Download or read book Technical Ekphrasis in Greek and Roman Science and Literature written by Courtney Roby and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2016-02-24 with total page 347 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ekphrasis is familiar as a rhetorical tool for inducing enargeia, the vivid sense that a reader or listener is actually in the presence of the objects described. This book focuses on the ekphrastic techniques used in ancient Greek and Roman literature to describe technological artifacts. Since the literary discourse on technology extended beyond technical texts, this book explores 'technical ekphrasis' in a wide range of genres, including history, poetry, and philosophy as well as mechanical, scientific, and mathematical works. Technical authors like Philo of Byzantium, Vitruvius, Hero of Alexandria, and Claudius Ptolemy are put into dialogue with close contemporaries in other genres, like Diodorus Siculus, Cicero, Ovid, and Aelius Theon. The treatment of 'technical ekphrasis' here covers the techniques of description, the interaction of verbal and visual elements, the role of instructions, and the balance between describing the artifact's material qualities and the other bodies of knowledge it evokes.

Download or read book Technical Ekphrasis in Greek and Roman Science and Literature written by Courtney Roby and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2016-02-24 with total page 347 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book analyzes the rhetorical and visual strategies used in technical texts and non-technical literature to describe technological artifacts.

Download or read book Artificial Intelligence in Greek and Roman Epic written by Andriana Domouzi and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2024-05-16 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first scholarly exploration of concepts and representations of Artificial Intelligence in ancient Greek and Roman epic, including their reception in later literature and culture. Contributors look at how Hesiod, Homer, Apollonius of Rhodes, Moschus, Ovid and Valerius Flaccus crafted the first literary concepts concerned with automata and the quest for artificial life, as well as technological intervention improving human life. Parts one and two consider, respectively, archaic Greek, and Hellenistic and Roman, epics. Contributors explore the representations of Pandora in Hesiod, and Homeric automata such as Hephaestus' wheeled tripods, the Phaeacian king Alcinous' golden and silver guard dogs, and even the Trojan Horse. Later examples cover Artificial Intelligence and automation (including Talos) in the Argonautica of Apollonius and Valerius Flaccus, and Pygmalion's ivory woman in Ovid's Metamorphoses. Part three underlines how these concepts benefit from analysis of the ekphrasis device, within which they often feature. These chapters investigate the cyborg potential of the epic hero and the literary implications of ancient technology. Moving into contemporary examples, the final chapters consider the reception of ancient literary Artificial Intelligence in contemporary film and literature, such as the Czech science-fiction epic Starvoyage, or Small Cosmic Odyssey by Jan Kr?esadlo (1995) and the British science-fiction novel The Holy Machine by Chris Beckett (2004).

Download or read book Prosthetics and Assistive Technology in Ancient Greece and Rome written by Jane Draycott and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2022-12-31 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first comprehensive study of prosthetics and assistive technology in classical antiquity, integrating a wide range of types of evidence.

Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Science written by Steven Meyer and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-05-03 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1959, C. P. Snow lamented the presence of what he called the 'two cultures': the apparently unbridgeable chasm of understanding and knowledge between modern literature and modern science. In recent decades, scholars have worked diligently and often with great ingenuity to interrogate claims like Snow's that represent twentieth- and twenty-first-century literature and science as radically alienated from each other. The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Science offers a roadmap to developments that have contributed to the demonstration and emergence of reciprocal connections between the two domains of inquiry. Weaving together theory and empiricism, individual chapters explore major figures - Shakespeare, Bacon, Emerson, Darwin, Henry James, William James, Whitehead, Einstein, Empson, and McClintock; major genres and modes of writing - fiction, science fiction, non-fiction prose, poetry, and dramatic works; and major theories and movements - pragmatism, critical theory, science studies, cognitive science, ecocriticism, cultural studies, affect theory, digital humanities, and expanded empiricisms. This book will be a key resource for scholars, graduate students, and undergraduate students alike.

