Chapter 15 details Goethe’s commitment to Greek and Roman art, demonstrating that it pervades all his activity, including his literary work. His interest was primed by his years as a student in Leipzig, but his Italian journey of 1786–8 was the turning point, for it enabled him to connect the theory which he had learned with his own creative practice. Moreover, Italy gave him access to both Roman and Greek heritage. The chapter also examines neoclassical tenets in Goethe’s writing on art and closes with an analysis of his characterisation of Winckelmann.

This section consists of four selections from Plato, Aristotle, Cicero and Quintilian that serve as an introduction to the classical understanding of rhetoric. What is rhetoric? Is it an art or a mode of knowledge? What is its value? What are its elements or parts?

Loanwords are divided into cultural borrowings and core borrowings, then categorised into semantic fields to allow typological comparisons. Fewer borrowings come from Roman political and military power (i.e. fall into semantic fields connected to law, government, and the army) than was previously thought. An analysis by parts of speech shows that nouns predominate but adjectives and verbs were also borrowed. Two loanwords related to identity, ‘Roman’ and ‘Christian’, are given more detailed consideration in the context of the imperial and late antique world.

From the first century AD, Cambridge was raided, invaded and settled by different groups of people from overseas, for about a thousand years. The author charts how Cambridge changed, grew and shifted geographically: from Roman fort on Castle Hill to Anglo-Saxon town trading on Market Hill; from Viking port by Quayside to Norman stronghold with a motte and bailey castle on Castle Mound, occupied by the much-loathed Sheriff Picot. Local resistance fighters Boudicca and Hereward the Wake are included. Stephanie Boyd draws on evidence ranging from landmarks such as Devil’s Dyke, to local place-names and a rare bed burial at Trumpington Meadows, to piece together a picture of life in the local area more than a thousand years ago.

The account of the best life for humans, that is, of happy or flourishing life, was the central theme of ancient ethics. This book addresses other important questions about the value of life that likewise received much discussion in antiquity: What does it take to have a life that, if not happy, is at least worth living, in comparison to being dead or never having come into life? Does every human life have some non-instrumental value that makes it worth living? And do all lives that are worth living for those who live them also have to be meaningful, in the sense of making a positive contribution to other humans or world at large? In reconstructing, for the first time, philosophical engagements with these questions from a range of ancient philosophers, from Socrates to Plotinus, the work offers a fresh narrative of ancient ethics. It explores these views against the background of the pessimistic outlook on the human condition adopted by the Greek poets, but also points out continuities and contrasts between the ancient perspective and modern philosophical debates about related themes in biomedical ethics and in the ethics of procreation.

The use of local languages is sometimes considered a marker of resistance to Roman power or culture. However, we show that continued use of local languages cannot necessarily be equated with resistance, nor is it easy to identify the use of language or script in particular inscriptions as driven by a desire to express resistance. This chapter discusses how (and whether) it is possible to know when resistance is involved in language use in the Roman Empire and examines case studies of inscriptional evidence pertaining to the use of Faliscan, Oscan, Paelignian, Venetic, Celtiberian, and Hebrew. We propose that many of them were written to present a ‘non-Roman’ rather than an ‘anti-Roman’ identity, and that ‘non-Roman’ identity could stand alongside both acceptance of Rome and violence resistance to its political hegemony.

The origins of modern georgic writing lie in the ancient Mediterranean, in the literature of ancient Greece and Rome. On the Greek side the genre begins with the poetry of Hesiod, embraces dozens of treatise in poetry and prose written during the Hellenistic era, and comes to an end in Byzantine times with the massive compilation of farming lore known as the Geoponica. Latin georgic starts with Cato’s essay on agriculture, culminates in Vergil’s Georgics – the poem that defined the genre for later European authors – and persists in the Latin prose of Columella, Pliny, and Palladius. The diversity of the genre evades definition. Its popularity is unsurprising in the context of a world where wealth meant ownership of land and most people tilled the soil.

The introduction provides an overview of certain recurring subjects of the study, including music’s role in fostering the “good cheer” of the banquet, the power of metasympotic representations, the use of music for communication and display, the social and political aspects of self- and class-display through social music, ways in which elite music-making at archaic and classical symposia influenced customs of later periods and their interpretation, and the interconnections between dining and the festival/theater in all periods.

An intense debate has arisen among scholars concerning the financial sustainability of the grain funds that Greek and Roman cities used to cope with the instabilities of the grain market. In this paper, we apply a Monte Carlo simulation to model their financial dynamics. Due to the uncertainties pertaining to the scope of such funds (targeting urban dwellers only or including rural residents), our model takes into account two scenarios: ‘optimistic’ (urban only) and ‘pessimistic’ (both urban and rural). The analysis reaches several important findings: (1) For both scenarios, we witness a considerable rate of funds collapsing in their first 10 years of operation. After 10 years, however, the probability of failure displays very little change, as if there was a threshold over which the funds had accumulated enough capital to withstand shortages. (2) As expected, the survival rates are significantly higher for the optimistic scenario. (3) The withdrawals seem to have the most dramatic impact on the dynamic of the fund. Overall, while the grain funds do not appear to be sustainable in the urban-rural scenario, they show clear signs of sustainability in the urban-only scenario. The results invite reconsideration of the widespread view that grain funds were an inefficient and precarious response to food crisis.

Chapter 27 covers the period from the beginning of the Christian Era to the advent of the Renaissance. The Eastern Roman and Byzantine, (Holy) Roman, Umayyad and Abbasid as well as Chinese empires, in addition to the Indian subcontinent, documented translation and interpreting activity during the millennium when expansionist empires and kingdoms rose and fell, and Silk Road trade flourished. Classical Greek, Latin, Persian, Sanskrit and Arabic texts were revered and much translated, as were the texts of two religions founded during the period, Christianity and Islam. The Chinese invented the fabrication of paper early in the second century, which reduced the cost of producing translations.