scholarly journals Creating the Ancient Rhetorical Tradition

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laura Viidebaum

This book explores the history of rhetorical thought and examines the gradual association of different aspects of rhetorical theory with two outstanding fourth-century BCE writers: Lysias and Isocrates. It highlights the parallel development of the rhetorical tradition that became understood, on the one hand, as a domain of style and persuasive speech, associated with the figure of Lysias, and, on the other, as a kind of philosophical enterprise which makes significant demands on moral and political education in antiquity, epitomized in the work of Isocrates. There are two pivotal moments in which the two rhetoricians were pitted against each other as representatives of different modes of cultural discourse: Athens in the fourth century BCE, as memorably portrayed in Plato's Phaedrus, and Rome in the first century BCE when Dionysius of Halicarnassus proposes to create from the united Lysianic and Isocratean rhetoric the foundation for the ancient rhetorical tradition.

Author(s):  
Steven L. Goldman

What do scientists actually know and what do they know about? Answers to these questions are crucial not only for our understanding of the nature of scientific knowledge, but also for the formulation of effective science-based public policies, from global warming and energy to biotechnology and nanoscience. There is a lack of convincing answers to these questions because of an illogical conflation within modern science of epistemology and ontology, seeking to transcend experience and produce knowledge of reality using experience itself. Attempts at explaining the nature of scientific knowledge from the seventeenth through the twentieth centuries reveal that scientific reasoning has selectively employed deduction and induction, rationalism and empiricism, the universal and the particular, and necessity and contingency as if these opposites were compatible. As Thomas Kuhn showed, the history of science belies the definitive truth of ontological claims deduced from theories and, as a corollary, the definitive truth of theories themselves. Science Wars reviews the competing conceptions of scientific knowledge from Plato and Aristotle in the fourth century BCE to the “science wars” of the 1990s and provides thought-provoking analyses for understanding scientific thought in the twenty-first century.


Author(s):  
Julien Aliquot

This chapter traces the history of Phoenicia from the advent of Rome in Syria at the beginning of the first century bce to the foundation of the Christian empire of Byzantium in the fourth century ce. It focuses on the establishment of Roman rule and its impact on society, culture, and religion. Special attention is paid to the establishment of Roman rule and its impact on society, culture, and religion. The focus is on provincial institutions and cities, which provided a basis for the new order. However, side trails are also taken to assess the flowering of Hellenism and the revival of local traditions in the light of the Romanization of Phoenicia and its hinterland.


Author(s):  
Lawrence J. Bliquez

The chapter looks at Greek and Roman surgical instruments. The survival of Greco-Roman surgical instruments falls into two divisions: tools available in Hippocratic times (fifth to fourth century bce), and instruments at the disposal of surgeons, mostly Greek, from the late Republic through the Empire (first century bce to fifth century ce). From the former, most survivals are cupping vessels from graves. The texts suggest the Hippocratic physician often created his tool on the spot or had a tool prepared for an immediate need, whereas most of an Imperial surgeon’s repertoire consisted of instruments professionally made and sold by smiths. The various kinds of instruments are described, explained, and illustrated: cupping vessels, scalpels, phlebotomes (for phlebotomy), lithotomes (for bladder stones), needles, probes, cauteries, hooks, forceps, saws, drills, chisels, files, levers, tubes, douches, specula, and abortives.


1954 ◽  
Vol 4 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 151-157
Author(s):  
H. C. Baldry

This article is a survey of familiar ground—those passages of the Poetics of Aristotle which throw light on the treatment of legend by the tragic poets. Although sweeping generalizations are often made on the use of the traditional stories in drama, our evidence on the subject is slight and inconclusive. We have little knowledge of the form in which most of the legends were known to the Attic playwrights, for the few we find in the Iliad and Odyssey appear there in very different versions from those they take on in the plays, and the fragmentary remains of epic and lyric poetry between Homer and the fifth century B.C. present us with a wide field for speculation, but few certain facts; while vase paintings and other works of art supplement only here and there the scanty information gained from literature.The comments of ancient writers on this aspect of tragedy are surprisingly few, and carry us little farther. The Poetics stands out as the one source from which we can draw any substantial account of the matter. Even Aristotle, of course, is not directly concerned with the history of drama, and deals with it only incidentally in isolated passages; and in considering these it must constantly be borne in mind that he is discussing tragedy as he knew it in the late fourth century, for the benefit of fourth-century readers. But even so, his statements are the main foundation on which our view of the dramatists' use of legend must be built.


