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Afro-Colombian Manuel Zapata Olivella’s historical novel, Changó, The Biggest Badass (1983) follows members of the African Diaspora from their capture and continues through their oppression in Spanish America of the colonial and nineteenth century independence periods, Haiti, Brazil, and the United States from the 1800s to the 1960s. The story of the enslaved has been commonly called the “history of people with no history” (Fontana, Pérez) since with few exceptions, slaves were usually illiterate (Luis).

Recent scholarship on the reception of classical drama in Latin America has attempted to shed light on the ways in which ancient themes and ideas are renewed through interaction with African-based religious beliefs and practices, by focusing on José Triana’s Medea in the Mirror (Havana, 1960), the second adaptation of a story drawn from classical tragedy in the history of post-Independence Cuban theater (Nikoloutsos 2012: 25-7). This paper aims to explore this intersection further through a different case study, Virgilio Piñera’s Electra Garrigó.

This paper examines two distinct ways in which Classical references are incorporated into literary works dealing with the African experience of diaspora in Brazil. Meleagro (1951), by folklorist Luís da Cãmara Cascudo (1898-1986), is an anthropological study on the origins and practice of Afro-Brazilian witchcraft (Catimbó). The book betrays a clear Eurocentric perspective as already expressed in its title.

Bull-lifting was a form of collective ritual action in which a group of young men placed a bull on their shoulders and, standing before an altar, ritually killed and offered it to a god or gods. While receiving scant attention in the literature, scholars have regarded bull-lifting as having a special association with ephebes, newly enrolled eighteen and nineteen year old citizens undergoing military training. Ephebes, they claim, lifted bulls at altars as a maturation or initiation ritual.

Years ago, Sterling Dow determined that Athenians who appeared next to one another with the same patronymic in ephebic lists were not true twins but brothers born close in time, commenting 'of course the presence of non-twins in even one list proves that at a very early period the age-limit was altered. Brothers served together as (full) epheboi' (TAPA 91 [1960] 391). Although Dow's insight has been commonly accepted, its implications have not yet been explored.

The aim of this paper is to examine the history of the Athenian ephebeia for the last quarter of the fourth century B.C. It argues, contrary to the prevailing view (e.g. Pélékidis 1962; Reinmuth 1971), that the formal ephebic institution as described in Chapter 42 of the Aristotelian Athenaion Politeia ceased to function during the oligarchy of Phocion (322/1-319/8 B.C.) and the regime of Demetrius of Phalerum (317/6-307/6 B.C.).

The Athenian ephebeia was a multi-faceted institution, serving a variety of functions. Vidal-Naquet famously drew attention to its role as initiation ritual (Vidal-Naquet, 1981).

This study reassesses the evidence for Hellenistic Cycladic numismatic production. In keeping with scholarship on the Cyclades more generally, previous scholars have identified a unified Rhodian iconographic and metrical influence on production and circulation across the entire Cyclades. This paper argues that numismatic production was sub-regionally focussed, and enables us to identify four hitherto unrecognised economic systems.

The question of an ancient state's ability to exclude foreign currency from its territory, let alone its markets, is no small matter. Just how far we are willing to go in crediting an ancient state with these powers reveals our fundamental assumptions about the nature of its sovereignty. This paper urges a more precise deployment of the concept of closure by examining two special monetary zones of the eastern Mediterranean in the mid-second century B.C.E.: the Attalid kingdom of Pergamon and the Seleukid province of Koile-Syria and Phoenicia.

While the Ptolemaic monetary system is often held up as the standard closed monetary zone, little attention has been paid to the functioning and ramifications of this system within the closed monetary zone itself. This paper seeks to shed additional light on the integration of the Ptolemaic kingdom outside of Egypt by examining the production and circulation of Ptolemaic-weight coins in Cyprus and Syria-Phoenicia with particular emphasis on the integration of these outside territories into the monetary trends best understood within Egypt itself.