The purpose of this chapter is to provide a background to current research in Classics on topics related to distributed cognition and to consider how the various chapters in this volume represent, reflect and advance work in this area. This volume brings together eleven chapters by international specialists in the historical period from archaic Greece to late antiquity, with the majority of essays focusing on the period from the fifth century BCE to the third century CE. It includes essays on the ways in which cognition is explicitly or implicitly conceived of as distributed across brain, body and world in Greek and Roman technology, culture, science, medicine, philosophy, art, literature and drama. Together the chapters make evident the ways in which the particular range of sociocultural and technological contexts that existed in antiquity fostered and reflected particular notions of distributed cognition. In what follows I attempt to put these contributions in their wider research context, in terms of (a) mainstream classical scholarship, (b) earlier work in Classics which draws on the theories and findings of the cognitive sciences in general, and (c) existing applications of specific aspects of distributed cognition theory to classical material. In each of these sections I freely intersperse references to the chapters in this volume, where they can be seen as taking forward the issues in question or where they provide further information on topics canvassed here, before turning, in the concluding section, to the chapters themselves.

Distributed Cognition and Traditional Classical Scholarship

To a considerable extent, traditional ways of doing Classics, ancient history and classical archaeology either lend themselves to recasting in terms of distributed cognition or in fact already employ, usually without realising it, approaches and assumptions that can be expressed in those terms. For example, as contributors to this volume such as Christopher Gill and George Kazantzidis make clear, ancient philosophical theories of the nature of the psychē, its capacities, affections and afflictions, as well as its relation to the body, regularly rest on models that assume the interaction of body and soul in most if not all aspects of cognition and affectivity. The primacy of the body, as Kazantzidis demonstrates, is a given of Hippocratic medical theory. Aristotle's hylomorphic theory of the relation between body and psychē implicates the body in all or virtually all aspects of mental functioning.

This book, like the series of which it is part, explores the notion that the mind is spread out across brain, body and world, for which we have adopted ‘distributed cognition’ as the most comprehensive term. Distributed cognition primarily draws evidence from philosophy, cognitive science, psychology, linguistics and neuroscience. Distributed cognition covers an intertwined group of theories, which include enactivism and embodied, embedded and extended cognition, and which are also together known as ‘4E cognition’. An overview and explanation of the various strands of distributed cognition are provided in the general introduction.

Distributed cognition can be used as a methodology through which to pursue study of the humanities and is also evident in past practices and thought. Our series considers a wide range of works from classical antiquity to modernism in order to explore ways in which the humanities benefits from thinking of cognition as distributed via objects, language and social, technological and natural resources and environments, and to examine earlier notions that cognition is distributed. Theories of distributed cognition are transformative in terms of how we understand human nature and the humanities: they enable a different way of perceiving our interactions in the world, highlighting the significant role of texts and other cultural artefacts as part of a biologically based and environmentally grounded account of the mind. Theories of distributed cognition offer an opportunity to integrate the humanities and the sciences through an account that combines biologically and culturally situated aspects of the mind. The series illuminates the ways in which past ideas and practices of distributed cognition are historically and culturally inflected and highlights the cognitive significance of material, linguistic and other sociocultural developments. This evidence has the potential to feed back into cognitive science and philosophy of mind, casting new light on current definitions and debates.

Each volume provides a general and a period-specific introduction. The general introduction, which is replicated across all four volumes, aims to orientate readers unfamiliar with this area of research. It provides an overview of the different approaches within distributed cognition and discussion of the value of a distributed cognitive approach to the humanities.

The papers presented in this volume represent the completely revised and rewritten record of the Eighth A. G. Leventis Conference in Greek, Edinburgh, 7–10 November 2013. That conference, in turn, was one of the many highlights of Professor Margaret (Meg) Alexiou's tenure of the University of Edinburgh's A. G. Leventis Chair in Greek. The conference and its surrounding events featured not only the scholars whose papers are presented in this volume, but also a diverse array of musicians and artists whose contributions turned the biennial Leventis Conference into a celebration of Greek culture. Meg's tenure of the Chair in general constituted something of a festival of Hellenic and Celtic civilisations, with frequent crossovers between the Greek and the Gaelic in the presentations and performances by which her presence in Edinburgh was marked.

Our premise was that Greek laughter and tears, if explored at key stages of recorded history, afford insights into the range and complexity of human emotions and interactions, modes of transmission, and potential for expressing and inciting opposite emotions, joy and sadness, sympathy and discord, sometimes both at once. We invited scholars, musicians and artists from diverse periods, with emphasis on the transitions from late antiquity (making the most of Edinburgh's international distinction in that field), while introducing Byzantium and modern Greek in what we hope will prove an enduring manner, thanks to the generosity of the A. G. Leventis Foundation.

For their assistance in making the conference the huge success that it was, we have to thank Dimiter Angelov, Alexander Lingas and Panagiotis Roilos, who presented at the event but whose papers could not, for various reasons, be published in this volume. As we noted above, however, the conference was in this case more than just a single academic occasion: its social programme began with Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones and Lucy Macrae in their presentation of Greek wonder-tale The Girl With Two Husbands (see jacket illustration and Appendix) and culminated, at the conference dinner, in a splendid performance of scenes from Euripides’ Trojan Woman, directed by Ms Lydia Koniordou of the Greek National Theatre.

Once upon a time there lived a man and wife, very much in love, and they had a little daughter they loved better than their own two eyes. The child grew. Time came to send her to school.

Schoolteacher, soon as she went inside their home – they asked her in all the time because of the child – took a fancy to her dad, such a good husband as she saw he was. She made eyes at him, but his own were just for his wife, and she got nowhere.

Teacher decided to get rid of wife so as to get hold of the husband. She fondled and kissed the child, feeding her must-pies and saying ‘If only you were my child, I'd give you everything you wanted, never say no, never tell you off!’ This, that, whatever. She got the child to listen to every word she said.

One day teacher says, ‘Ask your mum to give you walnuts from the marble chest. Soon as she bends over, let the lid clamp down on her, so your dad can marry me, then you'll be my child, just see how well we'll get on!’

Child, just seven years old, goes to her mother, starts on at her, ‘Mum, I want nuts fresh from marble chest!’ Mother replies, ‘Take these off the shelf, they're just as good. Who'll lift the lid, I can't do it on my own!’ Child grabs the chance, ‘Give me nuts from marble chest – I'll hold the lid!’

Mother opens, bends down to get walnuts. Child drops lid, it chops off mother's head, kills her! She goes and tells her teacher, full of glee. Father wept for his wife, now left alone with child. Not long after, teacher told child to ask her dad to marry her, but he wouldn't listen.