Defending and Defining the Faith

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
D. H. Williams
Keyword(s):  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Fifth Century ◽  
Second Century ◽  
Christian Identity ◽  
Double Object ◽  
Beliefs And Practices ◽  
Intellectual Context ◽  
Christian Apologetics ◽  
Scholarly Projects ◽  
Christian Beliefs

Christian apologetics in the patristic era should be understood broadly as a defense of Christian beliefs and practices against non-Christian beliefs, practices, and policies (religious, social, and political) that were either antithetical to Christian beliefs and practices or openly hostile to Christianity. The advantage of this conceptualization of apologetics is that it enables readers to follow the discussion of Christian responses to Hellenistic culture beyond the context of persecution associated with the pre-Constantinian period, which tends to be where many scholarly projects on apologetics end. The reader is also invited to see the links in the intellectual trajectory from early second-century apologetics through those written in the early fifth century, prompting deeper reflection about the process of Christian self-definition in late antiquity. This book explores Christian apologetic literature from the second through fifth centuries, examining the writers within the intellectual context of their times. The book argues that most apologies were not directed at a pagan readership. In most cases, ancient apologetics had a double object: to instruct the Christian, and persuade less devout Christians or non-Christians who were sympathetic to Christian claims. Taken cumulatively, it finds that apologetic literature was integral to the formation of Christian identity in the Roman world.

scholarly journals Sleep of the Soul and Resurrection of the Body: Aphrahat’s Anthropology in Context

2019 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 433-466
Author(s):  
J. Edward Walters
Keyword(s):  
Present Article ◽  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Eastern Mediterranean ◽  
Fourth Century ◽  
The Body ◽  
Christian Identity ◽  
Beliefs And Practices ◽  
Christian Communities ◽  
Mediterranean World ◽  
Body And Soul

Abstract The fourth-century Syriac corpus known as the Demonstrations, attributed to Aphrahat, the Persian Sage, provides a unique window into the early development of Christianity among Syriac-speaking communities. Occasionally these writings attest to beliefs and practices that were not common among other contemporaneous Christian communities, such as Aphrahat’s apparent belief in the “sleep of the soul” and the implications of that belief for his concept of the soul-body relationship and what happens to the soul and body at the resurrection. Aphrahat addresses this topic in the context of a polemical argument against an unnamed opponent, which provides the occasion to consider whom these arguments might be addressed against. The present article seeks to understand Aphrahat’s views on the body and soul within the broad religious milieu of the eastern Mediterranean world in Late Antiquity. The article concludes with an argument for reading and understanding the Demonstrations as a witness to the contested development of Christian identity in the Syriac-speaking world.

Xenophanes, Aeschylus, and the doctrine of primeval brutishness

1985 ◽  
Vol 35 (2) ◽  
pp. 264-277 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael J. O'Brien
Keyword(s):  
Early Life ◽  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Good Reason ◽  
Fifth Century ◽  
Second Century ◽  
The Other ◽  
Classical Antiquity ◽  
Ancient Medicine

The belief that primitive men lived like beasts and that civilisation developed out of these brutal origins is found in numerous ancient authors, both Greek and Latin. It forms part of certain theories about the beginnings of culture current in late antiquity. These are notoriously difficult to trace to their sources, but they already existed in some form in the fifth century b.c. One idea common to these theories is that of progress, and for this reason a fragment of Xenophanes is sometimes cited as their remote prototype: ‘The gods did not reveal all things to men from the beginning; instead, by seeking, men discover what is better in time’. Mainly on the strength of this fragment, Ludwig Edelstein devoted the first chapter of his bookThe Idea of Progress in Classical Antiquityto Xenophanes, and W. K. C. Guthrie has even declared that there is good reason to attribute to him a fuller account of progress, one that would include details found in later authors who speak of the early life of mankind. One of these details is the statement that the life of primitive men was ‘brutal’ or ‘beastlike’ (θηριώδης). In these authors the implication of that term varies from ‘unschooled in the basic crafts’ to ‘inhumanly violent and bloodthirsty’. In one sense or the other it is repeatedly encountered in ancient references to this subject. Accounts of primitive brutishness which make use of the wordθηριώδης(orθηριωδ⋯ςcan be found in theSuppliantsof Euripides, in the Hippocratic treatiseOn Ancient Medicine, in three passages of Diodorus, one of which is thought by some to contain Democritean doctrine, in four passages of Isocrates, in a fragment from a satyr-playSisyphuswhich the ancient sources attribute variously to Euripides and to Critias, in a fragment of Athenion, in a second-century inscription, in Plutarch, in Tatian, in Themistius, and in a scholion to Euripides.

