Stars

2019 ◽  
pp. 115-131
Author(s):  
Belden C. Lane
Keyword(s):  
Human Life ◽  
Star Cluster ◽  
Third Century ◽  
The Sun ◽  
Winter Solstice ◽  
Orbital Resonance ◽  
The Third ◽  
Christian Theologian ◽  
Music Of The Spheres ◽  
Cahokia Mounds

The stars have always fascinated poets and astronomers alike. Early Greek philosophers imagined a music of the spheres—a musica universalis—produced by the heavenly bodies. The sun, moon, planets, and stars, said Pythagoras, all emit their own unique hum, an orbital resonance based on the mathematical harmony of their movements. Number, motion, harmonics, mystery: These are the rhetoric of the stars. Origen of Alexandria, the third-century Christian theologian, drew on Plato and others before him in contending that the stars were living beings, actively engaged in praising God and assisting human life. In the twelfth century, the Mississippian people at the Cahokia Mounds site near East St. Louis carefully studied the rising of the sun and stars at important times of the year. The Cahokians created a habitable cosmos by perceiving the stars as the living source of their cultural and religious life. They built more than a hundred mounds and five wood-henges in order to carefully measure solstices, equinoxes, and star risings. They monitored the ascent of celestial objects like Venus and the star cluster we know as the Pleiades. On the winter solstice, the author spends a cold, wet night atop Monk’s Mound, awaiting the rising of the Pleiades himself.

General

2017 ◽  
Vol 64 (2) ◽  
pp. 220-238
Author(s):  
Ivana Petrovic ◽  
Andrej Petrovic
Keyword(s):  
The Sun ◽  
Creation Myths ◽  
The Third ◽  
Greco Roman ◽  
Astronomical Instruments ◽  
Music Of The Spheres ◽  
Desert Island ◽  
Complete Translation

If you still haven't chosen a book to take with to the desert island, I have a suggestion: L'encyclopédie du ciel. At 1,202 pages, it will keep you occupied day and night: what you read as text by day will help you read by night in the sky. This wonderful and extremely useful book is as difficult to classify as it is to put down. Essentially, it is a compendium of Greco-Roman discourse on the stars and planets, divided into three parts. The first (‘Les images: histoire et mythologie: voir et raconter’) is about the constellations and the planets. It opens with a catalogue in which each constellation is illustrated, explained, and accompanied with appropriate quotations from Eratosthenes’ Catasterismoi and Hyginus’ Astronomica. There follow essays about the names of the constellations, on the Sun, Moon, and the planets, and one on Greek and Roman creation myths. All are accompanied by long passages of appropriate Greek and Latin texts in translation. The second part of the book (‘Les lois: l'astronomie: observer et calculer’) is about the ancient attempts to make sense of and explain the stars and planets as a system, about calendars, and about ancient astronomical instruments and objects. This part of the book also contains a complete translation of Hipparchus’ Commentary on the Phaenomena of Eudoxus and Aratus. It closes with an account of Greek star catalogues. The third part of the book is concerned with various attempts to interpret the celestial phenomena (‘Les messages: signes et influence: interpréter et prédire’). It includes, but is not restricted to, astrology; philosophical ideas are also discussed, such as astral apotheosis, the ascent of the soul through the sky, and the music of the spheres. There is a dictionary of astronomical and astrological terms and a dictionary of ancient astronomers and authors dealing with astronomy. The book closes with parallel star catalogues of Eratosthenes, Hipparchus, and Ptolemy.

scholarly journals A doutrina cosmológico/soteriológica ontológico/materialista dualista maniqueísta

2004 ◽  
Vol 11 ◽  
pp. 273
Author(s):  
Marcos R. NUNES COSTA
Keyword(s):  
Third Century ◽  
The Sun ◽  
Salvation History ◽  
The Third ◽  
History Of ◽  
Light Particles ◽  
The Universe

Founded in Asia, in the third century, by Mani, manicheism constituted, by itself, in a doctrinal viewpoint, in a gnosis that mixed oriental principles of sects/religions, specially from Zoroastrism and Budism, Greek-Roman Philosophy and Christianism. His basic thesis consisted of statement of two ontological principles: Good or Light, presented by the sun, and Evil or Darkness, personified in matter. From this ontological Dualism arose a cosmology/soteriology that presented the salvation history of world in three moments: the first-one, initial, embodies the two principles cosmic origins and their first conflicts. The second-one, medial, is the mixture time is characterized by the downfall of one the Light parts in the matter, as well as it is the universe being creation time. At last, the third-one, final, marks the liberation of all Light particles, imbricated in the matter, meaning the Light return to Father's kingdom and the matter's definitive downfall into the hell.

