This chapter examines the temporal texturing of Apollonius Rhodius’ Argonautica. Unlike the Aeneid, the Argonautica is not tied to a specific political project, but it uses epic and specifically Homeric narrative models more allusively to shape its reader’s experience of the world. Focusing on Orpheus’ cosmogonic song, the ecphrasis of the Acherousian headland, and then the consequences of desire as felt by Medea, Phillips draws attention to the small moments of temporal shaping within the Argonautica – how time is experienced by the characters and the readers on the level of the individual line, phrase and even word – which contain the many perspectives offered by Apollonius on navigating the burden of living as a subject of history.

An examination of the Anatolian sources of Greek theogonic traditions, syncretistic myths that took shape in admixed Ur-Aeolian–Luvian communities in the Late Bronze Age, and descendent Aeolian assemblages of mythic and cult elements that persist into the Iron Age. Essential to many of these traditions is the presence of honey, especially honey having psychotropic properties of a sort that occurs naturally along the southern and eastern shores of the Black Sea.

Investigation of the Bee-nymphs of Mt. Parnassus and the ancestral Indo-European strain and Anatolian strains of divination introduced into European Hellas by migrant pre-Aeolian communities.

Khushhal Khan ‘Gunasamudra’ was the most feted court singer of the mid-seventeenth century. Great-grandson of the most famous Mughal musician of all time, Tansen, and chief musician to the emperors Shah Jahan (r.1627−1658) and Aurangzeb (r.1658−1707), he was written about extensively in his lifetime as a virtuoso of exceptional merit. Yet this was not how he was memorialised in the 1750s, when legends of the great Mughal musicians of past and present were first compiled into biographical collections. Rather, he was remembered as the instigator of a shocking political scandal that supernaturally sealed Shah Jahan’s downfall. In this chapter I retell Khushhal’s story from the vantage point of the 1750s, in the light of the canonical Mughal music treatises of Shah Jahan’s and Aurangzeb’s reigns. I consider what they together tell us about the role and power of music in the Mughal empire, just before everything began to unravel.

This chapter focuses on a selection of recipes included in Byzantine alchemical and pharmacological compendia that are preserved in manuscripts dating between the fourteenth and the fifteenth centuries: MSS Parisinus gr. 2314, Bononiensis 1808, and Vaticanus gr. 1174. These manuscripts represent important case studies that are compared with similar collections, from late antique medical encyclopaedias to Byzantine alchemical writings and Nicholas Myrepsos’ pharmaceutical handbook. Through an in-depth analysis of the contents and the terminology of these works, I track the transformation of their technical vocabulary, focusing on cross-cultural exchanges between the Byzantine, Arabic, and Latin traditions. Byzantine authors and copyists reshaped and ‘updated’ a long-lasting technical tradition deeply rooted in late antique and early Byzantine writings, which continued to be read and commented on during the Palaiolοgan period, when scholars compiled large selections of formulas and prescriptions belonging to different, yet overlapping fields, such as metallurgy, pharmacology, and cuisine.

Ch 1: The first chapter centers on three classical authors’ representations of the descent of Orpheus into the underworld to retrieve his wife. It focuses not on the myth of Orpheus or its abundant allegorical interpretations but on the workings of the representations themselves. In the Virgilian version, irony and pathos work together to produce an empathy that allows for the reader’s judgment and provides elements that prepare a case for equity. The Ovidian version places rhetoric at the foreground, on the one hand (specifically, a rhetoric of compelling respect), and privileges a different case for pardon, one based on the physical movement of the couple, on the other. The Senecan versions elide pathos and rhetoric entirely, in order to allow the reader to understand what is lacking in the gods unable to pardon.

The gorgeous surface of Vergil’s didactic poem on farming lulls the reader into a sense of false security – by the end of the poem, scenes of plague, crop failure, and the collapse of an allegorical society of bees brings vividness to the contemporary context of civil war. Analogy invites us to see the bees as Romans, but plausible deniability keeps the similarities from cutting too close. Although Aristaeus, the beekeeper, manages to restore his hive, the fantastical bugonia, which brings rebirth from an abject, rotting corpse of a bludgeoned calf, alienates. Out of Egypt, it offers an illusory salvation. Technology and sacrifice, in parallel registers, each fail to achieve the task at hand. Aristaeus is being punished for threatening to rape Orpheus’ wife Eurydice and causing her death. What is needed is not just to bring the dead back to life, but to placate the spirit of Eurydice, whose etymology, “broad justice,” reveals the real need as social restoration. The bees’ tendency to faction and to adore an autocratic monarch, on the model of Egypt, warns that the price of restoration for Rome after civil war is an oriental empire.

