Classical Greece was a high period for city networks, with trading centers dotting the map of the Aegean Sea like “frogs around a marsh” in the words of Aristotle. These were strange times, where Spartans annually declared war on their slaves. Where the Athenian reformer Solon banned the export of vital foodstuffs – on penalty of death – while at the same time laying the groundwork for unprecedented political pluralism. Yet we see an uncommon iteration of city networking that was well ahead of its time. Embedded in the lives of these cities was an early echo of the modern. Athens was the alpha city in a polis system of autonomous city-states that, at its height, spanned from Spain to Africa to the Black Sea with a total population of thirty million people. This was an incredible period of seafaring. Language, culture, aesthetics, and revolutionary political ideas flowed in the currents alongside goods and services in an elaborate trading network. Far from localized cultures of self-sufficiency, most Greek cities depended on trade for basics such as foodstuffs, but also for military, intellectual, and cultural production.

This chapter explains that the reasonable person was not the first anthropomorphised legal standard. The idea of model characters can be traced back to the oldest documents of humanity. The chapter introduces three of these ancient ancestors of the reasonable person: the silent person of Egypt (geru maa), the earnest person of Greece (ho spoudaios), and the male head of a family in ancient Rome (paterfamilias). There are many other ancestors of the reasonable person, and at least implicit anthropomorphised standards of behaviour could probably be found in any society at any time. The three concepts here are presented only as examples, and because they form part of one Mediterranean context in which the ancient Egyptians probably influenced the ancient Greeks, who in turn influenced the Romans, whose influence on contemporary European law and on the systems derived from it can still be felt. Each of the three figures introduced in this chapter deserves its own biography and the analysis offered here remains fragmented. Nonetheless, the selected aspects of the lives of the geru maa, of the spoudaios, and of paterfamilias foreshadow many of the questions, tensions, and challenges with which the common law’s reasonable person still struggles today.

This chapter presents an overview of key views on erotic desire and its management as well as common practices and norms in the Greek and Roman worlds from the seventh century BCE to the third century CE. No single canonical text or religious moral code existed that prescribed sexual relations. Instead, we rely on their rich textual and visual culture to reconstruct standards, attitudes, and practices. We know most about the sexuality of elite male citizens since most texts and visual objects were created by and for them. Gender and status were key components in any sexual relations, with the citizen male having the greatest access to partners: wives, sex labourers, other free men and boys, and enslaved people. Sexual virtue was expected of free citizen women and girls, but it may not have excluded sexual relations with other females, at least in the Greek world. The chapter surveys concepts of desire in literature (by genre) and sexual imagery in art (including male, female, and transgender bodies), and considers the everyday practices and experiences of sexuality for free, enslaved, elite, and non-elite. What emerges is a complex and even conflicting view of desire and sexual relations. Rather than a belief system, we more accurately talk about discourses of ancient sexualities.

This chapter presents an overview of, and insight into, the sexual lives of the inhabitants of Athens in the fifth and fourth centuries BCE. It examines both public attitudes and private behaviours by focusing on three key areas: marriage, prostitution, and male same-sex relationships. The discussion of marriage looks at the traditional ages at which men and girls traditionally wed, how marital partners were chosen, and the emotional and sexual life of married couples, as well as divorce, widow(er)hood, and remarriage. The section on prostitution considers the wide variety of sex workers operating in classical Athens, the conditions in which they worked, and the status they enjoyed. The discussion takes in streetwalkers and brothel workers whose services could be bought cheaply (pornai), trained musicians and dancers who provided entertainment at all-male drinking parties, and high-fee hetairai renowned for their looks, wit, and intelligence. The last section examines the practice of pederasty, a traditionally elite pursuit which saw adult men form relationships with pubescent boys. This discussion covers courtship and its power dynamics, the age of participants, and the ways in which pederasty is depicted in art, as well as shifting public attitudes towards pederasty throughout the classical era.

Humanistic inquiry is not just about timeless questions and human experience. Viewed historically, it is equally about working within the constraints of a world of ideas shaped by a small set of exemplars. In this chapter I look at concrete instances of the use of canons in the history of the humanities. Different cultures designate different works as canonical. The point is not that everyone interested in the questions posed by the humanities should be reading the same works, but rather that humanistic inquiry in each community (however defined) must designate certain works as canonical in order to reap the scholarly benefits of a shared world.