Explaining Evil in Late Antiquity

Evil ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 129-154
Author(s):  
Dominic J. O’Meara
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Moral Evil ◽  
Physical World ◽  
Third Century ◽  
The Third ◽  
Greco Roman ◽  
Christian Theologian ◽  
The Problem Of Evil ◽  
Pseudo Dionysius

The problem of evil was often debated in the Greco-Roman world of late antiquity. Two very influential contributors to this debate were the Christian theologian Augustine and the pagan Platonist Proclus, whose theory of evil reached the Middle Ages through a paraphrase in the Pseudo-Dionysius. Augustine and Proclus were both influenced by, and distanced themselves from, the original theory of evil developed by the pagan Platonist philosopher Plotinus in the third century AD. Plotinus identified the indeterminate background (“matter”) against which the physical world appears as the reason for the existence of physical and moral evil. Here a summary of Plotinus’s theory of evil is given, together with a discussion of the various difficulties and objections that arise, in particular in Proclus’s criticism of it.

Historical Fragments’ Mobile Echo

Transfers ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 115-119 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan E. Bell ◽  
Kathy Davis
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Cultural Revolution ◽  
Ming Dynasty ◽  
Third Century ◽  
Refugee Crisis ◽  
The Third ◽  
Opium War ◽  
The Subject

Translocation – Transformation is an ambitious contribution to the subject of mobility. Materially, it interlinks seemingly disparate objects into a surprisingly unified exhibition on mobile histories and heritages: twelve bronze zodiac heads, silk and bamboo creatures, worn life vests, pressed Pu-erh tea, thousands of broken antique teapot spouts, and an ancestral wooden temple from the Ming dynasty (1368–1644) used by a tea-trading family. Historically and politically, the exhibition engages Chinese stories from the third century BCE, empires in eighteenth-century Austria and China, the Second Opium War in the nineteenth century, the Chinese Cultural Revolution of the mid-twentieth century, and today’s global refugee crisis.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barbara K. Gold
Keyword(s):  
Third Century ◽  
Historical Documents ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Status ◽  
Key Issues

This chapter discusses the key issues surrounding Perpetua’s life and her narrative, the Passio Sanctarum Perpetuae et Felicitatis. It introduces the most perplexing circumstances around her life and times: the authorship of her Passio (which is written in at least three different hands); her life and family; the conditions of her martyrdom and of martyrdoms during the pre-Constantinian period; the status of martyrdom texts as personal, social, or historical documents; whether persecutions can be historically verified or were exaggerated by the Christians and others; and the afterlife of Perpetua and her text in writers from the third century to contemporary times. The introduction lays out the arguments for these thorny issues and tries to find a reasonable position on each one.

Letters from High to Low in the Graeco-Roman Period

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Willy Clarysse
Keyword(s):  
Roman Period ◽  
Third Century ◽  
Test Cases ◽  
The Third ◽  
Total Lack

In this chapter, papyrus letters sent from superiors to their inferiors are studied on the basis of test cases ranging across the Graeco-Roman period in Egypt, from the third century BCE to the third century CE. This correspondence is drawn from four archival groups of texts: the archive of Zenon; the letters of L. Bellienus Gemellus and the letters of the sons of Patron; and the Heroninus archive. The letters are usually short, full of imperatives, and characterized by the absence of philophronetic formulae. Recurrent themes of the correspondence are urgency, rebukes, orders, and interdictions, and there is an almost total lack of polite phrases.

‘At last Roman, at last restored to the true light of Empire’

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adrastos Omissi
Keyword(s):  
British Empire ◽  
Economic Reforms ◽  
Third Century ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Military ◽  
Late Roman

This chapter begins by considering what made the late Roman state distinctive from the early Empire, exploring the political developments of the later third century, in particular the military, administrative, and economic reforms undertaken by the tetrarchs. It then explores the presentation of the war between the tetrarchy and the British Empire of Carausius and Allectus (286‒96), taking as its core sources Pan. Lat. X, XI, and VIII. These speeches are unique in the panegyrical corpus, in that two of them (X and XI) were delivered while the usurpation they describe was still under way, the third (VIII) after it was defeated. In this chapter, we see how the British Empire was ‘othered’ as piratical and barbarian, and how conflict with it helped to create the distinctive ideology of the tetrarchy.

Inscriptions and the Narrative of Roman History

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
David S. Potter
Keyword(s):  
Roman History ◽  
Third Century ◽  
Historical Events ◽  
The Third ◽  
Literary Sources

This chapter offers an analysis of how inscriptions can complement the narratives of Roman history from the third century BCE to the third century CE provided in literary sources. They reveal certain historical events or details that would otherwise be unknown, and they supplement the information offered by the surviving Roman historians .

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