Jesus of Nazareth, deeply rooted in Second Temple Judaism, lived and taught within its religious and cultural traditions. He observed Jewish customs like the Sabbath and dietary laws, while offering fresh interpretations in light of the kingdom of God. His teachings, often in dialogue with different Jewish sects, emphasized a relational approach to Torah, prioritizing love and ethical conduct over ritual precision. Jesus saw himself as a messenger for this inaugurated kingdom, foregrounding his own and his followers’ relationship to God as a compassionate Father.

Scipio had served at Ticinus, where he saved the life of his wounded father Publius the consul; at Cannae as military tribune, he rallied survivors. He was aedile (213). In 218, Publius had sent his brother Gnaeus to Iberia; he himself returned to northern Italy to fight Hannibal. In Iberia, Gnaeus scored successes against the Carthaginian Hanno. Publius rejoined him in 217. They fought and negotiated successfully until killed in separate engagements (211). In 210, young Scipio was appointed with imperium to replace them and in 209 captured the important coastal city of New Carthage, allegedly with Neptune’s help. At Baecula (208, site recently identified), he defeated Hannibal’s brother Hasdrubal (who however escaped to Italy) and another Hasdrubal (Ilipa, 206). On return, he was denied a triumph but elected consul for 205. The tradition, only in Appian, that he founded an Iberian city Italica is a myth from Hadrian’s time.

In the late 1970s, queer parents increasingly fought to maintain custody of their children from different-sex relationships. These mothers and fathers were responding in part to the gay liberation movement, which inspired them to come out and demand their rights. Also important was that the American Psychiatric Association declassified homosexuality as a mental illness, which eliminated what had been an all-but-impenetrable barrier to custody. Courts were nevertheless reluctant to grant these petitions, fearing that the children would learn to be gay or lesbian from the adults in their lives. In response to these court cases, social scientists developed research studies that concluded parental homosexuality had no effect on the future sexual orientation of children. Based on that work, family courts around the country granted custody to lesbian mothers and gay fathers in the late 1970s and early 1980s, creating the first wave of visible queer-headed families.

Chapter 2 analyzes the life histories and experiences of métis children who were wards of the colonial state in the 1930s in Senegal and Gabon. They received government funding and management of their education. The daily lives of métis wards became a battleground through which fictive and blood kin, métis activists, emerging African political leaders, French colonial administrators, and Catholic missionaries debated the meanings of race, culture, and child welfare. In Senegal, African stakeholders mediated métis children’s access to French education, living conditions, and colonial welfare payments based on their parentage from French and European men. The state was obliged to provide access to education for all children born in Africa, with métis as a distinct group. In Gabon, an association of adult métis lobbied for access to favorable material conditions for métis children and for them to attend a school for European children and reside in a boarding home without black children. Contestations around their welfare hinged on the French republican rhetoric of universal rights and equality and racialized hierarchies within African societies.

During his last days at Oxford in 1840, John Ruskin inscribed in a new notebook, ‘I have determined to keep one part of diary for intellect and another for feeling.’ There is no diary for 1845, when Ruskin made his first Italian tour without his parents. Instead, broadly speaking, what Paul Tucker calls Ruskin’s Résumé is for intellect and the letters home to his father for feeling. The emphasis in this chapter is not upon the letters as travel writing or as indices of Ruskin’s intellectual journal, but rather upon their intrinsic qualities as communications between a son and his father that, though written abroad and taking nine or ten days to arrive, sustain the intimacy of a connection between two difficult and complex personalities who have a ‘strong desire to be speaking’ to one another. Whereas Browning and Barrett are embarking upon a new relationship, John Ruskin seeks to maintain an established connection with a beloved father whose demands are testing.

