Paul’s Incarnational Ethic: In Galatians, Paul encourages the Galatians to imitate Jesus’ self-gift by sharing themselves with other believers and by considering what belongs to others in the community as their own.

Conclusion: Love, for Paul, is oriented towards a relationship of shared selves. As such, Paul’s ethics are more properly articulated as an expression not of egoism or of altruism but of ‘nostruism’.

The Self-Sharing Messiah: Paul’s description of the Christ event in Galatians and elsewhere in his letters portray Jesus’ loving action not as self-sacrifice but as his positive participation in human and specifically Israelite condition. His action shares all that belongs to him with believers and establishes believers as competent moral actors and enables them to reciprocate his self-gift.

Chapter 3 samples some ancient conversations across language at the interface of literature and lived experience: lifestyle, in the strictest sense. The title nods at antiquity’s most famous Greco-Roman comparativist, Plutarch; but discussion quickly moves on to the Latin prose miscellanist Aulus Gellius. What can we learn if we press the micro-dramas of philological competition characteristic of Gellius’ so-titled Attic Nights for cultural insights into the ‘parallel lives’ of the Greeks and Romans encountered in them? Next comes a matter earlier raised amid the counterfactual vignettes of Chapter 1: what if we had some stories to tell, against the grain of literary history, about a Greek poet responding to something – anything – written in Latin? Virgil’s fame makes his a good case to ponder here; and the Bay of Naples, where Virgil spent much of his life, invites attention as a microclimate of poetic biculturalism. The last section considers a collection of Greek epigrams assembled by a Greek who enjoyed patronage in first-century CE Rome: in the face of most modern critical work on the Greek Anthology, what happens if the Garland of Philip is read as Roman poetry?

The Self, the Other, and the Telos of Prosocial Action: Paul and Ethicists Ancient and Modern: Ancient ethicists portrayed ideal behaviour as oriented towards the construction of shared selves whose interests are irreducibly common, whereas modern ethicists rejected the possibility of shared selfhood and so interpreted all actions along a spectrum of egoism and altruism. Paul’s letters appear to stand in the former tradition.

The Self-Gift of a Crucified Messiah: Self-gifts in ancient discourse are about offering the self into relationship. The phrase ‘gave himself’ in Galatians 1.4 and 2.20 portrays Jesus as not ‘sacrificing’ himself but as giving himself as gift through his death.

Latin poetry has always been defined by its relationships with poetry in other languages – first with poetry in ancient Greek, more recently with poetry in the European vernaculars. The Introduction defines the book less as a literary history of Latin poetry across languages, as such, than as a set of essays that offer test cases, sometimes limit cases, for such a literary history. What is promised is a book of intertextual juxtapositions, moving between extreme close-ups and broader treatments of intercultural relationality. A special interest is expressed in the possibilities of two-way poetic conversation across languages. The Introduction concludes with trailers for the book’s seven chapters.