The Cloud‐Astrophysics of Xenophanes and Ionian Material Monism

2009 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexander P. D. Mourelatos
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Fifth Century ◽  
Second Century ◽  
Human Knowledge ◽  
Next Generation ◽  
Critical Thought ◽  
Standard Edition ◽  
The One

This article discusses Xenophanes' “cloud astro-physics”. It analyses and explains all heavenly and meteorological phenomena in terms of clouds. It provides a view of this newer Xenophanes, who is now being recognized as an important philosopher-scientist in his own right and a crucial figure in the development of critical thought about human knowledge and its objects in the next generation of Presocratic thinkers. Xenophanes' account has been preserved in Aëtius, the doxographic compendium (1st or 2nd century ce) reconstructed by Hermann Diels late in the nineteenth century mainly from two sources that show extensive parallelism: pseudo-Plutarch Placita Philosophorum or Epitome of Physical Opinions (second century ce); and Ioannes Stobaeus' Eclogae Physicae or Physical Extracts (fifth century ce). In the Stobaeus version, which is also the one printed in the standard edition of the Pre-socratics.

Capital Scripts

2020 ◽  
pp. 78-97
Author(s):  
David Wright
Keyword(s):  
Eighth Century ◽  
Fifth Century ◽  
Second Century ◽  
Sixth Century ◽  
Augustan Era

This chapter surveys capital letterforms, which have been in use from the second century BC until the present day. It defines two types of capitals in use since the Augustan Era: formal Square Capitals and informal Rustic Capitals, and traces the development of Rustic Capitals as a text hand in manuscripts of classical authors until the sixth century AD as well as the use of Square Capitals until the late fifth century AD. It closes with a look at the use of Rustic Capitals in rubrics of eighth-century manuscripts from England, and Rustic and Square Capitals found in Carolingian contexts.

III. Language and Stage Action

1984 ◽  
Vol 16 ◽  
pp. 8-11
Keyword(s):  
Fifth Century ◽  
Second Century ◽  
Dio Chrysostom ◽  
Dionysius Of Halicarnassus

Although the career of Sophocles overlapped in its earlier years with that of Aeschylus and later on with that of Euripides, it is very hard to avoid over-simplifying the development of fifth-century tragedy into a progression from Aeschylus to Sophocles to Euripides. The same simplification is found amongst ancient critics, for whom Sophocles is ‘the middle one’ in ways which go beyond mere chronology. Thus Dio Chrysostom (first/early-second century A.D.) in his comparison of the three tragedians’ versions of the Philoctetes story says of Sophocles that ‘he seems to stand midway between the two others, since he has neither the ruggedness and simplicity of Aeschylus nor the precision and shrewdness and urbanity of Euripides, yet he produces a poetry that is august and majestic (σϵμνήν δέ τινα καί μϵγαλοπρϵπἢ ποίησιν), highly tragic and euphonious in its phrasing, so that there is the fullest pleasure coupled with sublimity and Stateliness (μϵτἁ ὕψους καί σϵμνότητος)’ Approximately a century earlier the critic Dionysius of Halicarnassus also found a ‘middle’ quality in Sophocles’ style: between the ‘austere’ (Pindar, Aeschylus, Thucydides, etc.) and the ‘smooth’ (Sappho, Euripides, Isocrates, etc.) he located the intermediate, ‘well-blended’ (ϵὔκρατος) mode of composition, including Sophocles as well as Homer, Demosthenes, Plato, and others. Of this intermediate style Dionysius says he is at a loss to decide ‘whether it is produced by excluding the extremes or by blending them’; but it is at any rate clear that it is defined principally by reference to what it is not.

