In Search of the Dioskouroi. Image, Myth and Cult

Who were the Dioskouroi? This study sets out to revisit the evidence and explore the Greeks’ experience of the Spartan brothers Kastor and Polydeukes in image, myth and cult. Commonly equated with the Roman Dioscuri, Castor and Pollux, first by Roman writers in antiquity and subsequently by their western successors, the Greek Dioskouroi are here examined as they were represented in the period before the Roman hegemony of Greece. The evidence is explored through a series of case studies, chosen to focus chiefly on the brothers’ homelands in myth – Sparta, Messene and Argos in the Peloponnese. Also reviewed is their presence on Eastern Aegean shores, and on trading routes where Greeks and other mariners may have sought the protection of the Dioskouroi, above all Thera, Kyrene and Naukratis. Our journey of rediscovery also includes Delos, crossroads of cultures in antiquity. In the process, some fresh perspectives have emerged, not least that Kastor and Polydeukes may not always have been synonymous with the Dioskouroi and, when they were, that appellation may have carried a specific and votive meaning.

Sarah V. Graham (née Fraenkel) holds a Master’s degree and a Doctorate in Classical Archaeology from the University of Oxford, where she studied Ancient Greek vase-painting with Professor Donna Kurtz. Her first degree was in Modern History from the University of Edinburgh. She also undertook postgraduate research at Oxford in eighteenth-century French history under the late Professor Richard Cobb before embarking on a career in Government, including a spell as a Director in the then Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit at No.10. Subsequently she was the founding Chair of a social enterprise employing people who had been in prison. She has been drawn afresh to academic study by a love of Greece, ancient and modern. She currently lives and works in Oxford, where she is an associate member of Wolfson College and co-directed its Ancient World Research Cluster.