Thucydides, early in his account of the war between the Peloponnesians and the Athenians, expresses his intention to write a book that will reveal the truth about “that which is human” and then remarks that his book will therefore be “a possession for all time.”1 Thucydides’ explicitly philosophic intention in writing this book in order to convey lasting truths about the character and condition of human beings suggests that his book is better understood as a work of philosophy than as a work of history. Yet, while the end of his book is philosophic–to teach the permanent and universal truth about human nature–the means is historical–to give an account of a particular conflict between the alliance of the Peloponnesians, led by the city of Sparta, and the city of Athens.

Thucydides indicates in a number of ways that the section of his book from its beginning up until the account of the factional strife in Corcyra presents the case for the greatness of Athens over Sparta – of Athens’ regime and its education, and of the understanding of human nature and the human condition on which Athens is based (1.1–3.69). First, as we have seen, in the Archaeology, he presents himself as a partisan of Periclean Athens.1 Second, Thucydides presents a comparison of the two “who had come to be the most illustrious Greeks of their time,” “Pausanias the Spartan and Themistocles the Athenian,” a comparison that highlights the violent, tyrannical, and foolish character of Pausanias but that culminates with Thucydides’ first eulogy of an individual in the book, his eulogy of Themistocles for his outstanding practical wisdom.2 Third, this section of the book presents what is by far Thucydides’ longest eulogy of any individual in the book, of the Athenian statesman Pericles, more than triple the length of Thucydides’ next longest eulogy, that of the Spartan Brasidas.3 Thucydides’ eulogy concludes a discrete, relatively compressed subsection of the book, that is introduced by Thucydides’ praise of Pericles as “a man at that time first of the Athenians, most powerful at both speaking and acting,” a subsection that is 8.1 percent of the book as a whole, and that is entirely dominated by Pericles.4 This subsection contains four unanswered speeches by Pericles – three in direct discourse, and one in indirect discourse – including three of the eight longest speeches in the book and by far the longest speech of all, the Funeral Oration.5 That oration presents Pericles’ eloquent account of the greatness of Athens and specifically its superiority to Sparta in the enjoyment of life and in intelligence.6 Fourth, this section of the book presents the Athenians’ two naval victories over the vastly more numerous Peloponnesian forces, led by Sparta, victories presented by Thucydides as due to the Athenians’ superiority in skill, judgment, and daring.7 Finally, this section presents the Athenians’ thoughtfully compassionate treatment of the rebellious Mytileneans – the greatest act of compassion in this harsh war – in stark contrast with the seemingly thoughtless and cruel treatment by the Spartans of the Plataeans.8 Thucydides in this section of the book portrays Athens as a city with the most sagacious statesmen, the most ingenious and energetic citizenry, and the most thoughtfully humane character.

This chapter combines digital search tools with traditional philological methods to explore Shakespeare’s use of the linguistic repertoires embodied in the Book of Common Prayer and English translations of the Bible. On a daily, weekly, and yearly basis, Shakespeare (not to mention his readers and playgoing audience) heard and repeated the regimen of biblical quotations, prayers, and theological propositions encoded in the Book of Common Prayer. These repetitions made available a kind of embodied dictionary of formal categories and templates. Shakespeare’s plays and poems make extensive use of that dictionary. When Shakespeare filled these forms, he did so by selecting words and fitting them to the form in sometimes surprising ways. This chapter argues that the dramatic and poetic power of Shakespeare’s language derives from this filling of words with forms. Indeed, many of Shakespeare’s uses of forms from the Book of Common Prayer or the Bible carry with them what we call content or semantic features, so that our experience of Shakespeare’s language is in fact a register of Shakespeare’s experience of the language of the Bible.

Classic Maya elites promoted cultural cohesion and coherence of their hieroglyphic writing system across a politically fragmented landscape through ritual participation and exchange of religious artifacts.

