Chapter 2 traces Albanian history through the Roman and Byzantine periods. The ancestors of contemporary Albanians were well integrated into these empires. The Latin influence on the Albanian language is correspondingly strong. In late antiquity, the Roman empire recruited an important part of its elite from the southwestern Balkans. The arrival of Slavic groups in the Balkans led to the collapse of state administration and the church and thus to a cultural turning point that was much more profound than in Western Europe. It was not until the ninth century that Byzantium was primarily re-Christianized. The Albanians came under the influence of the new Slavic states in the Balkans. Urban communities flourished particularly along the coast. The region was closely intertwined with the Venetian-Adriatic culture, but also with Byzantine civilization. With the decline of Byzantium, the southwestern Balkan region splintered into numerous small dominions. Venice, the Kingdom of Naples and, from the end of the fourteenth century, the Ottomans vied for influence. Albania was one of the first areas in the Balkans conquered by the Ottomans and nowhere was the resistance to the new empire as fierce as in Albania. Georg Kastriota Scanderbeg, who is revered as a national hero today, is symbolic of this resistence.

Veterinary medicine can be defined as the prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of animal health problems in the context of human–animal relationships. This broad definition is used in this book to include many types of animal healing throughout history. However, this "concise" history of veterinary medicine does not attempt to include all important topics in the history of animal healing. Instead, the history of animal healing and veterinary medicine is framed using a global and world history approach. Activities are included at the end of each chapter that encourage readers to explore the veterinary history of their own region and nation. Every chapter considers how animal healing interacted with tensions between the economic, military, and cultural value, status, and uses of domesticated animals. Who were the animal healers? What was their social status? How were they trained? What skills and knowledge did they have? How did people explain or theorize, and respond to, animal health problems in each place and time period?

The efforts to decode the mystery of the Antikythera mechanism, a unique machine surviving from around 70–60 BC, extend more than a century since its discovery in an ancient shipwreck off the coast of a Greek island. Although the first experts who looked at the device were baffled by its gear mechanisms, dating, and purpose, this chapter explains how many of these inscrutable aspects slowly came to be clarified and deciphered. The author illustrates the immense efforts it can take to ‘solve’ an enigma: in this case, the combined work of historians, epigraphers, radiographers, X-ray machines, mechanics, filmmakers, and multinational technology companies. The chapter also displays the valuable insights which can come from such endeavours. Decoding the Antikythera mechanism challenged common assumptions about technological skill and astronomical knowledge in antiquity, but it also encouraged innovations in modern technology and revealed something of humanity’s search to understand the cosmos.

There is a tendency, at least among secular readers, to bracket off Dante’s faith as something no longer true, something to which we no longer subscribe. Yet that would seem to miss not just an aspect of the Divine Comedy, but its central point. The episodes in the Inferno this volume focuses on, paradigmatic for the whole work, point to a problem of faith – lack of a shared belief, misreadings of important stories, failed allegiance, and broken promises. But it is the choice of Virgil as a guide, lost because of his belief in “false and lying gods,” that teaches us how to read ancient books whose culture we no longer share. How indeed can we believe in them?

This chapter analyzes the white supremacist fear of racial hybridity and scientific racism’s uncertain and contradictory construction of whiteness through a reading of Edgar Allan Poe’s Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1837) and Maxwell Philip’s Emmanuel Appadocca, or Blighted Life: A Tale of the Boucaneers (1854). Both New World novels, respectively written in light of and in response to the Jacksonian Indian removal and the passing of the Fugitive Slave Law, articulate the fractured Black Atlantic world by representing and critically contesting Anglo-Saxonism’s cultural pathology. The essay shows how antebellum debates about the “racial” character of two different antiquities – ancient Egypt and the medieval Norse settlement of America – function as an imaginary filter for negotiating fears of racial hybridity and degeneration in the removal/antebellum present. Next to uncertainties as to the civilizational significance of writing, these literary works reveal a Black Atlantic literary counterdiscourse that explores the economic and social undercurrents of racial slavery – a form of labor whose continued existence depended on the incessant circulation of imaginary “scientific” constructions of a “natural” hierarchy within mankind.

Chapter 1 situates the reader within the landscape of Blackness in the twenty-first century. In addition to laying out the task at hand (untangling representations of blackness in Greek antiquity), this chapter underlines the dangerous consequences that occur when scholars conflate modern tropes with ancient material.

In my view, there is no artwork that captures the modern sense of time as profoundly as Christian Marklay’s installation, The Clock – first produced in 2010, and, since its opening, repeatedly staged in galleries around the world, to amazed reviews. It is, as Zadie Smith declared, ‘sublime’. The Clock is made up of around 12,000 short film and television clips that run on a 24-hour loop. In every single clip, you can see a watch or clock which shows the exact time at which you are watching The Clock. The synchronization is both funny and uncanny. If you start watching at 2.10, each of the short extracts contains a timepiece showing 2.10 – often several clips for the same minute. At 2.11, it is all 2.11 – and so on for twenty-four hours. At 6.00, a string of hatted men suggests a cocktail; tea is taken repeatedly between 4.00 and 4.30, tea-time; high noon looms and awaits its gunshots. The joy or frustration of interruption is replayed again and again with an extraordinary fascination.