Environmental Change, the Acts of John, and Shifting Cultic Landscapes in Late Antique Ephesus

2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 176-215
Author(s):  
Travis Proctor
Keyword(s):  
Environmental Change ◽  
Deep Water ◽  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Focal Point ◽  
Christian Identity ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
Cultural Shift ◽  
Greco Roman ◽  
The City

The city of Ephesus experienced a marked civic transformation in Late Antiquity. After having centered its settlements and economic fortunes on its proximity to a deep-water harbor for over a millenium, late antique Ephesus gradually shifted to an inland, fortified settlement on Ayasoluk Hill. While several factors undoubtedly informed this civic reorientation, the most commonly cited impetus for Ephesus’s late antique reorientation was the infilling of its deep-water harbor. This article argues that, in addition to this environmental cause, an important cultural shift correspondingly informed Ephesus’s late antique reconfigurations. Namely, the emergence and development of the tomb of John on Ayasoluk Hill, informed by an array of literary legends associating the apostle with the city, increasingly positioned this site as a cultic and economic focal point in Late Antiquity. This article argues that an important early strand in this cultural fabric was the Acts of John, a collection of apocryphal tales that narrate John’s exploits in Ephesus. Significantly, the Acts of John articulates a “counter-cartography” that disassociates Christian identity from prominent Ephesian cultic sites and accentuates the importance of spaces “outside the city” of Ephesus, including and especially the tomb of John. Through its own circulation as well as its influence on later Johannine narratives, the early Acts of John helped inform a shift in the cultural cartographies of Ephesus, where Greco-Roman polytheistic spaces were gradually devalued in favor of Christian sites, the tomb of John on Ayasoluk chief among them.

Danebury, Hampshire: Second Interim Report on the Excavations 1971–5

1976 ◽  
Vol 56 (2) ◽  
pp. 198-216 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barry Cunliffe
Keyword(s):  
Fifth Century ◽  
Second Century ◽  
The Other ◽  
Third Century ◽  
Interim Report ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Hill ◽  
Religious Nature ◽  
Continuous Strip

SummaryThe results of five seasons of excavation (1971–5) are summarized. A continuous strip 30–40 m. wide extending across the centre of the fort from one side to the other was completely excavated revealing pits, gullies, circular stake-built houses, rectangular buildings, and 2-, 4-, and 6-post structures, belonging to the period from the sixth to the end of the second century B.C. The types of structures are discussed. A sequence of development, based largely upon the stratification preserved behind the ramparts, is presented: in the sixth–fifth century the hill was occupied by small four-post ‘granaries’ possibly enclosed by a palisade. The first hill-fort rampart was built in the fifth century protecting houses, an area of storage pits, and a zone of 4-and 6-post buildings laid out in rows along streets. The rampart was heightened in the third century, after which pits continued to be dug and rows of circular houses were built. About 100 B.C. rectangular buildings, possibly of a religious nature, were erected, after which the site was virtually abandoned. Social and economic matters are considered. The excavation will continue.

The Date and Circumstances of Olympiodorus of Thebes

Traditio ◽  
1993 ◽  
Vol 48 ◽  
pp. 1-29 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Gillett
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Fifth Century ◽  
Imperial Court ◽  
Political Narrative ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Rich ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Western Half

