scholarly journals Sofocle: Magia, Medicina, Religione

2021 ◽  
Vol 57 ◽  
Author(s):  
Enrica Zamperini
Keyword(s):  
Medical Science ◽  
Fifth Century ◽  
Investigation Method ◽  
Greek Thought ◽  
Divine Origin ◽  
First Cause ◽  
The City ◽  
Oedipus At Colonus

In Sophocles’ tragedies the interweaving of medicine, religion and magic produces a lot of meanings and concepts that show the complexity of the Greek thought of the Fifth century. In his tragedies, Sophocles shows his interest both in the magical and religious medicine and in the new Hippocratic medical science. The aim of this paper is to analyze the conceptual and lexical intertwining that reflects this interest, focusing on the character of Oedipus. In fact, Oedipus is the hero who best embodies this duplicity. At the beginning of the drama he assumes a rational investigation method through which he tries to discover Laius’ murderer and then to heal Thebes from the plague that afflicts it. However, his responsibility emerges during the tragedy; Oedipus’ fault has divine origin and makes him the first cause of the evil of the city. In the Oedipus at Colonus, Oedipus’ body is released from the contamination that had made him the origin of the plague and the hero’s body turns into a sort of magic amulet to protect the polis that will guard it when he will be dead.

Se perdre afin de se retrouver : l'importance du passage entre l’absence et la présence dans Œdipe sur la route de Henry Bauchau

2012 ◽  
pp. 116-123
Author(s):  
Alicja Ślusarska
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Meaning Of Life ◽  
The Road ◽  
De Se ◽  
The City ◽  
Oedipus At Colonus

Retracing in his novel the labyrinthine journey that leads Oedipus from the place of his abomination (Thebes) to the city of his future glory (Colonus), Henry Bauchau fills the emptiness between Sophocles’s Oedipus the King and Oedipus at Colonus. Bauchau’s hero, a powerful king, loses everything and stabs his eyes out when the cruel truth about his real identity is revealed. Blind, homeless, devoid of meaning of life, Oedipus leaves on a journey to pass away anywhere. However, his way to death turns out to be, thanks to benevolent presence of others and art’s liberating power, the road to personal elucidation. The story of Bauchau’s Oedipus, who finally recognizes himself as a truly human, is based therefore on the passage between absence and presence, between darkness and lucidity, on the union of contradictions which symbolize the complexity of human nature. This paper attempts to analyse different representations of absence in Bauchau’s novel. Afterwards, the article focuses on the ways which facilitate Oedipus’s road leading from depersonalization to rediscovery of his own identity.

A Wolf in the City

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cinzia Arruzza
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Detailed Analysis ◽  
Moral Psychology ◽  
Fifth Century ◽  
Political Leaders ◽  
Athenian Democracy ◽  
The City ◽  
Shed Light

A Wolf in the City is a study of tyranny and of the tyrant’s soul in Plato’s Republic. It argues that Plato’s critique of tyranny is an intervention in an ancient debate concerning the sources of the crisis of Athenian democracy and the relation between political leaders and the demos in the last decades of the fifth century BCE. The book shows that Plato’s critique of tyranny should not be taken as a veiled critique of the Syracusan tyrannical regime but, rather, as an integral part of his critique of Athenian democracy. The book also offers an in-depth and detailed analysis of all three parts of the tyrant’s soul, and contends that this approach is necessary to both fully appraise the complex psychic dynamics taking place in the description of the tyrannical man and shed light on Plato’s moral psychology and its relation with his political theory.

scholarly journals “His Soul Is Weeping inside That He Cannot Bury the Dead as before.” Plague and Rebellion in Debrecen (Hungary), 1739–1742

Religions ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (12) ◽  
pp. 687
Author(s):  
Ildikó Sz. Kristóf
Keyword(s):  
18Th Century ◽  
Medical Science ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
Criminal Proceedings ◽  
Historical Sources ◽  
Anthropological Study ◽  
Late 18Th Century ◽  
The Social ◽  
Religious Piety ◽  
The City

