The Material Circumstances

2019 ◽  
pp. 15-50
Author(s):  
Lucy C. M. M. Jackson
Keyword(s):  
Fourth Century ◽  
Fifth Century

Chapter 1 brings together the evidence for when and where dramatic choruses danced in the fourth century, providing an historical base for the later discussions of fourth-century dramatic choral activity. After establishing the certain and likely locations for dramatic performances in Athens, Attica, and the wider ancient Mediterranean (and beyond), the chapter considers the question of who the choral performers were, and what their choral training might have involved. Through this focus on the choral performer, and the practicalities of producing so many dramatic productions in each year, the chapter can begin to draw together a new picture of choral industry in the fourth century, an industry that clearly had its roots in the fifth century. Considering the theory that ‘local’, ‘amateur’ choruses would be recruited for travelling groups of actors, it suggests that the evidence supports, instead, a class of skilled choral performers in line with the industry’s professionalizing turn.

Fortuna in Translation, Fortuna as Translation

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniele Miano
Keyword(s):  
Fourth Century ◽  
Fifth Century ◽  
Structural Elements ◽  
Magna Graecia ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter considers the relationship between Fortuna and Tyche as one of translatability. The first half of the chapter focuses on Tyche, with the aim of determining semantic and structural elements common with Fortuna. The second part of the chapter looks at instances in which Fortuna is translated in Greek. The appearance of bronze strigils bearing the epithet soteira from Praeneste in the fourth century BC seems to presuppose this translation, and also points to the salvific meanings of Fortuna as a base for the process of translation. This process of translation had probably occurred through early contacts between Latium, Sicily, and Magna Graecia, where Tyche seems to be associated with salvation already from the fifth century BC. Other instances of translations of Fortuna and Tyche are studied across the Aegean.

The Athenian Hoplite Force in 431 B.C.

1927 ◽  
Vol 21 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 142-150 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. W. Gomme
Keyword(s):  
Military Service ◽  
Fourth Century ◽  
Fifth Century ◽  
Arbitrary Assumption

There is still something to be said about these figures for the Athenian hoplite force, the more so as the most reasonable discussion of them, Meyer's, is spoilt by some unsound inferences and has in consequence not found support. Their difficulty is apparent: a muster πανσημει in 338 meant calling up all classes up to the age of 50 (Lycurg. c. Leocr. 39), and since Socrates fought at Delion and Amphipolis when he was in his late forties, and not at Mantineia when he was over 50, we may assume that it meant the same in the fifth century; we also assume (though this is by no means proved) that ‘the youngest’ are those in their nineteenth and twentieth years, as in the fourth century, certainly after the reform of the Ephebeia, perhaps earlier (Aeschin. II. 167); military service ceased at 60. But how could the number of men in these twelve classes, 19-20 and 51-60, stand in the proportion of 13: 17 (16,000 less 3,000 metics, 13,000 plus 1,000 cavalry and 3,000 metics) to the men between 21 and 50 ? They could not be more than a third, and might be less. (Beloch, 1923, tries to make the problem more difficult by the arbitrary assumption that the 13,000 citizen hoplites are all the men of 21-60, instead of 21-50. Meyer, who accepts Thucydides’ figures, forgets that there must have been ‘oldest and youngest’ metics, besides the 3,000 who marched into Megara. Busolt and Meyer also argue that the classes 51-60 will have suffered specially heavy losses in the battles of 459-445, while the eight youngest classes would have seen no fighting;

Helen in the Fifth Century and After

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lowell Edmunds
Keyword(s):  
Southern Italy ◽  
Fourth Century ◽  
Fifth Century ◽  
Greek Literature

This chapter explores the fifth-century strands of reception of Helen. The Helens discussed in this chapter are a selection made to illustrate the postepic narrative as presupposed by various writers in various media. In addition to these fifth-century strands, the chapter also turns to the fourth century, which is another important strand of reception. The fourth century traces a strand which begins with the Pythagoreans in Croton in southern Italy and leads on to Goethe by way of Simon Magus. Another strand begins with the first fictional Helen, which can be found in Ovid. The chapter accompanies this discussion with an introduction into the concept of fiction. Finally, this chapter provides an example of the parallel phenomenon in Greek literature.

Divine Generation and Human Potentiality

2019 ◽  
pp. 13-54
Author(s):  
Jarred A. Mercer
Keyword(s):  
Fourth Century ◽  
Third Century ◽  
John 1 ◽  
Early Christian ◽  
Eternal Generation ◽  
Human Potentiality

Chapter 1 demonstrates that divine generation is the beginning of Hilary of Poitiers’s trinitarian anthropology. This chapter frames the discussion of divine generation within the boundaries of early Christian interpretation of John 1:1–4, Hilary’s favored text for the discussion. This illuminates the importance of divine generation in fourth-century Christianity and also Hilary’s unique contributions and the significant anthropological implications therein. In his reading of the passage (in polemical engagements with Homoian theology) the nature of God as eternally generative is seen to directly implicate humanity in that productivity. Hilary argues that in the eternal generation of the Son all things are potentially created, so that the nature of humanity is directly dependent upon the eternal generation of the Son, as this is where it finds its origin. This chapter also provides a trenchant reading of third-century ideas of divine generation (in Origen, Tertullian, and Novatian), which provide the foundation on which Hilary builds.

