General Petrovic, Andrej
Greece and Rome,
04/2024, Letnik:
71, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
In our recent faculty meetings here in Virginia, issues regarding ChatGPT and its uses were often broached, for reasons both good and bad, and this November, as I am writing these lines, turbulences ...in the AI sector are making the news. In papyrology and epigraphy, we have been relying on advanced digital technologies for a while now, and there's no doubt that recent advances in generative AI will soon bear fruit for all text and image-based disciplines in the humanities. Hence, I will open this general review with four exciting books on ancient science and technology.
This volume explores the significance of the physical materials and contexts of inscribed texts in Greek and Roman antiquity and their performative roles in ancient society from an anthropological ...and historical perspective (7th century B.C.E. to 4th century C.E.).
This edited volume explores the intermediality of image and text in Graeco-Roman sculpture. Through its choice of authors, disciplinary backgrounds are deliberately merged in order to bridge the ...traditional gap between archaeologists, epigraphists and philologists, who for a long time studied statues, material inscriptions and literary epigrams within the closely confined borders of their individual disciplines. Through its choice of objects, privileging works of which there are significant material remains, through its inclusion of all kinds of figural-cum-inscriptional designs, ranging from grand sculpture to reliefs and ‘decorative’ marble-objects, and through its methodological emphasis on ‘close viewing’ (and reading!) of individual objects, this volume focuses on the materiality of both sculpture and inscription. This perspective is enriched by two comparative chapters on inscribing Greek vases and Roman walls (graffiti). The intermediality of image and inscription is envisaged from various thematic angles, including the intricacies of combining image and epigram (both materially and in literary projection), the original production and reception of inscribed sculpture in its ‘long life’, the viewing and ‘reading’ of sculpture in a space of movement, the issue of (re-)naming statues, and the image and inscription in its social and gender-historical context.
General Petrovic, Andrej
Greece and Rome,
04/2018, Letnik:
65, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
‘The truth is out there’: the tagline of The X-Files, the iconic spooks'n'aliens TV show from the nineties, is twice borrowed by Jan Kwapisz in his Introduction to Fragments, Holes and Wholes: ...Reconstructing the Ancient World in Theory and Practice, an edited volume resulting from a conference organized at the University of Warsaw in 2014. The epilogue of this volume consists of a re-enactment, and a record, of discussion exchanges between Han Baltussen and S. Douglas Olson, entitled ‘A Conversation on Fragments’, which indeed is partly a conversation on what constitutes a fragment, but also a conversation on issues of the truth – S. Douglas Olson's pointed claim, printed on the last page of the epilogue states that ‘Greek poetic texts…do not matter much.… There may be no truth, but there is methodology’ (406). Well then, if these two statements are anything to go by, there must have been some lively debates taking place in Warsaw in 2014.
General Petrovic, Andrej
Greece and Rome,
04/2018, Letnik:
65, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
‘The truth is out there’: the tagline of
The X-Files
, the iconic spooks'n'aliens TV show from the nineties, is twice borrowed by Jan Kwapisz in his Introduction to
Fragments, Holes and Wholes: ...Reconstructing the Ancient World in Theory and Practice
, an edited volume resulting from a conference organized at the University of Warsaw in 2014. The epilogue of this volume consists of a re-enactment, and a record, of discussion exchanges between Han Baltussen and S. Douglas Olson, entitled ‘A Conversation on Fragments’, which indeed is partly a conversation on what constitutes a fragment, but also a conversation on issues of the truth – S. Douglas Olson's pointed claim, printed on the last page of the epilogue states that ‘Greek poetic texts…do not matter much.… There may be no truth, but there is methodology’ (406). Well then, if these two statements are anything to go by, there must have been some lively debates taking place in Warsaw in 2014.
The commentary is concerned with 15 verse inscriptions, the composition of which was probably commissioned from Simonides. The commentaries on the individual inscriptions, taking their historical, ...literary, and architectural contexts into consideration, follow the discussion of the archaic and classical epigrams in the first part of the book.
General Petrovic, Ivana; Petrovic, Andrej
Greece and Rome,
10/2017, Letnik:
64, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
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.
General Petrovic, Ivana; Petrovic, Andrej
Greece and Rome,
10/2017, Letnik:
64, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
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.
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