Not all merchants were rich; smaller traders faced both poor defaulting customers and rich exploitative ones, and inter-imperial war took its toll even on larger operators. Merchants did not dominate society; landed elites and officeholders were the politically dominant groups. Their wealth was much more easily transmitted to heirs, whereas a large part of a merchant’s assets was immaterial and highly attached to the person (e.g. his or her “credit”). Women, or members of religious minorities such as Jews, were operating under extra constraints, and even more so servants and unfree laborers, with slaves and freed blacks in the colonial plantation complex at the bottom of the social hierarchy. Still, non-merchant groups fought everywhere to contain merchant power through counter-discourses delegitimizing merchant profit, from religious strictures on greed to moral economy rules limiting profit-making through social pressure and market regulations, or Physiocratic and free-market policy proposals. The resulting sociopolitical equilibria were highly variable, ranging from wealthy metropolises in Western Europe to marginalized areas in Eastern Europe or in colonies overseas.

Phillis’s brief life coincided with one of the most consequential periods in American – indeed world – history, spanning the years between the accession of George III and the establishment of the United States. She survived the Middle Passage. The vessel that brought her from Africa to America became her namesake when John and Susanna Wheatley purchased her. Phillis arrived in Boston at the beginning of the reign of George III and during the transatlantic evangelical Christian movement known as the Great Awakening. Susanna Wheatley felt obligated her to enable Phillis to read the Bible and to become an evangelist herself. Colonial demands during the American Revolution for liberty from tyranny, based on natural rights, were often expressed as calls for freedom from political enslavement. Challenges to metaphorical enslavement inevitably led to questions about whether colonial enslavers could justify the actual chattel enslavement of people of African descent.

Phillis rose from an obscure origin in Africa to become an internationally celebrated author before she was twenty years old. The Great Awakening, the transatlantic slave trade, the abolitionist movement, and the American Revolution, affected Wheatley Peters’s life and writings. Recent discoveries about Phillis’s marriage to John Peters may give us significant insight into her personality and ambitions. Phillis’s trip to London in 1773 enabled her to transform her legal, social, and political identities as well as her literary identity. Rather than seeing her works, including her surviving correspondence, as transparently autobiographical, we must remember that she is always a rhetorician. Particularly noteworthy are her shifts in agency, voice, and subjects in her writings before and after she gained her freedom in 1773. Phillis played a far more active role is establishing her African American identity than has previously been recognized.

When the Korean War exploded in 1950, few Americans felt a strong commitment to South Korea (ROK). By the end of the Cold War, however, the US–ROK alliance had emerged as one of the closest relationships in the American diplomatic portfolio. This essay examines the post-Korean War diplomacy between the two nations to suggest that the strong contemporary relationship is rooted in the immediate post-Korean War years, when skillful political maneuvering by ROK leaders, along with increasing cultural and economic connections between the two nations and the presence of a competing developmental model immediately across the 38th parallel, drove the two sides together despite the reluctance of American leaders.

‘Religion, Migration and the Irish Novel’ considers the way in which the bitter sectarian divisions that characterised Irish society in the nineteenth century were both reflected in and produced by the fiction of the period. Novels such as William Parnell’s Maurice and Berghetta: or, the Priest of Rahery (1819) were written with the clear intention of repealing the Penal Laws that restricted the rights of Irish Catholics, while Selina Bunbury’s The Abbey of Innismoyle (1828) uses Gothic tropes of abduction by malicious friars to stoke Protestant fears of Catholic conspiracies. These sectarian divisions were reinforced for Irish migrants in novels such as Mary Anne Sadlier’s New Lights (1853), a Famine novel that pits a charitable Catholic priest against a rapacious Protestant evangelical, and which was published in New York for Irish-American readers, taking its place with Irish-American novels such as Peter McCorry’s The Lost Rosary (1870).

Chapter 8 explores Homeric religion as lived practice rather than abstract theology. It examines fate and choice, divine agents and human responsibility, and the rituals that connected communities to the sacred. The chapter discusses sacred places, prayer and sacrifice, and the afterlife, showing how epic memory uses the gods to think through uncertainty, mortality, and the limits of control.