Olympiodorus of Thebes is an important figure for the history of late antiquity. The few details of his life preserved as anecdotes in hisHistorygive glimpses of a career which embraced the skills of poet, philosopher, and diplomat. A native of Egypt, he had influence at the imperial court of Constantinople, among the sophists of Athens, and even outside the borders of the empire. HisHistory(more correctly, his “materials for history”) is lost, surviving only as fragments in the narratives of Zosimus, Sozomen, and Philostorgius, and in the rich summary given by the ninth-century Byzantine patriarch Photius. These remains comprise the most substantial narrative sources for events in the western Roman Empire in the early fifth century. Besides its value as a source, theHistoryis important as a monument to the vitality of the belief in the unity of the Roman Empire under the Theodosian dynasty. Olympiodorus wrote in Greek, and knowledge of his work is attested only in Constantinople, yet his political narrative, from 407 to 425, concerns only events in the western half of the empire. To understand the significance of these facts, it is necessary to set the composition of Olympiodorus's work in its proper context. Clarifying the date of publication is the first step toward this goal. Internal and external evidence suggests that the work was written in 440 or soon after, more than a decade later than the date of composition usually accepted. Taken with thematic emphases evident in the structure of theHistory, this revised dating explains why an eastern writer should have written a detailed account of western events in the early part of the century. Olympiodorus's account is a characteristic product of the highly literate class of eastern imperial civil servants, and of their genuine preoccupation with the relationship between the eastern and western halves of the Roman Empire at a time when both were threatened by the rise of the new Carthaginian power of the Vandals.

Leadership for the Christian Empire: Emperors and Bishops in theEcclesiastical Historyof Philostorgius

2018 ◽  
Vol 87 (3) ◽  
pp. 684-717
Author(s):  
Anna Lankina
Keyword(s):  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Early Christianity ◽  
Fifth Century ◽  
Raw Data ◽  
Ecclesiastical History ◽  
Theory Of History ◽  
The Relationship

The fifth-centuryEcclesiastical Historyof Philostorgius is an unusual example of a surviving minority source. Although scholars have mined his work for raw data on events between 320 and 425c.e., in contrast to other contemporary ecclesiastical historians, Philostorgius has received little attention. His work has suffered derision, being seen as nothing more than “Arian” polemic and thus as more partisan than its pro-Nicene counterparts. This essay analyzes Philostorgius's role as one of many competitive voices participating in the composition of historical works for the elite readership of Constantinople in the fifth century. Philostorgius'sEcclesiastical Historyconstituted an integral part of the historiography of late antiquity and early Christianity. His representation of the relationship between bishops and emperors reveals a distinctive theory of history which informs his entire work.

scholarly journals The Groma and the Gladius: Roman Surveyors in the Later Republic

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Jason C Morris
Keyword(s):  
Social Identity ◽  
Roman Republic ◽  
Legal Framework ◽  
Fifth Century ◽  
Second Century ◽  
Social Forces ◽  
Roman Army ◽  
Imperial Period ◽  
The Social ◽  
Land Surveying

<p>Boundaries have been a concern for all settled peoples in all times and places. The Romans  were no exception to this rule. Literary documents from the second century B.C. right  through to the end of the Western Empire in the fifth century A.D. show a continuous  preoccupation with the delineation of boundaries and the ownership or control of land. As part of this preoccupation, the Romans developed a complex legal framework for coping with property ownership. To accompany this legal framework, they developed a sophisticated system of boundary marking and land surveying known as centuriation. A great deal of scholarly attention has been expended on understanding both the system of centuriation and the legal framework governing Roman land use. Far less attention has been paid to the social development of the agrimensores or land surveyors who actually carried out the operation of centuriation and dealt with the problems of property disputes in the Imperial period. This thesis will focus on the social identity of the Roman land surveyors with a particular emphasis on understanding their origins in the surveying institutions of the later Republic. To accomplish this study, the thesis will be broken down into three broad chapters, each chapter containing two or three subsections. The first chapter will examine the social identity and evolution of the finitor, who has traditionally been considered the surveyor of the Roman Republic. The second chapter will examine the identity of the agrimensores or mensores in the particular context of the Roman army in an effort to distinguish them from the metatores, three names which have been considered to refer to the same or a similar occupation. The third chapter will examine the mensor in the context of the Roman Republic and trace the social forces that shaped their identity as specialists in land law and surveying.</p>

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