Hans Beck, Images of centrality. Phlious and its coinage in the Classical period
Hans Beck2024, Memory and Impression. Proceedings of an international Colloquium organised at Tegea, December 12-13, 2019
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Abstract
Identity of place, Omphalos, communal acengy, localism, Xenophon
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The journal Trends in Classics, and the accompanying Supplementary Volumes publish innovative, interdisciplinary work which brings to the study of Greek and Latin texts the insights and methods of related disciplines such as narratology, intertextuality, reader-response criticism, and oral poetics. Both publications seek to publish research across the full range of classical antiquity.
Ioannis Papachristou, John Philoponus on Physical Place, Ancient and Medieval Philosophy 60, Leuven University Press, Leuven 2021
2021
This book examines the place of physical bodies, a major topic of natural philosophy that has occupied philosophers since antiquity. Aristotle’s conceptions of place (topos) and the void (kenon), as expounded in the Physics, were systematically repudiated by John Philoponus (ca. 485-570) in his philosophical commentary on that work. The primary philosophical concern of the present study is the in-depth investigation of the concept of place established by Philoponus, putting forward the claim that the latter offers satisfactory solutions to problems raised by Aristotle and the Aristotelian tradition regarding the nature of place. Philoponus’ account proposes a specific physical model of how physical bodies exist and move in place, and regards place as an intrinsic reality of the physical cosmos. Due to exactly this model, his account may be considered as strictly pertaining to the study of physics, thereby constituting a remarkable episode in the history of philosophy and science.
Review: Michael Scott, Delphi and Olympia: The Spatial Politics of Panhellenism in the Archaic and Classical Periods. Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010.
Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2010.08.55
(L.) Edmunds Oedipus. Pp. xxii + 177, ills, maps. London and New York: Routledge, 2006. Paper, £12.99, US$23.95 (Cased, £50, US$90). ISBN: 978-0-415-32935-4 (978-0-415-32934-7 hbk)
Classical Review, 2008
The Ancient Greek Symposion as Space for Philosophical Discourse: Xenophanes and Criticism of the Poetic Tradition, "Tekstualia" 1/8 (2022), p. 3-24
Tekstualia, 2022
The aim of the present article is to discuss relations between archaic Greek philosophy and poetry through the example of Xenophanes of Colophon (sixth century BCE), the poet best known for a critique of traditional religion using anthropomorphic imagery. The initial problem lies in understanding the performative aspect in Xenophanes’ elegiac poems; analysis of fragments 1W and 2W has revealed that his literary output can be situated within the framework of the aristocratic symposium. This sympotic context determines the second question: how the poetic fragments fi t with those compositions in which Xenophanes attacks traditional beliefs and poetic ideas of Homer and Hesiod. As I suggest, the critique of traditional mythical narratives, and undermining other poets’ authority, can be interpreted as an expression of performative practices functioning at symposia of the archaic and classical epochs. By removing the division between “philosophy” and “poetry”, different aspects of Xenophanes’ fragments begin to coincide with the phenomenon of the ancient symposium, understood as a space for intellectual competition.
Pausanias Book X. A Detour to the Fringes of "Classical" Greece
A. Kouremenos (ed.), The Province of Achaea in the 2nd Century AD. The Past Present, 2022
Why does Pausanias end his work with a description of the Greek landscapes of Phocis and Western Locris, which at first glance seem less “classical”? Why does he describe the small poleis there, which seem to lack everything that makes up the Greek city of the 2nd century CE? In this paper, I argue that, for Pausanias, in this remote world an important part of what constitutes Greece had survived the passage of time more undisturbed than in the “classical” Greek world: the small polis that had produced mythological heroes and participated in Panhellenic wars, that guarded its borders, that maintained its cults, that longed for a temple of stone and that was the home of proud citizens. In this sense, Pausanias uses Book X to document the present of Greece’s past through this seemingly marginal example.
