This chapter introduces the book’s two major claims: that learning to read and write fiction was integral to literate education in the Roman world, and that Imperial prose fiction emerged in response to this pedagogy. Drawing on a wide range of literary, philosophical, and educational sources, it argues that the acquisition of “fiction competence” – the trained ability to identify, interpret, and evaluate fictional narratives – was central to the curriculum from early childhood through rhetorical education. It then proposes an “institutional theory of fiction” for classical antiquity, arguing that ancient fictionality be defined not by genre or authorial intent but by culturally embedded conventions taught through schooling. Tracing the roots of these conventions to Greek philosophical and sophistic traditions, the chapter reconstructs four pedagogical principles that structured how students learned to engage with fiction. These principles centered on deception (apate), enigmatic speech (ainigma), and evaluative criticism. The chapter demonstrates that educational texts and practices shaped ancient readers’ expectations of fiction and that literary fiction, in turn, reflected and contested its institutional training. Fiction in antiquity, the chapter contends, must be understood as a socially regulated practice, embedded in and shaped by systems of education.

The vertebral column in the genus Homo has a unique morphology compared with other primates and mammals due to the posture of the trunk (orthograd, i.e., vertical) and locomotion (obligate bipedalism). Neandertals are the best represented extinct hominin species and the studies in the last 15 years have drastically altered our view on their spine and thorax. In this chapter we provide a brief historical account of the changing ideas on the morphology of the Neandertal vertebral column and thorax and provide a comprehensive account of the most up-to-date view that we have on these anatomical regions based on the latest paleontological research. Neandertals show a distinct morphology of their vertebral column and thorax, which covaries with other anatomical regions and is a mixture of primitive and derived features. Neandertal-derived features did not appear all at once, and some of them can be found in European Middle Pleistocene populations.

Ginsberg was not just a primary figure in the literary and countercultural movements of the decades following World War II. As this chapter details, he also provides a crucial link, too infrequently acknowledged, between these postwar movements and the Old Left ideals and communities of the 1930s and early 1940s. Touching on the numerous moments in Ginsberg’s poetry and biography where he recalls a youth shaped by his parents’ communist and socialist commitments, including their support for labor unions, this essay explains briefly why those commitments needed to be reformulated as Ginsberg began his poetic career in the mid 1950s, in the early years of the Cold War.

Race, racism, and ethno-racial factors have shaped histories of ancient Greece and Rome from at least the nineteenth century. Historians of the ancient world show the influence of Hegel and race science on their writings. Notable examples include Droysen’s comments on Persian civilisation and Mommsen’s on the Celtic. Historians are troubled by racial mingling in the Roman empire, and some explain the decline and fall of Rome as the result of racial mingling. Racialising attitudes and analyses can be found in the early twentieth century as well and continue into the years of the Second World War. Not all historians are straightforwardly racist, and many show complicated and contradictory attitudes towards race. They make clear that a liberal outlook on life is not incompatible with racist beliefs in some areas. This is the context in which to appreciate Frank Snowden’s writings on Blacks in antiquity and Martin Bernal’s attempt to rewrite the history of Graeco-Roman antiquity and classical scholarship.

Approaches to La consagración de la primavera tend to consider that its central aspects are the historical and the autobiographical, judging the text for its ideological dimension and its stance on the Cuban Revolution. However, the omnipresent discourse on the arts and the figure of the artist, the way in which this is dealt with within the narration, as well as the intermedial devices used in it, confer on Carpentier’s penultimate novel the timelessness and universality of the Great Works. By textual analysis and a comprehension of the functioning of Carpentier’s aesthetic system, this chapter offers a humanist reading of a novel rooted in the dream of being a total work that metaphorically encompasses all arts and the writer’s own previous oeuvre.

What marks out Athens in the Early Iron Age (EIA) is not only clear continuity from the Bronze Age but a steady rise of population through the EIA into the Archaic period. Following a brief topographical overview and a summary of Athens before 1200 BCE, this chapter focuses on the evidence of tombs, including an account of five and a half Athenians: a putative warrior aged 35–45 years at death, an old man aged 70, a young woman in her early 20s accompanied by terracotta model boots, a slightly older woman with her unborn child, and a social outcast. This is followed by what evidence there exists for the settlement of Athens. A major theme is the resilience of the population from the Bronze Age into the EIA and Archaic period. Whether it is cast as a village or town, the urban nucleus of the settlement was the Athenian Acropolis. What played out in the EIA in Athens was the formation of what was to become one of the largest and most successful city-states of the ancient Greek world.

Study of the material remains of Greek and Roman antiquity played a key role in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century emergence of the modern disciplinary formation of Classics as the comprehensive study of the ancient Mediterranean world. Over the same period, it was also central to the development of racial thought in the spheres of aesthetics, ethnology, and historical anthropology. After articulating a conception of race that, following Stuart Hall and Noémie Ndiaye, treats it as a ‘sliding signifier’ drawing upon an archive or repertoire of racial tropes, this chapter discusses how, in studying Greek and Roman monuments under the sign of ‘art’, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century scholarship attended to material antiquity in a manner that was both formed by and formative of constructions of race emerging between the ‘Age of Discovery’ and the European ‘Enlightenment’. It explores the relation of classical art historiography to other racializing discourses of difference along three key axes: ‘Culture’, ‘Differentiation’, and ‘Beauty’, attending to the role of environmental or climate theory, heredity, and physiognomy in emerging theories that sought to explain the diversity of ancient and modern peoples as evidenced by their visual and material productions.

