Romantic writing in English developed a rich repertoire of variations on the classical distinction between undertaking and undergoing an action, one that descends to us, for example, in the grammatical distinction between the active and passive voice. Shelley’s central writings often foreground this kind of distinction, as when in Act I of Prometheus Unbound, Prometheus tells Jupiter: “I weigh not what you do but what you suffer.” Yet, in Shelley’s case, suffering is more particularly identified with the experience of pain and sorrow, and nowhere more clearly so than in Prometheus Unbound, where the Titan is repeatedly defined by his suffering, and his suffering is repeatedly cast as his capacity not only to confront the pain and sorrow of the world but also to bear them. Such radical passivity would become crucial to Shelley’s proto-Gandhian doctrine of revolutionary nonviolence, as spelled out in his Philosophical View of Reform, written in the wake of Peterloo just weeks after the completion of Prometheus Unbound. This doctrine, which Gandhi would have encountered in his London days from Henry Salt, would be eventually embraced, mutatis mutandis, by Christian leaders of the American civil rights movement who would have been otherwise unsympathetic to Shelley’s atheism, and in nonviolent movements around the world ever since.

This chapter explores the Histories’ interest in human nature on the battlefield in terms of valour. It reviews instances in which the historical actors – including Pixodarus, Xerxes, and Themistocles – foreground the strategic importance of "surpassing nature." This is a motif that places the speakers in a network of sophistic and later, Platonic, theories on man’s desire to outstrip his own nature. At stake is a philosophy of "superior nature" that is strongly undercut by the complexity of the action on the battlefield.

This chapter examines Shelley’s images of the collapse of human civilizations and the colonization of their ruins by a darkly resurgent nature. In particular, it places Shelley’s fascination with civilizational collapse and natural overgrowth in the context of recent conceptions of “rewilding.” It argues that “rewilding” as currently conceived by its leading advocates remains an irreducibly human project, whereas Shelleyan overgrowth conceives of a resurgent nature that both occludes and darkly perpetuates the ruins of humanity. A number of key moments in Shelley’s work are central here: his description in his preface to Prometheus Unbound of the situation of the composition of that poem; a fragment of 1818, “Flourishing vine, whose kindling clusters glow”; and the description in Adonais of “Desolation’s bones.” Through close readings of these episodes, the chapter shows that Shelleyan overgrowth represents what we may call a “dark rewilding” – which is for us, as it was for Shelley, a future that human civilization increasingly appears to anticipate. Shelley anticipates many of the conceptual and ethical complexities of today’s rewilding, articulating instead a more ambivalent, less obviously hopeful conception of overgrowth as the eerie perpetuation of the ruins of a disappeared humanity.

What might Shelley’s A Defence of Poetry teach us about the current crisis of the humanities? This crisis is perpetual at least since Plato banished poets from his Republic. But in our current climate of anti-intellectualism, the crisis feels especially urgent. Or is it? Shelley’s answer was the autonomy of imagination, a creative spirit that sustained liberal notions of what Northrop Frye called an “educated imagination,” the hallmark of civil society. Yet Shelley feared this future might never arrive. Instead of a second half of the Defence, he wrote an elegy on the death of Keats. So, what is our future in a world where the autonomy of imagination has morphed into fake news and alternative facts? Add to this the existential crises of a pandemic and climate change and poetry must not only reimagine the world but justify its capacity to do so. This latter necessity defines a neoliberal academy in which the humanities, precisely because historically they have questioned being instrumentalized, need to make themselves ever more relevant or perish altogether. This chapter asks what hope might be created from contemplating that possible wreck, and thus what it means to educate our imaginations in perilous times.

This chapter surveys the evidence for the sophistic debate on relativism as evident in the fragments of the sophists, including comic and tragic poets. A widespread interpretation of the Histories claims that Herodotus supports nomos without qualification. By contrast, this chapter argues that this claim fails to capture the complexity of Herodotus’ engagement with those figures who use nomos as a rhetorical ploy to justify what is contrary to popular ethics. Similarly, Presocratic thinkers were working through the challenges presented by those who identified nomos as only a relative set of values as opposed to an objective norm to be followed. The Histories’ exploration of the problem of relating custom and law to justice takes place in the context of the rise and expansion of Persian imperialism. Further, it implicates the despot in a relativizing of justice and constitutes a key explanatory paradigm in the Persian attack against the Greek mainland in the Greco-Persian Wars.

This final chapter shifts to look to Herodotus’ reception in the early fourth century in the Dissoi Logoi. What questions does Herodotus raise for subsequent philosophers? How does allusion to the Histories in a treatise that is explicitly philosophical expand our understanding of his project? What is the consequence of this for Herodotus’ generic positionality? The Dissoi Logoi offers a case study in the reception of the Histories as an example of its prominence in intellectual culture. The second half of the chapter reprises the conclusions of the book and reexamines the value of reading what will become early Greek "historiography" alongside philosophy.

