Auswahl der wissenschaftlichen Literatur zum Thema „Utopias - greek texts - early works“

AbstractThe aim of this study is to explore the nature of Turkish literary utopias written in the early republican period. As a study in history and literature, it contextualizes the ideal social order envisioned in these works. My main argument is twofold: First, I claim that these works reflect Kemalism as an ideal system. They presuppose that the present regime has in itself the dynamics that enables an ideal social order and that this ideal social order can be attained by getting rid of the practical irregularities that prevent a full-fledged realization of the present regime. With these presuppositions, they serve the efforts to turn Kemalism into a hegemonic discourse. Secondly, through a detailed analysis of these texts, I argue that Kemalism has not been a monolithic discourse, but rather that it contained different and sometimes competing currents.

We present the techniques of various operations on the larynx and pharynx (incision of abscesses of the tonsils, tonsillectomy, tracheotomy, uvulectomy, and removal of foreign bodies) found in the Greek texts of Byzantine physicians. The techniques of these operations were the first to be so meticulously described and were compiled from the texts, now lost, of the ancient Greek physicians. These medical texts, which followed and enriched the Hippocratic, Hellenistic, Roman, and Galenic medical traditions, later influenced medieval European surgery, either directly through Latin translations or indirectly through works of Arab physicians.

Throughout antiquity memory played a central role in the production, publication, and transmission of texts. Greek mnemotechnics started developing as early as the 6th century bc and by the 2nd century bc memory established itself as a formal division of rhetoric. Techniques of memorization are described at length in ancient rhetorical or scientific works (such as Aristotle’s De memoria), or alluded to in literary works. The theory of mnemotechnics was concerned with how to learn virtually any text by heart, but there is no systematic discussion of what makes a text intrinsically easy to memorize, nor of how to compose in a memory-friendly manner. However, passing remarks scattered throughout ancient Greek texts show that some awareness existed that certain stylistic and structural features improve the memorability of texts. A systematic study of these primary sources reveals that (a) memorization was not regarded as specifically functional to oral performance alone, and (b) the Greek literary and technical writers consciously looked at the mnemonic advantage of stylistic and structural features only when they wanted to favour the memory of the audience, not that of the performer.

