In this chapter we treat law as inextricably connected to a text. We examine the ways in which laws and other elements of the legal process, including documents, procedural records, and judicial opinions and commentaries, are produced, preserved, transmitted and communicated to various audiences in ancient Greece and Rome, the ancient Near East and Egypt, ancient India and ancient China. We include discussions of when and how texts first emerged in these societies, the materials on which they were written and preserved, and other special features of their written texts, such as language, syntax, degree of precision, and organization and codification. We also examine these aspects of secondary legal texts, including historical accounts and reports, literature, philosophical, religious and other intellectual works, non-legal documents, instructional materials and visual ‘texts’, to see how these contributed to the understanding of law as text.

The account of the best life for humans, that is, of happy or flourishing life, was the central theme of ancient ethics. This book addresses other important questions about the value of life that likewise received much discussion in antiquity: What does it take to have a life that, if not happy, is at least worth living, in comparison to being dead or never having come into life? Does every human life have some non-instrumental value that makes it worth living? And do all lives that are worth living for those who live them also have to be meaningful, in the sense of making a positive contribution to other humans or world at large? In reconstructing, for the first time, philosophical engagements with these questions from a range of ancient philosophers, from Socrates to Plotinus, the work offers a fresh narrative of ancient ethics. It explores these views against the background of the pessimistic outlook on the human condition adopted by the Greek poets, but also points out continuities and contrasts between the ancient perspective and modern philosophical debates about related themes in biomedical ethics and in the ethics of procreation.

The introduction sets out the rationale, objectives and scope of the project. The rationale is to explore ancient views about the criteria for a life at least barely worth living. In contrast to the more familiar themes of ancient ethics, particularly the account of a happy life or the morality of suicide, these views have been neglected in the scholarship, despite their potential relevance for modern philosophers working on related themes. The objective of this project is to offer an overview of ancient discussions about the life worth living from Socrates to Plotinus. These ancient discussions are introduced in the broader context of early Greek views about the value of human life in non-philosophical literature, as well as in the context of contemporary philosophical accounts of the life worth living.

The origins of modern georgic writing lie in the ancient Mediterranean, in the literature of ancient Greece and Rome. On the Greek side the genre begins with the poetry of Hesiod, embraces dozens of treatise in poetry and prose written during the Hellenistic era, and comes to an end in Byzantine times with the massive compilation of farming lore known as the Geoponica. Latin georgic starts with Cato’s essay on agriculture, culminates in Vergil’s Georgics – the poem that defined the genre for later European authors – and persists in the Latin prose of Columella, Pliny, and Palladius. The diversity of the genre evades definition. Its popularity is unsurprising in the context of a world where wealth meant ownership of land and most people tilled the soil.

Telemann’s complex relationship with the musical past encompassed a healthy respect for the works of previous generations (Lully, Corelli, and others), ambivalence about “ancient” music that was marked by impoverished melodies and contrapuntal excesses, and disdain for Ancients who rejected whatever was new. This chapter addresses yet another perspective, of a composer at pains to bring outmoded musical idioms into a meaningful dialogue with more modern ones. Two works in particular, church cantatas that Telemann composed in Frankfurt am Main, demonstrate how such juxtapositions can serve as rhetorically powerful tools for communicating a theological message. Whereas Sehet an die Exempel der Alten (TVWV 1:1259) cleverly caricatures music of the mid-seventeenth century, the striking dialogue cantata Erhöre mich, wenn ich rufe (TVWV 1:459) casts a doubting, disconsolate Christian as a musical Ancient and the consoling Jesus as a Modern, an opposition vividly highlighted by text, musical style, and instrumentation. That Telemann’s reminiscences of the musical past are not cut of a purely nostalgic or ironic cloth but instead offer a productive dialogue with the musical present – one articulating an enlightened awareness of the divide between historical and present-day consciousnesses – may be read as evidence of the composer‘s extraordinary capacity for aesthetic and theological reflection.

This chapter explores the representation of emotions in justifications of slavery during antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the rise of Atlantic slavery, paying close attention to the shift from the notion of “slavery to passions” in ancient Greco-Roman philosophy to the principle of “slavery to sin” in early Christian thought. This chapter concludes with an analysis of the role of emotional discourse in the globalization of racialized slavery.

The naming of poetic predecessors within one’s own composition, often associated with a so-called Hellenistic aesthetic, has a less explored heritage going back to the sixth century BCE. This chapter traces the strategy in its earliest phases, especially as we find it within lyric poetry, from the reported statement by Stesichorus [fr. 168 Finglass] that the Shield of Heracles was indeed composed by Hesiod, to the Simonidean allusion to Homer as his forerunner in praise-poetry (fr.11.15–18), and on to Pindar’s complex and varied namings of Archilochus, Terpander, and the masters of hexameter verse. It offers a typology of three main functions of such naming (approbation, criticism, or the representation of conversational interaction), and then an in-depth analysis of two problematic issues: the generic affiliations of Stesichorean art, and the difficulties related to the Pindaric naming of Homer, in particular at Nemean 7.20–7. The device of naming a predecessor emerges as a sort of reception degree-zero, whereby previous verbal art is highlighted, distilled, and set up as a foil, while a new performative space is opened up for the presentation of one’s own innovative productions.

In Chapter 2, Angelique EagleWoman (Wambdi A. Was’teWinyan) explores some historical trade relationships and the vast networks connecting Indigenous commerce in the Americas. She sets forth the values and worldviews that traditionally undergirded the commercial framework as well as providing an overview of the inter-nation trade in goods and services that has developed over hundreds of years. The chapter closes with insight into the potential for revitalizing and reconnecting traditional trade alliances to rebuild Indigenous economies.