The non-agricultural economy of the ancient Greek world included crafts, trade, and services. Evidence for such, heavily biased towards Athens, is found via philosophical writing, comedy, forensic speeches, inscriptions, and archaeological finds. Elite attitudes, in which farming was the idealised citizen occupation, also impact the evidence. Nevertheless, at least 230 different terms for non-agricultural roles and occupations can be found in the sources (with many overlaps). Of these, fifty-three are for women. Workshops were generally small, with up to five or six craftsmen of low status, predominantly resident aliens (metics), freedmen or slaves. At least some rich citizens at Athens owned workshops, with a number of slaves perhaps able to live and work independently. Notable trades such as mining, marble-, bronze-, and metalwork, ceramics, and tanning seem to have clustered in common locations within cities and territories. Women’s non-agricultural economic roles seem to have been related mainly to textiles, retail of simple products, and provision of personal services.

In the Sophist, Plato asks how there can be false statements. A false statement (logos) says what is not. But a statement cannot say nothing – there must be something that it says. Plato tries to solve the puzzle by investigating the notion of not-being and the notion of a logos. To understand not-being, we must first understand being. That in turn requires understanding how something can be called by many different names. Plato’s solution to these problems rests on the distinction between what something is of itself and what it is because it is related to other things. It also rests on an understanding of the notion of difference. The class of not-beautiful things, for example, is a real group: they are different from the beautiful things. Similarly, not-beings are a real group. The upshot is this: “Theaetetus is flying” is false, in that flying is different from what is with reference to Theaetetus. Theaetetus has being. Flying has being. But “Theaetetus is flying” says with reference to him what is not.

This chapter investigates the evolution of rap music in Guadeloupe at the end of the 1990s. Based on ethnographic data and grounded in both postcolonial and decolonial theories, the chapter explores the relationship between Guadeloupe and American hip-hop, as well as the role local French Caribbean cultural politics served in enabling new constructions of belonging to take root in Guadeloupe hip-hop.

The idea of the world soul is a distinctive Platonic doctrine. It is particularly significant in late Antique thought, the 12th century Renaissance, the Italian Renaissance. It is transmitted via the Cambridge Platonists, mystical pietism, Cabbala and the Spinoza revival to German Romantic period and the great age of Russian literature. Historically, it has been either loosely associated with or even identified with the Divine Sophia. This Divine Wisdom itself has a complex reception history, and constitutes a conspicuous feminine image of the Divine, and is relevant to recent discussions about the intellectual inheritance of Western Christian thought and the ecological crisis.

This chapter considers what we know about climate in ancient Greece and how this structures our thinking. The issue of very different local environments and interannual variation is observed, both its challenges but also the potential for exploitation. The question of whether and when climate can be related to history is then discussed –the case of 541 CE and the plague under Justinian is considered as an example of what we do and do not know – and some of the main climate proxy evidence available for ancient Greece are briefly reviewed. The Greek to Roman period is mainly notable for a relatively benign and stable climate regime over a number of centuries.

This chapter maps out the central paradigms for conceptualizing the monsters of American horror, marking their inextricability from politics and moving toward identifying the principal forms of monstrosity in the early twenty-first century. Monstrosity has been defined as impure and abject, existing on borders, not categorizable; the incarnation of “otherness,” typically racial, gendered, sexual, or class; and a terrifying reflection of the “self,” as the monster has increasingly become an avatar of “normality” rather than what threatens it, embodying dominant rather than marginalized social structures and ideologies. Most recently, monsters are being generated by scientific explorations that insist on the thoroughgoing entanglement of life, the ways in which the “human” is not singular, not exceptional, but rather symbiotically entwined with nonhuman life. This form of horror is adeptly exploited in Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s 2020 novel Mexican Gothic, about an entangled fungus and a colonial family.

