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For Danielle Allen, punishment is more a window onto democratic Athens' fundamental values than simply a set of official practices. From imprisonment to stoning to refusal of burial, instances of punishment in ancient Athens fueled conversations among ordinary citizens and political and literary figures about the nature of justice. Re-creating in vivid detail the cultural context of this conversation, Allen shows that punishment gave the community an opportunity to establish a shining myth of harmony and cleanliness: that the city could be purified of anger and social struggle, and perfect order achieved. Each member of the city--including notably women and slaves--had a specific role to play in restoring equilibrium among punisher, punished, and society. The common view is that democratic legal processes moved away from the \"emotional and personal\" to the \"rational and civic,\" but Allen shows that anger, honor, reciprocity, spectacle, and social memory constantly prevailed in Athenian law and politics. Allen draws upon oratory, tragedy, and philosophy to present the lively intellectual climate in which punishment was incurred, debated, and inflicted by Athenians. Broad in scope, this book is one of the first to offer both a full account of punishment in antiquity and an examination of the political stakes of democratic punishment. It will engage classicists, political theorists, legal historians, and anyone wishing to learn more about the relations between institutions and culture, normative ideas and daily events, punishment and democracy.

In Alastor and Laon and Cythna, Shelley translates his ‘feelings and opinions’ into poetry that draws strongly on his personal experiences without resorting to crude confession. Reading Shelley’s letter to Thomas Jefferson Hogg at the end of August 1815 in the light of Alastor, and Shelley’s letter to Mary Godwin on 28 October 1814 in the context of Laon and Cythna, this chapter traces how the pressure of biography, the role of the poet, and how the letters might inform the poetry, become vitally important to Alastor and Laon and Cythna as Shelley seeks to refigure his life in his poetry.

Some such pairings, ostensibly antithetical constructions intended to illustrate contrasts, extend to the oxymoronic: \"dark hope\" (32), \"mute music\" (66), and \"bright shadow\" (233), perhaps the Romantic answer to Milton's \"darkness visible\" (Paradise Lost 1.62).We may in part account for these images as another attempt to describe the earth in terms of the sublime, or vice versa-a grasping at that \"incommunicable dream\" that reveals nature's immensity (39); the question remains of what we should make of explicit pairings with less explicit points of contact. [...] at some points, the dualities in Alastor explode into larger groups dripping with conjunctive polysyndeton: \"Athens, and Tyre, and Balbec, and the waste\" (109).