In the early fourth century, a lawyer and public figure from the Nile valley city of Hermopolis made a six-month business related journey to Antioch. The day to day details are preserved on papyrus ...documents and offer a remarkable record of this journey, covering everything from distances traveled to daily food purchases, from medicinal supplies to fees paid for services.In this book, the classicist and historian John Matthews translates these important documents and places them in the wider context of the social history of the Graeco-Roman world. The memoranda relating to Theophanes' journey are presented within a historical narrative that offers an array of revelations on diet, travel, social relations, and other fascinating topics. This book creates an unprecedented account of daily life in the years preceding Emperor Constantine's rise to power in the eastern provinces of the Roman empire.
Riding the Wind with Liezi Ronnie Littlejohn, Jeffrey Dippmann / Ronnie Littlejohn, Jeffrey Dippmann
2012, 2011
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The Liezi is the forgotten classic of Daoism. Along with the Laozi (Daodejing) and the Zhuangzi, it's been considered a Daoist masterwork since the mid- eighth century, yet unlike those well-read ...works, the Liezi is little known and receives scant scholarly attention. Nevertheless, the Liezi is an important text that sheds valuable light on the early history of Daoism, particularly the formative period of sectarian Daoism. We do not know exactly what shape the original text took, but what remains is replete with fantastic characters, whimsical tales, paradoxical aphorisms, and philosophically sophisticated reflection on the nature of the world and humanity's place within it. Ultimately, the Liezi sees the world as one of change and indeterminacy. Arguing for the Liezi 's historical, philosophical, and literary significance, the contributors to this volume offer a fresh look at this text, using contemporary approaches and providing novel insights. The volume is unique in its attention to both philosophical and religious perspectives.
This article discusses three textual problems in Servius’ commentary on Virgil (Serv. on Aen. 11.741; Ecl. 2.58; Ecl. 4.4). In two notes a new conjecture is proposed; in one passage a transmitted ...reading, so far neglected by earlier editors, is supported.
Quintus Smyrnaeus Baumbach, Manuel; Bar, Silvio; Dummler, Nicola
2012, 2007, 2007-11-30, Letnik:
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Odprti dostop
The "Events after Homer", described by Quintus Smyrnaeus in the third century AD in his Greek epic Posthomerica, are an attempt to bridge the gap between the Iliad and the Odyssey , and to combine ...the various scattered reports of the battle for Troy into a single tale: the fate of Achilles, Ajax, Paris and the Amazon Penthesileia, the intervention of Neoptolemos and the story from the Trojan horse to the destruction of the city. The volume presented here summarizes the results of the first international conference on Quintus Smyrnaeus.
This book, the first monograph in English on Quintus Smyrnaeus' Posthomerica in over a century, offers a comprehensive study of the poem's poetics and narrative, with a specific focus on the ...interaction between its Homeric intertextuality and Late Antique influences.
In this pioneering effort, noted Jewish philosopher Eugene B. Borowitz opens up the rules by which the language-game of aggadic discourse is carried on in the Talmud, the foundational document of ...rabbinic and all later Judaism. These findings are compared with the aggadah (the realm in which almost all explicit statements about classic Jewish religious belief occur) of some other early rabbinic writings. Two issues drive Borowitz's inquiry: What, if anything, constrains the unprecedented freedom of this realm? and How might one positively characterize the aggadah? Borowitz introduces us to the rabbis not only in their amazing profundity, but also in their unguarded humanity. He concludes with a reflection on how this old Jewish language-game should influence contemporary Jewish thought, and, perhaps, other religious thought as well.
