Chapter 2 places Hieron’s kingship in conversation with the Hellenistic monarchies of the eastern Mediterranean and goes on to explore the qualities of his rule that set Hieron’s basileia ahead of its time – as, for example, in his diplomatic dealings with Rome.

Decretals, epistolae decretales, are papal letters that have a claim to universal validity and clarify questions of Church law. Already in Late Antiquity, petitioners would submit legal or disciplinary questions to the Roman emperor, who in response would provide authoritative answers in imperial rescripts. Papal decretal law was the product of an analogous procedure. Private parties would ask the pope to adjudicate their disputes, and in response the pope would set forth authoritative answers in decretal letters. The oldest fully preserved papal decretal is by Pope Siricius (384–99). Only with the pontificate of Alexander III (1159–81), however, did the number of decretals skyrocket and, as a result, there take place the further legal development and elaboration of the ius novum. Just two generations after Gratian’s Decretum (c. 1140), papal legislative acts had developed and changed canon law like never before.

In the four decades following the death of Tsar Nicholas I in 1855, long-repressed cultural energies broke loose across imperial Russia. The Great Reforms of Alexander II, which began in 1861 with the Emancipation of Russia’s serfs, introduced transformative changes in law, politics, society, the economy, and the army. Creative endeavor also stirred. Freedom was in the air, and artists and writers imagined it for themselves and for the nation. They developed new content and forms of expression and assumed greater control over their creative lives. By the end of the century, literature and the arts had rejected the unitary model of state-sponsored patronage and transitioned to become free professions, although funding from state and Church remained important. Simultaneously, print culture extended outward to a growing public. Part I treats the meta-theme of freedom and order by examining the how the Fools and rebellious heroes of tradition were modernized and harnessed to the topics of the day. Issues of inclusion and boundaries surfaced as lines between and among the legal estates blurred and civic participation broadened. Publics and audiences for the arts transformed, and expectations about the roles of artists and the arts changed accordingly.

Anton Chekhov and Leo Tolstoy imagined a diverse nation in different ways, but each embraced humanity in all its diversity and did so not only as artist but also as citizen and moral spokesman. In Chekhov’s The Island of Sakhalin (1895) and Tolstoy’s Resurrection (1899), the writers led the evolution of the artist’s role as a new civic actor on the national stage. Russian writers began to dream in the 1860s of an inclusive big tent of the arts, but just what and how the disparate elements of Russian society might share in a common culture was contested. Tolstoy and Chekhov expressed their own views on the topic in their books Resurrection and Sakhalin, which were neither backward-looking glorifications of peasant traditions nor forward-looking visions of modernization. Rather, the authors described people sharing the vast landscape of the empire in recognition of their commonality, acceptance of diversity, and rejection of parochial interests. They emphasized place rather than time. Both authors carved out a shared national space, within which they offered readers a new view of their fellow citizens. Of the two authors, it would be Chekhov rather than Tolstoy who transitioned successfully into the next wave of innovation in art.