A History of Ancient Greek: From the Beginnings to Late Antiquity (review)

2010 ◽  
Vol 103 (2) ◽  
pp. 261-262
Author(s):  
Pura Nieto Hernández
Author(s):  
Derek Attridge

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.


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.


2017 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 273-293
Author(s):  
Matteo Nanni

AbstractDuring the Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, different strategies of visualizing music were adopted. In this article the history and the development of music-related diagrams is put into the larger context of a cultural history of visualization. The philosophical discussion on notational iconicity and diagrammatology, known as ‘Schriftbildlichkeit’, supplies a theoretical background for the description of the music diagrams offered here. The basic question is how visuality and musical graphic (diagrams and notation) interact focusing on a specific visual logic related to musical issues. After a short introduction to Sybille Krämer‘s concept of diagram and after working out some main characteristic of medieval diagrams, a selection of music related diagrams is depicted. The sources presented range from ancient Greek and Latin descriptions of musical diagrams (Aristoxenus of Tarentum, Phaenias of Eresus, Bakchios and Vitruvius) to the wing diagrams of Aristides Quintilianus and Martianus Capella, the structural graphics by Boethius and concludes with the notational diagrams in the Carolingian music treatises (Musica and Scolica Enchiriadis).


Figurines ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 1-10
Author(s):  
Jaś Elsner

This book has three purposes. First, it is an attempt to put on the table the category of the figurine as a key conceptual and material problematic in the art history of antiquity. It does so through comparative juxtaposition of close-focused papers drawn from deep art-historical engagement with specific ancient cultures, all but the last from the first millennium BCE; the cultures addressed being ancient Greek, ancient Chinese, Mesoamerican before the arrival of Europeans, and Roman in late antiquity. Second, in doing so, and alongside other books in this series by the same authors, it makes a claim for comparative conversation across the disciplines that constitute the art history of the ancient world, through finding categories and models of discourse that may offer fertile ground for comparison and antithesis....


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