Public and Private in Ancient Mediterranean Law and Religion

The aim of this volume, as of the conference in which it originates, is to explore the public-private distinction in two grand normative domains of life in the ancient Mediterranean, law and religion. From its inception, the project has taken two principles as axiomatic: first, for all the weight with which the distinction is freighted, its definition and salience within particular ideological contexts are highly contingent. Second, notions of public and private (insofar as these have reasonable correlates in the cultures under study) themselves interact with highly charged but equally contingent concepts: the household, the family, and the people as political collectivity among them. For these reasons, we plan- ned a conference and volume that were avowedly comparative and historicist. In this way, the project aspires to shed light not simply on why, when and where boundaries are drawn, but also, ex comparatione, on where they are not.