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Some remarks on the structure of John Eugenikos’ Ekphraseis of cities and places, Parekbolai 11 (2021) 81-90 (https://ejournals.lib.auth.gr/parekbolai/article/view/8198)
Among the prose works of John Eugenikos1 an important place is held by his seven ekphraseis, the short rhetorical descriptions he composed on Corinth, Trebizond, the Peloponnesian village of Petrina, the island of Imbros, an icon of the Theotokos, and two works of art, pictures of a plane tree and the newly-wed royal couple in a garden, imprinted respectively on leather and fabric.2 The first four ekphraseis form a unit, because they describe two cities, a village and an island: that is, they are ekphraseis of places. The structural and verbal similarities found in these texts, which have been pointed out from time to time, will give rise to some overall assessments concerning the composition of these ekphraseis.3
Review of Geography in Classical Antiquity, by D. Dueck, Cambridge, 2012. Classical Review 63.1 (2013): 148-50.
Downloaded from http://journals.cambridge.org/CAR, IP address: 132.174.254.12 on 16 Dec 2015 discussion of the alternative network structures advocated by Braudel, Horden and Purcell, and J.-P. Morel does not give the impression that the likeliness of his hypothesis is any greater. On the other hand, M. rightly argues that dynamic network processes add explanatory power to these structures, and he illustrates this throughout the book for his own hypothesis. M. seems to be very aware of this issue when stressing, 'The identification of connections and particular networks falls within the historian's search for "what was there" (the factual, or the truth level); the suggestion that network dynamics forms the Greek "small world" is by contrast an interpretation, but to my mind it is one that has a high probability of being right ' (p. 207). Yet the book too often reads like a summing up of historically attested ties in a one-to-one relationship with complex network concepts that are by no means exclusive to small-worlds (e.g. emergence, self-organisation, hubs, fractal patterning, preferential attachment, decentralisation, multi-directionality, phase transitions, clustering) to allow for disregarding alternative network structures out of hand. The innovative network perspective is also only to a limited degree utilised to revisit concepts like ethnicity, Greek civilisation and identity. It is a new hypothesis that focusses largely on explaining past processes of emergence from given states.
Centres and Peripheries in the History of Philosophical Thought
Brepols, 2021
This volume is an homage to the great intellectual contribution made by Loris Sturlese in the field of the history of medieval philosophy. Its topic has been inspired by Sturlese’s methodological intuition, according to which in a historical and conceptual reconstruction of medieval philosophical thought the focus should not only be devoted to the classical, most famous centers for the transmission and elaboration of knowledge, but also to the so-called peripheries, where texts and ideas circulated as well. In this volume, the notions of ‘centre’ and ‘periphery’ are not understood in a merely geographical sense, but also in conceptual, linguistic, historical and literary terms. The richness of this approach is demonstrated by the broad spectrum of the contributions present in the volume, which range from Islamic philosophy to Italian Renaissance, including the reception of ancient philosophy as well as of Arabic scientifical works in the Latin world, and eighteenth-century French geography. A special attention is devoted to the philosophical thought developed the German area. This fruitful perspective is applied to important medieval figures, such as Dante, as well as to central philosophical notions, such as the concept of rationality. The volume explores connections, ruptures, relations and affinities through the analysis of paradigmatic figures, places and topics within the micro- and macro-histories of philosophy. Table of contents: Introduction, p. vii Nadia Bray, Diana Di Segni, Fiorella Retucci, Elisa Rubino Bibliography, p. xvii Loris Sturlese Ein nicht-existierender Gegenstand? Eine gelehrte und nichtsdestotrotz persönliche Geschichte der Bochumer Schule (1971-1995), p. 1 Ruedi Imbach Il Linguaggio di Adamo, la Caduta di Adamo. Walter Benjamin alla luce di un inedito testo arabo