illustrations, technical

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Courtney Ann Roby
Keyword(s):  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Medieval Manuscript ◽  
Ancient Texts

Ancient Greek and Roman scientific and technical works, especially in the exact sciences, were much more commonly illustrated than texts in other genres. The images in those texts ranged from the relatively abstract diagrams in mathematical, astronomical, and harmonic texts to the more pictorial images of botanical, medical, and surveying texts. For the most part, the images that survive are found in medieval manuscript copies. Although there are often striking variations from one manuscript to another, and the parchment or paper codex offers very different possibilities for illustrations than the papyrus rolls on which the ancient texts would originally have been composed, the texts themselves often offer clues about the author’s intentions for the images that accompanied the text.

La part d’Henri Weil dans l’édition du De la musique attribué à Plutarque (Paris, E. Leroux, 1900)

2017 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 233-265
Author(s):  
Laurent Calvié
Keyword(s):  
Original Condition ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Close Collaboration ◽  
First Time ◽  
Ancient Texts

The Weil-Reinach edition of the De musica attributed to Plutarch is the result of a close collaboration of two among the best philologists and specialists of ancient Greek music active in France between the 19th and the 20th centuries : H. Weil and his pupil Th. Reinach. The latter (who personally provided the collation of the manuscripts, some of the exegetical notes and the index) put together the material, but it was Weil who should be regarded as primarily responsible for the work, whose overall organization and component parts are perfectly consistent with the principles and methods that he had already applied to his previous editions : the subordination of the criticism of the texts, founded on the recension of manuscripts, to their history and interpretation. The interventionism typical of this publication derives from the extremely ambitious target that Weil imposed on all his ecdotic works : the reconstruction not of the corrupt archetype of the extant Byzantine and Humanist manuscripts, but of the original condition of the ancient texts. Viewed in this light, the Weil-Reinach edition of the De musica is a treasure of erudition and intelligence, in which the textual problems of a text, which had been deeply altered since antiquity, are raised for the first time.

The 373 B.C. Helike (Gulf of Corinth, Greece) Earthquake and Tsunami, Revisited

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stathis C. Stiros
Keyword(s):  
Eastern Mediterranean ◽  
Total Loss ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Archaeological Data ◽  
Gulf Of Corinth ◽  
Tectonically Active ◽  
City States ◽  
The Town ◽  
Archaeological Excavations ◽  
Ancient Texts

Abstract Ancient authors report the destruction and drowning in 373 B.C. in the Gulf of Corinth (Greece) of Helike (Helice and Eliki), an important, nearly coastal town, and of Boura (Bura, Buris, Bouris, and Voura), another town in the hinterland, as a punishment by the ancient God Poseidon because of a serious crime committed in his shrine. This narrative has been regarded as a description of a true event, though with some exaggerations, and the 373 B.C. event is included in earthquake and tsunami catalogs. In the first part of this article, it is shown that (1) local natural hazards exclude the possibility (risk) of total loss of the ancient “polis” (town state) of ancient Helike because of its vulnerability due to its geography. (2) Systematic geoarchaeological studies confirm this prediction because they reveal essentially undisturbed archaeological layers predating and postdating 373 B.C., with no signs of a tsunami. (3) Archaeological excavations have recently brought to light, among other findings, remains of the harbor of Boura and of the shrine of Poseidon at Helike, as well as coins issued by Helike several decades after its alleged loss. This evidence permits a reconsideration of ancient texts related to the loss of Helike in a supervised learning-type approach. It was found that genuine ancient Greek texts do not mention any catastrophe of Helike, but rather that the legend of its total loss appeared several centuries later in Roman times, in local legends, rumors, and forged or manipulated ancient texts (e.g., by pseudo-Aristotle). The ancient legend became important because it explained the collapse of the town state of Helike and it fit ancient religious ideas in a tectonically active region because of the rapid burial (“disappearance”) of ancient Greek remains under sediments in a young delta and because of the prominent location of Helike in the seafaring route between Rome and the eastern Mediterranean. For earthquakes before our era, historical and archaeological data have attracted interpretations… attributing to earthquakes… the demise of flourishing city-states. …The reason for the revival of catastrophe hypotheses is perhaps that they are easy to explain. They are too simple, too obvious and too coincidental and chiefly because they have become fashionable in recent years. (Ambraseys, 2006)

scholarly journals Hippocrates, Galen, and the uses of trepanation in the ancient classical world

