This chapter explores the slow and uneven property reform path ushered in by the short-lived liberal reformers that gathered around Baron von Stein. After Stein’s resignation, the discourse of property modernization was shortlived and the reconcpetualization of property was carried on by two leading,moderately conservative Roman law scholars who had been close to Stein’s cicle: Barthold Georg Niehbur and Friedrich Karl von Savigny. Animated by sincere scholarly devotion, and yet not shy to use Roman law and agrarian history to support their political agenda, Neihbur built a powerful narrative equating the liberation of the German peasantry to the struggle of the dispossessed Roman free peasant. Simultaneously, Savigny outlined a new Romanist architecture for the law of property designed to enable and protect the full mastery of the owner’s will over a physical thing.

This chapter explores Galen’s ideas concerning the digestive-nutritive process. It focuses on his explanation of the motion of nutritive matter from its ingestion as food through its alteration into blood until its complete assimilation to the different body parts. The discussion follows its path inside the body from the mouth to the individual parts and describes the changes it undergoes in its different anatomical ‘stations’ and by what means it moves through these ‘stations’. In so doing it brings to light a fundamental but generally overlooked part of the digestive-nutritive process in Galen, namely physical motions of the parts such as the oesophagus, stomach and intestines. The chapter shows how these motions of contraction and extension actively and ‘mechanically’ move the nutritive matter into and through the body by pulling, pushing and compressing the parts of the body and the matter they hold inside them.

This chapter charts the emergence of an anti-feudal disocurse of property modernization and the newly indpendent republics of Latin America. While the tones and the arguments of this anti-feudal discourse echoed the assault on feudal property in the metropole, the intellectual sources and the material interests of the detractors of feudalism in Latin America were far more complex. The liberal creole elites drew upon a vast and diverse political-economy literature that went beyond the obvious canonical authors of the French Enlightenment and included semi-peripheral regional traditions, such as the Neapolitan Enlightenment, that more closely resonated with their specific concerns about underdevelopment and metropolitan-satellite relations. Committed to agricultural improvement but also reluctant to undo the semi-feudal relations of production that allowed the landed elite to extract profit from the peasantry, jurists crafted a system that combined feudal property and modern dominium.

The Romanist-bourgeois property tradition that eased the advance of liberal capitalism in nineteenth-century Europe remained dominant throughout the twentieth century, despite its obvious shortcomings. Surprisingly, its influence seems only to be growing, even among the most sophisticated property theorists in the United States. Several of the centerpieces of Romanist-bourgeois property have made a spectacular comeback. Henry Smith and Thomas Merrill have repurposed the Roman conceptual architecture of property centered on dominium and the right to exclude. While the right to exclude by no means captures every relevant attribute of the institution of property, giving individuals the right to exclude others from particular resources is a cost-effective way of organizing the management and control of resources in society and one that also promotes a variety of other ends, including, willingness to share resources.744 Novel theories of abuse of rights continue to resurface and to spark controversy. Larissa Katz has recently proposed a principle of abuse of rights focused on owners’ reasons for action.745 Because owners’ power to make authoritative decisions about the use of resources inevitably threatens the autonomy interests of others, the exercise of this authority over others is legitimate only if owners have can present a worthwhile agenda for the resource. Critics have noted the limited use of this account of abuse of property rights that merely scrutinizes the owners’ reasons and have proposed a more capacious, anti-domination principle of abuse of rights.746 The social function of property has also experienced a similar revival with Gregory Alexander, who, in a foundational essay, courageously implied a broad social obligation norm in US property law, one that is not limited to curbing owners’ powers but goes as far as foregrounding the place of nonowners and requiring redistributive intervention.747 Alexander’s piece proved highly influential, sparking a rich conversation about the merits and limits of the social function of property in property circles in the United States.

The first chapter examines the reasons that the led nineteenth-century liberal jurists who sought to modernize property to turn to Roman antiquity for inspiration. In Roman law, jurists found a powerful idea of legal scientific method, a professional role model, a large inventory of ostensibly apolitical doctrines produced by jurists of a distant and revered age.

*In December 2018, a group of archaeologists, philosophers, historians and classicists came together at the University of Cyprus to discuss body–machine interactions in Greek and Roman antiquity. The idea for this volume has grown from that conversation. We would like to thank the University of Cyprus and the Department of Classics there for their support.

The Introduction lays out the context, the motives, and the main features of the reinvention of Roman property in nineteenth-century Europe. It introduces the global professional network of elite liberal jurists who embarked in this ambitious project and explores the reasons of their attraction to Roman propert and their committment to changing ideas of modernization. Further the introduction examines the conceptual structre of modern dominium.

This chapter starts by exploring the familiar scene at the end of Iliad 18, where the Homeric poet describes a sequence of artefacts that Hephaestus has manufactured: first the self-moving twenty golden tripods that he is in the process of completing, now fitting them out with ‘ears’, then the golden girls, automata, who are filled with ‘voice and strength’, then twenty self-blowing bellows that keep the fire strong, and finally Achilles’ wondrous shield, filled with individuals, animals and other elements that move, speak, sing and grow before our eyes for all (as the poet takes pains to remind us) that they are metal-forged. The Odyssey introduces another set of Hephaestus-forged animated metal goods, the guard dogs standing on the threshold of Alcinous and described in book 7.91–4. The second part of the chapter explores some of the vivified objects that populate archaic hexameter poetry, hybrids that stand at the interstices between the living and inanimate and among which the Hesiodic Pandora claims a place together with several other Hesiodic beings. The discussion’s second half focuses on the late archaic and early classical period, and on a number of figures that appear in Pindaric poetry.

In a well-known passage (Juv. 13 (7).473a15–474a24), Aristotle preserves a fragment of Empedocles’ poem dealing with respiration, in which the clepsydra is used as a model for breathing. Although there is a substantial literature on this subject, most scholars have focused on explaining Empedocles’ account of the mode of operation of the clepsydra as well as on assessing the extent to which Aristotle’s interpretation does justice to Empedocles’ fragment. What has received little attention is the fact that Aristotle begins his criticism of Empedocles by offering a specific counterproposal of his own, one that rests on the idea that the mechanism of respiration can be explained in a much clearer fashion through the analogy of a forge bellows. References to bellows are actually already traceable to Homer. At the same time, the bellows–lungs analogy continued to be used for centuries after Aristotle. The aim of this chapter is to provide an overview of the existing literary and archaeological evidence about bellows in Greek antiquity in order to build a complete picture of its function and hence clarify Aristotle’s theory of respiration.