The historical research of the illustrated Nuremberg Chronicle [Schedelsche Weltchronik (English: Schedel’s World Chronicle)] of Hartmann Schedel com­prises the complex historical knowledge about numerous woodcuts which pre­sent views of various cities important in the world’s history, e.g. Jerusalem, Constantinople, or the European ones such as: Rome, some Italian, German or Polish cities e.g. Wrocław and Cracow; some Hungarian and some Czech Republic cities. Researchers have made a serious study to recognize certain constructions in the woodcuts; they indicated the conservative and contractual architecture, the existing places and the unrealistic (non-existent) places. The results show that there is a common detail in all the views – the defensive wall round each of the described cities. However, in reality, it may not have existed in some cities during the lifetime of the authors of the woodcuts. As for some further details: behind the walls we can see feudal castles on the hills shown as strongholds. Within the defensive walls there are numerous buildings with many towers typical for the Middle Ages and true-to-life in certain ways of building the cities. Schematically drawn buildings surrounded by the ring of defensive walls indicate that the author used certain patterns based on the previously created panoramic views. This article is an attempt of making analogical comparisons of the cities in medieval painting. The Author of the article presents Roman mosaics and the miniature painting e.g. the ones created in the scriptorium in Reichenau. Since the beginning of 14th century Italian painters such as: Duccio di Buoninsegna, Giotto di Bondone, Simone Martini and Ambrogio Lorenzetti painted parts of the cities or the entire monumental panoramas in various compositions and with various meanings. One defining rule in this painting concerned the definitions of the cities given by Saint Isidore of Seville, based on the rules which he knew from the antique tradition. These are: urbs – the cities full of architecture and buildings but uninhabited or civita – the city, the living space of the human life, build-up space, engaged according to the law, kind of work and social hierarchy. The tra­dition of both ways of describing the city is rooted in Italy. This article indicates the particular meaning of Italian painting in distributing the image of the city – as the votive offering. The research conducted by Chiara Frugoni and others indica­ted the meaning of the city images in the painting of various forms of panegyrics created in high praise of cities, known as laude (Lat.). We can find the examples of them rooted in the Roman tradition of mosaics, e.g. in San Apollinare Nuovo in Ravenna. They present both palatium and civitas. The medieval Italian painting, especially the panel painting, presents the city structure models which are uninha­bited and deprived of any signs of everyday life. The models of cities – urbs, are presented as votive offerings devoted to their patron saints, especially to Virgin Mary. The city shaped as oval or sinusoidal rings surrounded by the defensive walls resembled a container filled with buildings. Only few of them reflected the existing cities and could mainly be identified thanks to the inscriptions. The most characteristic examples were: the fresco of Taddeo di Bartolo in Palazzo Publico in Siena, which presented the Dominican Order friar Ambrogio Sansedoni holding the model of his city – Siena, with its most recognizable building - the Cathedral dedicated to the Assumption of Mary. The same painter, referred to as the master painter of the views of the cities as the votive offerings, painted the Saint Antilla with the model of Montepulciano in the painting from 1401 for the Cathedral devoted to the Assumption of Mary in Montepulciano. In the painting made by T. di Bartolo, the bishop of the city of Gimignano, Saint Gimignano, presents the city in the shape of a round lens surrounded by defence walls with numerous church towers and the feudal headquarters characteristic for the city. His dummer of the city is pyramidally-structured, the hills are mounted on the steep slopes reflecting the analogy to the topography of the city. We can also find the texts of songs, laude (Lat.) and panegyrics created in honour of the cities and their rulers, e.g. the texts in honour of Milan, Bonvesin for La Riva, known in Europe at that time. The city – Arcadia (utopia) in the modern style. Hartman Schedel, as a bibliophile and a scholar, knew the texts of medieval writers and Italian art but, as an ambitious humanist, he could not disregard the latest, contemporary trends of Renaissance which were coming from Nuremberg and from Italian ci­ties. The views of Arcadia – the utopian city, were rapidly developing, as they were of great importance for the rich recipient in the beginning of the modern era overwhelmed by the early capitalism. It was then when the two opposites were combined – the shepherd and the knight, the Greek Arcadia with the medie­val city. The reception of Virgil’s Arcadia in the medieval literature and art was being developed again in the elite circles at the end of 15th century. The cultural meaning of the historical loci, the Greek places of the ancient history and the memory of Christianity constituted the essence of historicism in the Renaissance at the courts of the Comnenos and of the Palaiologos dynasty, which inspired the Renaissance of the Latin culture circle. The pastoral idleness concept came from Venice where Virgil’s books were published in print in 1470, the books of Ovid: Fasti and Metamorphoses were published in 1497 and Sannazaro’s Arcadia was published in 1502, previously distributed in his handwriting since 1480. Literature topics presented the historical works as memoria, both ancient and Christian, composed into the images. The city maps drawn by Hartmann Schedel, the doctor and humanist from Nurnberg, refer to the medieval images of urbs, the woodcuts with the cities, known to the author from the Italian painting of the greatest masters of the Trecenta period. As a humanist he knew the literature of the Renaissance of Florence and Venice with the Arcadian themes of both the Greek and the Roman tradition. The view of Constantinople in the context of the contemporary political situation, is presented in a series of monuments of architecture, with columns and defensive walls, which reminded of the history of the city from its greatest time of Constantine the Great, Justinian I and the Comnenus dynasty. Schedel’s work of art is the sum of the knowledge written down or painted. It is also the result of the experiments of new technology. It is possible that Schedel was inspired by the hymns, laude, written by Psellos in honour of Constantinople in his elaborate ecphrases as the panegyrics for the rulers of the Greek dynasty – the Macedonians. Already in that time, the Greek ideal of beauty was reborn, both in literature and in fine arts. The illustrated History of the World presented in Schedel’s woodcuts is given to the recipients who are educated and to those who are anonymous, in the spirit of the new anthropology. It results from the nature of the woodcut reproduc­tion, that is from the way of copying the same images. The artist must have strived to gain the recipients for his works as the woodcuts were created both in Latin and in German. The collected views were supposed to transfer historical, biblical and mythological knowledge in the new way of communication.