“Dream Defenders and the Inside Songs” explores the extent to which Percy Shelley's poetic legislation is able to counter racial divisiveness and antiBlackness in “our” communities and universities. It enlists Fred Moten’s poem “barbara lee” and Benjamin Zephaniah’s characterization of Shelley as the “original dub poet” to claim that what is “wholly political” about the semantic and sonic relays activated in Shelleyan songs is their capacity to disrupt the associational logics undergirding white-body supremacy and literary Anglo-Eurocentrism. Tracking the process enacted in “barbara lee,” by which reliance on “the inside songs” enables Representative Lee to vote against President Bush’s military authorization act, the chapter proposes some pedagogical and creative-critical revisions to Shelley studies that might effect a similar “inside outward opening” of Shelley. Leftist celebrations of “Red Shelley” have emphasized the collective and street-performative dimensions of his then-unpublished protest songs. The chapter probes the salience of a “black” Shelley by recasting two familiar Shelleyan devices. One emphasizes sound’s activation of embodied knowledge that circumvents the priority granted to textual literacy. A second accentuates association as a process that expands the affective-cognitive connections mobilized by a word and by encounters with another person. In other words, the intimacy between who we know and what we know is an underacknowledged fact of scholarly method. Diversifying one is key to diversifying the other in an ongoing cycle. Cultivating the two promises to transform “defenses” of poetry into live performances of antiracism.

While Percy Shelley anticipates and speaks to many important subjects of “our times,” he also developed a poetry and methodology for connecting and collaborating with peoples in other places and epochs. In this account, the editors reconsider Shelley’s often binaristic historical reception as both politically radical and childishly idealist, instead offering a version of the poet who continuously rethinks categories and relations among people and their times.

Shelley believed that poetry transcends the moral precepts of its time to present ethical truths that are eternally valid. Yet he was also committed to the power of poetry to effect political change in its present. This chapter approaches the latent contradiction between timelessness and contemporaneity through the figure of “chameleonism.” Shelley mentions the concept in a letter about Adonais, where he suggests that poets are “a very chamæleonic race: they take the colour not only of what they feed on, but of the very leaves under which they pass.” The formulation suggests a form of inadvertent intertextuality: the poet’s work is colored by other writings whether he intends to or not. The chapter explores how Shelley’s poetry takes its color from discourses surrounding the enslavement of Africans in Britain’s overseas colonies. While Shelley was not purposefully intervening in debates around abolition or the scientific codification of “race,” his writings reflect the anti-Black ideological horizon of his time. Looking at a number of his works, including Adonais, The Cenci, Hellas, and the translation of Plato’s Symposium, the chapter also historicizes the relationship between criticism and ethics: are we entitled to judge Shelley’s racial attitudes with the standards of our time?

This chapter turns to Herodotus’ unique narratorial reticence in making firm truth claims. "What is said" and "what seems" are found with much greater frequency than "what is true." Juxtaposing the Histories with contemporary discussions on epistemology will demonstrate the extent to which truth was problematized as a standard of inquiry in the fifth century. The narrator’s response to this is to use truth as an elusive criterion in order to highlight the difficulty of meeting its conditions. The final portion of this chapter looks to the frequency of "veridical" εἰμί in the Histories and points to its status as a criterion of accuracy in Presocratic epistemology. It argues for its incorporation in historical narrative as a distinctive marker of epistemic certainty.

Critics have long argued over Beatrice Cenci’s guilt and moral responsibility in relation to her murder of her father and rapist, as Shelley himself anticipated they would. Far less attention has been paid, however, to Count Cenci’s program for corrupting his daughter and turning her, at least in part, into a mirror version of himself. Count Cenci engineers a perverse kind of empathic identification, one that Shelley calls, in Prometheus Unbound, “loathsome sympathy.” This chapter presents “loathsome” sympathy in turn as an extreme or inverted form of the sympathy that plays so crucial a role in Shelley’s poetic and ethical theories, theories he develops from passages in various eighteenth-century moral philosophers including Hume, Rousseau, Burke, and Adam Smith. Twenty-first-century research on empathy and “mirror neurons” provides a number of partial and provocative analogies with eighteenth-century sympathy theory that are used heuristically to provide a novel perspective on the tradition that leads from Hume to Shelley. The chapter looks especially at how mirror neuron research emphasizes the embodied, visual, intersubjective, and unconscious workings of empathy. Shelley, the chapter argues, develops a comparable sense of sympathy, one that, in its “perverse” version, informs The Cenci.