This is a historical anthropological study of a period of social and religious tensions in a Calvinist city in the Kingdom of Hungary in the first half of the 18th century. The last and greatest plague epidemic to devastate Hungary and Transylvania between cca. 1738 and 1743 led to a clash of different opinions and beliefs on the origin of the plague and ways of fighting it. Situated on the Great Hungarian Plain, the city of Debrecen saw not only frequent violations of the imposed lockdown measures among its inhabitants but also a major uprising in 1739. The author examines the historical sources (handwritten city records, written and printed regulations, criminal proceedings, and other documents) to be found in the Debrecen city archives, as well as the writings of the local Calvinist pastors published in the same town. The purpose of the study is to outline the main directions of interpretation concerning the plague and manifest in the urban uprising. According to the findings of the author, there was a stricter and chronologically earlier direction, more in keeping with local Puritanism in the second half of the 17th century, and there was also a more moderate and later one, more in line with the assumptions and expectations of late 18th-century medical science. While the former set of interpretations seems to have been founded especially on a so-called “internal” cure (i.e., religious piety and repentance), the latter proposed mostly “external” means (i.e., quarantine measures and herbal medicine) to avoid the plague and be rid of it. There seems to have existed, however, a third set of interpretations: that of folk beliefs and practices, i.e., sorcery and magic. According to the files, a number of so-called “wise women” also attempted to cure the plague-stricken by magical means. The third set of interpretations and their implied practices were not tolerated by either of the other two. The author provides a detailed micro-historical analysis of local events and the social and religious discourses into which they were embedded.

scholarly journals Comparing maternal genetic variation across two millennia reveals the demographic history of an ancient human population in southwest Turkey

2016 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 150250 ◽  
Author(s):  
Claudio Ottoni ◽  
Rita Rasteiro ◽  
Rinse Willet ◽  
Johan Claeys ◽  
Peter Talloen ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Demographic History ◽  
Population Decline ◽  
Fifth Century ◽  
Seventh Century ◽  
Human Occupation ◽  
Dna Variation ◽  
Genetic Discontinuity ◽  
History Of ◽  
The City ◽  
Modern Sample

More than two decades of archaeological research at the site of Sagalassos, in southwest Turkey, resulted in the study of the former urban settlement in all its features. Originally settled in late Classical/early Hellenistic times, possibly from the later fifth century BCE onwards, the city of Sagalassos and its surrounding territory saw empires come and go. The Plague of Justinian in the sixth century CE, which is considered to have caused the death of up to a third of the population in Anatolia, and an earthquake in the seventh century CE, which is attested to have devastated many monuments in the city, may have severely affected the contemporary Sagalassos community. Human occupation continued, however, and Byzantine Sagalassos was eventually abandoned around 1200 CE. In order to investigate whether these historical events resulted in demographic changes across time, we compared the mitochondrial DNA variation of two population samples from Sagalassos (Roman and Middle Byzantine) and a modern sample from the nearby town of Ağlasun. Our analyses revealed no genetic discontinuity across two millennia in the region and Bayesian coalescence-based simulations indicated that a major population decline in the area coincided with the final abandonment of Sagalassos, rather than with the Plague of Justinian or the mentioned earthquake.

The plague in Moscow in 1771 and a new coronavirus infection: what they have in common

2021 ◽  
pp. 62-77
Author(s):  
Leonid Anatolievich Denisov ◽  
Mikhail Sergeevich Pakhomov
Keyword(s):  
Mental Health ◽  
Health Care ◽  
Effective Treatment ◽  
Medical Science ◽  
Historical Event ◽  
Prevention Measures ◽  
Physical And Mental Health ◽  
Coronavirus Infection ◽  
The City

The article is devoted to a historical event that occurred 250 years ago in Moscow. The authors draw analogies between the plague epidemic and the current situation associated with a new coronavirus infection, and note what unites these events. It shows the dedicated work of doctors in the conditions of complete ambiguity of the causes and spread of these infections, in the absence of effective treatment methods, what was the behavior of the population, how prevention measures were developed, and what is the role of the authorities of Moscow and St. Petersburg in the fight. How the state of medical science and the level of health care, referred to by economists as the non — material sphere, can affect the physical and mental health of the population and the economic situation of the city, country and the whole World.

The Brain as Treasury and as Aqueduct

2018 ◽  
Vol 2 (4) ◽  
pp. 542-566
Author(s):  
Jessica Wright
Keyword(s):  
Fifth Century ◽  
The Body ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
Material Resources ◽  
Brain Functions ◽  
Motor Nerves ◽  
Architectural Structures ◽  
A Site ◽  
The City ◽  
The Brain