During the last century there have been many discoveries that have reshaped our understanding of early monastic texts and their authorship. The writer of these two substantial volumes proposes new ones. In The real Cassian revisited he argues that the Latin monastic works traditionally ascribed to an early fifth-century monk named John Cassian, later resident in Gaul, are actually a medieval ‘augmented interpolated product originating in a far shorter Greek original by Cassian the Sabaite’, whom he identifies as an early sixth-century monk of Mar Saba in Palestine (The real Cassian revisited, 152; cf. A newly discovered Greek Father, p. xii). This Greek text, edited with substantial commentary in A newly discovered Greek Father, has historically been considered a condensed translation of selections from the Latin works. In reversing this view, Tzamalikos announces the ‘rediscovery’ of a forgotten Greek genius.

The paper raises and discusses the problem of the attitude of Roman authors to the practice of imitating the texts of their Latin and Greek predecessors; as well as to their interpreting of the plots of early works and borrowing from them. Based on ancient sources (including the texts of Suetonius, Cicero, Macrobius and others), an attempt is made to answer the questions whether it is possible to speak of plagiarism in relation to Antiquity and how the Romans themselves treated this phenomenon. Through the analysis of Macrobius’ The Saturnalia, it is demonstrated how the controversy around the texts of Virgil was built in Antiquity. It is noted why, despite extensive borrowings, the works of Roman authors were considered as original ones.

While ethnographic research is often envisioned as a 19th or 20th century development in the social sciences (Wax 1971; Prus 1996), a closer examination of the classical Greek literature (circa 700-300BCE) reveals at least three authors from this era whose works have explicit and extended ethnographic qualities. Following a consideration of “what constitutes ethnographic research,” specific attention is given to the texts developed by Herodotus (c484-425BCE), Thucydides (c460-400BCE), and Xenophon (c430-340BCE). Classical Greek scholarship pertaining to the study of the human community deteriorated notably following the death of Alexander the Great (c384-323BCE) and has never been fully approximated over the intervening centuries. Thus, it is not until the 20th century that sociologists and anthropologists have more adequately rivaled the ethnographic materials developed by these early Greek scholars. Still, there is much to be learned from these earlier sources and few contemporary social scientists appear cognizant of (a) the groundbreaking nature of the works of Herodotus, Thucydides, and Xenophon and (b) the obstacles that these earlier ethnographers faced in developing their materials. Also, lacking awareness of (c) the specific materials that these scholars developed, there is little appreciation of the particular life-worlds depicted therein or (d) the considerable value of their texts as ethnographic resources for developing more extended substantive and conceptual comparative analysis. Providing accounts of several different peoples’ life-worlds in the eastern Mediterranean arena amidst an extended account of the development of Persia as a military power and related Persian-Greek conflicts, Herodotus (The Histories) provides Western scholars with the earliest, sustained ethnographic materials of record. Thucydides (History of the Peloponnesian War) generates an extended (20 year) and remarkably detailed account of a series of wars between Athens and Sparta and others in the broader Hellenistic theater. Xenophon’s Anabasis is a participantobserver account of a Greek military expedition into Persia. These three authors do not exhaust the ethnographic dimensions of the classical Greek literature, but they provide some particularly compelling participant observer accounts that are supplemented by observations and open-ended inquiries. Because the three authors considered here also approach the study of human behavior in ways that attest to the problematic, multiperspectival, reflective, negotiated, relational, and processual nature of human interaction, contemporary social scientists are apt to find instructive the rich array of materials and insights that these early ethnographers introduce within their texts. Still, these are substantial texts and readers are cautioned that we can do little more in the present statement than provide an introduction to these three authors and their works.

Within the linguistic research on the works of Maximus the Greek, the article raises the question of the peculiarities of an individual intellectual dictionary in his creative work. The object of this study is the authors use of three terms conveying the concept of "fate", in particular the lexical borrowing from the Greek είμαρμένη and from the Latin words fatum and fortuna, rarely used in Church Slavonic literature up to the 16 th cent. The use of significant terms is described through lexicographical analysis in the first two volumes of the modern edition of Maximus the Greeks works. Special attention is paid to the comparison of the meanings of individual words and their functioning with the data taken from the historical section of the National Corpus of the Russian language, and as well as from a selection of dictionaries of Old Church Slavonic and Church Slavonic languages, in order to identify the characteristic features of lexical preferences of Maximus the Greek. Thorough contextual analysis of the texts allows us to show how, conveying the concept of necessity caused by the stars or mysterious destiny, the author shows himself as an innovator, enriching Church Slavonic vocabulary with new borrowings. The article verifies the hypothesis about the reasons for lexical preferences of Maximus the Greek and makes assumptions about the interpretation of synonymy of the words denoting "fate" that appears in the studied texts. Linguistic goals, formulated on the basis of the results obtained, can be achieved only taking into consideration the general trends in the development of religious and philosophical thought in Europe in the Early Modern Era.