Download or read book Medicine and the Law Under the Roman Empire written by Claire Bubb and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2023-06 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What happens when we juxtapose medicine and law in the ancient Roman world? This innovative collection of scholarly research shows how both fields were shaped by the particular needs and desires of their practitioners and users. It approaches the study of these fields through three avenues. First, it argues that the literatures produced by elite practitioners, like Galen or Ulpian, were not merely utilitarian, but were pieces of aesthetically inflected literature and thus carried all of the disparate baggage linked to any form of literature in the Roman context. Second, it suggests that while one element of that literary luggage was the socio-political competition that these texts facilitated, high stakes agonism also uniquely marked the quotidian practice of both medicine and law, resulting in both fields coming to function as forms of popular public entertainment. Finally, it shows how the effects of rhetoric and the deeply rhetorical education of the elite made themselves constantly apparent in both the literature on and the practice of medicine and law. Through case studies in both fields and on each of these topics, together with contextualizing essays, Medicine and the Law Under the Roman Empire suggests that the blanket results of all this were profound. The introduction to the volume argues that medicine was not contrived merely to ensure healing of the infirm by doctors, and law did not single-mindedly aim to regulate society in a consistent, orderly, and binding fashion. Instead, both fields, in the full range of their manifestations, were nested in a complex matrix of social, political, and intellectual crosscurrents, all of which served to shape the very substances of these fields themselves. This poses forward-looking questions: What things might ancient Roman medicine and law have been meant or geared to accomplish in their world? And how might the very substance of Roman medicine and law have been crafted with an eye to fulfilling those peculiarly ancient needs and desires? This book suggests that both fields, in their ancient manifestations, differed fundamentally from their modern counterparts, and must be approached with this fact firmly in mind.

Download or read book Revolutions and Continuity in Greek Mathematics written by Michalis Sialaros and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2018-04-23 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume brings together a number of leading scholars working in the field of ancient Greek mathematics to present their latest research. In their respective area of specialization, all contributors offer stimulating approaches to questions of historical and historiographical ‘revolutions’ and ‘continuity’. Taken together, they provide a powerful lens for evaluating the applicability of Thomas Kuhn’s ideas on ‘scientific revolutions’ to the discipline of ancient Greek mathematics. Besides the latest historiographical studies on ‘geometrical algebra’ and ‘premodern algebra’, the reader will find here some papers which offer new insights into the controversial relationship between Greek and pre-Hellenic mathematical practices. Some other contributions place emphasis on the other edge of the historical spectrum, by exploring historical lines of ‘continuity’ between ancient Greek, Byzantine and post-Hellenic mathematics. The terminology employed by Greek mathematicians, along with various non-textual and material elements, is another topic which some of the essays in the volume explore. Finally, the last three articles focus on a traditionally rich source on ancient Greek mathematics; namely the works of Plato and Aristotle.

Download or read book Military Literature in the Medieval Roman World and Beyond written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2024-05-30 with total page 463 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What do the mysterious Roman author Vegetius, the Byzantine emperor Leo VI, and the Chinese general Li Jing all have in common? They are three of the dozens of authors across the medieval Mediterranean world and beyond who wrote works of military literature, sometimes called military handbooks, manuals, or treatises. This book brings together a multidisciplinary international team of scholars who present cutting edge essays on diverse aspects of medieval military literature. While some chapters offer novel approaches to familiar authors like Vegetius, some present research on under-valued topics like Byzantine military illustrations, and others provide holistic studies on subjects like early modern treatises, they all move the discussion of medieval military literature forward. Contributors are Michael B. Charles, Georgios Chatzelis, Pierre Cosme, Maxime Emion, Immacolata Eramo, Michael Fulton, David Graff, John Haldon, Catherine Hof, John Hosler, Savvas Kyriakidis, Łukasz Różycki, Katharina Schoneveld, Georgios Theotokis, Conor Whately, Michael Whitby, and Nadya Williams.

