Sarah Ruden has published several books, including, most recently, The Face of Water: A Translator on Beauty and Meaning in the Bible and a new translation of Augustine’s Confessions.
Girlhoods, boyhoods, childhoods, "freindships": Youth is the setting (and subject) in works by Jane Austen, J.M. Coetzee, Michael Ondaatje, and Leo Tolstoy.
For the Romans, 'luxuria' was the near-equivalent of Greek hubris. It has behind it the imagery of material excess leading to a diminished sense of cause and effect.
