Results by title

A multidisciplinary account showing how ancient notions of sympathy changed ways of thinking about interconnectedness.

When we hear the word sympathy today, we tend to imagine the emotional bond between people. But for centuries, sympathy just as commonly brought to mind interdependencies between plants, rocks, and celestial bodies. It explained why magnets attract iron, how the stars influence human destiny, and why one trembles when one is afraid. It implicated human beings in a complex network of loves (sympathies) and hates (antipathies). The ancient notion of sympathy led to ways of thinking about community even beyond the boundaries of the human that continue to influence how we think about life, society, and Nature today.

This book offers the first comprehensive account of ancient sympathy, spanning the fifth century BCE to the third century CE. Tracing connections across works of philosophy, natural history, cosmology, medicine, and literature, Brooke Holmes argues that how people thought about sympathetic communities played a crucial role in shaping the idea of Nature as a webbed, well-ordered whole in the Hellenistic and Roman Imperial Mediterranean. From the scale of the organism to that of the cosmos, this book interrogates the ancient history of a protoecological, antimechanistic conception of Nature, proposing the richly textured thought-world of sympathy as a resource for rethinking and reimagining human and nonhuman communities, the stories we tell about the classical world, and the political and theoretical stakes of vital materialisms.

Humane ideals were central to the image Athenians had of themselves and their city during the classical period. Tragic plays, which formed a part of civic education, often promoted pity and compassion. But it is less clear to what extent Athenians embraced such ideals in daily life. How were they expected to respond, emotionally and pragmatically, to the suffering of other people? Under what circumstances? At what risk to themselves?

In this book, Rachel Hall Sternberg draws on evidence from Greek oratory and historiography of the fifth and fourth centuries BCE to study the moral universe of the ancient Athenians: how citizens may have treated one another in times of adversity, when and how they were expected to help. She develops case studies in five spheres of everyday life: home nursing, the ransom of captives, intervention in street crimes, the long-distance transport of sick and wounded soldiers, and slave torture. Her close reading of selected narratives suggests that Athenians embraced high standards for helping behavior—at least toward relatives, friends, and some fellow citizens. Meanwhile, a subtle discourse of moral obligation strengthened the bonds that held Athenian society together, encouraging individuals to bring their personal behavior into line with the ideals of the city-state.

"Treason" is a word with many connotations, a word applied to a host of varied offenses throughout the history of humanity. These essays by Floyd Seyward Lear analyze the development of the political theory of treason from its beginning in Roman Law to its transformation in the Germanic custom of the early Middle Ages.

The author has presented treason as a political idea, possessing historical continuity, though varying from age to age as it follows the evolution of political authority itself. These studies trace the shifting emphasis in crimes against the state from acts directed against a central absolutist authority to acts involving the personal relationship of a pledged troth and individual fealty. This is a shift from the concept of majesty in Roman law to the concept of fidelity in Germanic law with the corollary shift from allegiance as an act of deference to allegiance as a token of mutual fidelity.

These ideas are examined chronologically across an interval extending from archaic Roman law to incipiently feudal forms, from which modern theories of treason, allegiance, and sovereignty derive. Contemporary concepts in these political areas can hardly be understood apart from their historical origins. Broadly considered, this work is intended as a contribution to intellectual history.

Further, this collection represents the synthesis of material widely scattered in the primary sources and relevant secondary works. The two concluding bibliographical essays are intended as a general survey of the literature relevant to these studies in Roman and Germanic public law. Descriptive and interpretive works which deal with treason and its allied aspects of political and legal theory are not numerous in the English language.