ABSTRACT
We are out of the ancient earth and no longer in it. But many things, beings like ourselves included, came out of the ancient earth. Some things and some types of being persisted into newer worlds and social formations. Some things and beings were lost. This includes texts of lost classical plays and even mythical beings like the gods which were part of the lived ritual experience of ancient societies. This process of persistence, preservation and cancellation is part of the vagaries of historical development and the cultural evolution of human beings and their gods and objects. Yet this immediately raises problems of what types of human beings and what kinds of ancient societies we are talking about. On the one hand the invention of the cultural and physiological ‘human’ is a product of modernity, albeit related to ideas and themes in the philosophy of ancient thinkers like Aristotle and Epicurus. Perhaps it is more telling that these ‘classical’ human beings considered themselves, or those humans of their own mythological past, to be Argives and Trojans, Lapiths and Ionians rather than humans per se. Further, there were many kinds of ancient and archaic societies enmeshed with the human past, including those of Africa and Neolithic and Bronze Age Western Europe as well as classical Greece (Hudson 2016, 2017a, 2017b). This text refers to the ancient world of classical Greece (and to a lesser extent Rome) and its human beings and divine entities. But it is not about that world, but about ours. This needs some initial elaboration.
