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Man and animal in Severan Rome : the literary imagination of Claudius Aelianus
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ISBN: 9781107033986 1107033985 9781139524056 1108401937 1316010759 1139990144 1139985523 1316006255 131600399X 1316008495 1139524054 1316012999 131600175X Year: 2014 Volume: *25 Publisher: Cambridge : Cambridge University Press,

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The Roman sophist Claudius Aelianus, born in Praeneste in the late second century CE, spent his career cultivating a Greek literary persona. Aelian was a highly regarded writer during his own lifetime, and his literary compilations would be influential for a thousand years and more in the Roman world. This book argues that the De natura animalium, a miscellaneous treasury of animal lore and Aelian's greatest work, is a sophisticated literary critique of Severan Rome. Aelian's fascination with animals reflects the cultural issues of his day: philosophy, religion, the exoticism of Egypt and India, sex, gender, and imperial politics. This study also considers how Aelian's interests in the De natura animalium are echoed in his other works, the Rustic Letters and the Varia Historia. Himself a prominent figure of mainstream Roman Hellenism, Aelian refined his literary aesthetic to produce a reading of nature that is both moral and provocative.


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Greek identity and the Athenian past in Chariton : the romance of empire
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ISBN: 9789077922286 9077922288 9491431455 Year: 2007 Volume: 9 Publisher: Eelde : Groningen : Barkhuis ; Groningen University Library,

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I, Chariton of Aphrodisias, secretary of the rhetor Athenagorus, shall relate a love story that took place in Syracuse. Thus begins the earliest of the canonical Greek romances, the 1st century CE historical novel known as Callirhoe. Chariton's erotic tale is about the constancy of love in a world where virtue is always in danger of being corrupted. Chaereas and Callirhoe fall in love, but then are tragically separated after the heroine, believed dead, is buried alive. Each is eventually sold into slavery in the East, and Callirhoe herself contemplates the abortion of her unborn child when she


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The rise and decline of American religious freedom
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ISBN: 9780674724754 0674724755 0674730135 0674730968 9780674730137 Year: 2014 Publisher: Cambridge, Massachusetts

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Familiar accounts of religious freedom in the United States often tell a story of visionary founders who broke from centuries-old patterns of Christendom to establish a political arrangement committed to secular and religiously neutral government. These novel commitments were supposedly embodied in the religion clauses of the First Amendment. But this story is largely a fairytale, Steven Smith says in this incisive examination of a much-mythologized subject. The American achievement was not a rejection of Christian commitments but a retrieval of classic Christian ideals of freedom of the church and of conscience. Smith maintains that the First Amendment was intended merely to preserve the political status quo in matters of religion. America's distinctive contribution was, rather, a commitment to open contestation between secularist and providentialist understandings of the nation which evolved over the nineteenth century. In the twentieth century, far from vindicating constitutional principles, as conventional wisdom suggests, the Supreme Court imposed secular neutrality, which effectively repudiated this commitment to open contestation. Instead of upholding what was distinctively American and constitutional, these decisions subverted it. The negative consequences are visible today in the incoherence of religion clause jurisprudence and the intense culture wars in American politics.

The constitution & the pride of reason
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ISBN: 128047095X 0195353560 160256244X 0585211760 9780585211763 9781280470950 9786610470952 6610470952 0195117476 9780195117479 019771871X Year: 2023 Publisher: New York : Oxford University Press,

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Has constitutional law become merely the confused but self-important incantations of a secular priesthood? This volume offers an iconoclastic assessment of American constitutionalists from Madison and Jefferson to Dworkin and Bork, as well as a provocative overview of both the aspirations and the tragic failures of American constitutionalism.


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Law's quandary
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ISBN: 0674043820 9780674043824 Year: 2004 Publisher: Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press,

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This lively book reassesses a century of jurisprudential thought from a fresh perspective, and points to a malaise that currently afflicts not only legal theory but law in general. Steven Smith argues that our legal vocabulary and methods of reasoning presuppose classical ontological commitments that were explicitly articulated by thinkers from Aquinas to Coke to Blackstone, and even by Joseph Story. But these commitments are out of sync with the world view that prevails today in academic and professional thinking. So our law-talk thus degenerates into "just words"--or a kind of nonsense. The diagnosis is similar to that offered by Holmes, the Legal Realists, and other critics over the past century, except that these critics assumed that the older ontological commitments were dead, or at least on their way to extinction; so their aim was to purge legal discourse of what they saw as an archaic and fading metaphysics. Smith's argument starts with essentially the same metaphysical predicament but moves in the opposite direction. Instead of avoiding or marginalizing the "ultimate questions," he argues that we need to face up to them and consider their implications for law.


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Greek epigram and Byzantine culture : gender, desire, and denial in the age of Justinian
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ISBN: 1108572030 1108647936 1108480233 1108570208 Year: 2019 Publisher: Cambridge : Cambridge University Press,

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Sexy, scintillating, and sometimes scandalous, Greek epigrams from the age of the Emperor Justinian commemorate the survival of the sensual in a world transformed by Christianity. Around 567 CE, the poet and historian Agathias of Myrina published his Cycle, an anthology of epigrams by contemporary poets who wrote about what mattered to elite men in sixth-century Constantinople: harlots and dancing girls, chariot races in the hippodrome, and the luxuries of the Roman bath. But amid this banquet of worldly delights, ascetic Christianity - pervasive in early Byzantine thought - made sensual pleasure both more complicated and more compelling. In this book, Steven D. Smith explores how this miniature classical genre gave expression to lurid fantasies of domination and submission, constraint and release, and the relationship between masculine and feminine. The volume will appeal to literary scholars and historians interested in Greek poetry, Late Antiquity, Byzantine studies, early Christianity, gender, and sexuality.


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Getting over Equality : A Critical Diagnosis of Religious Freedom in America.
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ISBN: 9780814786949 Year: 2001 Publisher: New York : New York University Press,

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No detailed description available for "Getting Over Equality".


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Bailey's Dam
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Year: 2020 Publisher: Project Gutenberg

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Law's quandary
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ISBN: 0674015339 9780674015333 9780674025738 0674025733 Year: 2004 Publisher: Cambridge, Mass. Harvard University Press

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The disenchantment of secular discourse
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ISBN: 0674056868 9780674056862 9780674050877 0674050878 Year: 2010 Publisher: Cambridge, Massachusetts ; London, England : Harvard University Press,

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Prominent observers complain that public discourse in America is shallow and unedifying -- This debased conditions often attributed to, among other things, the resurgence of religion in public life. Steven D. Smith argues that this diagnosis has the matter backwards: it is not primarily religion but rather the strictures of secular rationalism that have drained our modern discourse of force and authenticity. Thus Rawlsian "public reason" filters appeals to religion or "other comprehensive doctrines" out of public deliberation. But these restrictions have the effect of excluding our deepest normative commitments, virtually assuring that the discourse will be shallow. Furthermore, because we cannot defend our normative positions without resorting to convictions that secular discourse deems inadmissible, we are frequently forced to smuggle in those convictions under the guise of benign notions such as freedom and equality. Smith suggests that this sort of smuggling is pervasive in modern secular discourse. He shows this by considering a series of controversial, contemporary issues, including the Supreme Court's assisted-suicide decisions, the "harm principle," separation of church and state, and freedom of conscience. He concludes by suggesting that it is possible and desirable to free public discourse of the constraints associated with secularism and "public reason."

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