The civil war initiated a publishing industry. The war between the Northern Union and the Southern Confederacy inspired chronicles – photographic, historical, journalistic, and literary – at a rate unmatched by previous wars. As one soldier noted of his appetite for “cheap literature … I, certainly, never read so many such before or since.” Dime novels written for soldier audiences and run in series such as “Dawley's Camp and Fireside Library” and Redpath's “Books for the Camp Fires,” sold in the hundred thousands. More conventional novels such as Metta Victor's The Unionist's Daughter (1862); Charles Alexander's Pauline of the Potomac (1862); John Trowbridge's The Drummer Boy (1863); Edward Willett's The Vicksburg Spy (1864); and Sarah Edmonds's Unsexed: or, The Female Soldier (1864) provided those at home and at war on both sides with a steady stream of courageous soldiers, wartime courtships, and cross-dressed spies. Newspapers and magazines featured dramatic war testimonials, such as Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.'s account (Atlantic Monthly) of his frantic search for Oliver Jr. (the future Supreme Court Justice), who was wounded at Antietam. Editors like Joseph Medill of the Chicago Tribune, Horace Greeley of the New YorkTribune, and Henry J. Raymond of the New York Times, assumed the role of elder statesmen, as they reviewed military and diplomatic strategies, while one Alabama editor warned those corresponding with soldiers to avoid news “that will embitter their thoughts or swerve them from the path of duty.”

CLASSES AND INDIVIDUALS

Young women in Dreiser's An American Tragedy (1925) talk baby talk to the objects of their desire; that is what alerts us to the connection between Sondra Finchley's desire for Clyde Griffiths – “Sondra so glad Clydie here,” she tells him, and Hortense Briggs's desire for the coat in the window of Rubenstein's fur store – “Oh, if I could only have 'oo,” Hortense says to the coat. Whether the girls understand themselves or the objects as infantilized by their desires is unclear; Clyde calls Sondra his “darling baby girl” but what Sondra likes about Clyde is how “dependent” he is “upon her” – which one is the baby? Things are a little more straightforward between Hortense and the coat but only, perhaps, because what the coat has to offer Hortense is so much more obvious than what Clyde has to offer Sondra. The coat is the “darlingest” because it is the “classiest”; where Clyde represents for Sondra a social problem, as we will see, analogous in its double-edgedness to the psychological one of dependency, the coat represents to Hortense an unambiguously upward transformation of her “social state.” The coat has “class” and wearing it, Hortense imagines, she will begin to belong to the class it has.

As the analogy between the coat and Clyde suggests, class transformation and erotic attraction are deeply linked in An American Tragedy, which, in concerning itself with love affairs that cross class boundaries, sees those boundaries not as obstacles to love but as the conditions of its possibility.

THE ORIGINS OF DISTINCTION

William Dean Howells, in an 1887 editorial column for Harper's Monthly, noted that four prestigious American periodicals – The Century, Scribner's, the Atlantic Monthly, and his own Harper's – had all simultaneously published new stories by Henry James. “The effect,” Howells writes, “was like an artist's exhibition.” This “accidental massing” of James's fiction, in other words, reminded Howells of a unique kind of public place, the museum or exhibit gallery: “one turned from one masterpiece to another,” viewing “a high perfection” on display in each one. Howells's trope, comparing published fiction to a museum exhibit, was not in itself unusual. A century earlier, for instance, a New York City serial that included fiction and poetry appeared under the title Weekly Museum (1788–1817). But the assumptions that motivate Howells's trope in the 1880s differ sharply from those that had informed the title of the earlier serial. The New York weekly was a “museum” because it collected for the reader heterogeneous materials of general interest, advertising itself as a “repository” or “assemblage of whatever can interest the mind.” By 1887, however, the figure of the museum no longer connotes eclecticism but rather a consistency of “high perfection,” aesthetic purity rather than diversity. Howells's use of the museum trope, moreover, bespeaks a new kind of cultural authority also absent from the earlier era. By invoking the museum, he claims for fiction the imprimatur of a defining modern institution whose authority is based first and last on the importance of disciplined representation, the specialized exhibition of images and objects. Howells’s analogy draws on the currency of what his contemporary George Brown Goode, director of the Smithsonian, called “the modern Museum idea.”