Throughout his political works, Plato takes the aim of politics to be the virtue and happiness of the citizens and the unity of the city. This paper examines the roles played by law in promoting individual virtue and civic unity in the Republic, Statesman, and Laws. Section 1 argues that in the Republic, laws regulate important institutions, such as education, property, and family, and thereby creating a way of life that conduces to virtue and unity. Section 2 argues that in the Statesman, the political expert determines the mean between extremes and communicates it to citizens through laws that guide their judgment and conduct, so that they become virtuous themselves and the city is unified; this account of the role of law suggest how even non-expert legislation can contribute to virtue and unity. Section 3 argues that the Laws affirms and develops the idea that citizens should know and accept the laws to become virtuous themselves and to unify the city, and explains how the persuasive preludes and the sanction for violation attached to laws contribute to citizen virtue and civic unity.

Athens and the Aegean were at the centre of the economic life of the Greek world in the late archaic and classical period. Like the other cities of the Aegean, Athens actively exploited its territory, but the specific characteristic of its economy was the presence of the Laurium mines, which gave it an unbeatable natural advantage over the other players. In the Hellenistic period, the Aegean cities were only one of the many players on the international landscape, and they had lost their pre-eminence, although to a certain extent the city of Rhodes succeeded Athens in its role of platform for international trade, and the little island of Delos ended in being for a while the main hub of trans-Mediterranean trade.

This chapter shows how, from Charles Brockden Brown’s Edgar Huntly to Jeff Barnaby’s Blood Quantum, American horror erupts out of the violence performed on indigenous people by white settler society, on people and land on the slavery plantation, and on citizens in the Global South and Middle East during period when the United States has extended and protected American global hegemony. By reading American colonialism and neo-imperialism as central to American extractivist capitalism, the chapter reveals how American horror also narrates the devastating violence done to the planet itself. The chapter observes that much American horror produced by and for white settler society represents settler violence against people and land as justified and regenerative, but it also discusses a number of less reactionary texts that make plain the horrific violence inherent in the capitalist colonial project.

While rarely at the center of debates around censorship in the United States, horror narratives have been profoundly shaped by pressures to constrain their provocative and shocking nature. This chapter explores the history of censorship efforts by government agencies, media companies, and public organizations and the impact they have had on horror across all forms of media. Tracing these efforts across various media, including literature, comic books, motion pictures, radio, and television, this chapter details the various entities that have tried to constrain the horror genre and the ways horror has adapted to these changing conditions. Throughout this historical period, regulatory efforts have consistently sought to limit shocking imagery and as well as restrict the evocation of feelings of shock and horror. Examining this regulatory history gives insights into the dynamic and evolving public dialogue about the limits of social acceptance and how much transgression society can accept.

This chapter investigates the merengue as a tool for unpacking the complicated questions about race and representation in the Dominican Republic. Warning against viewing merengue through essentialist frames, it invites readers to formulate a more heterogenous approach to studying merengue, Dominican identity, and experiences of Blackness.

By distancing creation from nature Christianity rejected freer notions of nature as pagan or pantheist, while imposing a gender hierarchy that rivaled in orthodox fixity creation-from-nothing. Despite the advance of scientific rationalism, Enlightenment culture did not overthrow Christian gender hierarchy. While the ecofeminist movement seized on the liberation of women to bring about ecological change, its agenda stagnated when its activism decreased. Applying a critical-theological reading, this article sees gender hierarchy as subtly read into the Christian exegesis of Genesis rather than flowing from biblical revelation. Acknowledging our current culture as interreligious, it points to two movements forwards, pertaining to gender and creation. First, by locating gender roles in the Trinity, we can loosen the ties with creation and link them to the issue of difference. Second, based on the medieval theological parallelism of nature and scripture one can argue that, in an era where scriptural literacy has lost much of its force, nature can assume a prophetic role. This allows us to reconceive the nature complex insofar as it calls not only for the unity of all creatures as well as of all genders, but ultimately also for the unity of creation with the Creator, what Eriugena called, the unity of all natures.

This chapter analyses the heterogeneous, contradictory and shifting social meanings that salsa music has articulated since its inception in the late 1960s. Shifting from the Nuyorican-grounded urban masculinity and anticolonial politics in its early years to the current globalised and neoliberal spaces of dance studios, this chapter explores how the sounds of salsa, as popular music, become sites for power struggles over cultural, racial, ethnic and gender identities.