Download or read book The Frame in Classical Art written by Verity Platt and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017-04-20 with total page 737 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The frames of classical art are often seen as marginal to the images that they surround. Traditional art history has tended to view framing devices as supplementary 'ornaments'. Likewise, classical archaeologists have often treated them as tools for taxonomic analysis. This book not only argues for the integral role of framing within Graeco-Roman art, but also explores the relationship between the frames of classical antiquity and those of more modern art and aesthetics. Contributors combine close formal analysis with more theoretical approaches: chapters examine framing devices across multiple media (including vase and fresco painting, relief and free-standing sculpture, mosaics, manuscripts and inscriptions), structuring analysis around the themes of 'framing pictorial space', 'framing bodies', 'framing the sacred' and 'framing texts'. The result is a new cultural history of framing - one that probes the sophisticated and playful ways in which frames could support, delimit, shape and even interrogate the images contained within.

Download or read book Strategies of Ambiguity in Ancient Literature written by Martin Vöhler and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2021-02-22 with total page 431 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ambiguity in the sense of two or more possible meanings is considered to be a distinctive feature of modern art and literature. It characterizes the "open artwork" (Eco) and is generated by "disruptive tactics" (Wellershoff) and strategies to engender uncertainty. While ambiguity is seen as a "paradigm of modernity" (Bode), there is skepticism regarding its use in the pre-modern era. Older studies were dominated by the conviction that there was a lack of ambiguity in pre-modernity because, according to the rules of the "old rhetoric", ambiguity was seen as an avoidable error (vitium) and a violation of the dictate of clarity (perspicuitas). The aim of the volume is to re-examine the putative "absence of ambiguity" in the pre-modern era. Is it not possible to find clear examples of deliberately employed (intended) ambiguity in antiquity? Are the oracles and riddles, the Palinode of Stesichoros and Socrates (Phaedrus), the dissoi logoi of rhetoric, the ambiguities of the tragedies all exceptions or do they not indicate a distinct interest in the artistic use of ambiguity? The presentations of the conference, which will include scholars from various philologies, will combine a recourse to theoretical concepts of intended ambiguity with exemplary analyses from the field of pre-modern art and literature.

Download or read book Greek and Roman Military Manuals written by James T. Chlup and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-09-07 with total page 319 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume explores the enigmatic primary source known as the ancient military manual. In particular, the volume explores the extent to which these diverse texts constitute a genre (sometimes unsatisfactorily classified as ‘technical literature’), and the degree to which they reflect the practice of warfare. With contributions from a diverse group of scholars, the chapters examine military manuals from early Archaic Greece to the Byzantine period, covering a wide range of topics including readership, siege warfare, mercenaries, defeat, textual history, and religion. Coverage includes most of the major contemporary siege manual writers, including Xenophon, Frontinus, Vegetius, and Maurice. Close examination of these texts serves to reveals the complex ways in which ancient Greeks, Romans, and Byzantines sought to understand better, and impose order upon, the seemingly irrational phenomenon known as war. Providing insight into the multifaceted collection of texts that constituted military manuals, this volume is a key resource for students and scholars of warfare and military literature in the classical and Byzantine periods.

Download or read book Scientific Visual Representations in History written by Matteo Valleriani and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2023-01-01 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores continuity and ruptures in the historical use of visual representations in science and related disciplines such as art history and anthropology. The book also considers more recent developments that attest to the unprecedented importance of scientific visualizations, such as video recordings, animations, simulations, graphs, and enhanced realities. The volume collects historical reflections concerned with the use of visual material, visualization, and vision in science from a historical perspective, ranging across multiple cultures from antiquity until present day. The focus is on visual representations such as drawings, prints, tables, mathematical symbols, photos, data visualizations, mapping processes, and (on a meta-level) visualizations of data extracted from historical sources to visually support the historical research itself. Continuity and ruptures between the past and present use of visual material are presented against the backdrop of the epistemic functions of visual material in science. The function of visual material is defined according to three major epistemic categories: exploration, transformation, and transmission of knowledge.

