Citizen: Did you mean...?

Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) was an English philosopher and liberal social reformer best known as the founder of utilitarianism based on the greatest happiness principle, that is, rationally judging the success of a law by considering how many...

In this collection, we examine one of the greatest contributions made by the ancient Greeks to world culture: their systems of government and, above all, the ideas of democracy and mass participation in politics. We also consider the society...

The Ecclesiazusae (aka Assemblywomen) is a comedy play written by Aristophanes, one of the great Greek comic playwrights. Written sometime between 393 and 391 BCE, it is, along with his play Wealth, one of only two he wrote after the Athenian...

Roman invective (uituperatio lat.) was the rhetorical and literary genre that aimed at systematically and publicly blaming a political foe to set him aside from the whole community and turn the audience against him during judicial, forensic...

From the early days of the Roman Republic through the volatile reigns of such ignoble emperors as Caligula, Nero, and Commodus, the Roman Empire continued to expand, stretching its borders to encompass the entire Mediterranean Sea as well...

A Roman boy's rite of passage, a ceremony or ritual marking a transitional period in life from childhood to adulthood, was the assuming of the toga virilis, the adult toga. The ceremony usually took place sometime between the boy's 14th and...

The Curse of Agade (also given as The Cursing of Agade) is a poem dated to the Ur III period of Mesopotamia (circa 2112 to circa 2004 BCE), though it is thought to be somewhat older in origin. It tells the story of the Akkadian king Naram-Sin...

The French Revolution (1789-1799) sought to dismantle the oppressive society of the old regime and build a new world based on the principles of "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity". This push for societal change led to a burgeoning feminist movement...

Plato (l. c. 424/423 to 348/347 BCE), the Greek philosopher whose works have significantly shaped Western thought and religion, is said to have initially been a poet and playwright and, even if the primary source of this claim (the often...

"Outlawed in my own land for having served her with courage," the Marquis de Lafayette wrote to his wife, Adrienne, "I have been forced to flee into enemy territory from France, which I defended with so much love. To the very last minute...