Paradoxography

2018 ◽  
pp. 430-444
Author(s):  
Klaus Geus ◽  
Colin Guthrie King
Keyword(s):  
Literary Field ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Greco Roman ◽  
Ancient Science ◽  
Roman Literature ◽  
History Of

The chapter explores the ancient Greek and Roman literature on wonders, “paradoxical” objects and events in the natural (and human) worlds, things that are strange but true. The main source for this literature was not observation or experience, but other literature. The chapter describes the genesis and development of the genre and defines its common characteristics; introduces its main authors; and explains its importance for the history of ancient science. Paradoxographical texts have been characterized variously as: (1) lists of facts which are considered wondrous, or (2) a sensationalist and consumer-oriented type of writing, or (3) the second-rate extracts from proper historical and scientific authors. Paradoxography was a thriving literary field from Early Hellenistic times, throughout the Greco-Roman era, and into Byzantine times.

Oxford Handbook of Science and Medicine in the Classical World

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Greco Roman ◽  
Ancient Science ◽  
Classical World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Byzantine Period ◽  
The Many ◽  
Reading Key

The book offers 50 essays introducing, surveying, summarizing, and analyzing the many sciences of the classical world, that is, ancient Greek and Roman worlds. The opening section offers 10 essays on mathematics, astronomy, and medicine in other ancient cultures that may have either influenced the Greek world or else served as informative alternative accounts of ancient science. There is a brief section on Greek science of the 6th through 4th centuries bce, then a long section on Greek science of the Hellenistic era, the period in which ancient Greek science was most active. The Greco-Roman era, that is the early Roman Empire, is treated in a fourth section, and the final section addresses the sciences of Late Antiquity, or Early Byzantine, period, the 4th through 7th centuries ce. Throughout, the volume insists on the close integration of the ancient sciences with one another and on the consequent necessity to study them as a whole, not in isolation. Sciences elsewhere neglected or excluded are here included as first-class citizens, such as alchemy, astrology, paradoxography, pharmacy, and physiognomy. The essays invite readers to study these fascinating disciplines, and in many cases offer new interpretations and syntheses. Each essay includes a bibliography supporting its content and providing further reading. Key figures in the history of ancient science, Pythagoras with Plato, Hippocrates, Aristotle, Galen, and Ptolemy, each receive their own essay.

Apuleius in Meiji Japan: The Golden Ass as an Educational and Reformatory Novel

Ramus ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 38 (1) ◽  
pp. 123-144
Author(s):  
Akihiko Watanabe
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Meiji Japan ◽  
The Public ◽  
Greco Roman ◽  
Ancient Novel ◽  
Roman Literature ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Literary Character ◽  
History Of ◽  
Western Novel

This paper will consider the 1887 Japanese translation of Apuleius'Golden Assfrom the angle of classical reception. Although this was the first translation of Greco-Roman literature to appear in modern Japanese, it has, at least in print, never been examined by a classicist before. With the rising interest in the study of classical receptions, including those taking place outside the West, the time may be ripe for a serious look at this early Meiji translation by Morita Shiken—its content, source, intellectual climate surrounding its production, and its own subsequent reception in Japan.The ancient novel, as Whitmarsh observes, is a genre uniquely suited for reception studies, especially of the more usual kind that is concerned with the modern period. Although a late and ignoble genre within antiquity, despite its often considerable linguistic and literary artistry, it came to enjoy relatively wide cultural recognition and circulation in the early modern period, before being outshone by the modern Western novel and sinking back into relative obscurity again both in the public and in academia—and its literary character is still very much controversial, to the extent that it is debated whether the ancient genre may justifiably be called ‘novel’. The history of the reception of the novel therefore may show more intriguing twists and contradictions than that of such established and uncontroversially ‘great’ genres as epic or tragedy.

The History of Ancient Science: A Personal View

2013 ◽  
Vol 26 (4) ◽  
pp. 587-593 ◽  
Author(s):  
Geoffrey Lloyd
Keyword(s):  
Physical World ◽  
Third Century ◽  
Personal View ◽  
The Third ◽  
Roman World ◽  
Greco Roman ◽  
Ancient Science ◽  
Land Mass ◽  
Third Millennium Bce ◽  
History Of

My subject is the history of science in antiquity, where the convention I adopt for “antiquity” is that it covers everything from the earliest recorded Mesopotamian investigations in the third millennium BCE down to the end of the third century CE, by which time two particularly significant upheavals had taken place at either end of the Euro-Asia land mass. I refer to the Christianization of the Greco-Roman World and the rise of Buddhism in China. That study poses a number of distinctive problems, both substantive and methodological, which I shall go on immediately to identify. At the same time it is particularly worthwhile, in my view, for the light it can throw on very early efforts at understanding the physical world. Let me give a brief preliminary explanation of my main thesis.

