This chapter discusses how the layout and organisation of the ancient Roman house comprised a veritable Mise-en-scène in which both patrons and guests expressed and were conditioned by a culture and aesthetic practices in which the theatre was a dominant influence. It analyses the spatial and decorative organisation of Roman domestic spaces, and describes how these created an intensely theatricalised ambience which directly impacted upon and was reflected in the behaviour of both patrons and guests.

Chapter 4 shows how Pseudo-Hegesippus participates in the common ancient Mediterranean historiographical discourse of national decline. In De Excidio 5.2, the author juxtaposes five biblical figures (Moses, Aaron, David, Joshua, Elisha) of the Hebrew past to the first-century Jews of his narrative in a way that exposes the relative lack of virtue, faith, and strength among the “latter-day Jews.”

Whereas the previous chapters dealt with the influence of Hellenistic philosophy on Roman law in terms of method, this chapter deals with the influence with regard to a substantive issue, the notion of person. The Roman jurists became interested in the abstract use of the notion of person in the slipstream of the philosophers, who combined the Greek understanding of person with a more indigenous, that is Etruscan, understanding thereof. ‘Person’ thus understood would become one of the central notions in Roman law and beyond.

Dionysius of Halicarnassus discusses the Athenian funeral orations in his Antiquitates Romanae and his literary-critical essays. He takes a negative view of both the Athenian public funeral and of three specific examples of funeral orations –the Periclean epitaphios in Thucydides, Socrates’ speech in Plato’s Menexenus, and the funeral oration ascribed to Demosthenes (Dem. 60). The nature of his negative pronouncements suggests that his moral aversion to the orations, and to what the public funerals had represented, guided his aesthetic responses to the individual texts. While the encomiastic commonplaces on view in the funeral orations provide the blueprint for Dionysius’ idealised conception of Athens, the speeches themselves are vehicles unworthy of conveying those ideals. The case of the funeral oration offers a good illustration of how Dionysius’ classicism is inherently, recursively nostalgic and so ultimately chimerical. His idealised view of Athens is defined not by the funeral orations themselves, but by the valorisation of authors who made a project of berating their compatriots for failure to live up to the example, and exempla, of earlier generations.

This chapter by Elias Khoury, who is one of the most important living Arabic novelists and a perennial candidate for the Nobel prize in literature, is adapted from an essay first published in the cultural supplement Mulḥaq, in the Lebanese newspaper al-Nahār, in 1997. The chapter, which has as its starting point a description of Sa’dallah Wannous’ funeral as a means of explicating his significance as a playwright and public intellectual, offers a particularly vivid portrait of Wannous. It includes descriptions of Khoury’s first reading of An Evening’s Entertainment for the Fifth of June in the cultural journal al-Mawāqif in Beirut in 1968, a meeting with Wannous in Paris at Farouk Mardam-Bey’s house, and of being informed of Wannous’ premature death in 1997 on May 15, which, in the Arab world, is Nakba Day, the ‘day of catastrophe,’ when the state of Israel was created.

Chapter 4 interprets funerals and second lines performed since Hurricane Katrina to articulate an ethics of mourning and hospitality. In the context of post-Katrina New Orleans, these second lines perform memorials for all those who died or were dispossessed during the storm and have been unable to return. They are simultaneously forms of mourning and protest, occupying public space in resistance to government policies of diaspora. Drawing on trauma theory, I argue that Katrina can only be understood from a morally and politically engaged position, and healing can only happen within this context. Furthermore, I build on Jacques Derrida’s work on hospitality to link mourning and repair in post-Katrina New Orleans, illuminating the ways the people of New Orleans articulated an ethics for climate disruption through solidarity and social care. I conclude with a reading of Jesmyn Ward’s novel Salvage the Bones, which depicts the empathy, care, and courage of an African American family in the bayou during the storm.

The two Homeric epics make use of different early historical contexts for athletic practice in order to explore broader poetic and ideological themes specific to the poems. Where athletic competition is closely associated with death and the funeral in the Iliad, in the Odyssey we see the potentially violent aspects of athletic contest used in the contexts of entertainment, marriage, and the renewal of life.