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Fifty-six middle-income children ages 5 to 10 were videotaped completing five stories thematically related to attachment experiences and classified according to representation of attachment disorganization (D, non-D). Mothers completed a self-report questionnaire assessing three core components of personality organization—identity diffusion, primitive defenses, and failure of reality testing—and two other self-report questionnaires assessing current depression and trait and state anger. Finally, mothers completed a questionnaire assessing their children's externalizing behavior. A series of multiple regression analyses demonstrated that identity diffusion and disorganized attachment representations independently predicted externalizing behavior, particularly aggressive behavior. Identity diffusion alone predicted delinquent behavior. Two potential developmental pathways of externalizing behavior are delineated as a function of the significant roles played by maternal personality organization and disorganized attachment representations. Even in a nonclinical sample, mothers' identity diffusion—a key component of borderline personality organization—made a direct contribution to externalizing behavior over and above disorganized attachment representations. This finding suggests that mothers of children with externalizing behavior need psychotherapy to integrate split-off self and object representations and thus provide a coherent parenting experience, while their children need to perceive a coherent image of themselves in the mind of the therapist to facilitate affect regulation.

As a contribution to the study of empire and imperial ambition, the present study considers the greatest analysis—Xenophon'sThe Education of Cyrus—of one of the greatest empires of antiquity—the Persian. Xenophon's lively and engaging account permits us to watch Cyrus as he builds a transnational empire, at once vast and stable. Yet Xenophon is ultimately highly critical of Cyrus, because he lacks the self-knowledge requisite to happiness, and of the empire, whose stability is purchased at the price of freedom. Cyrus finally appears as a kind of divinity who strives to supply the reward for moral excellence that the gods evidently do not. Xenophon implies that any truly global empire would have to present itself as a universal providential power capable of bestowing on human beings a blessed happiness that as such transcends our very mortality.

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The present essay sketches the outline and the intention of Hesiod's Works and Days. Hesiod's principal task appears to be the identification (and praise) of the best way of life for his wayward brother Perses, but in carrying out this task, Hesiod speaks of justice and its human and divine supports in such a way as to go well beyond what would be of benefit to his brother. For in the course of his analysis of justice, or as a result of it, Hesiod praises also the life of autonomous understanding, the life that appears to be the poet's own. In crucial ways, then, Hesiod explores the chief themes of what was to become political philosophy, and for this reason, among others, he deserves the attention of all those who are also concerned with it.