This paper investigates the ritual labor performed by the enslaved and freed members of the familia Caesaris who supported the emperor in his role as priest. Drawing on Roman art and funerary inscriptions, it contrasts elite and non-elite perspectives regarding religious work. Visual depictions – such as reliefs of the Ara Pacis and imperial sacrifice scenes – frame attendants as anonymous extensions of the emperor’s ritual authority, performing physical and sensory tasks that enhanced his prestige but denied their individuality. In contrast, inscriptions from the familia Caesaris record victimarii, musicians, and custodians of sacred implements who chose to highlight these roles in funerary commemoration. Their job-titles signaled skill, training, and membership in social networks that extended beyond imperial service, including participation in collegia and communal tombs. Examining these sources together reveals how ritual work was simultaneously devalued by elites and deeply meaningful to its practitioners, shaping identities, communities, and the lived experience of Roman religion.

Why did the nineteenth century see so little progress in addressing smoke pollution, even as smoke was increasingly recognised as a problem and economical technological solutions were identified? This article argues that efforts to abate smoke were impeded by the antagonistic class relationship between stokers and manufacturers, which prevented the emergence of a mutually beneficial compromise around smoke abatement. Employers sought to reduce smoke by compelling their stokers to take greater care under the threat of punishment. Law played an important role, siding with employers to impose liability for smoke pollution on stokers. Even when stokers were not prosecuted directly, employers often demanded indemnities as compensation for careless stoking. This reinforced mistrust between the two classes, undermining efforts to bring stokers on board with the goal of abating smoke. These findings may offer lessons today, as climate policy continues to be opposed despite the availability of green technologies and the existence of a scientific consensus on climate change.

This lead article introduces the Crucibles of Power forum, highlighting Michael David-Fox’s groundbreaking study of Smolensk under Stalinist and Nazi rule. Crucibles of Power offers a model social history of occupation, weaving together Soviet and German sources, survivor testimonies, and decades of scholarship to dismantle binary frameworks of totalitarian theory. By reframing power as a fractured and negotiated process, David-Fox reveals how overlapping regimes shaped individual choices, collaboration, and violence. Key themes-such as ‘biographical logics,’ the entanglement of Nazi and Soviet systems, and the performative dimensions of fear, rumor, and denunciation-anchor this forum’s discussions by Jochen Hellbeck, Elena Osokina, and Anna Krylova, alongside David-Fox’s own response. Read against the present, this book warns how authoritarian regimes are assembled, naturalized, and remembered. The article argues that Crucibles of Power not only reshapes our understanding of Stalinism and Nazism but also calls for new comparative histories of violence, emotion, and survival across Eastern Europe.

The contribution that coal miners made to the reconstruction of Europe is hard-wired into popular memory, with widespread tales of the selfless sacrifice that saw miners conduct extra shifts and work longer hours for the nation. This article compares three conflicts that arose when miners were ordered to go the extra mile: the campaign to have miners in the Nord-Pas-de-Calais basin (France) make up public holidays in early 1945, the extension of the Saturday shift in the coal mines of the Ostrava-Karviná basin (Czechoslovakia) in late 1946, and the calls on miners in the Ruhr basin (Germany) to conduct extra shifts to provide the population with coal for the winter of 1946/47. Where trade unionists invoked patriotic sentiments and, when that failed, ethnic resentments to motivate miners to go the extra mile, this article shows that generational conflict between old and young miners was the driving force behind these disputes.

