When he took up his new quarters in the Villa d'Este in 1869, Franz Liszt was 58 years old, and he seemed to recognise that a new phase of his life was beginning. The Villa afforded the seclusion he needed to escape the demands of a hectic schedule and to turn his attention to what he most wanted to do – write music. Nonetheless, he was not able or willing to renounce the obligations he felt toward his public, his Hungarian homeland, his Roman Catholic faith, and especially the significant group of young musicians who sought his guidance. He had hit upon the arrangement of a ‘vie trifurquée’ that he was to maintain for the remainder of his years, dividing his time between Rome, Weimar, and Budapest.

FAMILY

Marriage and Children

Although there are other corporate groups within the polis, for Aristotle the basic constituting element of the polis is the oikia, the family group. By oikia, Aristotle means the nuclear family, within which the relations between husband and wife, father and children, master and slaves assume legal significance (Arist. Polit. 1253b). Aristotle's approach is basically confirmed by the legal measures regarding family organization in Athens and these are not contradicted by fragmentary information on the law of persons in other poleis (even though the Spartan tradition gives a very different view of the family group, albeit one that is virtually impossible to verify).

The oikia is constituted by marriage (gamos). Marriage is virilocal: the woman proceeds from her father's house to her husband's. The marriage ceremony, which is undoubtedly of great social and religious importance, is not significant from a legal point of view. What is important, instead, is the agreement between the woman's father (or, after his death, her brother) and the future husband, according to which the woman will be “given” and “received.” In Athens this agreement is given the name engyē or engyēsis; in legal speeches it is used as proof that a marriage exists. In the case of an heiress (epiklēros), engyē did not exist: the woman was assigned, according to epidikasia, to the male relative who demonstrated his right over other relatives to succeed the dead man (see further Cantarella in this volume).

INTRODUCTION: THE STATUS OF MORALITY IN MAIMONIDEAN THOUGHT

What sort of life constitutes the highest perfection for a human being? For Maimonides, as for Aristotle, the answer is not moral excellence, but rather intellectual perfection, that is, “the conception of the intelligibles [eternal truths], which teach true opinions concerning the divine things” (GP 3.54, p. 692). Attaining this perfection leads to immortality. Morality, by contrast, is “a preparation for something else” (viz., the life of contemplation) “and not an end in itself” (GP 3.54, p. 635). “To [the] ultimate perfection there do not belong either actions or moral qualities” (GP 3.27, p. 511). The subordination of moral perfection to intellectual perfection is already found in Maimonides' early work, the Commentary on the Mishnah: “Man needs to subordinate all his soul's powers to thought . . . and to set his sight on a single goal: the perception of God . . . I mean, knowledge of Him, in so far as that lies within man's power.”

Moral perfection cannot be supreme, Maimonides argues, for the highest perfection cannot involve, as part of its essence, anyone else besides the person who is questing for perfection. The ultimate perfection must be achievable even by a solitary individual with no social connections. Because moral habits are only dispositions to be useful to other people, “it [moral perfection] is an instrument for someone else” (GP 3.54, p. 635. See also 1.34). Just as God’s perfection does not depend on anything outside Himself, so too the perfected person is a self-sufficient agent and his ultimate perfection does not require others for its attainment.

There is nothing Maimonides values more than knowledge, especially knowledge of metaphysics or, in medieval terminology, “divine science.” The Mishneh Torah opens with the basic metaphysical and scientific truths everyone is obligated to know and ends with a depiction of the messianic age as an era in which the whole world is engaged exclusively in the pursuit of knowledge. The Guide of the Perplexed opens and closes with two parables that depict the “true human perfection,” not as the moral or ritual life but as “the acquisition of the rational virtues . . . true opinions concerning the divine things” (GP 3.54, p. 635). And throughout the Guide, Maimonides reconstructs traditional religious concepts in epistemic terms: To love God is to know Him (GP 3.51, p. 621), and the worst form of idolatry is a cognitive error, “believing [God] to be different from what He really is” (GP 1.36, p. 84).

Yet Maimonides’ philosophical corpus contains no systematic discussion of the concept of knowledge. One reason may be, as Maimonides says about the plan of the Guide, that his “purpose . . . was not to compose something on natural science, or to make an epitome of divine science,” that is, to explain sublunar physics, cosmology, or metaphysics. Writing within the context of Arabic Aristotelianism, Maimonides could take many theoretical notions for granted. Even where he must engage in its explication, he says his aim is never the idea itself but to give a “key to the understanding” of a parable or “secret” in the books of prophecy (GP 2.2, p. 254). To piece together a picture of Maimonides’ epistemology, one must therefore look to his accounts of divine attributes, prophecy, divine providence, and cosmology. Maimonides’ comment also hints at a second possible reason: Because these topics are bound up with “secrets,” he provides no explicit discussion of them. But in the case of knowledge, what could that secret be?

Gortyn, like the rest of classical Crete, presents a paradox. Though we know little of its history in the archaic and classical periods from literary sources, and though we know virtually nothing about individuals, the exceptional richness of its legal inscriptions has made the city a prime focus of attention for historians both of Greek law and of Greek society. Yet, although no survey of Greek law can neglect these texts, they present intractable problems. Above all, there is no indigenous non-legal material. Apart from the imaginary southern Cretan landscape and lawscape depicted in Plato's Laws (Morrow 1960), we have only a few pages' worth of literary descriptions, made mostly by non-Cretans. The virtual silence of the historians is broken only by a long fragment of Ephoros (FGrH 70 F 149), an analytical passage of Aristotle's Politics (II 10, 1271b20-1272b23) and some excerpts of very uneven quality from later historians, Cretan and other. This evidence has major weaknesses.