The article describes the continuity between pagan and Christian views on miracle and magic and examines the dialogue about miracles that unfolded between them in the 2nd – 3rd centuries. The author explores such issues as the ancient Greek or Roman and Jewish traditions concerning sorcerers, the terms for describing miracle workers and sorcerers, evidence from early Christian literature of miracles in the Apostolic period and later, the role of miracles in the spreading of Christianity, and the controversy between Christians and pagans, especially Origen and Celsus, about the nature of the miracles performed by Christ and his followers. Special attention is paid to miracles in hagiographic works. They can be found in a number of texts, and their character — omens of imminent death, visions, the gift of the ability to endure torture — is “non-public”, which distinguishes them from what can be seen in the ancient writings or in apocryphal Acts of the Apostles. We believe that the appeal to miracles is more typical of texts addressed to an external pagan audience rather than to a Christian one.

This article focuses on the analysis of a medical and veterinary meaning of the term uermis in mediaeval writings on equine and human Medicine. The term appears in late mediaeval works on Hippiatrics. But we also provide some testimonies of early mediaeval manuscripts offering these use of uermis, which have not been taken into account so far in the studies on medical and veterinary Latin. In order to determine the meaning of uermis in all these texts, we compare them with several chapters of the late antique Latin treatises on Veterinary and with some others Greek texts.

Abstract The books brought by Hythloday to Utopia cover the range of materials recommended in early sixteenth-century educational manuals: the Utopians are to receive an exemplary humanist education, in spite of the remoteness of their island home. England was regularly characterized as a remote intellectual backwater, but Aldus Manutius’ innovative Greek type allowed English humanists to participate in a trans-European academic conversation by standardizing Greek texts and greatly increasing their availability. Thus the humanist Republic of Letters was fed by the Greek letters of Aldus’ type as well as the exchange of epistolary communications across Europe. This chapter positions More’s work—as it positions itself—within the framework of these broader European conversations and the humanist project exemplified by the Aldine academy and press. But the smooth transmission of Greek knowledge to Utopia is disrupted by a book-destroying monkey, raising questions about the place of Utopia in the Republic of Letters.

Christian authors and scribes are mainly responsible for the relatively intact survival of the writings of Philo and Josephus, along with the scattered fragments from various other Hellenistic Jewish apologists, commentators, historians, and poets. Byzantine Christianity is also a valuable witness to the Greek text of Second Temple parabiblical writings. Among other things, Christian authors found in these sources insights into the meaning of the biblical text, confirmation of the truth and antiquity of Christian teachings, and raw material for historiography. Christian authors and scribes are mainly responsible for the relatively intact survival of the writings of Philo and Josephus, along with scattered fragments from Jewish apologists, commentators, historians, and poets of the Hellenistic age. Clement, Origen, and Eusebius of Caesarea (among others) found in these sources confirmation of the truth and antiquity of Christian teachings, and raw material for historiography. While official categorization of parabiblical works from Second Temple Judaism as “apocrypha” may have eroded confidence in their authority, it did not ensure their demise. As late as the 12th century, Byzantine chroniclers and commentators continued to cite approvingly from the Book of Enoch and the Book of Jubilees.

This chapter accounts for the nearly one-fifth of the extant works of Philo that have reached us by way of a sixth-century Armenian translation, including substantial parts of QG and QE as well as the complete “dialogues” with Tiberius Julius Alexander. The Armenian corpus also includes works the Greek of which is extant, and these provide a valuable control over the Greek text, having been translated in a predominantly interlinear fashion from a text that predates the extant Greek manuscripts. The chapter concludes with a brief survey of the Philonic influence on medieval Armenian authors, focusing on certain works by Gregory of Narek (d. 1003) as an example.

