In this chapter, I compare the characterization of Thecla in the Latin translation of the Acts of Paul and Thecla (henceforth APT) and of Eugenia in two Latin versions of the Passion of Eugenia (BHL 2667 and 2666). As scholars have already noted, the two Passions of Eugenia differ remarkably: the references to the APT in the oldest version (BHL 2667, second half of the fifth century) are removed in the later rewriting (BHL 2666, sixth or seventh century). Based on earlier scholarship, I contextualize this rewriting as a signal of the wider tendency to use Thecla as a model of virtue, while the APT is rejected for its problematic canonicity; I do so by delving deeper into the wider Latin literature of the late antique and medieval periods. I then demonstrate the ways in which both Passions of Eugenia engage with the figure of Thecla as a model to imitate even as Eugenia surpasses her in terms of rhetoric.

This chapter compares two reading lists of Greek literature, one from the Augustan Age and one from the Second Sophistic: Dionysius of Halicarnassus’ On Imitation and Dio of Prusa’s letter On Training for Public Speaking (oration 18). Although several scholars have argued that the two lists are similar, this chapter argues that they are fundamentally different. Dionysius prefers Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Herodotus and Demosthenes, he ignores Hellenistic and imperial writers, and he demands that his students work hard. Dio recommends Menander, Euripides, Xenophon and Aeschines, he includes orators from the Augustan Age, and he tells his addressee that laborious training is not needed. In many points Dio’s reading list corresponds more closely to Quintilian’s contemporary canon (in Institutio oratoria book 10) than to Dionysius’ On Imitation. Three factors can explain the differences between the reading lists presented by Dionysius and Dio: their audiences, the literary preferences of the Augustan Age and the Flavian Age, and the genres of their works. Dionysius’ reading list is part of a serious rhetorical treatise which foregrounds the ‘beauty’ of classical Greek literature. Dio’s reading list is presented in a light-hearted letter which adopts a more pragmatic (and at times humoristic) approach to rhetorical imitation.

A wide-ranging study of Plato’s treatment in the Republic of the forms and institutions of a society’s culture (anthropologically understood), and the way culture shapes character through its operation, often gradual and imperceptible, upon the soul. Topics discussed in detail include Book X’s account of the structures within the human soul that Plato identifies in describing and explaining the way culture impacts upon it; Book II’s account of the first ‘economic’ city and its successor, the city of luxury, with special attention to the use of couches in the ancient Greek’s conception and practice of the key cultural practice of civilised feasting; the puppets and the puppeteers in the Cave analogy of Book VII, interpreted as symbolising the role of cultural products and their creators in shaping human susceptibility to cultural formation; and Book X’s discussion of the ontological status both of cultural products as indirect imitations of Forms, and of those Forms themselves, particularly considered as the paradigms upon which a more soundly based culture might be modelled.

The book’s final chapter, on the work of Phyllis Wheatley, considers the aesthetics and politics of imitation. Wheatley’s poems both enact and challenge assimilation, by performing a form of Christian whiteness and decorum through acts of imitation for which she has been repeatedly criticised by contemporary readers. But notes of resistance can be heard in her images of chains, oceanic voyages and flight from earthly constraint. Wheatley’s poems transform constraint into ornament, but in a way that ironises her own experiences of capture and enslavement. This introduces a productive incompatibility between the prevailing aesthetic and the experience of bondage that must be overcome if the poem can be written. The chapter argues against contemporary readings of Wheatley as only a ‘sickly little black girl’, for whom whiteness itself was a constraint, and shows how she manages with limited means to particularise dominant poetic traditions to her own experience of enslavement and the Middle Passage.

In 1810, news reached Byron of the death of John Edleston, whom he had loved when he was at Cambridge. He wrote to Hobhouse that the news had left him ‘rather low’, and ‘more affected than I should care to own elsewhere; Death has been lately so occupied with every thing that was mine, that the dissolution of the most remote connection is like taking a crown from a Miser’s last Guinea’. But then he changes the subject, though in a way that may nevertheless be responding to that feeling of loss and separation.

