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Roman Isis And The Pendulum Of Tolerance In The Empire, D. Jasmine Merced-Ownbey

Inquiry: The University of Arkansas Undergraduate Research Journal

This paper examines the evolution of Isis, ostensibly the "sacred mother," as a political tool in Egypt and (especially) in Rome. Through an analysis of primary and secondary source materials, it is established that Isis' treatment by Roman politicians represented a running discourse on the contemporary political relationship between Rome and Egypt, and, at times, on Rome's complex negotiation of foreign influences on its own society. Following the deaths of the first two Roman emperors, Isis was gradually elevated from the status of pariah to an acclaimed goddess within the Roman pantheon who was deemed worthy of beneficence and protection …

Sozomen, Barbarians, And Early Byzantine Historiography, Walter Stevenson

Classical Studies Faculty Publications

Sozomen, writing in mid-fifth century Constantinople, stands out as an exception proving the rule in Byzantine historiography. He is the first and last Christian Byzantine historian to make a serious effort at ethnography.⁵ When we consider how quickly Christianity was spreading outside the boundaries of the eastern Empire in the fourth and fifth centuries it is striking how little mention barbarians and their evangelization earn in the early ecclesiastical histories.⁶ To illustrate this point I will begin by showing that Sozomen’s predecessors, Eusebius, Rufinus, and Socrates, de-emphasized the natural interest that the historical genre had expressed in ethnography, …

Targeting Emotion In Early Stoicism, Scott M. Rubarth

The Society for Ancient Greek Philosophy Newsletter

The Stoic sage is a cold, heartless being who would not grieve over the loss of a beloved companion or child. Unmoved, unemotional, uncaring, the sage is an ethical and emotional monstrosity hiding behind the pretension of the so-called virtues of detachment and austerity. That, at least, is how many who study Stoic ethics perceive the sage in regard to his/her emotional life. In this paper I will argue that this conception of the Stoic theory of emotion and passion is misleading; emotions, in fact, are central to Stoic ethics and apatheia should not be confused with the contemporary idea …

Sagp Newsletter 2002.2 (December), Anthony Preus

The Society for Ancient Greek Philosophy Newsletter

No abstract provided.

Animal Perception In Early Stoicism: A Response To Richard Sorabji, Scott Rubarth

The Society for Ancient Greek Philosophy Newsletter

The Stoics cannot deny that animals perceive things in relation to each other things (e.g. the scent coming from that direction). The dog must minimally connect the scent a direct if we are to explain the animal following an animal's trail. And it is also true that if the animal is to act on a stimulus it must connect the stimulus with a desire or experience. The dog must connect the scent with its desire or hunger. However, I do not agree that the animal must believe that the scent is coming from a given direction or even believe that …

Herakleia Trachinia In The Archidamian War, Mychal P. Angelos

Dissertations

No abstract provided.

Alexander On Form-In-Matter And The Breakdown Of Aristotle's Categories, John O. Ellis

The Society for Ancient Greek Philosophy Newsletter

My discussion is divided into six sections. In the first I provide some background to the form-in-matter problem in Aristotle; the second focusses on Alexander's solution to the problem; in the third, we consider Plotinus' contribution; in the fourth, there's brief treatment of the problem by the commentators on the Categories; and finally in the fifth section I look at what I call the 'Lucius problem' - this pertains directly to the substantial qualities doctrine, and it reveals, I suggest, how Alexander's way of solving the form-in-matter problem contributes to the breakdown of Aristotelian categories. In the sixth section …

The Lives Of The Peripatetics: Diogenes Laertius, Vitae Philosophorum, Book Five, Michael Sollenberger

The Society for Ancient Greek Philosophy Newsletter

The fifth book of Diogenes Laertius’ Lives of the Philosophers is concerned with the first four heads of the Peripatos – Aristotle, Theophrastus, Strato, and Lyco – and two outstanding members of the school – Demetrius of Phalerum and Heraclides of Pontus. Consideration is given her to rather general matters of structure, organization, and arrangement of material in Book Five as a whole, to the different categories of information in the individual lives, and to the most striking feature of this book which set it apart from other books: namely, the wills of the first four scholarchs and the extensive …

The Unambiguity Of Aristotelian Being, Jaakko Hintikka

The Society for Ancient Greek Philosophy Newsletter

In this paper, I shall try to enhance our understanding of Aristotle's thought by relating it to certain contemporary problems and insights of philosophical logicians. One of the most central current issues in philosophical logic is a challenge to a hundred-year old dogma. Almost all twentieth-century philosophers in English-speaking countries have followed Frege and Russell and claimed that the words for being in natural languages — "is," "ist," ἔστι etc.— are ambiguous between the is of predication, the is of existence, the is of identity, and the generic is. The significance of this ambiguity thesis has not been limited to …

"Nothing" As "Not-Being": Some Literary Contexts That Bear On Plato And On Parmenides, Alexander P.D. Mourelatos

The Society for Ancient Greek Philosophy Newsletter

In the main Section of this paper I examine a certain "characterizing" use of meden/ouden and medeis/oudeis in pre-Platonic non-philosophical contexts. The passages discussed and analyzed offer cle.ar and suggestive illustrations of the assimilation of "nothing" or "nobody" to "not-being." In the concluding Section I explore connections between that use and philosophical concepts,with particular reference to Plato's doctrine of degrees of reality.

The dialectic of being in classical Greek speculation focuses not on 'What there is' but on 'what it is' or 'how it is'; not on existence but on physis, constitution, or form.

Ephesus, Pagan And Christian 133 B.C. - 262 A.D., Ruth O. Michener

Graduate Thesis Collection

This dissertation is an atrcempt to reconstruct and to recapture a period in the history of this famous city, a center so important in New Testament times and in the first two centuries or the Christian Church, but a metropolis which centuries ago became buried in the silt of a river. The site and a primitive kind of settlement began in pre-historic times. We will briefly trace the story of its ancestory; its youth; its changes; traditions; then its glory between the years 133 B.C. to A.D. 262; its contribution to culture; its spirit; its contact with Christianity; its period …