This chapter presents the Jewish Old Testament apocryphal tradition that was transmitted in Armenian and other such works, created in Armenian drawing on biblical and apocryphal tradition. The Jewish works were translated from Greek and Syriac, and the question of Armenian knowledge of Hebrew is discussed. The works attributed to “Books” and “Secret Books of the Jews” are discussed, as well as Canon Lists. Well-known pseudepigrapha are presented, including Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, Joseph and Asenath, 4 Ezra, Life of Adam and Eve, Vitae Prophetarum and other such writings. Embroidered Bible writings, typical of the Armenian tradition, are considered, and the scholarly elaborations on lists of questions, genealogy, and objects or events are examined.

The works of first century CE Jewish historian Flavius Josephus constitute our main source for the study of Jewish history of the Second Temple period. In this chapter, we briefly discuss Josephus’ career and his four compositions, as well as the condition of the Greek manuscript tradition of his works. The chapter also deals with the Latin translations of Josephus, a late antique Christian adaptation of mainly Judean War in Latin, known as Hegesippus, and the remnants of Judean War in Syriac. Next comes Josippon, a medieval Hebrew adaptation of Josephus and some other sources, and finally the much-discussed Slavonic, or Old Russian, version of the Judean War.

Abstract This chapter explores how the different approaches to illustrating Greek vases in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries impacted the study of ancient visual narrative. It examines the scholarly treatment and visual presentation of two vessels by the Meidias Painter and his circle in Adolf Furtwängler and Karl Reichhold’s seminal 1904 Hervorragende Vasenbilder. The discussion establishes how, in contrast to earlier documentations of these vessels, Furtwängler and Reichhold firmly emphasized in their texts and illustrations the materiality of the vessels as a support for the figure scenes. The analysis establishes how their approach fostered a concern with questions of form and style in subsequent studies. The chapter concludes by demonstrating how Furtwängler and Reichhold’s focus on classification and style prevented their contribution from fostering scholarship on Greek visual storytelling akin to the seminal works of Carl Robert and Franz Wickhoff. Despite the opportunities to use Reichhold’s illustrations to investigate narrative methods, the key parameters for analysing such narratives—namely, the relationship of space and time as they unfold across the painted clay surfaces—remained underappreciated for much of the twentieth century.

Abstract This chapter brings together five genres which gave the early modern reader access to pre-existing scientific literature, ancient and medieval sources, and contemporary texts. The first genre to be discussed is translations. The texts translated were mostly of Greek and Arabic origin in the beginning; from the seventeenth century, mainly vernacular texts were Latinized so that they could reach a pan-European readership. Secondly, many scientific texts had to be rendered understandable by commentaries. Classical works used for teaching at the universities were routinely commented upon, while contemporary works were equipped with commentaries mainly for the benefit of private readers. Thirdly, technical dictionaries helped readers to cope with terminological problems encountered in ancient authors and to keep up with the proliferation of new terms that accompanied the development of early modern science. Fourthly, as more and more scientific writings accumulated, readers drowning in an ocean of books were thankful for the orientation provided by bibliographies, which began to appear in the sixteenth century. Finally, reviews published in the new medium of the learned journal from the late seventeenth century collectively constituted a kind of topical bibliography.

Abstract This chapter considers how the evolution of scientific knowledge in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries laid the foundations for the landmark accomplishments of the mid-sixteenth century. The science taught in early modern universities was based on the logic, metaphysics, and natural philosophy of Aristotle, understood through the prism of the commentaries and translations of Averroes. The dislodging of Aristotle was accomplished by the recovery of Greek texts of works by figures such as Galen, Ptolemy, Plato, and Euclid. The dissemination of science was facilitated by the printing of both medieval and contemporary scientific works, including translations of Arabic and Hebrew texts. Developments in mathematics facilitated refinements in mapping and astronomy, and figures such as Mercator developed spherical geometry. Finally, in the early 1540s Copernicus’s On the Revolution of the Heavenly Spheres, Vesalius’s On the Fabric of the Human Body, and Fuchs’s Notable Commentaries on the History of Plants offered a new understanding of nature.

