each contribution challenges the dichotomy between standards and deviations, suggesting that studying linguistic diversity through socio-literary interconnectedness can enrich our understanding of language history and cultural wealth.

Ever since Thales fell into the well, popular imagination has pictured philosophers as abstracted from everyday reality. Materia Philosophiae: The Material Dimensions of Ancient Philosophy counters that view. Philosophy in ancient Greece grew out of and remained closely connected to the material realities around it—difficulties of travel, reliance on cumbersome scrolls, learning acquired literally at the foot of a master; but also the spread of coinage, contemporaneous achievements in technology and engineering, and contact with everyday household objects. By resituating philosophers in their material contexts, Materia Philosophiae opens research avenues that have not previously been explored in a single volume.

This collection of essays explores processes of innovation in Greco-Roman technology and science. It uses the concept of ‘anchoring’ to investigate the microhistories of technological and scientific practices and ideas. The volume combines broad, theoretical essays with more targeted case studies of individual inventions and innovations. In doing so, it moves beyond the emphasis on achievement that has traditionally characterized modern scholarship on ancient technology and science. Instead, the chapters of this volume analyse the manifold ways in which new technologies and ideas were anchored in what was already known and familiar, and highlight how, once familiar, technologies and ideas could themselves become anchoring points for inventions and innovations.

Social Psychology and the Ancient World: Methods and Applications fosters an interdisciplinary dialogue between classics and social psychology. Classicists use modern social-psychological insights to interpret ancient texts, while social psychologists engage with classical case studies to refine their own conceptual frameworks. This dialogue unfolds through an innovative structure: thematic sections introduced by social psychologists are paired with wide-ranging case studies by classicists, covering topics such as the psychology of tragic characters, comedic group dynamics, and the cognitive processes at play in oracles and deification. The volume offers methodological guidance for reconstructing the social psychology of past societies, addressing questions like: How did ancient Greeks understand character? How did laughter shape social cohesion? What role did emotional contagion play in narratives? How did ancient societies accommodate religious innovation? And above all: how do we know, and how can we properly investigate such questions?

In 480 BCE, during their invasion of Greece, the Persians began the destruction of Athens. How has this event shaped our understanding of Greek history? This interdisciplinary volume investigates the commemoration of the attack in Antiquity and how it became anchored in modern scholarship as a watershed dividing Archaic and Classical Greece. Drawing on ancient literature, material culture, including deposits in the Athenian Agora, and reception history, the book explores if and how the destruction of Athens stimulated cultural innovation. By investigating the significance of 480 BCE as a historical anchor for the scholarship on ancient Greece, the volume reopens the discussion on the periodization of Archaic and Classical Greece.

Ancient meteorology was not just about predicting the weather but a broader notion involving the study of phenomena that belong under such disciplines as astronomy and geology today. This collective volume deals with meteorological phenomena in a wide variety of texts from classical antiquity: philosophical and scientific, literary, poetical, historical as well as medical. It takes a special approach in its sustained focus on how ancient authors sought to anchor novel insights into the work of their predecessors, tracing the development of meteorology beyond antiquity well into (early) modern times and adding perspectives from present-day science.

This book represents the first reception history of the classical myth of the “Golden Age” from Antiquity up until the present. The introduction proposes “Golden Age thinking” as a set of connected ideas about the flexible organization of time, morality and divine interventions. The case-studies reveal the different ways this has been and still is being used to promote a particular vision of the future by connecting it to an idealized vision of a lost past. Together they offer a toolkit for understanding this motif’s enduring power, and reconstruct the trajectory during which Greco-Roman antiquity, from being the origin of the Golden Age myth, was transformed into a kind of Golden Age itself.