The everydayness of benders reflecting the physical properties of their elements reminds the authors of the work of the late Jicarilla Apache philosopher V.F. Cordova. Cordova describes “bounded space” as a land base defined by geographic features such as mountains, rivers, deserts, lakes, oceans, and canyons. At the beginning of each Avatar: the Last Airbender ( ATLA ) episode, the audience is reminded: “Long ago, the four nations lived together in harmony”. The sequence shows four individuals bending the water, earth, (...) fire, and air elements. The specific bounded spaces of the respective nations are reflected in their people and their benders. The ATLA universe provides narratives that point to Indigenous intergenerational ways of knowing. Within the ATLA universe, the authors witness regular connections with the spirit realm or spirit world. Many Indigenous scholars have explored these connections to the “spirit world” as understood in ATLA. (shrink)

This article explores the geographical outlook of the late antique author Ausonius of Bordeaux (c.310–395 c.e.). It offers close readings of his poems on roads, oysters and cities, and situates him within the vibrant geographical debates of his day. Section I, on roads, argues that an overlooked passage in Epistula 24 reflects attested routes through Gaul, and that other passages in Ausonius’ letters are similarly influenced by ‘hodological’ ways of thinking. Section II, on oysters, identifies a new geographic mode, (...) ‘teleports’, in Epistula 3, a poem in a long tradition of works that use oysters to chart imperial space and map cultural landscapes. Section III, on cities, brings the recent paradigm of ‘landmarks’ to bear on the Ordo nobilium urbium, arguing that Ausonius uses the catalogue form both to articulate imperial unity and to express pride in his homeland of Gaul. This article thus advances our understanding of three related aspects of late antique geography: it demonstrates the importance of literary texts for discussions of cultural geography; shows how conceptions of space were influenced by provincial identity; and provides further evidence of the great diversity of Roman understandings of space. (shrink)

Perhaps the most remarkable feature of the works in which Ausonius of Bordeaux and Libanius of Antioch, writing within a few years of each other, recall their long and varied careers is that there is so little resemblance between them; the impressions given by these experienced and successful teachers could hardly be more disparate. The reader of Ausonius finds in his Protrepticus a familiar enough picture of the terrors of the schoolroom; his Professores offer at first sight a series (...) of bland commemorations apparently deficient in the interesting information which might be expected from such an archive. Libanius' many volumes, on the other hand, compared where appropriate with the Vitae Sophistarum of Eunapius, present a situation which is well summarised by the following sentences from Walden's work The Universities of Ancient Greece : ‘There was, among the sophists of the fourth century…little, if any, of that spirit of brotherhood… that usually exists in a community of scholars at the present day. Instead there were jealousy, spite and often unrelenting hatred’. This striking divergence between Ausonius and his Eastern counterparts is unlikely to reflect a basic difference between East and West, or between Latin- and Greek-speaking milieux; the complaints of Augustine about his problems in Africa and Rome warn against such a simple answer. When one adds the evidence provided seven centuries later by the Frenchman Peter Abelard, whose plaintive Historia Calamitatum — an account of the disasters he suffered, not those which he caused — is remarkably similar to the prickly self-justification of Libanius in its account of bitter scheming and almost military manoeuvres in the educational world, one is forced to consider whether the evidence of Ausonius is not a serious anomaly, and to seek an explanation. (shrink)

Perhaps the most remarkable feature of the works in which Ausonius of Bordeaux and Libanius of Antioch, writing within a few years of each other, recall their long and varied careers is that there is so little resemblance between them; the impressions given by these experienced and successful teachers could hardly be more disparate. The reader of Ausonius finds in his Protrepticus a familiar enough picture of the terrors of the schoolroom; his Professores offer at first sight a series (...) of bland commemorations apparently deficient in the interesting information which might be expected from such an archive. Libanius' many volumes, on the other hand, compared where appropriate with the Vitae Sophistarum of Eunapius, present a situation which is well summarised by the following sentences from Walden's work The Universities of Ancient Greece : ‘There was, among the sophists of the fourth century…little, if any, of that spirit of brotherhood… that usually exists in a community of scholars at the present day. Instead there were jealousy, spite and often unrelenting hatred’. This striking divergence between Ausonius and his Eastern counterparts is unlikely to reflect a basic difference between East and West, or between Latin- and Greek-speaking milieux; the complaints of Augustine about his problems in Africa and Rome warn against such a simple answer. When one adds the evidence provided seven centuries later by the Frenchman Peter Abelard, whose plaintive Historia Calamitatum — an account of the disasters he suffered, not those which he caused — is remarkably similar to the prickly self-justification of Libanius in its account of bitter scheming and almost military manoeuvres in the educational world, one is forced to consider whether the evidence of Ausonius is not a serious anomaly, and to seek an explanation. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Klio Jahrgang: 99 Heft: 2 Seiten: 765-769.