Pietro Bembo on Etna

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gareth D. Williams
Keyword(s):  
Generational Differences ◽  
Mount Etna ◽  
Latin Text ◽  
Greek Language ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
One Dimensional ◽  
Greco Roman ◽  
Pietro Bembo ◽  
History Of ◽  
Father And Son

This book is centered on the Venetian humanist Pietro Bembo (1470–1547), on his stay in Sicily in 1492–4 to study the ancient Greek language under the Byzantine émigré Constantine Lascaris, and above all on his ascent of Mount Etna in 1493. The more particular focus of this study is on the imaginative capacities that crucially shape Bembo’s elegantly crafted account, in Latin, of his Etna adventure in his so-called De Aetna, published at the Aldine Press in Venice in 1496. This work is cast in the form of a dialogue that takes place between the young Bembo and his father, Bernardo (himself a prominent Venetian statesman with strong humanist involvements), after Pietro’s return to Venice from Sicily in 1494. But De Aetna offers much more than a one-dimensional account of the facts, sights, and findings of Pietro’s climb. Three mutually informing features that are critical to the artistic originality of De Aetna receive detailed treatment in this study: (i) the stimulus that Pietro drew from the complex history of Mount Etna as treated in the Greco-Roman literary tradition from Pindar onward; (ii) the striking novelty of De Aetna’s status as the first Latin text produced at the nascent Aldine Press in the prototype of what modern typography knows as Bembo typeface; and (iii) Pietro’s ingenious deployment of Etna as a powerful, multivalent symbol that simultaneously reflects the diverse characterizations of, and the generational differences between, father and son in the course of their dialogical exchanges within De Aetna.

Der Vergleich des Lebens mit einem Gastmahl als Verhaltensanweisung: Lk 14,7–11 und 22,26–27 im Lichte von Texten Epiktets und Dions von Prusa

2016 ◽  
Vol 107 (2) ◽  
pp. 206-231
Author(s):  
Matthias Becker
Keyword(s):  
Gospel Of Luke ◽  
Greek Literature ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Narrative Art ◽  
Willingness To Serve ◽  
Dio Chrysostom ◽  
Greco Roman ◽  
Roman Literature ◽  
The One

Abstract: Similes comparing life to a banquet or symposium can be found in different genres of ancient Greco-Roman literature. On the one hand, the imagery of leaving a symposium was used to euphemistically describe suicide or death. On the other hand, the notion of man being a guest on earth hosted by the gods aided philosophers like Epictetus and orators like Dio Chrysostom in illustrating ethical and philosophical advice. In this article, it is argued that in two passages of the Gospel of Luke (14,7–11; 22,26–27) previously unnoticed analogies can be found that are reminiscent of these ancient similes. Like Epictetus and Dio, Luke uses sympotic and banquet imagery to illustrate a certain ideal behaviour, in particular the humble conduct of Christians and their willingness to serve other believers. In addition to revealing a previously unnoticed aspect of the topic of the meal in Luke’s writings, these similarities between the literary technique of the gospel writer and his pagan contemporaries also shed new light on the literary quality of Luke’s narrative art within the context of ancient Greek literature.

FORMATION OF CULTURE OF THE CITY OF JIZAK

2019 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 62-65
Author(s):  
Dilbar Abdurasulova ◽  
◽  
Akbar Màjidov
Keyword(s):  
Ancient History ◽  
Greco Roman ◽  
History Of ◽  
The City ◽  
Chinese Travelers

This article provide that Uzbekistan is one of the oldest centers of culture, in particular, the works of Greco-Roman historians, Arab and Chinese travelers and geographers serve invaluable source for studying the ancient history of Jizzak

Going Through Hell; ΤΑΡΤΑΡΟΣ in Greco-Roman Culture, Second Temple Judaism, and Philo of Alexandria

2013 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 352-378
Author(s):  
Clint Burnett
Keyword(s):  
Second Temple ◽  
Second Temple Judaism ◽  
Jewish Literature ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Philo Of Alexandria ◽  
Second Temple Period ◽  
Greco Roman ◽  
Literary Sources ◽  
Roman Culture ◽  
Greek Myths

This article questions the longstanding supposition that the eschatology of the Second Temple period was solely influenced by Persian or Iranian eschatology, arguing instead that the literature of this period reflects awareness of several key Greco-Roman mythological concepts. In particular, the concepts of Tartarus and the Greek myths of Titans and Giants underlie much of the treatment of eschatology in the Jewish literature of the period. A thorough treatment of Tartarus and related concepts in literary and non-literary sources from ancient Greek and Greco-Roman culture provides a backdrop for a discussion of these themes in the Second Temple period and especially in the writings of Philo of Alexandria.

The Experience of Poetry

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Derek Attridge
Keyword(s):  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Cultural Practice ◽  
Oral Traditions ◽  
English Renaissance ◽  
Ancient Rome ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Continuity And Change ◽  
Private And Public ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Impact

The question this book addresses is whether, in addition to its other roles, poetry—or a cultural practice we now call poetry—has, across the two-and-a-half millennia from the composition of the Homeric epics to the publication of Ben Jonson’s Works and the death of Shakespeare in 1616, continuously afforded the pleasurable experience we identify with the crafting of language into memorable and moving rhythmic forms. Parts I and II examine the evidence for the performance of the Iliad and the Odyssey and of Ancient Greek lyric poetry, the impact of the invention of writing on Alexandrian verse, the performances of poetry that characterized Ancient Rome, and the private and public venues for poetic experience in Late Antiquity. Part III deals with medieval verse, exploring the oral traditions that spread across Europe in the vernacular languages, the importance of manuscript transmission, the shift from roll to codex and from papyrus to parchment, and the changing audiences for poetry. Part IV explores the achievements of the English Renaissance, from the manuscript verse of Henry VIII’s court to the anthologies and collections of the late Elizabethan period. Among the topics considered in this part are the advent of print, the experience of the solitary reader, the continuing significance of manuscript circulation, the presence of poet figures in pageants and progresses, and the appearance of poets on the Elizabethan stage. Tracking both continuity and change, the book offers a history of what, over these twenty-five centuries, it has meant to enjoy a poem.

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