Social learning, a type of information transmission in which individuals gain information by observing or interacting with another animal or the products of another animal’s actions, is an extensively studied subject in a wide array of species. Of particular interest is the ability of chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) to learn socially, especially given their extensive sociality and fission–fusion dynamics, which provides many opportunities for individuals to learn from each other in different contexts. Using observational and experimental approaches, researchers have explored how faithfully chimpanzees copy others, the type of information conveyed between individuals, and the extent to which social learning is influenced by external factors. In this chapter we review what is currently known about the mechanisms by which chimpanzees socially learn and the strategies they may employ when doing so. We also discuss the much-debated topic of chimpanzee "culture," and how this compares to our own culture. Last, we provide a comparative perspective for social learning in chimpanzees with other species, and discuss how understanding chimpanzee social learning can be useful in their captive care and aiding their conservation in the wild.

Bottlenose dolphins are a large-brained, long-lived, highly social species, operating within a fission-fusion society characterized by broad multi-level social networks, extensive care giving and teaching of offspring, cooperative and diverse hunting tactics, long-term alliances, and learned vocal signals that broadcast an individual’s identity, can be used in referential exchanges and can be imitated by close associates. Observations of behavior and social interactions in the wild suggest that social cognition in the bottlenose dolphins is well developed. Over the past thrity years, experimental studies have revealed that bottlenose dolphins have decades long social memories of associates, can develop a broad concept of imitation that extends to arbitrary novel sounds and social behaviors presented in a variety of contexts as well as to self-initiated behaviors. Dolphins have also been shown to be able to learn about and appreciate the social requisites of cooperative behavior, can spontaneously understand the referential character of human-initiated social signals involving pointing and gazing, and can employ pointing productively in communicative exchanges with humans to achieve goals. Collectively, dolphin social-cognition abilities are sophisticated and similar in several aspects to those of other species living within complex social networks, such as elephants, chimpanzees, and humans.

A second horse racing innovation is riding “acey-deucy.” With this technique, the jockey’s left stirrup iron is commonly placed from 2 to 12 inches lower than the right by separately adjusting the attached leather straps. This acey-deucy style confers important advantages on oval tracks, where only left turns are encountered in counterclockwise American races; it permits the horse and jockey to better lean into the turns and to enjoy better strength and balance, thus harnessing the centripetal force of a tight bend. This sounds so scientific that it must have resulted from careful study and planning, right? But, no it didn’t! The origin of riding acey-deucy was actually accidental. Bad fortune became good fortune for riding sensation Jack Westrope, who is now credited with beginning and perfecting this racing innovation. Combined with the monkey crouch, acey-deucy allows the jockey to “fold into” the horse instead of squatting over him.

This chapter discusses the use of technê to characterize the creator god in Plato’s Timaeus. Timaeus explains how a divine craftsman, the Demiurge, made the whole cosmos as a living being. He created the heavenly bodies, but left the creation of human and other mortal beings to these ‘lesser’ gods. But if the Demiurge was the best of all craftsmen, seeking to make the finest cosmos possible, why did he not make the mortal beings too? Having outlined Plato’s conception of craft, Johansen explains how this problem, which he calls the ‘technodicy’, arises for Timaeus, contrasting it with the classical theodicy. The Demiurge’s creation is limited by his craft. Timaeus therefore assigns another craft to the lesser gods to produce mortal beings. However, even this craft prevents the lesser gods from directly producing non-human animals, and so the problem is reiterated. The issue is sought to be resolved by making humans themselves responsible for their own reincarnation as lower animals. Timaeus’ position is comparable to the view in Laws X: the lesser gods, consistent with their role as craftsmen, have overall responsibility for the organization of lower kinds of living being, without causing any particular beings to belong to particular kinds.

Chapter 6 analyses and discusses the relation between the Verse chronicle, the novel Aristandros and Kallithea and the so-called Moral poem. These three works share not only a number of motifs and themes but also a fairly large number of verses. They contain motifs such as the instability of fortune and the dangers of envy, which appear also in other texts by Manasses. The investigation here aims at understanding the significance of authorial choices in the handling of slander and envy: the recycling of images and expressions that transgress genre boundaries and thus contribute to a characteristic authorial voice. The attribution of the Moral poem to Manasses has been questioned, but in view of its relevance for a better understanding of Manasses’ authorship and its reception, it is included in the analysis. Regardless of who composed the poem, it represents the Manassean voice and makes for a fruitful discussion of questions of authorship, attribution and tradition.