In late antique theological texts, metaphors of the brain were useful tools for talking about forms of governance: cosmic, political, and domestic; failed and successful; interior discipline and social control. These metaphors were grounded in a common philosophical analogy between the body and the city, and were also supported by the ancient medical concept of the brain as the source of the sensory and motor nerves. Often the brain was imagined as a monarch or civic official, governing the body from the head as from an acropolis or royal house. This article examines two unconventional metaphors of the brain in the work of the fifth-century Greco-Syrian bishop Theodoret of Cyrrhus—the brain as a treasure within the acropolis, and the brain as a node in an urban aqueduct—both of which adapt the structural metaphor of governance to reflect the changing political and economic circumstances of imperial Christianity. Drawing upon medical theories of the brain, Theodoret expands upon the conventional governance metaphor of brain function to encompass the economic and the spiritual responsibilities of the bishop-administrator. Just as architectural structures (acropolis, aqueduct) contain and distribute valuable resources (treasure, water) within the city, so the brain accumulates and redistributes nourishing substances (marrow, blood, pneuma) within the body; and just as the brain functions as a site for the transformation of material resources (body) into spiritual goods (mind), so the bishop stands as a point of mediation between earthly wealth and the treasures of heaven.

The Date of the Mosaics of the Rotunda at Thessaloniki

1970 ◽  
Vol 38 ◽  
pp. 183-187 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Vickers
Keyword(s):  
Eighth Century ◽  
Fifth Century ◽  
Second Phase ◽  
Main Body ◽  
The South ◽  
East And West ◽  
The City ◽  
The Church

In a recent important article on the mosaics of the basilica of St. Demetrius at Thessaloniki, R. S. Cormack proposes a list of churches in the city with mosaics ‘for which a late fifth century date must be considered.’ The list comprises the Acheiropoietos basilica, the first phase of the basilica of St. Demetrius, and Hosios David. The purpose of this article is to show that the mosaics of the second phase of the Rotunda (now known as the church of St. George) should be included in Cormack's list.The first thing to note about the Rotunda mosaics is that there has been less than unanimity concerning the date of their construction. Volbach, Lazarev and Cormack, amongst others, follow Dyggve and Torp in dating the mosaics to c. 400 or slightly earlier; Diehl and Dalton dated them to the fifth century, Weigand to the sixth and Holtzinger to the seventh or eighth century, all on largely stylistic grounds. What are obviously needed are some objective dating criteria, and these are to be found, not so much in the mosaics themselves, but rather in the building fabric and the furniture of the converted Rotunda. The conversion of the Rotunda, incidentally, consisted of the blocking of an opaion in the cupola and the addition of an ambulatory, a monumental entrance to the south, an apse to the east (Plate XXIII) and various subsidiary buildings to east and west. The mosaics were placed in the cupola and in the niches which connected the main body of the Rotunda with the ambulatory.

scholarly journals Targeted Advertising for Women in Athenian Vase-Painting of the Fifth Century BCE

Arts ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 52
Author(s):  
Bennett
Keyword(s):  
Subject Matter ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Women's Work ◽  
Fifth Century ◽  
Vase Painting ◽  
Cultural Changes ◽  
Targeted Advertising ◽  
Delian League ◽  
City State ◽  
The City

This paper analyzes the trends in depictions of women in Athenian vase-painting during the 5th century BCE through an examination of approximately 88,000 vases in the Beazley Archive Pottery Database. It found a 15% increase in depictions of women during the 5th century BCE and a diversification in subject matter in which women appear. By considering these trends within the historical context of the hegemonic position of Athens in the Delian League and its wars, this paper proposes that the changes in representations and subject matter denote an expanded marketability of vases to female viewers. As targeted imagery, the images give perceptible recognition to an increased valuation of women’s work and lives at a time when their roles in Athenian society were essential for the continued success of the city-state. This paper suggests that these changes also point to the fact that a greater share of the market was influenced by women, either directly or indirectly, and successful artists carefully crafted targeted advertisements on their wares to attract that group. This paper provides new insights into the relationships between vases and their intended audiences within the context of the cultural changes occurring in Athens itself.

A Note on the Byzantine Palace at Thessaloniki

1971 ◽  
Vol 66 ◽  
pp. 369-371
Author(s):  
Michael Vickers
Keyword(s):  
Fifth Century ◽  
Second Phase ◽  
City Walls ◽  
Image Position ◽  
The City

There are several buildings at Thessaloniki that can be dated to the middle or second half of the fifth century A.D. and which have one feature in common, namely, the characteristic brick stamps illustrated in Figs, 1a and b. Bricks bearing these stamps occur in the following buildings: Acheiropoietos, the first phase of St. Demetrius, the city walls, and the second phase of the Rotunda. The conventional date for the Acheiropoietos basilica is c. 470 and for the first phase of St. Demetrius some time between 450 and 500. The dates usually given to the walls and the Rotunda are c. 380/390, but I have recently shown that the walls ought to be dated to around the middle of the fifth century and that phase two of the Rotunda belongs with the fifth-century churches. I hope to demonstrate that the Byzantine palace was also built at about the same period.

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