The Liber Regularum, written by Tyconius in the Fourth Century A.D., was the first system of biblical interpretation proposed by a Latin theologian. Augustine was very interested in this work and ...included an extraordinary summation of it in his De doctrina christiana. Although this treatment insured the preservation of the work and its lasting fame, Augustine's summary became better known than the original. Pamela Bright's The Book of Rules of Tyconius: Its Purpose and Inner Logic reintroduces this neglected classic of early church literature. Bright asserts that although Augustine was greatly influenced by the Liber Regularum, his philosophical differences caused him to misunderstand its meaning. Bright reexamines the meaning of "prophecy" and "rule" from Tyconius's perspective and reveals that the purpose of the book was not to provide a general guide to scriptural interpretation, but rather a way to interpret apocalyptic texts. She cites Tyconius's intense concern with evil in the church as the genesis of his interest in the apocalypse and subsequently the meaning of the scripture concerning it. Tyconius speaks of the "seven mystical rules" of scripture that with the grace of the Holy Spirit reveal the true meaning of prophecy. If an interpreter follows the "logic" of these rules, the nature of the church as composed by both good and evil membership is revealed. Bright argues that Tyconius was not illogical or incompetent in the work's composition as many critics have claimed but rather that he organized his material in a concentric pattern so that Rule Four, the center of the seven rules, is also the central development of his theory. Of interest to theologians, students of biblical interpretation and of Augustine, The Book of Rules of Tyconius focuses attention upon a work that had great influence on the understanding of the nature of the church, on interpreting scripture, and its meaning for the Church of its day.
The paper intends to investigate to what extent the attention of the ancient commentators to the antiquarian and theological erudition of Virgil can provide an accessus useful to penetrate some ...fundamental strands of meaning of the Virgilian poem. The analysis deals mostly with the scholia of Servius and Servius Danielis concerning the Penates of Troy. Starting with the exegesis of the expression Penatibus et magnis dis (Aen. 3.12 and 8.679), we discuss the various antiquarian interpretations witnessed in the stratified Virgilian exegesis, in relation to the relevance of the ‘theme of greatness’ in the overall design of the Aeneid
Late Antiquity witnessed intense scholarly activity on Virgil's poems. Aelius Donatus’ commentary, the twelve-book Interpretationes Vergilianae composed by the fourth-century or fifth-century ...rhetorician Tiberius Claudius Donatus and other sets of scholia testify to the richness of late ‘Virgilian literature’. Servius’ full-scale commentary on Virgil's poetry (early fifth century) marked a watershed in the history of the reception of Virgil and in Latin criticism in general. Primarily ‘the instrument of a teacher’, Servius’ commentary was intended to teach students and readers to read and write good Latin through Virgil. Lauded by Macrobius for his ‘learning’ (doctrina) and ‘modesty’ (uerecundia), Servius attained supremacy as both a literary critic and an interpreter of Virgil, the master of Latin poetry. His auctoritas had a profound impact on later Virgilian erudition. As Cameron notes, Servius’ commentary ‘eclipsed all competition, even Donatus’. Significantly, it permeated non-Virgilian scholarship from the fifth century onwards. The earliest bodies of scholia on Lucan, the tenth-century or eleventh-century Commenta Bernensia and Adnotationes super Lucanum and the scholia uetustiora on Juvenal contain material that can be traced as far back as Servius’ scholarly masterpiece.
We are ruled by judges whom we know, we enjoy the benefits | Of peace and war, as if the warrior Quirinus, | As if peaceful Numa were governing (Claud. IV Cons. Hon. 491–3).
With these words the poet ...Claudian lauds the Emperor Honorius on the occasion of his fourth consulship in 398 by comparing him to Rome's deified founder, Romulus-Quirinus, and to Numa Pompilius, its second king, who was proverbial for wisdom and piety. Claudian's panegyric stands in a long literary tradition in which the legendary Roman kings were depicted as models of statesmanship. This exemplary tradition left its mark on a broad array of late antique works, including historical compendia such as the pseudo-Aurelian De uiris illustribus, which narrates the kings’ deeds as soldiers and statesmen, and the writings of antiquarians such as Macrobius and Servius, who collected information on the kings’ invention of cults and calendars. Servius’ interest in the kings implies that they featured in the teaching provided by other late antique grammatici as well, and thus that most literate Latin-speakers would have had some knowledge of their deeds. Advanced education in rhetoric likewise drew on Virgil and other school texts for historical exempla including Romulus and Numa, who appear in panegyrics and in brief histories, such as Eutropius’ Breviary, that probably served as reference texts for the political elite. The kings thus loomed large in Roman perceptions of the founding of their empire, which began with the heroic Romulus, was strengthened by Numa's establishment of the Roman cultic system, and was secured by the later kings’ political and military successes.
