Cyclic Violence and the Poetics of Negotiation in Pre-Islamic Arabia

While Irfan Shahid may have offered the most comprehensive treatments of relationship between the Late Roman Empire and the Arab World before Islam to date,1 many of the cultural continuities and divergences across the borders of the Limus Arabicus have yet to be worked out in detail. Full comparative analysis of cultural institutions, manifestations and attitudes, including the use of poetry as a political medium in the Greek and Arabic corpora, has yet to be undertaken in depth. The comparative treatment of and remedies for violence have only begun to be explored.