This chapter explains that the reasonable person was not the first anthropomorphised legal standard. The idea of model characters can be traced back to the oldest documents of humanity. The chapter introduces three of these ancient ancestors of the reasonable person: the silent person of Egypt (geru maa), the earnest person of Greece (ho spoudaios), and the male head of a family in ancient Rome (paterfamilias). There are many other ancestors of the reasonable person, and at least implicit anthropomorphised standards of behaviour could probably be found in any society at any time. The three concepts here are presented only as examples, and because they form part of one Mediterranean context in which the ancient Egyptians probably influenced the ancient Greeks, who in turn influenced the Romans, whose influence on contemporary European law and on the systems derived from it can still be felt. Each of the three figures introduced in this chapter deserves its own biography and the analysis offered here remains fragmented. Nonetheless, the selected aspects of the lives of the geru maa, of the spoudaios, and of paterfamilias foreshadow many of the questions, tensions, and challenges with which the common law’s reasonable person still struggles today.

The chapter begins by looking at Beck’s theory of a Risk Society and how this has denied that risk is a term that can be applied to the ancient world. There is a survey of relevant work that has been carried out on uncertainty in antiquity, before the chapter examines how the term risk emerged and the various ways of defining the term. The chapter argues for a broader, cultural approach that sees risk as more than a modern numerical concept and the development of ideas concerning risk as a historical process.

Recent scholarly interest in the figure of the interpreter has resulted in a wealth of studies of individual interpreting careers and interpretation practices in specific historical contexts.  But, while it is common for present-day knowledge and personal experience of interpreting to inform historical case studies, or for historical examples to receive passing mention in accounts of the contemporary situation, a truly critically informed diachronic perspective is so far lacking.  This chapter takes a comparative diachronic approach to the study of interpreting by comparing and contrasting the lives of military interpreters in diverse historic contexts. Rather than offering separate biographies, my aim is to show how structural factors affect the position and practices of interpreters across time and space.  I will also show how experience in working with fragmentary evidence from one period (e.g., documents from the ancient Mediterranean world) can be used to inform research on interpreting in other historic contexts (e.g., British Army records from the First World War).

This chapter introduces the subject of prostheses, prosthesis use, and prosthesis users in classical antiquity. It compares contemporary, historical, and ancient historical prostheses and indentifies certain types of continuity across millennia. It undertakes a literature review of the current state of scholarship on impairment and disability in classical antiquity, highlighting how little attention has been paid to assistive technology by scholars to date. It explains the methodology that will be used in this monograph. It provides an overview of the different types of evidence that will be used (i.e. literary, documentary, archaeological, bioarchaeological). It outlines the contents of the monograph, chapter by chapter.