This chapter follows Baeck’s thought after his arrival to Theresienstadt Ghetto in January 1943, and his relationship with Germany and the Germans in the aftermath of the Holocaust. The chapter reconstructs Baeck’s imperial imagination while in the ghetto. Despite the harsh conditions, Baeck insisted that hope was possible and in fact necessary. He made this point by contrasting the prophets with the Western historiographical tradition, which he identified as espousing historical pessimism. Evil empires that thrived only on power and violent means, he comforted his audience in the camp, would eventually collapse and be left in ruins. Following liberation, Baeck returned to earlier ideas, identifying Marcionism as well as the historical pessimism as giving rise to Nazism. Baeck initially expressed skepticism about the possibility of a re-emergence of Germany, later he seemed to have slightly amended his position, leaving space for a tentative reopening of the conversation between Jews and Germans.

'Urbicide' is a Latin formation - as deployed in this chapter, it refers to the total or near-total destruction of cities (poleis) of the ancient Greek/Hellenic world between the 6th and the 4th centuries BCE. Urbicide was an extreme measure of interstate politics, but not as rare as one might have predicted - or hoped. It represented the other, dark side of the ancient Greeks' fierce attachment to their own native polis. In some cases a polis might be removed from the map once and for all (e.g. Arisba on the island of Lesbos). In others, it might be only temporarily annihilated (Thebes). In all cases, the possibility of largescale enslavement of formerly free Greek citizens was ever-present, and often was realised.

This chapter introduces the subject of prostheses, prosthesis use, and prosthesis users in classical antiquity. It compares contemporary, historical, and ancient historical prostheses and indentifies certain types of continuity across millennia. It undertakes a literature review of the current state of scholarship on impairment and disability in classical antiquity, highlighting how little attention has been paid to assistive technology by scholars to date. It explains the methodology that will be used in this monograph. It provides an overview of the different types of evidence that will be used (i.e. literary, documentary, archaeological, bioarchaeological). It outlines the contents of the monograph, chapter by chapter.

Ancient Greece provided the setting for the first detailed, recorded hypotheses about the causes of human activity. In the search for first principles of life, tentative explanations included: The naturalistic orientation of the Ionian physicists Democritus, Heraclitus, and Parmenides looked to some basic physical element in nature as this first principle. A biological orientation, developed by Alcmaeon, Hippocrates, and Empedocles, held that bodily physiology is the key. Pythagoras held that life is transcendent of the material world and found in the essential coherence of mathematical relationships. The Sophists posited a pragmatic orientation that denied the value of trying to seek out first principles, relying instead on observations of life as it is lived. Finally, Anaxagoras and Socrates, rejecting the Sophists, proposed the existence of a soul that defines humanity. This humanistic orientation developed the notion of the spiritual soul that possesses the unique human capabilities of the intellect and the will. The soul was elaborated as the central element in the interpretation of life offered by Plato and Aristotle. By the end of the Greek era the critical themes and issues of psychology as well as the methodological approaches were well identified and structured.

Chapter 26 discusses the role of translation in the years before the birth of Christ in Ancient Egypt, the Near and Middle East, Ancient Greece and Rome, and China. Despite the difficulties of finding texts in translated form stemming from a time when writing was generally limited to stone inscriptions and papyri, many of which have been lost, discoveries made since the 1900s in areas such as Egypt or the Iranian plateau have demonstrated that the practice of translation was not unknown. They reflect that the aims of translating into foreign languages were in no way different from the reasons why translation has been used in modern times: conquest, trade, dissemination of religious beliefs, and literary appropriation or adaptation.

This chapter is divided into two sections. The first provides an overview of the Age of Aspirations, from approximately the 1780s to the 1920s. This period was marked by an intense exploration of arbitration in all its forms. In private relations, arbitration was commonly used to settle commercial disputes, for example through the many trade associations in Europe. In the public arena, when used among states, arbitration was seen as a way of fostering peace and stability. The Age of Aspirations lasted until the 1920s, when arbitral institutions were founded, the importance of merchants and statesmen yielded to that of members of these arbitral institutions, and various efforts were made to recognize the validity of arbitration clauses. The second section of this chapter is more theoretical and looks at how a history of international commercial arbitration may be written. It explores various historical methods and approaches, and draws attention to methodological pitfalls that may be encountered when studying the history of international arbitration, especially its distant origins.

Sappho’s deployment of mythical material allows us to compare her with other early poets and poetic traditions. Chapter 14 of The Cambridge Companion to Sappho shows how, as one of the earliest preserved lyric voices, Sappho sets a benchmark for the rest of Greek – and ancient – literary history in her application of distant stories to the here and now.