Stealing Helen

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lowell Edmunds
Keyword(s):  
Detailed Comparison ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Old Irish ◽  
Divine Essence ◽  
Trojan War ◽  
Beautiful Woman ◽  
Helen Of Troy ◽  
Eye Opening ◽  
The Many ◽  
Many Sources

It's a familiar story: a beautiful woman is abducted and her husband journeys to recover her. This story's best-known incarnation is also a central Greek myth—the abduction of Helen that led to the Trojan War. Stealing Helen surveys a vast range of folktales and texts exhibiting the story pattern of the abducted beautiful wife and makes a detailed comparison with the Helen of Troy myth. This book shows that certain Sanskrit, Welsh, and Old Irish texts suggest there was an Indo-European story of the abducted wife before the Helen myth of the Iliad became known. Investigating Helen's status in ancient Greek sources, the book argues that if Helen was just one trope of the abducted wife, the quest for Helen's origin in Spartan cult can be abandoned, as can the quest for an Indo-European goddess who grew into the Helen myth. The book explains that Helen was not a divine essence but a narrative figure that could replicate itself as needed, at various times or places in ancient Greece. It recovers some of these narrative Helens, such as those of the Pythagoreans and of Simon Magus, which then inspired the Helens of the Faust legend and Goethe. This book offers a detailed critique of prevailing views behind the “real” Helen and presents an eye-opening exploration of the many sources for this international mythical and literary icon.

scholarly journals Helenê kinêmatographikê; or, Is this the face that launched a thousand films?

2016 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 215-257
Author(s):  
Martin M. Winkler
Keyword(s):  
Ancient Greece ◽  
Trojan War ◽  
Word And Image ◽  
Beautiful Woman ◽  
Helen Of Troy ◽  
The Face

In ancient Greece and Rome, Helen of Troy was the most beautiful woman among mortals. Her beauty, an almost divine quality, made Helen immortal. Its praise was an integral part of Greek and Roman letters. The cinema has eagerly followed in the footsteps of classical and later authors and artists by retelling her story. Beautiful actresses have variously portrayed her as unhappy wife of Menelaus, romantic lover of Paris, and ruinous cause of the Trojan War. This paper pays homage to Helen’s beauty by presenting, in word and image, her most notable screen incarnations from 1911 to 2013.

How Dead Languages Work

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Coulter H. George
Keyword(s):  
Old English ◽  
Opportunity To Learn ◽  
Biblical Hebrew ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Old Irish ◽  
Distinctive Features ◽  
Linguistic Patterns ◽  
Rig Veda ◽  
Lost In Translation ◽  
Oral Composition

What could a Greek poet or Roman historian say in their language that’s lost in translation? After all, different languages have different personalities, and this is especially clear with languages of the ancient and medieval world. This book celebrates six such languages—Ancient Greek, Latin, Old English, Sanskrit, Old Irish, and Biblical Hebrew—by first introducing readers to their most distinctive features, then showing how these linguistic traits play out in short excerpts from actual ancient texts. It explores, for instance, how Homer’s Greek shows signs of oral composition, how Horace can achieve striking poetic effects through interlaced word order in his Latin, and how the poet of Beowulf achieves a remarkable intensity of expression through the resources of Old English. But these are languages that have shared connections as well. Readers will see how the Sanskrit of the Rig Veda uses words that come from roots found also in English, how turns of phrase characteristic of the Hebrew Bible found their way into English, and that even as unusual a language as Old Irish still builds on common Indo-European linguistic patterns. Since most people don’t have the opportunity to learn these languages, the book throughout aims to give such readers an aesthetic appreciation of just how rich and varied they are.

Precursors to Public Choice

2019 ◽  
pp. 796-816
Author(s):  
Iain McLean
Keyword(s):  
Public Choice ◽  
Social Choice ◽  
Choice Theory ◽  
Social Choice Theory ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
The Social ◽  
Mathematical Skill ◽  
The Many ◽  
Selection Of

This chapter reviews the many appearances, disappearances, and reappearances of axiomatic thought about social choice and elections since the era of ancient Greek democracy. Social choice is linked to the wider public-choice movement because both are theories of agency. Thus, just as the first public-choice theorists include Hobbes, Hume, and Madison, so the first social-choice theorists include Pliny, Llull, and Cusanus. The social-choice theory of agency appears in many strands. The most important of these are binary vs. nonbinary choice; aggregation of judgement vs. aggregation of opinion; and selection of one person vs. selection of many people. The development of social choice required both a public-choice mindset and mathematical skill.

scholarly journals Children’s ability to edit their memories when learning about the environment from credible and noncredible websites

2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Kim P. Roberts ◽  
Katherine R. Wood ◽  
Breanne E. Wylie
Keyword(s):  
Environmental Sustainability ◽  
Choice Test ◽  
Multiple Choice Test ◽  
Sources Of Information ◽  
Older Children ◽  
Inaccurate Information ◽  
The Many ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Many Sources ◽  
Website Content