2007 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-9 ◽  
Author(s):  
Symeon Missios
Keyword(s):  
Surgical Procedures ◽  
Ancient Greece ◽  
The State ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Roman World ◽  
Classical World ◽  
The World ◽  
Medical Writers ◽  
Ancient Texts

✓Trepanation (ανατρησιζ) is the process by which a hole is drilled into the skull, exposing the intracranial contents for either medical or mystical purposes. It represents one of the oldest surgical procedures, and its practice was widespread in many ancient cultures and several parts of the world. Trepanation was used in ancient Greece and Rome, as described in several ancient texts. Hippocrates and Galen are two of the most prominent ancient Greek medical writers, and their works have influenced the evolution of medicine and neurosurgery across the centuries. The purpose of this paper is to examine Hippocrates' and Galen's written accounts of the technique and use of trepanation in the ancient Greek and Roman world. Examination of those records reveals the ancient knowledge of neurological anatomy, physiology, and therapeutics, and illustrates the state and evolution of neurosurgery in the classical world.

Vesalius and the Reading of Galen's Teleology*

1997 ◽  
Vol 50 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-37 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nancy G. Siraisi
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Natural History ◽  
Major Part ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Intellectual Tradition ◽  
New Information ◽  
The World ◽  
Modern Experience ◽  
Ancient Texts

Sixteenth-century approaches to the world of nature remained resolutely bound to ancient texts. Hostility to the medieval past, new theories, new experiences, and new information were evidently abundantly present. But medieval predecessors were far more likely to be criticized for failure to understand ancient authority than for slavish dependence on it; dissatisfaction with intellectual tradition was apt to express itself in form of a call for return to the ideas of ancients who preceded the standard school authors in time; and in every branch of natural philosophy, natural history, and medicine, examination of the writings of ancient Greek authors was a major, perhaps the major, part of the task of the investigator. Innovators — some of them very bold and some very eccentric indeed — reworked, recombined, and criticized the ancients, or measured their teachings against modern experience; but they seldom ignored them.

Marcian of Heraclea

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bianca Maria Altomare
Keyword(s):  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Medieval Manuscript

Marcian of Heraclea (beginning of the 5th century ce) was the editor of a geographical corpus, as well as an important researcher and intermediary between the ancient Greek and Byzantine traditions. He was the author of three works: The Periplous of the Outer Sea, an epitome of Artemidorus’ Geographoumena, and an edition of Menippus’ Periplous. Only the first survives directly, albeit transmitted in a fragmentary state via a sole medieval manuscript, but the others can be reconstructed on the evidence of Stephanus of Byzantium.

‘Orts, Scraps, and Fragments’: Translation, Non-Translation, and the Fragments of Ancient Greece

2019 ◽  
pp. 49-66
Author(s):  
Nora Goldschmidt
Keyword(s):  
James Joyce ◽  
Cultural Transmission ◽  
Ezra Pound ◽  
Ancient Greece ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Historical Difference ◽  
Ancient Texts

This chapter shows how a wide range of writers—including Richard Aldington, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, C. P. Cavafy, and James Joyce—deployed contemporary interpretations and translations of fragments of Ancient Greek. A wealth of newly discovered source texts on papyrus was uncovered in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Together with recent scholarly commentaries on fragmentary Greek authors, these were taken up by modernist writers, foregrounding the difficulties of textual and cultural transmission. The chapter emphasizes the remoteness of the ancient texts and examines how modern attempts to downplay this historical difference, as in Liddell and Scott’s celebrated dictionary, could perversely prove to be barriers to understanding. The chapter contends that attempts to express the meaning of an alien and irrecoverable ancient past can be more estranging even than non-translation.

