From Bedroom to Courtroom argues that the fictional trial scenes in the Greek ideal romances reflect Roman legal institutions and ideas, particularly relating to family and sexuality. Given the genre's emphasis on love and chastity, the specter of adultery looms over most of the scenarios that develop into elaborate trials. Such scenes shed light on the Greek reception of the criminalization of adultery promulgated by the moral legislation during the reign of Augustus. This book focuses on three major novels whose composition coincided with the extension of Roman citizenship when access to Roman courts was granted to increasing numbers of inhabitants of the eastern provinces of the Roman Empire. Chariton's Callirhoe is interpreted as an artifact of the generation after the implementation of the Augustan moral legislation, particularly its criminalization of adultery. Achilles Tatius' Leucippe and Clitophon was created in a legally pluralistic milieu where shrewd sophists learned to navigate and exploit the interstices between the overlapping jurisdictions of imperial and local law. Finally, Heliodorus' Aethiopica, widely regarded as the masterpiece of the genre, adapts the type-scene of the trial to present a series of case studies of different types of government, culminating in the utopian kingdom of Meroe. Through the novels' melodramatic trial scenes, we can begin to see how the opening of Roman courtroom to Greek-speaking citizens of the Roman Empire stimulated dreams of a world in which universal justice under Rome was wed to Hellenism.

Since taking power in 2010, the Coalition Government in the United Kingdom has pushed through a drastic program of cuts to public spending, all in the name of austerity. The effects on large segments of the population, dependent on programs whose funding was slashed, have been devastating and will continue to be felt for generations. This timely book by journalist Mary O'Hara chronicles the real-world effects of austerity, removing it from the bland, technocratic language of politics and showing just what austerity means to ordinary lives. Drawing on hundreds of hours of first-person interviews with a wide range of people and, in the paperback edition, featuring an updated afterword by the author, the book explores the grim reality of living amid the biggest reduction of the welfare state in the postwar era and offers a compelling corrective to narratives of shared sacrifice.

In the real life fictionalized in these pages, a young law professor at UCLA Law School, Edgar A. Jones, Jr., with no experience or desire to be an actor, by happenstance was persuaded in a telephone call by the producer of a popular local television courtroom program he had never seen. He flubbed the audition script, but by ad-libbing, he wound up a television "star" and the "Judge" with 20 million loyal viewers watching him each week for six and a half years (1958-1964) on three different American Broadcasting Company afternoon and evening award winning courtroom programs: "Traffic Court," "Day in Court," and "Accused."

What can early Jewish courtroom narratives tell us about the capacity and limits of human justice? By exploring how judges and the act of judging are depicted in these narratives, Trial Stories in Jewish Antiquity: Counternarratives of Justice challenges the prevailing notion, both then and now, of the ideal impartial judge. As a work of intellectual history, the book also contributes to contemporary debates about the role of legal decision-making in shaping a just society. Chaya T. Halberstam shows that instead of modelling a system in which lofty, inaccessible judges follow objective and rational rules, ancient Jewish trial narratives depict a legal practice dependent upon the individual judge's personal relationships, reactive emotions, and impulse to care. Drawing from affect theory and feminist legal thought, Halberstam offers original readings of some of the most famous trials in ancient Jewish writings alongside minor case stories in Josephus and rabbinic literature. She shows both the consistency of a counter-tradition that sees legal practice as contingent upon relationship and emotion, and the specific ways in which that perspective was manifest in changing times and contexts.

What would you see if you attended a trial in a courtroom in the early Roman empire? What was the behaviour of litigants, advocates, judges and audience? It was customary for Roman individuals out of general interest to attend the various courts held in public places in the city centre and as such the Roman courts held an important position in the Roman community on a sociological level as well as a letigious one. This book considers many aspects of Roman courts in the first two centuries AD, both civil and criminal, and illuminates the interaction of Romans of every social group. Actors and Audience in the Roman Courtroom is an essential resource for courses on Roman social history and Roman law as a historical phenomenon.

Some of the world's earliest large-form fictional narratives--what would today be called novels-are found in ancient Greece. Dating back to the first century CE, these narratives contain many of the elements common to the novelistic genre, for instance, the joining, separation, and reunion of two lovers. These ancient works have often been heralded as the ancestors of the modern novel; but what can we say of the origins of the Greek novel itself? This book argues that whereas much of Greek literature was committed to a form of cultural purism, presenting itself as part of a continuous tradition reaching back to the founding fathers within the tradition, the novel reveled in cultural hybridity. The earliest Greek novelistic literature combined Greek and non-Greek traditions. More than this, however, it also often self-consciously explored its own hybridity by focusing on stories of cultural hybridization, or what we would now call "mixed-race" relations. This book is thus not a conventional account of the origins of the Greek novel: it is not an attempt to pinpoint the moment of invention, and to trace its subsequent development in a straight line. Rather, it makes a virtue of the murkiness, or "dirtiness," of the origins of the novel: there is no single point of creation, no pure tradition, only transgression and transformation. The novel thus emerges as an outlier within the Greek literary corpus: a form of literature written in Greek, but not always committing to Greek cultural identity. Dirty Love focuses particularly on the relationship between Persian, Egyptian, Jewish and Greek literature, and explores such texts as Ctesias' Persica, Joseph and Aseneth, the Alexander Romance, and the tale of Ninus and Semiramis. It will appeal not only to those interested in Greek literary history, but also to readers of near eastern and biblical literature.