AbstractOne of the many sources of information easily available to children is the internet and the millions of websites providing accurate, and sometimes inaccurate, information. In the current investigation, we examined children’s ability to use credibility information about websites when learning about environmental sustainability. In two studies, children studied two different websites and were tested on what they had learned a week later using a multiple-choice test containing both website items and new distracters. Children were given either no information about the websites or were told that one of the websites (the noncredible website) contained errors and they should not use any information from that website to answer the test. In both studies, children aged 7- to 9-years reported information from the noncredible website even when instructed not to, whereas the 10- to 12-year-olds used the credibility warning to ‘edit out’ information that they had learned from the noncredible website. In Study 2, there was an indication that the older children spontaneously assessed the credibility of the website if credibility markers were made explicit. A plausible explanation is that, although children remembered information from the websites, they needed explicit instruction to bind the website content with the relevant source (the individual websites). The results have implications for children’s learning in an open-access, digital age where information comes from many sources, credible and noncredible. Education in credibility evaluation may enable children to be critical consumers of information thereby resisting misinformation provided through public sources.

scholarly journals A new noise detected in the ocean

2007 ◽  
Vol 87 (5) ◽  
pp. 1255-1256 ◽  
Author(s):  
Angel Guerra ◽  
Xavier Martinell ◽  
Angel F. González ◽  
Michael Vecchione ◽  
Joaquin Gracia ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Ambient Noise ◽  
Sound Production ◽  
Biological Activities ◽  
Physical Processes ◽  
Defensive Strategy ◽  
Reflection And Refraction ◽  
Turbulent Pressure ◽  
In The Wild ◽  
The Many ◽  
Many Sources

Many observers have noted that the sea is full of loud sounds, both ongoing and episodic. Among the many sources of natural ambient noise are wave action, physical processes such as undersea earthquakes, and biological activities of shrimps, fish, dolphins and whales. Despite interest by acoustics experts, sound production by cephalopods has been reported only twice, both involving squid. The ‘faint poppings’ produced were thought to result from fluttering of the thin external lips of the squid's funnel while water is being expelled through it. Otherwise, no information is available on cephalopod sounds. Here we present a noise produced by a stressed common octopus. The event was filmed and recorded in the wild. The hypothesis we offer to explain how this sound was produced is cavitation, which has been documented in several biological systems. In our case, the water expelled through the funnel may have created a jet with a velocity so high that the turbulent pressure dropped locally below the vapour pressure of the water. Seawater contains gas microbubbles, which will grow in size when they are entrained in the region of low pressure. Subsequently, the bubbles collapse violently when pressure rises again. The sound produced by the octopus is like a gunshot, and distinct lights observed at the same time contradict the existence of a simple pressure wave and point to the possible presence of gas-bubbles, which would change the light intensity by reflection and refraction of the sunlight. This behaviour seems to be a defensive strategy to escape from vibration-sensitive predators.

scholarly journals Use of text mining techniques for unsupervised organization of digital procedural acts

2018 ◽  
Vol 25 (4) ◽  
pp. 74
Author(s):  
Alfredo Silveira Araújo Neto ◽  
Marcos Negreiros
Keyword(s):  
Data Mining ◽  
Text Mining ◽  
Text Documents ◽  
Digital Format ◽  
Large Databases ◽  
Context Data ◽  
Self Discovery ◽  
The Many ◽  
Many Sources ◽  
And Storage

The rapid advances in technologies related to the capture and storage of data in digital format have allowed to organizations the accumulation of a volume of information extremely high, constituted a higher proportion of data in unstructured format, represented by texts. However, it is noted that the retrieval of useful information from these large repositories has been a very challenging activity. In this context, data mining is presented as a self-discovery process that acts on large databases and enables the knowledge extraction from raw text documents. Among the many sources of textual documents are electronic diaries of justice, which are intended to make public officially all the acts of the Judiciary. Despite the publication in digital form has provided improvements represented by the removal of imperfections related to divulgation at printed format, it is observed that the application of data mining methods could render more rapid analysis of its contents. In this sense, this article establishes a tool capable of automatically grouping and categorizing digital procedural acts, based on the evaluation of text mining techniques applied to groups determination activity. In addition, the strategy of defining the descriptors of the groups, that is usually conducted based on the most frequent words in the documents, was evaluated and remodeled in order to use, instead of words, the most regularly identified concepts in the texts.

The Physical Cosmos: Aristotelian Dialectics

2018 ◽  
pp. 76-109
Author(s):  
Anthony Cordingley
Keyword(s):  
World View ◽  
Narrative Structure ◽  
Ancient World ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Trinity College Dublin ◽  
Creative Transformation ◽  
Cosmic Order ◽  
Spatio Temporal ◽  
The Many ◽  
The Impact

This chapter explores the impact of the dialectics of the Ancient world after Plato upon Beckett’s French novels and the peculiar set of relations between characters and their physical environment in How It Is. It accounts for the presence of Aristotelian ideas of cosmic order, syllogism, space and time. Beckett’s study of formal logic as a student at Trinity College, Dublin and his private study of philosophy in 1932 is examined in this light; particularly his “Philosophy Notes,” along with further sources for his knowledge. The Aristotelian world view of his “I” is shown to be confronted with a set of relations resembling those of the Ancient Greek Stoics. The materiality of spatio-temporal relations in How It Is and the metaphysical coordinates between the “I”, its cosmos and any transcendent other are interrogated. The dialectic between Aristotelian and Stoic physics and metaphysics in How It Is emerges as a conceptual framework for exploring many of the novel’s contradictions, as well as the many confusions and digressions of its narrator/narrated. Beckett’s creative transformation of this ancient dialectic is shown, furthermore, to lead him to formal innovations, such as the novel’s continuous present tense and its complex narrative structure.