This chapter examines the concept of territory. While administrative space was no novelty in East Asia, notions related to space transformed in seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The Treaty of Nerchinsk marked the borderlines between the the Qing and Russian empires. Similar treaties in the early eighteenth century solidified them. Kangxi initiated a geographical survey spanning the country. This significantly impacted Korea, which made efforts to secure its border, altering perceptions of the state. Russian expansion along the Pacific coast raised concerns in Japan. From the late eighteenth century, Japanese intellectuals explored the Ezo region – areas that had held little interest. These developments introduced fresh concepts like territory, borders, and exclusive ownership (often considered European inventions) into traditional notions of imperial land. The new ideas didn’t supplant existing understandings, or engender a new interpolity system in East Asia.

This chapter reflects on modern and contemporary narratives surrounding the modern ‘racing’ of the inhabitants of Hellenistic and Roman Egypt by focusing on two cases, each of which pertains to a local woman. Both of these women’s bodies have become, two millennia or so after their death, a racial canvas at best, and a battlefield at worst. The first woman is the one portrayed on a funerary portrait on display at the Louvre Museum in Paris. The second woman needs no introduction: She was Cleopatra VII, the last pharaoh of Macedonian-ruled Egypt.

During the Geometric period (ca. 900–700 BCE), the sociopolitical structure of Big Men became collaborative aristocratic rule. Most Geometric buildings had fieldstone foundations, mudbrick walls, and pitched thatch roofs, or, in the Cyclades and Crete, fieldstone walls and flat roofs. Larger dwellings were usually apsidal or rectangular, smaller dwellings often oval. In the eighth century, a large household could include separate buildings and areas inside an enclosure (Oropos, Eretria). By 700, multi-room rectangular houses with a courtyard appear (Zagora). Sanctuaries in settlements were usually open-air. Sanctuaries outside settlements proliferated in Late Geometric as sites of elite display and competition; rituals included animal sacrifice, communal feasting, and votive offerings. Monumental temples were built 725–700 at Eretria, Amarynthos, Naxos, Samos, Kalapodi, and Ano Mazaraki, all extra-urban except Eretria. Geometric burials were generally inhumations, though cremation was common in Athens/Attica. On pottery, angular geometric motifs replaced Protogeometric circular designs. Figured scenes (funerals, battles) appear in the mid-eighth century and possibly mythological scenes in the late eighth century. Greeks, probably Euboeans, borrowed the Phoenician alphabet ca. 800 BCE; early inscriptions were scratched on pottery, some in poetic meter. By ca. 700, many settlements had developed into the politically organized community called a polis.

This chapter considers the relationship between the rational-discursive faculty and species identity through the lens of the concepts of error and errancy. In a variety of cultural contexts, medieval audiences imagined that the act of “erring” – both in the etymological sense of wandering and the extended sense of moral fault – could function as an experience that troubled distinctions of species. The chapter uses this recurring fantasy as a lens to explore an intriguing phenomenon observable in manuscripts of the Roman de Renart: Scribes and the trickster fox whose tales they copied sometimes “err” in tandem with one another, with scribal slips of the pen overlapping ambiguously with beastly slips of the tongue. It argues that these disruptive situations enable unresolved questions about the place of the rational-discursive faculty to come to the fore, confronting readers with a surprising question: In whose subjectivity do the errors in question originate?

Chapter 3.2 covers the way hospitals are paid. Methods for paying hospitals vary across countries and include fee-for-service, block contracts, line-item budgeting (where purchasers specify exactly what funds are used for), and activity-based funding (with a fixed rate for each episode of care independent of the hospital’s costs of care). Increasingly, pay-for-performance elements are also used. Key learning includes that

• Third-party purchasers: government agencies, social health insurance funds, or insurance companies provide the bulk of hospital revenue giving them levers to shape provision.

• Purchasers and hospitals have distinct objectives that are not always aligned — purchasers will pursue the best quality of care at the lowest price for their covered population while hospitals seek stable revenue streams to cover their costs.

• Information asymmetries give hospitals advantages over purchasers.

• Purchasers use payment methods and financial rewards to incentivize the volume and quality of care, patient-mix and management effort they want. There are complex challenges around

• – Specifying the details

• – Negotiating effective contracts, and

• – Managing payment systems.

• Monitoring outputs and safeguarding quality requires structures and systems which are costly.

• Reforming funding or transitioning from one payment model to another is often a long process that demands sophisticated design and careful implementation.

This chapter historicises the current moment of transformation in international trade governance by examining the evolving boundaries of trade expertise and the shifting techniques of trade governance. It adopts a periodisation of post-Second World War international economic governance, starting with the ‘embedded liberal’ period, continuing with the ‘neoliberal period’, and concluding with the contemporary period of liberalism ‘in motion’ or kineo-liberalism. The chapter demonstrates how the boundaries of the expert field and the available governance techniques are deeply connected to the broader politics of trade governance, reflecting and sustaining larger shifts in convictions concerning the purposes and rationales of international trade governance. The current moment is characterised by instability, uncertainty, and contestation, leading to a denaturalisation of the boundaries of trade governance and a reinterpretation of its fundamental aspects.

This chapter examines the relationship between trade and sustainable development, including its developmental dimension. It argues that trade policy and international trade institutions must be integrated into broader international efforts to promote sustainable development. This requires an end to the siloed treatment of trade and other policy areas. It also requires a more holistic approach to international law-making, including greater cooperation among international organisations and a willingness to make trade-offs between competing goals. Finally, it requires a recognition of the different preferences of rich and poor countries and a willingness to address the power imbalances that exist in the global trading system.