Economies are fundamental to all human societies by providing the material support for their populations and respective social institutions. This volume brings together scholars from archaeology, anthropology, and history in a collaborative examination of how premodern societies produced and mobilized resources to support social, political, and religious institutions. Thirteen societies from horticultural/pastoral groups to expansionistic states are used to develop a truly comparative view of economic development. Topics discussed include the nature of productive self-sufficiency, forms of economic specialization, the economics of labor and resource mobilization, economic inequality and stratification, commerce and the marketplace, and urban and ritual economies. The book's collective discussions have led to the construction of five generalizations and eighteen specific hypotheses about the way that ancient and premodern societies navigated the material worlds in which they lived. These hypotheses will serve as a basis for scholars exploring how societies in other times and places navigated their economic landscapes.

This volume gathers 25 chapters focused on Latin texts on papyrus, exploring them from multi- and cross-disciplinary perspectives. It serves as a companion to the texts published in The Corpus of Latin Texts on Papyrus (Cambridge, forthcoming). The chapters provide in-depth analyses of the chosen texts from literary, philological, linguistic, and historical perspectives, or offer methodological reflections on Latin texts on papyrus, promoting innovative approaches. They cover topics ranging from palaeography and philology to Latin literature and from ancient law to ancient and medieval history, and brilliantly demonstrate the potential of Latin texts on papyrus to inspire and illuminate the field of Classics.

This Element concerns Hegel's engagement with Spinoza's metaphysics, and divides into three main parts. The first enlists help from Hegel's interpretation to introduce and defend philosophical strengths in Spinoza's defense of metaphysical monism. The second defends Hegel's criticism of Spinoza, concluding that Spinoza's philosophy must eliminate all finitude and determinacy, leaving only a shapeless abyss. The third employs these defenses to open up an approach to the philosophical interpretation of Hegel's Logic, the core of his philosophical system, understanding the meaning of Hegel's ambitious claims in terms of reasons that make them more than the mere unpacking of assumptions.

In this book, Ann Marie Yasin reveals the savvy and subtle ways in which Roman and late Roman patrons across the Mediterranean modulated connections to the past and expectations for the future through their material investments in old architecture. Then as now, reactivation and modification of previously built structures required direct engagement with issues of tradition and novelty, longevity and ephemerality, security and precarity – in short, with how time is perceived in the built environment. The book argues that Roman patrons and audiences were keenly sensitive to all of these issues. It traces spatial and decorative configurations of rebuilt structures, including temples and churches, civic and entertainment buildings, roads and aqueducts, as well as theways such projects were marked and celebrated through ritual and monumental text. In doing so, Yasin charts how local communities engaged with the time of their buildings at a material, experiential level over the course of the first six centuries CE.

Augustine's Confessions, written between AD 394 and 400, is an autobiographical work which outlines his youth and his conversion to Christianity. It is one of the great texts of Late Antiquity, the first Western Christian autobiography ever written, and it retains its fascination for philosophers, theologians, historians, and scholars of religious studies today. This Critical Guide engages with Augustine's creative appropriation of the work of his predecessors in theology generally, in metaphysics, and in philosophy as therapy for the soul, and reframes a much discussed - but still poorly understood - passage from the Confessions with respect to recent philosophy. The volume represents the best of contemporary scholarship on Augustine's Confessions from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, and builds on existing scholarship to develop new insights, explore underappreciated themes, and situate Augustine in the thought of his own day as well as ours.

This volume makes more widely available to students and teachers the treasure trove of evidence for the administrative, social, and economic history of Rome contained in the Digest and Codex of Justinian. What happened when people encountered the government exercising legal jurisdiction through governors, magistrates, and officials within the legal framework and laws sponsored by the state? How were the urban environment of Rome and Italy, the state's assets, and human relations managed? How did the mechanisms of control in the provinces affect local life and legal processes? How were contracts devised and enforced? How did banks operate? What was the experience of going to court like, and how did you deal with assault or insult or recover loss? How did you rent a farm or an apartment and protect ownership? The emperor loomed over everything, being the last resort in moderating relations between state and subject.

The ancient world existed before the modern conceptual and linguistic apparatus of rights, and any attempts to understand its place in history must be undertaken with care. This volume covers not only Greco-Roman antiquity, but ranges from the ancient Near East to early Confucian China; Deuteronomic Judaism to Ptolemaic Egypt; and rabbinic Judaism to Sasanian law. It describes ancient normative conceptions of personhood and practices of law in a way that respects their historical and linguistic particularity, appreciating the distinctiveness of the cultures under study whilst clarifying their salience for comparative study. Through thirteen expertly researched essays, volume one of The Cambridge History of Rights is a comprehensive and authoritative reference for the history of rights in the global ancient world and highlights societies that the field has long neglected.

Recent years have seen new systematic interest in Hegel's philosophical conception of the physical universe. It has become clear that Hegel's account of nature is revealing both on its own as well as by providing a non-naturalist understanding of the place of mind in nature. This Element focuses on the very foundations and method of Hegel's philosophy of nature, relating them to Newtonian and to modern physics. The volume also sheds light on Hegel's global account of the physical universe as a material space-time system and on his ecological conception of the Earth as a habitable planet populated by organic life. By drawing connections to relativity theory and earth systems science it is shown that Hegel's conception of nature is very much philosophically alive and can complement scientific accounts of nature in illuminating ways.