Download or read book Ecphrastic Shields in Graeco Roman Literature written by Karel Thein and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-09-30 with total page 373 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume takes a fresh look at ekphrasis as a textual practice closely connected to our embodied imagination and its verbal dimension; it offers the first detailed study of a large family of ancient ecphrastic shields, often studied separately, but never as an ensemble with its own development. The main objective consists of establishing a theoretical and historical framework that is applied to a series of famous ecphrastic shields starting with the Homeric shield of Achilles. The latter is reinterpreted as a paradigmatic "thing" whose echoing down the centuries is reinforced by the fundamental connection between ekphrasis and artefacts as its primary objects. The book demonstrates that although the ancient sources do not limit ekphrasis to artificial creations, the latter are most efficient in bringing out the intimate affinity between artefacts and vivid mental images as two kind of entities that lack a natural scale and are rightly understood as ontologically unstable. Ecphrastic Shields in Graeco-Roman Literature: The World’s Forge should be read by those interested in ancient culture, art and philosophy, but also by those fascinated by the broader issue of imagination and by the interplay between the natural and the artificial.

Download or read book Genealogy of Popular Science written by Jesús Muñoz Morcillo and published by transcript Verlag. This book was released on 2020-11-30 with total page 587 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Despite the efforts of modern scholars to explain the origins of science communication as a social, rhetorical, and aesthetic phenomenon, most researchers approach the popularization of science from the perspective of present issues, thus ignoring its historical roots in classical culture along with its continuities, disruptions, and transformations. This volume fills this research gap with a genealogically reflected introduction into the popularization of science as a recurrent cultural technique. The category »popular science« is elucidated in interdisciplinary and diachronic dialogue, discussing case studies from all historical periods. Classicists, archaeologists, medievalists, art historians, sociologists, and historians of science provide the first diachronic and multi-layered approach to the rhetoric techniques, aesthetics, and societal conditions that have shaped the dissemination and reception of scientific knowledge.

Download or read book The Rhetoric of Unity and Division in Ancient Literature written by Andreas N. Michalopoulos and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2021-01-18 with total page 458 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume, comprising 24 essays, aims to contribute to a developing appreciation of the capacity of rhetoric to reinforce affiliation or disaffiliation to groups. To this end, the essays span a variety of ancient literary genres (i.e. oratory, historical and technical prose, drama and poetry) and themes (i.e. audience-speaker, laughter, emotions, language, gender, identity, and religion).

Download or read book The Mechanical Tradition of Hero of Alexandria written by Courtney Ann Roby and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2023-06-30 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first book on Hero, a key figure in the history of technology in antiquity and the early modern period.

Download or read book Technical Automation in Classical Antiquity written by Maria Gerolemou and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2022-12-15 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Technical automation – the ability of man-made (or god-made) objects to move and act autonomously – is not just the province of engineering or science fiction. In this book, Maria Gerolemou, by taking as her starting point the close semantic and linguistic relevance of technical automation to natural automatism, demonstrates how ancient literature, performance and engineering were often concerned with the way nature and artifice interacted. Moving across epic, didactic, tragedy, comedy, philosophy and ancient science, this is a brilliant assembly of evidence for the power of 'automatic theatre' in ancient literature. Gerolemou starts with the earliest Greek literature of Homer and Hesiod, where Hephaestus' self-moving artefacts in the Iliad reflect natural forces of motion and the manufactured Pandora becomes an autonomous woman. Her second chapter looks at Greek drama, where technical automation is used to augment and undermine nature not only through staging and costume but also in plot devices where statues come to life and humans behave as automatic devices. In the third chapter, Gerolemou considers how the philosophers of the 4th century BCE and the engineers of the Hellenistic period with their mechanical devices contributed to a growing dialogue around technical automation and how it could help its audience glance and marvel at the hidden mechanisms of self-motion. Finally, the book explores the ways technical automation is employed as an ekphrastic technique in late antiquity and early Byzantium.