This chapter presents the first detailed study of afterlife heroic power in the Oresteia. Aeschylus only uses the word “hero” (hērōs) once in his plays, for the anonymous powerful ancestors who send and receive the expedition to Troy in the Agamemnon. But in the Choephoroi, Agamemnon is prayed to as powerful at his tomb, and in the Eumenides, Orestes predicts his own heroic power from beyond the grave. The Oresteia famously relocates these two mythical heroes to Argos to associate them with that city’s treaty with Athens. This chapter demonstrates that the representation of father and son after death reverses expectations not only from the world external to the play, but also from their living actions within the trilogy. Agamemnon becomes an ethically whitewashed ancestor figure; conversely, Orestes, who killed his mother, becomes a political hero. These radical afterlife transformations are a major part of the Oresteia’s “poetics of the beyond.”

Chapter 2 investigates how identity in Senecan tragedy is achieved via sympathetic identification with others, whether individuals or groups. The chapters focuses on Roman practices of exemplarity, which encouraged the formation of individual selves via the appropriation of others’ - often normative - characteristics. This habit of coyping and becoming a copy of other people connects the human individual to the fictional character, which is by nature inherently replicable. The two plays discussed in this chapter are Troades, where Astyanax is constantly characterised as a ‘second Hector’, and Hercules, where the protagonist pursues self-aemulatio in place of family attachments.

This chapter is a testimony from the perspective of the writer and novelist Dima Wannous, Sa’dallah Wannous’ daughter, as a young girl as she recalls the final days she spent with her father more than twenty years ago in Damascus when he encouraged her to be whatever she wanted to be. Wannous paints an elegant verbal portrait of herself as a child raised by a literary parent in a world of books.

Considers how Quintus captures his stance towards Homer through the presentation of family relationships. Harnessing the frequent collusion between generational and poetic succession (examined using Harold Bloom’s ‘anxiety of influence’ and very prevalent in silver Latin poetry), Quintus first depicts a series of failed rivalrous filial usurpations – Penthesilea, Ajax, Achilles, Memnon – and shows that they fail because of their violent antagonism. He then portrays the two most successful examples of succession – Neoptolemus and Athena – as characterised by impersonation, embodiment and necromantic possession. This contrast becomes a reading of Quintus’ own positive and assimilating approach to Homer. Becoming the poetic father thus becomes the surest way to achieve lasting renown.

Chapter 2 examines the concept of prodigality and the impulse to seize the moment through the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century prodigal son as a temporally subversive denier of delay. I begin with metatheatrical moments that define the prodigal’s denial of futurity in Shakespeare’s second tertralogy. I argue that the action of the prodigal’s riotous living, which challenges hierarchies of age, is paradoxically figured as a period of delay: it is a rejection of social maturation that threatens to feminise the prodigal as ineffectual. I go on to examine five Prodigal Husband plays that constitute a specific sub-genre of city comedy: Thomas Heywood’s How a man may chuse a good wife from a bad (1601-2) andThe Wise Woman of Hoxton (c.1604), the anonymous The London prodigall (1603-5) and The faire maide of Bristow (1603-4), and George Wilkins’ The miseries of inforst mariage (1605-6). In these plays, we see prodigality enforced by the older generation in order to disempower the young. However, when the prodigal son’s repentance is delayed, and he becomes a prodigal husband, he poses a threat to the stability of the marital unit, and potentially to systems of patriarchal control.

This chapter proposes that the author uses an ancient exegetical technique known as “prosopological exegesis.” This method was common in early Christianity, but is not often traced as far back as the NT. After establishing the author’s use, the chapter shows how this method developed out of Greco-Roman rhetorical training as well as literary criticism and also has resonances with Jewish reading strategies as well. Since this method was used by early Christian writers, such as Tertullian, to support a doctrine of the Trinity, this chapter also discusses the extent to which this is true of Hebrews. Finally, the chapter surveys previous literature on speech, or “the word of God,” in Hebrews.

The Homeric epics present a range of family arrangements, most of them patriarchal. The poems emphasize themes of family dissolution (Iliad) and reunification (Odyssey).