Valuing Others in Classical Antiquity

How does a discourse of ‘valuing others’ help to make a group a group? The fifth in a series exploring ‘ancient values’, this book investigates what value terms and evaluative concepts were used in Greece and Rome to articulate the idea that people ‘belong together’, as a family, a group, a polis, a community, or just as fellow human beings.

Human communities thrive on prosocial behavior. In eighteen chapters, ranging from Greek tragedy to the Roman gladiators and from house architecture to the concept of friendship, this book demonstrates how such behavior is anchored and promoted by culturally specific expressions of evaluative discourse.

Valuing others in classical antiquity should be of interest to linguists, literary scholars, historians, and philosophers alike.

Ralph M. Rosen, Ph.D. (1983) in Classical Philology, Harvard University, is the Rose Family Endowed Term Professor of Classical Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. His most recent book is Making Mockery. The Poetics of Ancient Satire (Oxford 2007).

Ineke Sluiter, Ph.D. (1990) in Classics, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, is Professor of Greek at Leiden University. Her most recent book is (with Rita Copeland) Medieval Grammar and Rhetoric. Language Arts and Literary Theory, AD 350-1475 (Oxford 2009).

Contributors: Tazuko van Berkel, John Bintliff, Sarah Bolmarcich, Gerard J. Boter, Matthew R. Christ, Kathleen M. Coleman, Cynthia Damon, Nick Fisher, Judith P. Hallett, Albert Joosse, David Konstan, Aislinn Melchior, Josiah Ober, Irene Polinskaya, Ivo Volt, Robert W. Wallace, Eveline van 't Wout