A thorough study of the majority of the hoard that is said to have been discovered near Randazzo. The book provides historical background to the coins as well as commentary on the mints and a catalogue of the coins.

Ancient Greek migrants in Sicily produced societies and economies that both paralleled and differed from their homeland. Explanations for these similarities and differences have been hotly debated. On the one hand, some scholars have viewed the ancient Greeks as one in a long line of migrants who were shaped by Sicily and its inhabitants. On the other hand, other scholars have argued that the Greeks acted as the main source of innovation and achievement in the culture of ancient Sicily, a culture that was still removed from that of mainland Greece. Neither of these positions is completely satisfactory. What is lacking in this debate is a basic framework for understanding ancient Sicily's social and economic history. Archaic and Classical Greek Sicily represents the first ever systematic and comprehensive attempt to synthesize the historical and archaeological evidence, and to deploy it to test the various historical models proposed over the past two centuries. It adopts an interdisciplinary approach that combines classical and prehistoric studies, texts and material culture, and a variety of methods and theories to put the history of Greek Sicily on a completely new footing. While Sicily and Greece had conjoined histories from the start, their relationship was not one of periphery and center or of colony and state in any sense, but of an interdependent and mutually enriching diaspora. At the same time, local conditions and peoples, including Phoenician migrants, also shaped the evolution of Sicilian Greek societies and economies. This book reveals and explains the similarities and differences between developments in Greek Sicily and the mainland, and brings greater clarity to the parts played by locals and immigrants in ancient Sicily's impressive achievements.

This groundbreaking book attempts a fully contextualized reading of the poetry written by Pindar for Hieron of Syracuse in the 470s BC. It argues that the victory odes and other occasional songs composed by Pindar for the Sicilian tyrant were part of an extensive cultural program that included athletic competition, coinage, architecture, sanctuary dedication, city foundation, and much more. In the tumultuous years following the Persian invasion of Greece in 480, elite Greek leaders and their cities struggled to capitalize on the Greek victory and to define themselves as free peoples who triumphed over the threat of Persian monarchy. Pindar's victory odes are an important contribution to Hieron's goal of panhellenic pre-eminence, redescribing contemporary tyranny as an instantiation of golden-age kingship and consonant with best Greek tradition. In a delicate process of cultural legitimation, the poet's praise deploys athletic victories as a signs of more general preeminence. Three initial chapters set the stage by presenting the history and culture of Syracuse under the Deinomenid tyrants, exploring issues of performance and patronage, and juxtaposing Hieron to rival Greek leaders on the mainland. Subsequent chapters examine in turn all Pindar's preserved poetry for Hieron and members of his court, and contextualizes this poetry by comparing it to the songs written for Hieron by Pindar's poetic contemporary, Bacchylides. These odes develop a specifically "tyrannical" mythology in which a hero from the past enjoys unusual closeness with the gods, only to bring ruin on him or herself by failing to manage this closeness appropriately. Such negative exemplars counterbalance Hieron's good fortune and present the dangers against which he must (and does) protect himself by regal virtue. The readings that emerge are marked by exceptional integration of literary interpretation with the political/historical context.

A broadly-illustrated overview of the contemporary state of Greco-Roman numismatic scholarship.

Some of the loveliest works of Archaic art were the Athenian korai—sculptures of beautiful young women presenting offerings to the goddess Athena that stood on the Acropolis. Sculpted in the sixth and early fifth centuries B.C., they served as votives until Persians sacked the citadel in 480/79 B.C. Subsequently, they were buried as a group and forgotten for nearly twenty-four centuries, until archaeologists excavated them in the 1880s. Today, they are among the treasures of the Acropolis Museum. Mary Stieber takes a fresh look at the Attic korai in this book. Challenging the longstanding view that the sculptures are generic female images, she persuasively argues that they are instead highly individualized, mimetically realistic representations of Archaic young women, perhaps even portraits of real people. Marshalling a wide array of visual and literary evidence to support her claims, she shows that while the korai lack the naturalism that characterizes later Classical art, they display a wealth and realism of detail that makes it impossible to view them as generic, idealized images. This iconoclastic interpretation of the Attic korai adds a new dimension to our understanding of Archaic art and to the distinction between realism and naturalism in the art of all periods.

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This book, Potamikon, presents an investigation into the origin and identity of the man-faced bull, as well as a catalogue of coins.