We analyze how firms from emerging markets upgrade their capabilities to improve their international competitiveness. We argue that firms use a combination methods, the four-I mechanisms, to upgrade their capabilities – imitation, integration, incorporation, and internal development – and that the underdevelopment of emerging markets affects this catching-up process. We propose that initially, as laggards in global competition, firms are more inclined to imitate products and services from more sophisticated firms, leveraging the relatively weak intellectual property protection of their home countries and aiming to serve low-income consumers. As they catch up, firms are more likely to integrate best practices through alliances to obtain technologies, or to learn by serving as suppliers of more sophisticated firms. Firms then incorporate best practices by acquiring technologies or firms that own sophisticated knowledge. Finally, as they catch up to leaders, firms focus more on internal development of capabilities. We highlight how the four-I mechanisms evolve with the development stages of firms and emerging economies.

Chapter Three studies ‘the word’ by merging two fields of association: first, the agglomeration of human labours, social practices, cultural values, and codified grammatical systems that made possible and supported the acquisition of Latin; second, the inhuman order of the ‘verbum Dei’. Each of these fields of association has, as its ultimate aim, the transformation of individual lives. It is under the rubric of this shared objective that I bring them together here. The first half of the chapter explores aspects of the medieval Latin grammatical tradition and its early modern afterlives. My goal is to make some seventh-century wranglings on the subject of the Latin case system serve as a point of entry into later fashions of prose style, and into the pedagogical disciplines of systematic imitation that were developed to teach Ciceronian Latin to schoolboys. The second half of the chapter explores a range of texts associated with St Paul, St Augustine, and Martin Luther in order to characterize the linguistic and spiritual stakes of medieval and early modern Britain’s absorption into Rome.

Chapter Two studies how Rome figures in shifting conceptions of the problem of the self. The chapter’s emphasis is on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writers and texts, ranging from Edmund Spenser and John Donne to Sir Thomas Wilson and John Milton. English perspectives on Rome, however, were mediated to a significant extent by continental writers such as Petrarch, Joachim Du Bellay, and Michel Eyquem de Montaigne. Writers trained within (and in Petrarch’s case, actively forging) the traditions of humanist inquiry celebrated their commitment to returning ad fontes. In practice, however, their engagements with a ‘text’ as complex and ramified as Rome risked leaving them endlessly navigating tributary brooks, creeks, streams, and rivers rather than reposing comfortably at the source. The chapter brings together scenes of schooling, staring, and travel in order to study tensions between understandings of the self as being an immured condition of metaphysical finitude, on the one hand, and as being formed via the absorption of capabilities that arrive from the outside, on the other.

This chapter rejoins the methodology of normative approaches to voice-ranges and functions sketched in Chapter 5. Renaissance polyphony is considered in terms of the related compositional determinants of scoring, texture, and scale. The principal topics are: fifteenth-century pieces that lie outside the normative parameters seen in Chapter 5; the rise of imitation, viewed as a sub-category of texture, through to its paradigmatic status in the sixteenth century; the polyphony of the English Renaissance, much of whose earlier history develops along very different lines to continental music; and finally, the changes of approach to scale in Renaissance polyphony, from the ‘out-sized’ cyclic Masses at the turn of the sixteenth century to the growing emphasis on the number of voices, culminating in the ‘sonic blockbusters’ fashionable in European courts at the end of the century, whose most enduring manifestation is Tallis’ forty-part motet ‘Spem in alium’.

Chiefly focusing on Swift’s Cowleyan odes and epistles of the 1690s, this chapter demonstrates the author’s early rejection of conventional imitation in favour of a spontaneous form of appropriative writing. Railing against the accumulated habits of his seventeenth-century forebears, Swift repeatedly reveals in the early poems his own thwarted attempts to reinvent poetry for an unheroic age. Temporarily discarding the panegyric mode at the end of the decade, Swift found a new metafictional style that challenged the very medium of poetry. How can we adequately describe whispering or smells? If a table-book could talk would it have anything valuable to say? What would the petition of a barely literate waiting woman sound like? What happens if an overconfident member of your circle finishes one of your unfinishable ballads?