Nostoi and Material Culture in the Classical and Hellenistic Adriatic

This lecture explores the roles played by images of returning heroes or nostoi in the expression of political identities and relationships between communities around the central Ionian and Adriatic seas in Classical and Hellenistic times.  It draws on insights from three recent trends in research – the date and formation of the surviving epic texts; the ‘materiality turn’ in the study of social, and especially ritual, behaviour; and regions (however construed), rather than individual communities, as shared frames of reference, with consequent questions of connectivity, mutability, shifting analytical scale, and diachronic change.