Maimonides lived in the Islamicate civilization of twelfth-century Spain/Andalusia, Morocco, and Egypt. He was heir to a rich body of philosophical, theological, and theosophical literature, traditions that converged and diverged at different points, depending on their origins and target audiences. Following in the footsteps of Christian theology, the Muslim theologians or mutakallimūn began within a hundred years of Muhammad's death. By the tenth century, Muslim philosophy and theosophy had appropriated their largely pagan Greek origins and established themselves as distinctive systems of thought. Arabic translations were made of the Greek philosophical corpus available in the ninth century: all of Aristotle with the possible exception of his Politics, and little directly of Plato except for his Timaeus, Republic, and Laws. Commentaries on Aristotle were also translated, as were works by Plotinus and Proclus that were passed off as Aristotle's. Falãsifa, like the tenth-century Alfarabi, the eleventh-century Avicenna, and the twelfth-century Averroes, incorporated so much of these teachings that Maimonides felt he could rely on them for his knowledge of Aristotle.

Augustus, like Queen Victoria, belongs to that special group of rulers who have given their name to a great period of art and literature. What we are happy to call “Augustan literature” was to be no less epoch-making for the later literature of Rome than Augustus himself proved to be for later Roman history. Such, in fact, was the continuing impact of both on the mind of posterity that it seems quite natural to speak of an “Augustan” period of English literature, too: that from John Dryden, greatest English translator of Virgil, to Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift, both of whom in their own verse constantly echoed and imitated Virgil and Horace. Pope indeed addressed to King George II, that eminently unpoetical monarch, an “imitation” of Horace's Epistle to Augustus which turned it into a suavely sarcastic poem of feline satire.

There is an element of luck in the universal acceptance of the term. Most of the poets whom we think of as Augustan had grown up and made their name before Caesar's heir reached the position of being, in his own phrase, “by universal consent in complete control of affairs” (per consensum universorum potitus rerum omnium; RG 33). Yet the only great poet actually produced in the reign was the recalcitrant and irritating Ovid, never really on message, who eventually provoked the Princeps, normally ostentatious in his 'clemency' - clementia was one of the virtues commemorated on the shield of virtues voted to him by Senate and People (RG 34) - into banishing him forever to the end of the earth.

A defining characteristic of classical Greek civilization is its tendency to understand and to organize phenomena not (as we do) through definitional focus on a specific subject in isolation, but through contrast, preferably through complementary antithesis. In no context, perhaps, is this trait more striking than in the area of commerce and commercial law. Although Anglo-American law easily contrasts “real property” and “personal property” but still allows for items sharing certain characteristics of both (“fixtures”), the Greek antithetical universe recognized only two contrasting divisions - “visible property” (phanera ousia) or “invisible property” (aphanēs ousia) - and even the differentiation between realty and personalty tended to be expressed through this distinction. Even the sale of sex was practiced through polarity: pragmatic business and conceptual legal distinctions flow from the binary contrast of the pornē (“whore”) and the hetaira (“courtesan”).

From Aristotle's perspective in the late fourth century, the question “who is a citizen (politēs)?” is one of the first questions that arise when thinking about the nature of the state. “The state,” he says at the opening of Book 3 of the Politics,

After considering and then rejecting various options, such as those who “live in a certain place” or those who have the “legal right to sue or be sued,” as too broad, Aristotle arrives at the conclusion: “he who has the power to take part in the deliberative or judicial administration of any state is said by us to be a citizen of that state” (1275b19-21). He then dismisses the “practical” definition that a citizen is the child of citizen parents as not in fact much of a definition - e.g., what about the founder of a new state - is he not a citizen (1275b23-33)?

In his Life of Augustus, Suetonius stops at chapter 61 for a preliminary assessment. He reminds the reader that up to this point he has given an account of Augustus' conduct in the various offices he held and in the administration of public affairs (in imperiis ac magistratibus) throughout the entire world. Now, Suetonius says, he will go on to describe his private and domestic life. In the following chapters we glimpse a few facts about his religious behavior, that is mostly his private superstitions, and his family life and physical appearance. We are told, for instance, that he was very afraid of thunderstorms (Suet., Aug. 90), and respected as very significant “the auspices and certain portents” (auspicia et omina quaedam; 92.1). Suetonius here refers to rather trivial reactions, which would be classified by any educated Roman as common superstitions, such as the right sequence of putting on his shoes, or the bad significance of certain days (92). We also learn that he often slept close to the place where he had to celebrate or attend a sacrifice, because he usually found it hard to get up in the morning (78.2); we should bear in mind that a sacrificial rite started closely after sunrise. As for foreign cults, he respected those of old, such as the Eleusinian mysteries, but not the temple in Jerusalem or the Egyptian Apis (93). Significantly, Suetonius mentions Augustus' relations with the cults of foreign cities in this part of the biography: they are not part of his official conduct in the area of religion, but a private matter.

“Spirituality” is a word for which there is no counterpart in classical Hebrew. Ruhaniut, the word in modern Hebrew, is itself a translation of the English term. Ruhaniut is derived from ruah, which means breath or wind, and, derivately, spirit. Its first occurrence is at the very beginning of the Torah:

By Maimonides' time ruah had developed a wide range of uses, including, very importantly, ruah ha-qodesh, the spirit of holiness (or, as more usually translated, “the holy spirit”), and, very differently, ruah tumah, the spirit of ritual impurity (often used to mean demons). The one meaning the word does not have in classical or even medieval Hebrew is “spiritual” in the sense of “spiritual life.” The closest one can come to this expression, I think, in classical Judaism is “holy life.”