“The love of possessions is a disease among them,” said Sitting Bull, summarizing with powerful conciseness the essential difference he saw between whites and Native Americans. One could argue that this statement provides as apt an explanation as any for the plight of America's original inhabitants in the late nineteenth century. In 1865 at the end of the Civil War there were over 300,000 Native Americans in the United States, a figure that excluded those who had avoided enumeration. During the war, Native-American loyalties were divided regionally. Southeastern Native Americans, including Cherokees, Chocktaws, Chickasaws, Seminoles, and Creeks sided with the South, inspired by a promise of their own state after the war. The Five Civilized Tribes, as they were called, were themselves slaveholders, and this fact together with their bitterness over the government's consistent failure to honor treaties, drew them to the Confederacy. Four thousand Native Americans from other tribes fought for the North. Native Americans on both sides suffered during and after the war from the pillaging of their territory, burning of their villages, and slaughter of their cattle. At the war's end, Native Americans who had been loyal to the Confederacy were punished by the triumphant Union more harshly than the Confederacy itself. Reconstruction treaties commandeered Native-American lands for railroads and white settlement, and the Native Americans in the gold-rush territories barely survived the invasion of fortune-hunters. Lincoln's promise to improve government and tribal relations after the war, renewed in the 1867 Doolittle report, confirmed the gap between rhetoric and reality in white–Native-American affairs.

FAMILY

Marriage and Children

Although there are other corporate groups within the polis, for Aristotle the basic constituting element of the polis is the oikia, the family group. By oikia, Aristotle means the nuclear family, within which the relations between husband and wife, father and children, master and slaves assume legal significance (Arist. Polit. 1253b). Aristotle's approach is basically confirmed by the legal measures regarding family organization in Athens and these are not contradicted by fragmentary information on the law of persons in other poleis (even though the Spartan tradition gives a very different view of the family group, albeit one that is virtually impossible to verify).

The oikia is constituted by marriage (gamos). Marriage is virilocal: the woman proceeds from her father's house to her husband's. The marriage ceremony, which is undoubtedly of great social and religious importance, is not significant from a legal point of view. What is important, instead, is the agreement between the woman's father (or, after his death, her brother) and the future husband, according to which the woman will be “given” and “received.” In Athens this agreement is given the name engyē or engyēsis; in legal speeches it is used as proof that a marriage exists. In the case of an heiress (epiklēros), engyē did not exist: the woman was assigned, according to epidikasia, to the male relative who demonstrated his right over other relatives to succeed the dead man (see further Cantarella in this volume).

INTRODUCTION: THE STATUS OF MORALITY IN MAIMONIDEAN THOUGHT

What sort of life constitutes the highest perfection for a human being? For Maimonides, as for Aristotle, the answer is not moral excellence, but rather intellectual perfection, that is, “the conception of the intelligibles [eternal truths], which teach true opinions concerning the divine things” (GP 3.54, p. 692). Attaining this perfection leads to immortality. Morality, by contrast, is “a preparation for something else” (viz., the life of contemplation) “and not an end in itself” (GP 3.54, p. 635). “To [the] ultimate perfection there do not belong either actions or moral qualities” (GP 3.27, p. 511). The subordination of moral perfection to intellectual perfection is already found in Maimonides' early work, the Commentary on the Mishnah: “Man needs to subordinate all his soul's powers to thought . . . and to set his sight on a single goal: the perception of God . . . I mean, knowledge of Him, in so far as that lies within man's power.”

Moral perfection cannot be supreme, Maimonides argues, for the highest perfection cannot involve, as part of its essence, anyone else besides the person who is questing for perfection. The ultimate perfection must be achievable even by a solitary individual with no social connections. Because moral habits are only dispositions to be useful to other people, “it [moral perfection] is an instrument for someone else” (GP 3.54, p. 635. See also 1.34). Just as God’s perfection does not depend on anything outside Himself, so too the perfected person is a self-sufficient agent and his ultimate perfection does not require others for its attainment.

There is nothing Maimonides values more than knowledge, especially knowledge of metaphysics or, in medieval terminology, “divine science.” The Mishneh Torah opens with the basic metaphysical and scientific truths everyone is obligated to know and ends with a depiction of the messianic age as an era in which the whole world is engaged exclusively in the pursuit of knowledge. The Guide of the Perplexed opens and closes with two parables that depict the “true human perfection,” not as the moral or ritual life but as “the acquisition of the rational virtues . . . true opinions concerning the divine things” (GP 3.54, p. 635). And throughout the Guide, Maimonides reconstructs traditional religious concepts in epistemic terms: To love God is to know Him (GP 3.51, p. 621), and the worst form of idolatry is a cognitive error, “believing [God] to be different from what He really is” (GP 1.36, p. 84).

