(L.P.) Gerson God and Greek philosophy: studies in the early history of natural theology.London: Routledge, 1990. Pp. xi + 340. £40. - (M.L.) Morgan Platonic piety: philosophy and ritual in fourth-century Athens.New Haven: Yale UP, 1990. Pp. x + 273. £25.

1994 ◽  
Vol 114 ◽  
pp. 192-194
Author(s):  
Catherine Osborne
Author(s):  
Anthony Grafton

This chapter examines the centrality of early modern ecclesiastical history, written by Catholics as well as Protestants, in the refinement of research techniques and practices anticipatory of modern scholarship. To Christians of all varieties, getting the Church's early history right mattered. Eusebius's fourth-century history of the Church opened a royal road into the subject, but he made mistakes, and it was important to be able to ferret them out. Saint Augustine was recognized as a sure-footed guide to the truth about the Church's original and bedrock beliefs, but some of the Saint's writings were spurious, and it was important to be able to separate the wheat from the chaff. To distinguish true belief from false, teams of religious scholars gathered documents; the documents in turn were subjected to skeptical scrutiny and philological critique; and sources were compared and cited. The practices of humanistic scholarship, it turns out, came from within the Catholic Church itself as it examined its own past.


1959 ◽  
Vol 49 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 34-38
Author(s):  
A. H. M. Jones

One of the mosaics of the villa at Piazza Armerina, which are generally dated to the early fourth century A.D., depicts in connection with a contest a table on and under which are what are evidently prizes, crowns, palms, and bags labelled , that is 12,500 denarii. I suggest that these bags are the folks, which were at this date and later units of currency. A follis was, as its name implies and as various metrological writers confirm, a purse, and these purses, according to literary and epigraphic sources, contained bronze coins or denarii. The follis is first attested in 308–9, but was probably introduced at an earlier date, somewhere between the great debasement of the antoninianus by Gallienus and the reform of the coinage by Diocletian, when the antoninianus or Aurelian's piece marked XXI were the only coins in circulation and their value had sunk so low that some higher denomination was essential. If this is so, the coins which the follis contained cannot have been denarii, which had ceased to be minted, though the value of the follis was reckoned in denarii.


Author(s):  
M. F. Burnyeat

In the fourth century BCE, Anaxarchus and Monimus compared the world to stage-painting, to express scepticism about sense-perception and the worthlessness of human affairs, respectively. But the comparison traces back to Democritus’ discussion of Anaxagoras’ famous claim, a century earlier, that ‘appearances are a sight of things unseen’. According to Vitruvius, they were influenced by what Agatharchus had written about stage-painting, something that can be assessed properly only by considering the genre of technical treatises and the claims of those who were first to write on a subject. The comparison with phenomenal experience should ultimately be credited to Anaxagoras, though the points that he and Democritus make differ, owing to their different views of how the macroscopic world is related to underlying reality. These texts are thus not about the early history of perspectival painting, but stem from a fifth-century epistemological debate about what, if anything, sense-perception reveals about reality.


1995 ◽  
Vol 3 (17) ◽  
pp. 379-392
Author(s):  
R. L. Ravenscroft

The office of archdeacon has its origins in the early history of the Church. The archdeacon is referred to by St. Jerome and other writers of the fourth century. He was the principal deacon of a local church. The eminent Victorian ecclesiastical lawyer, Sir Robert Phillimore wrote: ‘The primitive offices of the archdeacon may be enumerated under five heads. First, to attend the bishop to the altar and to order all things relating to the inferior clergy and ministrations in the church. Secondly, to assist the diocesan in the distribution and management of the ecclesiastical revenues.’


Antiquity ◽  
1928 ◽  
Vol 2 (7) ◽  
pp. 261-291 ◽  
Author(s):  
D. Newbold

Out of Africa there is always something new, as Aristotle wrote in the fourth century B.C., and although the Libyan Desert is one of the most desolate areas of the world’s surface, recent explorations have shown that there are many archaeological discoveries to be made which will throw considerable light on the early history of peoples and their migrations in North Africa.In the eastern Sahara and in the Libyan Desert, there are still many unexplored tracts, and even, it is probable, several unvisited oases, particularly in the great white spaces on the map which stretch southwest and southeast of the Kufara oasis-group.


1992 ◽  
Vol 85 (6) ◽  
pp. 736
Author(s):  
John E. Rexine ◽  
L. P. Gerson

Author(s):  
Robert Wiśniewski

When the cult of relics developed in the mid-fourth century, very few tombs of saints whose remains were to be venerated in the centuries to come had been identified. This chapter presents the early history of the search for and finding of such graves, which started in the last decades of the fourth century. It seeks to explain the reasons which lay behind this process, focusing both on the needs of the congregation and the role of the discovery in church politics. It also analyses the sense of the literary pattern of inventio and tries to find out how much this pattern reflected reality. Finally, it presents a case study: a literary dossier of the discovery of the relics of Gervasius and Protasius by Bishop Ambrose of Milan in 386.


Author(s):  
Michael Frede

This article sheds light on Aristotle's own understanding of philosophy. It tries to give an account of how Aristotle seeks to determine and to explain the origin of philosophy and to account for its early development. It focuses on his account of the history of philosophy from its beginnings down to his own time in Metaphysics 1.3–10, in particular 1.3–6. It derives a good deal of knowledge about early Greek philosophy directly from Aristotle. A great deal of the information provided by later ancient sources itself is derived from Aristotle and his students, like Theophrastus or Eudemus. The evidential value of this information is rather high. It also is clear that Aristotle had his own particular perspective on the history of early Greek philosophy, and that his students largely shared his general view of the early history of Greek philosophy.


1927 ◽  
Vol 10 ◽  
pp. 23-35 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. A. Cordingley ◽  
I. A. Richmond

The early history of the Augusteo, as the Mausoleum of Augustus is now called, wins little space in contemporary literature. Among classical writers first Strabo and then Suetonius tell us that Augustus built for himself and his family, between the Via Flaminia and the Tiber, this huge circular tumulus, crowned with evergreens, surmounted by his own effigy in bronze, and retained by a lofty base of white stone. And these accounts supplement one another in detail, Suetonius noting that the work was done in 28 B.C, and thereby causing one to wonder whether Antony's fate and the conspiracy of Lepidus set Augustus about building his own last resting-place; while Strabo mentions that anustrinum of similar stone, with an iron railing in a circle round it, stood not far away. The building was ready by 23 B.C, when Vergil spoke 4 of it as new. Many people— we know of fourteen great ones— lay within; but the last Emperor to be buried there was Nerva, and then the tomb, entrusted to a procurator's care, was only opened for a short time to house, in the part allotted to Lucius and Gaius, the remains of Julia Domna. In the fourth century it found a place in the list of City monuments, and Ammianus Marcellinus pauses to state that two obelisks in front of it were later additions. After that classical history tells no more of the building or of its fate.


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