This article examines the portrayal of social class and conviviality in Aristophanes’ Wasps 1208–15 and argues that the passage—in which Bdelycleon corrects Philocleon’s clumsy reclining as he prepares to attend an elite symposion—assumes that Philocleon (though a man of modest means) is no novice to reclined symposia, merely to the elegance expected of wealthy symposiasts. It is argued that the exchange between father and son focusses on reclining elegantly rather than on more rudimentary points, and that the passage’s language of haste suggests the matter is viewed as a trivial preliminary to more important components of Philocleon’s sympotic education. The article then considers external evidence supporting the argument that symposia were widespread through the social spectrum in fifth-century Athens, although more modest symposia did not employ costly paraphernalia such as banqueting klinai. Based on this external evidence and on consideration of the terminology in Wasps 1208–15, it is further argued that a klinê would have been used as a prop during the scene and that the scene centres on Philocleon’s unfamiliarity with using this costly piece of furniture rather than on more general ignorance of reclined conviviality. This conclusion has implications for sympotic scholarship, which remains divided on the extent to which symposia were restricted to the wealthy elite in Classical Athens. This article provides support for the position that sympotic conviviality was widespread across the social spectrum and that differences between elite and non-elite symposia centred on paraphernalia (such as banqueting klinai) and behavioural norms.

It remains a little-known fact that from March 1766 to May 1767 Jean-Jacques Rousseau – fleeing from persecution in France and Switzerland – stayed in the remote hamlet of Wootton in Staffordshire. There he composed the first half of his Confessions in a garden hermitage, a structure half natural and half architectural, ever since known as Rousseau’s Cave. Our paper records the hermitage in its current state (exposed to the elements); it creates a digital reconstruction of the hermitage as it was in Rousseau’s lifetime; and it provides digital access to a monument that is otherwise not generally accessible.

Our paper records a modest but fairly typical eighteenth-century garden hermitage and also, with the highest quality digital reconstructions and fly-throughs, provides a new insight into the creation of one of the world’s greatest works of literature.

The paper contributes substantial new material to the study of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and also contributes to garden history and the phenomenon of the garden hermitage.

The bishops of the Russian Orthodox Church, like military and civil servants in late imperial Russia, underwent significant “aging,” with the median age rising substantially as a result of greater life expectancy. In contrast to existing scholarship, which advances a political explanation for staffing in the episcopate (above all, the high rate of turnover and transfers), this study seeks to show that demography and the service structure were the key factors. Rather than rely on the politicized memoir literature, this analysis is based on the diary of the presiding member of the Synod, which focuses on the rationale and problems in staffing the episcopate. Significantly, the diocesan bishops were not only overaged but overtasked, finding it ever more difficult to perform traditional, let alone, additional roles. All this provides a new perspective on the Church’s capacity to address the growing social and confessional challenges in late imperial Russia.

This paper examines the criticism of Munīr Lāhorī (1610–44) regarding the early modern literary style of tāza-gū'ī (speaking anew) through his unedited commentaries on the qasidas of ʿUrfī Shīrāzī (1556–90). Munīr is critical of the Iranian poet's overly complex style, ungrounded in the literary tradition as he perceived it, and of developments in Mughal courts that began to favor Iranian literati over their Indian counterparts. His philological criticism of ʿUrfī's qasidas and the promulgation of tāza-gū'ī elucidates the methodologies of Safavid-Mughal literary criticism and illustrates how the prominence of Iranian figures in South Asian courts influenced the discourse on early modern Persian literary developments.

In Greek literature, the barber is always portrayed as a garrulous chatterbox and his shop as a central place for gossip and rumours. Apart from these numerous anecdotes, however, few scholars have investigated the concrete realities of the profession and the actual status of barbers in the Greek East (including Egypt). This paper seeks to fill this gap. It is based on a careful social and economic analysis of the profession, including barbers’ workspaces, their social recognition as skilled craftsmen, their funerary and religious practices, their relationships with their clients, as well as their income, wages and expenses. It attempts to re-place ancient barbers in their socio-professional and socio-economic environment, and to reconstruct some aspects of their daily lives that go beyond the statements of ancient authors and their elite discourse. By systematically cross-referencing all available historical data (literary texts, inscriptions, papyri, ostraca, iconographic and archaeological sources), the paper shows how their lives and status differ from their representation in the literary sources in order to bring these everyday workers out of the shadows and rehabilitate them as historical actors in Greek and Hellenized societies.