Deconstructing the Ancients/Moderns Trope in Historical Reception

2016 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 265-290
Author(s):  
John R. Wallach
Keyword(s):  
Thomas Hobbes ◽  
The Other ◽  
Greek Philosophy ◽  
Political Ethics ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Ancient Greek Philosophy ◽  
Theoretical Significance ◽  
Benjamin Constant ◽  
The One ◽  
Ancient Texts

Notably since Thomas Hobbes, canonically with Benjamin Constant, and conventionally amid Nietzschean, Popperian, Straussian, Arendtian, liberal (sc. Madison, Mill, Berlin, Rawls, Vlastos, Hansen), republican (sc. Skinner), political (sc. Finley), and sociological (sc. Ober) readings of ancient texts, contemporary scholarship on the ancients often has employed some version of the dichotomous ancient/modern or ancient/contemporary contrast as a template for explaining, understanding, and interpretively appropriating ancient texts and political practices – particularly those of ancient Greek philosophy and democracy (although Roman ideas and practices also have been invoked). In particular, this has been done to argue for some conception of political ethics and democracy. I argue that this rhetorical trope, often using Athens and Europe/America as synecdoches for antiquity and modernity, has generated narrow and distorted views of ancient texts and political practices, on the one hand, and their contemporary relevance, on the other – views that misinterpret the theoretical significance of historical phenomena and misread the potential lessons of ancient authorities. Instead, texts and practices should be read either with more qualifications or more fully against a historical dynamic of critical philosophy and political power – including its ethical, cultural, institutional, and governing elements – that is not framed by this dichotomy.

scholarly journals Before the Première: Recording the Performance of Ancient Greek Drama

Dramaturgias ◽  
2017 ◽  
pp. 10-21
Author(s):  
Eleonora Rocconi
Keyword(s):  
Greek Language ◽  
Original Performance ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Greek Drama ◽  
Linguistic Code ◽  
High Level ◽  
Ancient Texts

Ancient Greek theatre, a multimedia spectacle (originally conceived for a unique performance) which involved words, music, gestures, and dance, has always been a challenge for scholars investigating its original performance. This paper explores the possibilities of the performative elements of the plays to be recorded during their theatrical staging, that is, before their première. More in detail, it examines the probability that — given the rhythmic and melodic nature of ancient Greek language and the descriptive and/or perlocutionary character of the scenic information within the texts — the authors could inscribe music and gestural expressiveness into the linguistic code. The high level of ‘performativity’ implied in these ancient texts probably delayed the need for a technology that could record their different multimedia components. 

scholarly journals Die gebruik van die metafore in Psalm 80 (79 -LXX) in vergelyking met Johannes 15: 1-86

1999 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 455-464
Author(s):  
J.G. Van der Watt
Keyword(s):  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Ancient Literature ◽  
More Care ◽  
Ancient Texts

The dynamics of metaphor, which are found in John 15:1-8, are compared with the dynamics of metaphor in Psalm 79 (LXX). This is done against the background of the dominance of the ancient Greek philosphical tradition in considering metaphors in ancient texts. It is shown that the dynamics of metaphor in John 15 and Psalm 79 (LXX) are based on the same characteristics. This implies that more care should be taken in identifying the roots of the dynamics of metaphor in ancient literature.

THE CONCEPT OF MIMĒSIS IN THE HIPPOCRATIC DE VICTU

2014 ◽  
Vol 64 (2) ◽  
pp. 542-557 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hynek Bartoš
Keyword(s):  
English Translation ◽  
Classical Period ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
History Of Art ◽  
History Of ◽  
Ancient Texts

The concept of mimēsis was ‘shared by most authors, philosophers and educated audiences in the classical period, in antiquity as a whole, and even later’, although it has probably never been developed into a well-articulated theory. As far as we can judge from the extant evidence, the meaning of the expressions μίμησις and μιμέομαι differs from author to author and sometimes even from passage to passage. Ancient Greek views on mimēsis have often been discussed in modern scholarship, mainly within the field of history of art, and it has been demonstrated repeatedly that the traditional English translation ‘imitation’ is not always appropriate for the ancient texts and that in many contexts it is rather misleading. In the following study I aim to focus on this concept as it was employed in the oldest Greek cosmological and philosophical theories. As a rule, the study of these theories is complicated by their fragmentary state of preservation and by their distortion through the specifically Platonic views that were dominant among the later doxographers. I shall suggest that the Platonizing tendency still prevalent today, which tends to translate and interpret mimēsis as ‘imitation’ or ‘copy’, should be carefully revised in the light of the Hippocratic evidence and specifically in view of De victu, probably the oldest authentic, non-fragmentary, and non-Platonic document attesting the concept of mimēsis.

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