Yet Maimonides’ philosophical corpus contains no systematic discussion of the concept of knowledge. One reason may be, as Maimonides says about the plan of the Guide, that his “purpose . . . was not to compose something on natural science, or to make an epitome of divine science,” that is, to explain sublunar physics, cosmology, or metaphysics. Writing within the context of Arabic Aristotelianism, Maimonides could take many theoretical notions for granted. Even where he must engage in its explication, he says his aim is never the idea itself but to give a “key to the understanding” of a parable or “secret” in the books of prophecy (GP 2.2, p. 254). To piece together a picture of Maimonides’ epistemology, one must therefore look to his accounts of divine attributes, prophecy, divine providence, and cosmology. Maimonides’ comment also hints at a second possible reason: Because these topics are bound up with “secrets,” he provides no explicit discussion of them. But in the case of knowledge, what could that secret be?

Gortyn, like the rest of classical Crete, presents a paradox. Though we know little of its history in the archaic and classical periods from literary sources, and though we know virtually nothing about individuals, the exceptional richness of its legal inscriptions has made the city a prime focus of attention for historians both of Greek law and of Greek society. Yet, although no survey of Greek law can neglect these texts, they present intractable problems. Above all, there is no indigenous non-legal material. Apart from the imaginary southern Cretan landscape and lawscape depicted in Plato's Laws (Morrow 1960), we have only a few pages' worth of literary descriptions, made mostly by non-Cretans. The virtual silence of the historians is broken only by a long fragment of Ephoros (FGrH 70 F 149), an analytical passage of Aristotle's Politics (II 10, 1271b20-1272b23) and some excerpts of very uneven quality from later historians, Cretan and other. This evidence has major weaknesses.

Maimonides lived in the Islamicate civilization of twelfth-century Spain/Andalusia, Morocco, and Egypt. He was heir to a rich body of philosophical, theological, and theosophical literature, traditions that converged and diverged at different points, depending on their origins and target audiences. Following in the footsteps of Christian theology, the Muslim theologians or mutakallimūn began within a hundred years of Muhammad's death. By the tenth century, Muslim philosophy and theosophy had appropriated their largely pagan Greek origins and established themselves as distinctive systems of thought. Arabic translations were made of the Greek philosophical corpus available in the ninth century: all of Aristotle with the possible exception of his Politics, and little directly of Plato except for his Timaeus, Republic, and Laws. Commentaries on Aristotle were also translated, as were works by Plotinus and Proclus that were passed off as Aristotle's. Falãsifa, like the tenth-century Alfarabi, the eleventh-century Avicenna, and the twelfth-century Averroes, incorporated so much of these teachings that Maimonides felt he could rely on them for his knowledge of Aristotle.

Augustus, like Queen Victoria, belongs to that special group of rulers who have given their name to a great period of art and literature. What we are happy to call “Augustan literature” was to be no less epoch-making for the later literature of Rome than Augustus himself proved to be for later Roman history. Such, in fact, was the continuing impact of both on the mind of posterity that it seems quite natural to speak of an “Augustan” period of English literature, too: that from John Dryden, greatest English translator of Virgil, to Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift, both of whom in their own verse constantly echoed and imitated Virgil and Horace. Pope indeed addressed to King George II, that eminently unpoetical monarch, an “imitation” of Horace's Epistle to Augustus which turned it into a suavely sarcastic poem of feline satire.

There is an element of luck in the universal acceptance of the term. Most of the poets whom we think of as Augustan had grown up and made their name before Caesar's heir reached the position of being, in his own phrase, “by universal consent in complete control of affairs” (per consensum universorum potitus rerum omnium; RG 33). Yet the only great poet actually produced in the reign was the recalcitrant and irritating Ovid, never really on message, who eventually provoked the Princeps, normally ostentatious in his 'clemency' - clementia was one of the virtues commemorated on the shield of virtues voted to him by Senate and People (RG 34) - into banishing him forever to the end of the earth.

A defining characteristic of classical Greek civilization is its tendency to understand and to organize phenomena not (as we do) through definitional focus on a specific subject in isolation, but through contrast, preferably through complementary antithesis. In no context, perhaps, is this trait more striking than in the area of commerce and commercial law. Although Anglo-American law easily contrasts “real property” and “personal property” but still allows for items sharing certain characteristics of both (“fixtures”), the Greek antithetical universe recognized only two contrasting divisions - “visible property” (phanera ousia) or “invisible property” (aphanēs ousia) - and even the differentiation between realty and personalty tended to be expressed through this distinction. Even the sale of sex was practiced through polarity: pragmatic business and conceptual legal distinctions flow from the binary contrast of the pornē (“whore”) and the hetaira (“courtesan”).