Chapter 11 extends the subject of the preceding chapter by returning to Ovid’s Orpheus, Icarus, and Medusa. It begins with Jean Cocteau, who dealt with the myth of Orpheus in three thematically related films and addressed Orphic themes in other works. As mythic-creative character, Orpheus was Cocteau’s closest model. Poetic immortality is Cocteau’s chief concern, as is love beyond death. Statues play an important part in this. The chapter then turns to French critic André Bazin, who regarded the Icarus myth as an analogy to the nature of cinema as an idealistic phenomenon. A number of films with references to Icarus’ flight support Bazin’s thesis. Had Ovid not told his story, Icarus would have been all but forgotten. The cinema keeps his memory alive, especially in futuristic contexts. Icarus’ appearances in science-fiction films tell us that Ovid’s tale has lost none of its fascination. Thirdly, the cinema may be regarded as a benign Medusa Effect, through which actors become icons, if not necessarily statues, of themselves. All this, like much of the material dealt with in preceding chapters, is in essence marvelous, a quality that D’Annunzio had postulated as a major element in ancient art and that the cinema has revived spectacularly. “It’s a very old story,” we are told in Black Orpheus, which updates the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice to its own time and transports it into the New World. The myth is always renewable, as this film’s Orpheus observes: “There was an Orpheus before me, and one may come after I’m gone.” The eternal return of myth, especially of Ovidian myth, is prominent in our media of moving images: cinemetamorphoses.

As Charles Dempsey has argued, humanist culture often came about not through the revival of ancient models, but through the recasting of contemporary vernacular culture in light of ancient models. A central thesis of this book is that the ubiquitous humanist practice of solo singing to the lyre took shape principally in Florence, in the circles of Marsilio Ficino and Lorenzo de’ Medici/Angelo Poliziano, through adaptation of certain aspects of traditional canterino practice. This chapter sets forth what we know about the cantare ad lyram activity in these circles, establishes its clear relationship to civic practices, and argues for its integral role in both the Neoplatonic philosophy of Ficino and the vernacular poetics of Lorenzo and Poliziano. This leads to new perspectives on both Ficino’s “Orphic singing to the lyre” and Lorenzo’s lifelong involvement with singing to the lyre, both of which are typically regarded as idiosyncratic and tangential to their serious intellectual pursuits. This chapter also provides the occasion for considering the extraordinary figure of Baccio Ugolini, one of the great improvvisatori of his day, and a reassessment of Poliziano’s Fabula d’Orfeo in which Baccio sang the title role in 1480.

Chapter 4 examines how the Quran informs perception outside of the parameters of art. It traces an ontology of perception rooted in the heart emerging from a hierarchy of the senses implicit in Quranic passages. It contrasts the complex ontology of the Quran as representation of the divine tablet as simultaneously writing and sound, always complete and always immanent, with secular interpretations of its material history. The Quran emerges less as a book than as a sonic image of the divine continually present in all its parts. The second part of the chapter examines how internalized perception of the Quran gave way to extensive discourses of love, the composite senses, and the metaphor of the heart-as-mirror as central to sensory and imaginary experience. The emotive response to Quranic beauty reverberates with discourses of the heart, the imaginary, and the contemplative faculties in Islamic thought. The discussion suggests that the aesthetics of the Quran reflected and promoted existing norms of inward mimesis. Drawing out connections with Greek and Buddhist philosophy inherited through Sasanian and Abbasid policies of translation, the chapter belies later European appropriations of antiquity as exclusively ‘Western.’

Chapter 3 examines discussions about the mimetic possibilities of musical and visual images as reflected in late twelfth-century Persian-language epic poetry, focusing on intertextual and intermedial commentaries on philosophical discourses. Focusing on the narration and a sixteenth-century Mughal painting of a story about Plato as a musician in of the Iskandarnamah (1194) of Nizami of Ganj, the chapter argues that poetry served as a popularizing vehicle for Platonic thought consciously engaged at multiple moments in Islamic intellectual history. Painting augmented this discourse, enabling complex references to other texts including the fabular Kalila and Dimna and The Language of the Birds (1177) by Farid al-Din Attar. Delving into the poetry referenced through visual cues in the painting, the chapter reveals powerful currents of Platonic thought traced through Plotinus, the Brethren of Purity, ibn Sina, and the mystic Suhrawardi into the popular epic work by Attar. The analysis suggests that the mythic Simurgh central to the Language of the Birds incorporates complex Platonic symbolism into Islam, with strong implications about the limits and possibilities of representation. The intimacy of the poetry with Platonic thought suggests that far from inimical, philosophy and Islamic discourses may be indivisible.