medievale, p. 21 Carmela Baffioni L’aristotelismo vernacolare nel Rinascimento italiano: un fenomeno ‘regionale’?, p. 47 Luca Bianchi Cleaning up the Latin Language in Mid-Sixteenth-Century Basel: Antonius Stuppa’s Purgation of Albohazen’s De iudiciis astrorum, p. 69 Charles Burnett “Est autem testis Melissus pro cunctis temporis sui Philosophis, sed et pro omni antiquitate”. Le metamorfosi di Melisso, p. 83 Stefano Caroti Dante dal centro al cerchio, p. 103 Giulio D’Onofrio Per l’edizione critica delle opere di Pietro Aureoli, p. 141 Onorato Grassi Nicholas of Cusa’s marginalia to Plato’s dialogue Phaedrus as one of the forgotten sources of the supposed Cusanian Platonism, p. 157 Mikhail Khorkov Centri, periferie, luoghi e percorsi. Jules Michelet versus Victor Cousin, p. 179 Catherine König-Pralong On the Margin. Some Notes on Meister Eckhart, p. 199 Freimut Löser Una periferia o un centro? Filosofia e teologia allo Studium di Napoli in Età sveva e angioina, p. 223 Pasquale Porro Per una microstoria dell’umanesimo rinascimentale. Agostino Nifo e la cultura napoletana del Cinquecento, p. 247 Valeria Sorge Die Universalität der Vernunft und die Vielheit ihrer Sprachen, p. 263 Andreas Speer The Self-Location of Meister Eckhart, p. 293 Markus Vinzent Indexes, p. 303
From themistocles to philomathes:Amousos andamousia in antiquity and the early modern period
International Journal of the Classical Tradition, 2003
Greek myth and history are peppered with musician heroes, Orpheus, Amphion, and Arion being only the most prominent examples. Their antithesis was music's anti-hero, the amousos of fame marked by a deficit of culture. To be worthy of note, a person's amousia had to imply a paradox, as is the case with Zethus, Amphion's twin brother, and, above all, Themistocles, on one hand held by his contemporaries to be the "wisest of the Hellenes" (Herodotus), on the other notorious for his non-achievement in the field of music. Plutarch preserves a reference by Ion of Chios to Themistocles' abstention from playing the lyre and resulting disgrace, an episode emblematic of the mores and-seen from the polarized viewpoint of, e.g., Aristotle's Athenaion politeia-politics of 5th-c.-BC Athens (w Cicero redacted the story to exemplify e negativo music's high status in Greece, and Augustine used it to legitimize disdain for classical learning (w Cicero's redaction figured in the protreptic laus musices of the Early Modern Period (w and inspired the beginning of Thomas Morley's Introduction to Practicall Musicke (w The notions that immunity to music's charm is a sign of innate evil and that statecraft is a kind of music converged with the perennial debate on Themistocles' character in works by John Case, music's foremost Elizabethan apologist (w and Aelius Aristides, the second-century Greek orator (w respectively. Thus ancient and Early Modern authors related Themistocles' amousia to a variety of issues, emancipating it from its original context and instrumentalizing it according to their own agendas. Denique in proverbium usque Graecorum celebratum est indoctos a Musis atque a Gratiis abesse. Finally, the idea was frequently visited by the Greeks and ended up becoming a proverbial saying: "the uncultured are far from the Muses and Graces." (Quintilianus, Institutio oratoria 1,10,21) I am grateful to Professor Joachim Latacz (Basel) and to the anonymous referee for early advice on this paper. In particular I would like to thank Professor Wolfgang Haase (Boston), the editor of this journal, whose patient and insightful counsel is reflected on every page. All the more do I hasten to add that the paper's faults are entirely my own.-The aim of the paper is to sketch the genesis and Early Modern reception of the topic "amousia" as exemplified by Themistocles. It is hoped that the paper will appeal both to the classicist interested in knowing what happened to the Themistocles story after the close of antiquity and to the student of Renaissance music interested in knowing where it came from.
Review of Andrew Benjamin, Place, Commonality and Judgment: Continental Philosophy and the Ancient Greeks (Continuum, 2010)
International Journal of Philosophical Studies 21.2 (2013), 301-7
Place, Commonality and Judgment: Continental Philosophy and the Ancient Greeks
A review of Andrew Benjamin's book that appeared in Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews.
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