An important feature of the Fifth Mediterranean was the discovery of the First Mediterranean, and the rediscovery of the Second. The Greek world came to encompass Bronze Age heroes riding the chariots described by Homer, and the Roman world was found to have deep roots among the little-known Etruscans. Thus, during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries entirely new perspectives on the history of the Mediterranean were opened up. An early lead was given by the growth of interest in ancient Egypt, discussed in the previous chapter, though that was closely linked to traditional biblical studies as well. In the eighteenth century, the Grand Tour introduced well-heeled travellers from northern Europe to classical remains in Rome and Sicily, and Englishmen saw it as an attractive alternative to time spent at Oxford or Cambridge, where those who paid any attention to their studies were more likely to be immersed in ancient texts than in ancient objects. On the other hand, aesthetic appreciation of ancient works of art was renewed in the late eighteenth century, as the German art historian Winckelmann began to impart a love for the forms of Greek art, arguing that the Greeks dedicated themselves to the representation of beauty (as the Romans failed to do). His History of Art in Antiquity was published in German in 1764 and in French very soon afterwards, and was enormously influential. In the next few decades, discoveries at Pompeii and Herculaneum, in which Nelson’s cuckolded host, Sir William Hamilton, was closely involved, and then in Etruria, further enlarged northern European interest in ancient art, providing interior designers with rich patterns, and collectors with vast amounts of loot – ‘Etruscan vases’, nearly all in reality Greek, were shipped out of Italy as the Etruscan tombs began to be opened up. In Greece, it was necessary to purchase the consent of Ottoman officials before excavating and exporting what was found; the most famous case, that of the Parthenon marbles at the start of the nineteenth century, was succeeded by other acquisitions for northern museums: the Pergamon altar was sent to Berlin, the facings of the Treasury of Atreus from Mycenae were sent to the British Museum, and so on.

Abstract This chapter surveys the Greco-Roman mythological tradition from the mid-14th century to the late 16th. It begins with Bersuire, who continued the medieval tradition of allegorizing Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and Boccaccio, who continued the genealogical tradition in his Genealogia deorum gentilium and wrote several additional influential works. Boccaccio was the first humanist scholar to incorporate ancient Greek texts, albeit only the Homeric epics. They were followed in the early 15th century by Salutati, Christine de Pizan, Chaucer, Lydgate, and several others. The subsequent expansion of Greek studies inspired both poets (Poliziano) and painters (Pollaiuolo, Botticelli) associated with the Medici court, and the late 15th-century interest in ancient theater, sponsored by other northern Italian dynasties, revived Plautus’s Amphitryon and inspired Niccolò da Correggio’s Cefalo. Poliziano’s Orfeo established a mythological pastoral tradition that in the 16th century produced such popular dramas as Tasso’s Aminta and Guarini’s Il Pastor Fido, and such comprehensive syntheses as Sannazaro’s and Sydney’s Arcadia poems. The nonclassical epics of Tasso (La Gerusalemme Liberata) and Ariosto (Orlando Furioso) adapted numerous myths and Greco-Roman motifs. The survey concludes with the important scholarly contributions of Giraldi, Cartari, and Conti, the Florentine Masquerade of 1565, and the mid-16th-century paintings of Titian.

This paper deals with the problem of lexical variation in Old Church Slavonic translations from Greek. The authors investigate lexical correspondences for the same Greek word in a number of texts, whose origin is linked to the Preslav literary School (late 9th-early 10th century). They are on the one hand, the Didactic Gospel and the First Oration against the Arians by Athanasius of Alexandria (CPG 2039) translated by Constantine of Preslav, while, on the other hand, four anonymous translations of homiletical works. These include the Third Sermon on the Dormition of the Blessed Virgin Mary by John of Damascus (CPG 8063), the “A” and the “B” translations of the Homily on the Transfiguration of the Lord by Proclus of Constantinople (CPG 5807), and the Funeral Oration on the Great S. Basil, Bishop of Cæsarea in Cappadocia (Oratio 43 / CPG 3010.43) by Gregory of Nazianzus. The adopted methodology is based on a statistical approach to lexical variation. The statistical analysis has led the authors to the following conclusion. The largest percentage of Greek-Slavonic lexical matches occurs in Constantine's texts. This demonstrates that the adoption of a quantitative criterion, based on a statistical analysis of lexical data, may turn useful to verify the validity of the attribution of an anonymous text to a specific translator.