In the Extra Help, you’ll keep learning how to tackle any Greek sentence, including the next ‘branch’: the adjective. This chapter includes some extra work for consolidation, for those who have a mid-term break.

The Extra Help covers different Greek verb ‘tenses’, showing you some patterns that will save you time in the long run, and will help you relate every stage of parsing a verb to the information the verb communicates. In the Extra Material, you’ll discover some major uses of the imperfect tense.

In PA I.5, Aristotle encourages his audience to engage in a novel kind of philosophy: the scientific inquiry into animals and plants. What Aristotle is exhorting his readers to do, biology, is newly and originally conceived, but the literary technique employed – protreptic speech – is one of the oldest and most traditional kinds of philosophical discourse. In his earlier popular dialogue the Protrepticus, Aristotle had defended and promoted the Academic conception of philosophy and its preoccupation with theoretical and mathematical sciences such as astronomy by discussing the clarity of such sciences and the excellence of their objects. In the later protreptic to biology, he adapted these earlier arguments, arguing that biology also has excellent objects and offers a kind of clarity that may even surpass astronomy. These arguments turn out to be part of a general rhetorical strategy for comparing and rank-ordering sciences that was theorized in the Topics and Rhetoric.

This final chapter on Israel’s writing prophets highlights those whose messages supported postexilic restoration during the Persian period. As in earlier chapters, we will need to consider the conditionality of prophecy as well as its “forthtelling” rather than “foretelling” nature.

In 539 bce, the Persian king Cyrus allowed the first group of Israelite exiles to return to Jerusalem, now part of the administrative province of Yehud. The prophets Haggai and Zechariah serve to inspire this rebuilding process, particularly of the temple. We will observe in Zechariah growing evidence of a messianic hope in a future Davidic king as well as a literary shift from eschatology to apocalyptic forms. Malachi, dated around 470 bce, builds on earlier Old Testament prophetic themes of purity and covenant faithfulness. Much harder to date is Joel, as it contains sections indicative of two entirely different periods of Judah’s history; however, we will note the “day of Yahweh” theme in Joel, portrayed this time as a terrible day of reckoning for the nations. Jonah is unique as a narrative, conveying through rather humorous form the serious concern of Yahweh for all peoples.

While there is a dependency on some ancestry, there is also an effort to go beyond ancestors in terms of style and poetic meaning or thought in concomitance with transformations that enforce new lifestyles and new ways of expression and thinking. The understanding of adab as a combined effort of learning and refinement and the contributions of critics to understand the field as an entangled discursive space minimize the random application of saraq, theft, and initiate a counter understanding of production whereby inventiveness stands out as a challenge to conservative philology. The consolidation of literary criticism with a terminological arsenal in order to define theft, borrowing, and shared script was not an isolated occurrence. It was part of a mounting library of books on expressions, alfāẓ, and poetic meanings, maʿānī. It is also in line with the rising wave of poetic inventiveness and newness as a literary endeavor to escape the ordeal of an apparent dearth and depletion of expressions.

This chapter focuses on those parts of animals that are deformed, useless, harmful, or ‘weird,’ and that thereby challenge Aristotle’s teleological view that the sublunary world and the animals in it are beautiful on the grounds that they are functional, and that they are therefore worthy of our study as well. My account will present three different types of teleological failure that Aristotle identifies in the production processes of animals with such ‘bad’ parts, one of which attributes ‘genuine’ mistakes or oversights to the formal natures crafting these animals. The chapter argues that especially this third type of mistake signals a methodological weakness in the explanatory project of the Parts of Animals as a whole, namely that it overextends Aristotle’s theory of natural teleology to features that could have been explained more satisfactorily by reference to chance or necessity alone.

Ideological sadism has given way to the collapse and creation of various contemporary cultures. This chapter offers a comparative analysis of the Mongol invasions in Kievan Rus and modern-day Baghdad. The Mongol invasion and eventual reign of the Golden Horde became a major contribution to the enhancement of the cultures of contemporary Russia and Ukraine. On the other hand, this very same instance was noted as the tragic end of the Islamic Golden Age. The chapter sheds light on the paralleling narratives of ideological sadism implemented by the thirteenth-century Mongol hordes. Both Russian and Arabian cultures have chronicled the Mongols as brutal sadists; nonetheless, their adoption of this sadism and their reaction to it was unique and culture-specific. The chapter focuses on the primary characteristics of the people’s ‘acceptance’ and ‘embrace’ of Mongol sadism. The main sources used to configure the narratives are direct historical texts and local scripture that bespeaks of these two occurrences. The chapter argues that while the Slavs internalised the ideological sadism brought forth by the Mongol invaders who were culturally ‘inferior’ to them, the people of Iraq had the opposite reaction, resulting in a mark within the collective history of Arabs. The notion and the cultural interpretation of invasion was not a novel act, neither for the Arabs nor the Slavs; however, the interesting phenomenon was the pacification and internalisation of such modes of Mongol ideological sadism.