Author(s):  
David S. Neal

This is an account of excavations of the Roman villa in Gadebridge Park, Hemel Hempstead, which took place in 1963–8. It describes the history of a villa from its simple beginnings in the first century A.D. to its heyday in the fourth century when the owner could boast one of the largest villa bath houses and a bathing pool comparable in size to the Great Bath at Bath. In the mid-fourth century disaster struck. The coin evidence shows that the villa came to an abrupt end and that in or about A.D. 353 it may have been demolished as a result of reprisals against the owner for his support of the rebellion by Magnentius.


Author(s):  
Leszek Mrozewicz

The history of Mogontiacum spans the period from 17/16 BCE to the end of the fourth century CE. It was a strong military base (with two legions stationed there in the first century) and a major settlement centre, though without municipal rights. However, the demographic and economic development, as well as the superior administrative and political status enabled Mogontiacum to transform – in socio-economic and urbanistic terms – into a real city. This process was crowned in the latter half of the third century with the construction of the city walls.


Author(s):  
Evgeniy Karchagin ◽  
◽  
Svetlana Tokareva ◽  
Dmitriy Yavorskiy ◽  
◽  
...  

Introduction. The article analyzes the transformations of the concept of justice in early Byzantine thought. The purpose of the article is to test the hypothesis that the semantic shifts in the meaning of the concept of justice in the philosophical and theological literature were due to political processes and events. Methods. The article analyzes the political philosophical and political theological texts of the fourth century: “Oration in Honor of Constantine on the Thirtieth Anniversary of His Reign” by Eusebius of Caesarea; “Panegyric in Honour of Constantius” and “The Heroic Deeds of Constantius” by emperor Julian (“The Apostate”); “On Kingship” by Synesius of Cyrene. In the course of the analysis, the methodological tools of the history of concepts were used. Analysis. The analysis revealed a conflict between the concepts of “justice” and “piety”. It was found that the analyzed texts violate the ancient political and philosophical correlation of these concepts in which piety is considered as a form of justice. In the texts of Eusebius of Caesarea, piety is presented as a particular virtue without any connection with justice. Moreover, the frequency of using the concept of “piety” in the sense of the ruler’s virtue significantly exceeds the frequency of using the concept of “justice” in the sense of political virtue. In the texts of the Emperor Justinian, the discursive status of “justice” is restored. However, in the political philosophy of Synesius of Cyrene, the correlation of the concepts of “justice” and “piety” prescribed by Eusebius of Caesarea is fixed. Results. These processes is due to the influence of religious discourse on political one which is quite understandable in the works of theologians, on the one hand, and the crisis of polis and republican political technologies and discourses in the situation of increasing complexity of administrative tasks faced by the Roman emperors of the 4th century, on the other hand which subsequently led to the formation of a specific Byzantine “taxis” – a socio-cultural order. In this regard, the texts of Emperor Julian can be considered as an unsuccessful attempt to restore the previous discourse, an attempt to restore justice to a dominant place among the virtues of the ruler. The failure of this attempt is attested from the texts of Synesius of Cyrene. All the above allows us to conclude that a new Christian-imperial political discourse is being generated in the corpus of philosophical and theological texts in which the concept of justice is given a relatively modest place.


Author(s):  
M. F. Burnyeat

In the fourth century BCE, Anaxarchus and Monimus compared the world to stage-painting, to express scepticism about sense-perception and the worthlessness of human affairs, respectively. But the comparison traces back to Democritus’ discussion of Anaxagoras’ famous claim, a century earlier, that ‘appearances are a sight of things unseen’. According to Vitruvius, they were influenced by what Agatharchus had written about stage-painting, something that can be assessed properly only by considering the genre of technical treatises and the claims of those who were first to write on a subject. The comparison with phenomenal experience should ultimately be credited to Anaxagoras, though the points that he and Democritus make differ, owing to their different views of how the macroscopic world is related to underlying reality. These texts are thus not about the early history of perspectival painting, but stem from a fifth-century epistemological debate about what, if anything, sense-perception reveals about reality.


Traditio ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 68 ◽  
pp. 57-96 ◽  
Author(s):  
Els Rose

The history of Christianity shows roughly two ways of remembering the apostles: as acollegiumof twelve and as individual authorities or saints. In the earliest centuries, the reference to Christ's disciples as a group predominates. Both in the visual arts and in writing, “the twelve” are undiscriminated, forming a collective representation of testimony to Christian teaching. Prescriptive writings from the first four centuries dealing with matters of ecclesiastical organization, doctrine, and worship may serve as an example, such as the first-century document entitled “Doctrine of the Twelve Apostles,” better known asDidache, and the second- to fourth-century related sourcesDoctrina apostolorum, Didascalia apostolorum, andConstitutiones apostolicae.


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