Ten scholars explore ways of reading Athenian legal texts in their social and cultural context.

This is a highly original, interdisciplinary study of the archaic Greek word nomos and its family of words. More recently used to mean simply 'law' or 'law-making', Thanos Zartaloudis draws out the richness of this fundamental term by exploring its many roots and uses over the centuries. The Birth of Nomos includes extracts from ancient sources, in both the original and English translation, including material from legal history, philosophy, philology, linguistics, ancient history, poetry, archaeology, ancient musicology and anthropology. Through a thorough analysis of these extracts, we gain a new and complete understanding of nomos and its foundational place in the Western legal tradition.

The present volume is concerned with the problem of violence as reflected in the biblical texts, in their reception and interpretation. The expression `nomos' in the title of the book is understood in a broader sense, with reference to the concept of nomos as a `world of right and wrong' (Robert Cover). Therefore, the authors of the book are concerned not only with the legal texts of the Pentateuch, but also with other parts of the Old Testament / Tanak. Most of the contributors explore the theme of violence by interpreting specific narrative, legal, prophetic, and sapiential passages. Others attempt to offer a more general theological evaluation of violence in the Bible, also with constant reference to the biblical texts.

In September 2002, the University of Coimbra hosted, for the first time, a conference of the Réseau Thématique Plutarque, a research network created by several European universities in order to promote regular annual meetings of junior and senior scholars who share a common interest in Plutarch's work. The Coimbra meeting of 2002 was devoted to the fragments of Plutarch, and the results of that event were published one year later, in a volume edited by José Ribeiro Ferreira and Delfim Leão, under the title Os fragmentos de Plutarco e a recepção da sua obra (Coimbra, 2003). During the following years, many other universities organized conferences of the Réseau on a rotating basis, until the event came back to Coimbra, where the Portuguese section of the International Plutarch Society (SoPlutarco) hosted, from 16 to 18 June 2011, the twelfth meeting of the network, devoted this time to the subject "Nomos, kosmos and dike in Plutarch". The present volume comprises most of the contributions presented during the Coimbra meeting, after having been submitted to a process of revision, which involved the direct collaboration of the several regional sections of the Réseau. Although the volume kept the multilingual diversity of the participants in the conference, its structuring elements were composed in English, in order to reinforce the coherence of the book and to enlarge the number of potential readers.