‘Do you Think you’re Clever? Solve this Riddle, then!’ The Comic Side of Byzantine Enigmatic Poetry

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simone Beta
Keyword(s):  
Fifth Century ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Old Comedy ◽  
The Many

‘Comic’ is not an adjective one would normally use in connection with or ancient Greek Byzantine riddles. Yet Greek riddles began to show their comic side after the fifth century BCE, when they became typical sympotic pastimes. At some point, ainigmata turned into griphoi and, according to the definition given by the Peripatetic philosopher Clearchus of Soli, became a ‘a problem put in jest’. The comicality we see in in the many griphoi Athenaeus took from Attic comedy in the tenth book of the Deipnosophists is more evident, and less dangerous; and it is generally agreed that such drollery is mostly absent from Byzantine riddles. A survey shows how the unknown Byzantine authors who took pleasure in composing these little conundrums were even able, in some circumstances, to jest with Holy Scripture and to linger on topics more suitable for Old Comedy.

The Periodic System

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eric Scerri
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Platonic Solid ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Platonic Solids ◽  
System P ◽  
Chemical Inertness ◽  
Dimensional Shape ◽  
The Many

In ancient Greek times, philosophers recognized just four elements—earth, water, air, and fire—all of which survive in the astrological classification of the 12 signs of the zodiac. At least some of these philosophers believed that these different elements consisted of microscopic components with differing shapes and that this explained the various properties of the elements. These shapes or structures were believed to be in the form of Platonic solids (figure 1.1) made up entirely of the same two-dimensional shape. The Greeks believed that earth consisted of microscopic cubic particles, which explained why it was difficult to move earth. Meanwhile, the liquidity of water was explained by an appeal to the smoother shape possessed by the icosahedron, while fire was said to be painful to the touch because it consisted of the sharp particles in the form of tetrahedra. Air was thought to consist of octahedra since that was the only remaining Platonic solid. A little later, a fifth Platonic solid, the dodecahedron, was discovered, and this led to the proposal that there might be a fifth element or “quintessence,” which also became known as ether. Although the notion that elements are made up of Platonic solids is regarded as incorrect from a modern point of view, it is the origin of the very fruitful notion that macroscopic properties of substances are governed by the structures of the microscopic components of which they are comprised. These “elements” survived well into the Middle Ages and beyond, augmented with a few others discovered by the alchemists, the precursors of modern-day chemists. One of the many goals of the alchemists seems to have been the transmutation of elements. Not surprisingly, perhaps, the particular transmutation that most enticed them was the attempt to change the base metal lead into the noble metal gold, whose unusual color, rarity, and chemical inertness have made it one of the most treasured substances since the dawn of civilization.

Quid

Virtual Words ◽  
2010 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathon Keats
Keyword(s):  
Space Station ◽  
Publication Date ◽  
Old Irish ◽  
Space Tourism ◽  
Paper Money ◽  
Bank Of England ◽  
The Galaxy ◽  
New Space ◽  
The Many ◽  
Family Vacation

Of the many challenges facing tourism in space, one of the least obvious is the problem of intergalactic monetary exchange. Far more pressing to the nascent industry are issues such as extraterrestrial transportation and gravity-free accommodations. Charles Simonyi’s twelve-day trip to the International Space Station in 2007 cost him $25 million, more than the budget of an average family vacation. Yet years before even the most optimistic technophiles expect space tourism to be more than a fifteen-minute suborbital joyride on Virgin Galactic, a currency has been established, initially trading on Travelex for $12.50. It’s called the quid. Quid is an acronym for “quasi-universal intergalactic denomination.” Of course it’s also an appropriation of British slang for the pound sterling, and it is this association with the common term for a familiar item that gives it resonance, an evocative word for a provocative concept. One might have expected the new space money to repurpose the official name of an existing currency. The British and French have preferred that strategy when they’ve colonized other countries, and even Douglas Adams, for all his creativity, fell upon the formula when he coined the Altairian dollar in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. But colonization robs a place of its exoticism. And if space tourism has any purpose, it’s escapism in extremis. Unlike the pound or the dollar, the quid has no inherent allegiances. The word has also been used at various stages as slang for the shilling, the sovereign, and the guinea, as well as the euro and the old Irish punt. Even the origin is “obscure,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary, which cites a characteristic early use of the word in Thomas Shadwell’s Squire of Alsatia: “Let me equip thee with a Quid.” The 1688 publication date of Shadwell’s play overrules one popular folk etymology, which claims that quid is short for Quidhampton, location of a mill that produced paper money for the Bank of England. The Bank of England wasn’t established until 1694.

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