The Eudemian Theogony and Early Orphic Poetry

2018 ◽  
pp. 87-118
Author(s):  
Dwayne A. Meisner
Keyword(s):  
Fourth Century ◽  
Fifth Century ◽  
The Other ◽  
Fourth Section ◽  
The Third

The third chapter is about a theogony that had been known to the philosopher Eudemus (fourth century BC), and all of the other fragments that modern scholars have associated with this theogony. The Neoplatonist Damascius (fifth century AD) says that the theogony started with Night, but modern scholars have tried to link this to other early fragments of Orphic poetry. This chapter discusses Aristophanes in the first section, and Plato and Aristotle in the second section, arguing that their scattered references to Orphic poems might not have been from the same theogony. The third section introduces the Orphic Hymn(s) to Zeus that appear in different variations, the earliest of which are from around the same time as these other fragments. The fourth section suggests that early Orphic fragments about Demeter and Dionysus are not from the Eudemian theogony.

Greco-Roman Surgical Instruments

2018 ◽  
pp. 554-590
Author(s):  
Lawrence J. Bliquez
Keyword(s):  
Fourth Century ◽  
Fifth Century ◽  
Surgical Instruments ◽  
First Century ◽  
Bladder Stones ◽  
Greco Roman ◽  
Fourth Century Bce

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.

Chinese Painting and Archaic Greek Art

1940 ◽  
Vol 9 (27) ◽  
pp. 129-136
Author(s):  
T. B. L. Webster
Keyword(s):  
Fourth Century ◽  
Fifth Century ◽  
Chinese Painting ◽  
The World ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Greek Art ◽  
Manchester School

‘If a man were a good painter, he could deceive children and fools by painting a carpenter and showing it from a long way off, because it would seem really to be a carpenter.’ Plato here (Republic, 598c) is undoubtedly describing realistic painting, perhaps not so photographically realistic as the paintings in Pompeii or the painting that we know to-day, but painting which aimed at producing a likeness and rendering the appearance of the original. Such pictures can be seen on the vases of the fourth century and of the late fifth century b.c., for instance the two women on a red-figured perfume vase in the Manchester School of Art, which was painted about the time of the dramatic date of the Republic (Pl. I). But if we go back rather over a hundred years to the black-figure vase reproduced by Mr. Austin in Greece and Rome, vol. vii, we are in a completely different world of flat figures in conventional poses, and if we go further back still to the Geometric vase (Fig. I) which forms the subject of Mr. Austin's article, we are yet further from the world of ‘likeness’. These early Greek painters cannot have wanted to produce likenesses; but what was their aim ?

scholarly journals THE EARLY RECEPTION OF PLINY THE YOUNGER IN TERTULLIAN OF CARTHAGE AND EUSEBIUS OF CAESAREA

2017 ◽  
Vol 67 (1) ◽  
pp. 247-262 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Corke-Webster
Keyword(s):  
Fourth Century ◽  
Fifth Century ◽  
Third Century ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
Pliny The Younger ◽  
The Third ◽  
Stark Contrast ◽  
Eusebius Of Caesarea ◽  
Sidonius Apollinaris

In 1967 Alan Cameron published a landmark article in this journal, ‘The fate of Pliny'sLettersin the late Empire’. Opposing the traditional thesis that the letters of Pliny the Younger were only rediscovered in the mid to late fifth century by Sidonius Apollinaris, Cameron proposed that closer attention be paid to the faint but clear traces of the letters in the third and fourth centuries. On the basis of well-observed intertextual correspondences, Cameron proposed that Pliny's letters were being read by the end of the fourth century at the latest. That article now seems the vanguard of a rise in scholarly interest in Pliny's late-antique reception. But Cameron also noted the explicit attention given to the letters by two earlier commentators—Tertullian of Carthage, in the late second to early third century, and Eusebius of Caesarea, in the early fourth. The use of Pliny in these two earliest commentators, in stark contrast to their later successors, has received almost no subsequent attention.

The Archaeology of Beirut: A Report on Work in the Insula of the House of the Fountains

2003 ◽  
Vol 83 ◽  
pp. 195-229 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dominic Perring ◽  
Paul Reynolds ◽  
Reuben Thorpe
Keyword(s):  
Recent Work ◽  
Iron Age ◽  
Fourth Century ◽  
Fifth Century ◽  
Second Century ◽  
Hellenistic Period ◽  
Interim Report ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Western Margin ◽  
Post War

This insula, which lay on the western margin of the earlier Iron Age city, was uncovered during post-war reconstruction work carried out in Beirut during 1994–6. Laid out in the Hellenistic period, the insula was filled out with a series of small courtyard houses after the Roman annexation. A public portico was added along a main street in the second quarter of the second century, before a period of relative inactivity. The district was revived and rebuilt in the middle of the fourth century and was home to a series of handsome town houses in the fifth century, before being devastated by earthquake in AD 551. The site was then left derelict until the early nineteenth century. This interim report sets these findings within their broader historical and archaeological context, as well as summarizing the results of recent work on the site's ceramics and stratigraphy.

Aristotle and the Dramatisation of Legend

1954 ◽  
Vol 4 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 151-157
Author(s):  
H. C. Baldry
Keyword(s):  
Lyric Poetry ◽  
Fourth Century ◽  
Fifth Century ◽  
Wide Field ◽  
Works Of Art ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Scanty Information ◽  
The One ◽  
Traditional Stories

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.

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