For Plato, tragedy and comedy are meaningful generic forms with proto-philosophical content concerning the moral character of their protagonists. He operates with a distinction between actual drama, the comedy and tragedy of the fourth and fifth centuries BCE, and ideal drama, the norm for what comedy and tragedy ought to be like. In this book Franco Trivigno reconstructs, on Plato's behalf, an original philosophical account of tragedy and comedy and illustrates the interpretive value of reading Plato's dialogues from this perspective. He offers detailed analyses of individual dialogues as instances of ideal comedy and tragedy, with attention to their structure and philosophical content; he also reconstructs Plato's ideals of comedy and tragedy by formulating definitions of each genre, specifying their norms, and showing how the two genres are related to each other. His book will be valuable for a range of readers interested in Plato and in Greek drama.

Ancient Greek terminology continues to shape contemporary discourse; hubris is a case in point. Typically seen as the catastrophic yet common tendency to reach too high, only to fall, it remains a fixture in the contemporary discourse of business and politics. But hubris has also become a term of art for researchers in a number of academic disciplines; and it remains a hotly contested topic in Classics. This unique volume of essays explores the connections, continuities and differences between ancient hubris and its modern counterparts. Its distinguished multidisciplinary cast of experts in Classics, Business and Management Studies and Psychology explores what modern researchers can learn from the theorisation and deployment of hubris in ancient sources and how modern approaches to hubris can help us understand the ancient concept.

In today's societies, political and economic issues are closely intertwined, and political philosophy has turned more and more to economic issues. This Element introduces some key questions of economic philosophy: How to think about the relation between political and economic power? Can markets be 'tamed'? Which values are embedded in the economy and how do those relate to political values? It answers these questions by considering arguments from three theoretical perspectives – liberal egalitarian approaches, neorepublicanism, and critical theory or socialist thought – explaining their different background assumptions but also shared grounds. To illustrate these topics, it zooms in on the future of work: How could work be made more just, democratic, and sustainable? In the conclusion, some implications for research strategies in economic philosophy are explored.

In this volume, David Litwa offers a fresh introduction to the 'gnostic Bible,' arguably the most significant and widely read of all gnostic Christian texts ever written. Providing a fresh introduction to a particular version of the Secret Book of John, namely the shorter version that is found in Nag Hammadi Codex III, his study includes a new translation of this text and an extensive commentary in which he introduces the notable features of this codex and interrogates whether the Secret Book emerged from an actual gnostic community. Litwa also posits solutions to many questions related to this text, notably: its date and find spot, its relationship to the treatise known and summarized by Irenaeus in the late second century, its interpretation and re-creation of the book of Genesis for Christian readers, its novel interpretation of Greco-Roman philosophy, its foundations in apostolic authority, and the reception of the Secret Book of John in late antiquity, well into the fifth century CE.

This is the first comprehensive analysis in any language of Herodotus' interaction with the Greek poetic tradition, including epic, lyric, and tragic poetry. It is essential reading for scholars of ancient Greek storytelling (including myth) and those interested in the hybrid nature of narrative history, as both a true or truth-based account of past events and a necessarily creative account, which requires the author to present data in a meaningful and engrossing literary form. Close readings of specific passages demonstrate how Herodotus uses the linguistic, thematic, and narrative resources of the poets to channel and challenge their social authority, and to engage the emotions and intellect of a broad Hellenic audience steeped in the traditions of poetic performance. Herodotus adopts or adapts some poetic features while rejecting others (explicitly or implicitly) as a means of defining the nature of his own research and narrative.

How do we fit the Roman Empire into world history? Too often the empire has simply been conceived of in terms of the West. But Rome was too big to be squeezed into a purely European model; her empire bestrode three continents. Peter Fibiger Bang develops a radical new world history framework for the Roman Empire, presenting it as part of an Afro-Eurasian arena of grand empires that dominated the shape of history before the forces of globalization and industrialization made the world centre on Europe from the eighteenth century onwards. It was a world before East and West. The book traces surprising cultural connections and societal similarities between Rome and the other vast empires of Afro-Eurasia. Whether we look at war-making, slavery, empire formation, literary culture or intercontinental trade and rebellion, Rome is best approached in its Afro-Eurasian context.

The Cycladic islands have traditionally been considered as backwaters during the Roman and Late Antique periods. Through analysis of the material culture produced from the late first century BCE through to the seventh century CE, however, Rebecca Sweetman offers a fresh interpretation of Cycladic societies across this diachronic period. She demonstrates that the Cyclades remained vibrant, and that the islands embraced the potential of being part of wider political, economic and religious networks that were enabled as part of the Roman Empire. Sweetman also argues that the Cyclades were at the forefront of key social developments, notably, female social and physical mobility, as well as in the islands' early adoption of Christianity. Drawing on concepts related to Globalization, Christianization, and Resilience, Sweetman's analysis highlights the complex relationships between the islands and their Imperial contexts over time. The gazetteer of archaeological sites will be fundamental for all working on archaeology of the Roman and Late Antique periods as well as those interested in the Mediterranean.