The chapter traces the historical origins of the right to life from antiquity to the modern era. It encompasses the Code of Hammurabi and the American Declaration of Independence as milestones along a long road.

Why speak of ‘reception’ in classical antiquity, rather than ‘allusion’ or ‘intertextuality’? This chapter begins by assessing the reasons for the emergence of the term reception in the scholarship of the last thirty years, identifying (a) a shift away from unilateral models of ‘influence’; (b) a postmodern promotion of the status of the ‘copy’; (c) a pedagogical need for multiplication of access points into the ancient world. But the idea of ‘reception’ has been applied primarily to post-antique cultures: why? Speaking of reception helps us break down the idea that antiquity itself was sealed off from later cultures, and that it was a homogeneous monoculture through which a single, cohesive tradition ran. It puts the emphasis on discontinuity, and the specificity and idiosyncrasy of each act of receiving; such acts can therefore be understood as ‘theorisations’ of the idea of tradition. This approach to literary history creates an equivalence between all receptions, however apparently ‘central’ or ‘marginal’. It also spotlights the political embeddedness and materiality of each act of reception. The chapter closes by considering how the volume’s contributions further this agenda.

This introductory chapter provides broad overviews of science, religion, and magic, placing them in historical contexts and establishing some preliminary connections between them. After a brief summary of European society around the year 1400, including the effects of the Black Plague on urbanization and feudalism, the chapter outlines four major themes that run throughout the book: the influence of classical antiquity; the relationship between God and nature; the problem of occult or hidden causes; and the interconnectedness of the premodern world.

Richard Strauss's late operatic and instrumental works exemplify a positive meaning of lateness in the context of creative production: not to be "late" in an artistic or stylistic sense, but rather a fulfillment and purification of both compositional technique and content. Discussing Strauss's lateness in the larger context of the musical and philosophical debate (considering the positions of Gottfried Benn, Theodor Adorno, and Edward Said, as well as Auguste Rodin's ideas on antiquity), the author offers a new perspective in joining that intense period of the composer with James Hillman's consideration of aging as the culmination of a creative life. Thus, Strauss's last period exemplifies what the American psychologist calls the "force of character."

The complex mix of transgression and conservativism in the sexual politics of Decadence is well explored through the Decadent turn back to the ancient world. Looking back to antiquity at the end of the nineteenth century was an complex aesthetic performance, reflecting both genuflection to traditional cultural authority and transgression of modern political frameworks. The Decadent imagination was interested in the aesthetics of collecting. Decadent writers became fascinated by androgynous and hermaphroditic bodily forms, which they viewed as a symbol of decadent collecting culture – an assemblage of pleasurable, sensuous experiences. But the ambiguously gendered body of ancient art, so venerated by Decadent writers, revealed the ambivalences of their gender politics.

The second chapter explores diverse forms of mediation in pre-Christian civilisations, from the Israelite to the Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Persian and Greek monarchies, and the symbolic meanings connected with the idea of ‘consecration without mediation’. Based on textual, epigraphic and iconographical evidence, it privileges the analysis of the royal investiture ceremony in Achaemenid and Sassanid Persia, since the practice of self-coronation decisively influenced subsequent periods, reaching Islamic and even contemporary Persia (including the self-coronations of Shah Reza Pahlavi in 1926 and his son Mohammad Reza Pahlavi in 1967) and expanding beyond its borders, in Byzantium and central Asia. The objective of this chapter is try to find proof of the growing presence of the investiture and coronation ceremony in the images and narrations that have been preserved from antiquity, such as cave reliefs, coins, murals and historical texts. A natural consequence of the consolidation of this ceremony among the monarchies of the ancient civilisations was the multiplication of the ritual forms in which it appeared, and the consequent images that preserved the ceremony or imagined it. These images necessarily imply, regardless of whether they had a ceremonial reality, the unequivocal message of consecration-without-mediation of the sovereign, a resistance to priestly mediation.

The introduction explores the genesis of Dionysus and the Greeks in Nietzsche’s thought, from their initial appearance at the publication of The Birth of Tragedy in 1872 until his breakdown in Turin at the dawn of 1889. It argues that one of the central elements of their appeal to later authors is that Nietzsche used the Greeks to develop an innovative way of speaking about modernity. It was this explosive mixture of the archaic and the present that encouraged authors to consider the way that the example of classical antiquity could help them think through the rapidly changing conditions of their contemporary era. By examining different approaches to the temporality of antiquity and to ancient works of art, the chapter argues that Kracauer and Bloch’s idea of the ‘contemporaneity of the uncontemporaneous’ captures the way that classical antiquity exists in the present, as one obtrusion among many within a confusing fabric of competing times and experiences. This is also linked to the aesthetic and literary movement of modernism and to the vogue for tragedy that sprang up in the twentieth century.