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. (shrink)

Dion is a full-bodied man. Theon is that part of him which consists of all of him except his left foot. What becomes of Dion and Theon when Dion’s left foot is amputated? In Burke 1994, employing the doctrine of sortal essentialism, I defended a surprising position last defended by Chrysippus: that Dion survives while the seemingly unscathed Theon perishes. This paper defends that position against objections by Stone, Carter, Olson, and others. Most notably, it offers a (...) novel, conservative solution to the many-thinkers problem, a solution that enables us to accept the existence of brain-containing person-parts while denying that those person-parts are thinking, conscious beings. (shrink)

Here is a puzzle from the Stoic, Chrysippus: There was once a man called Dion, who was unfortunate enough to have his foot annihilated. Thereafter, he was known as Theon. Theon is identical to what was left over after Dion’s foot was removed. That is, Theon is that part of Dion that does not include his foot. If all this is true, then Theon is a proper part of Dion. That is, he is a part of (...) Dion, but not identical to Dion. But if that’s right, then, surprisingly, Dion didn’t survive the loss of his foot. (shrink)

Dion is a full-bodied man. Theon is that part of him which consists of all of him except his left foot. What becomes of Dion and Theon when Dion’s left foot is amputated? Employing the doctrine of sortal essentialism, I defend a surprising answer last defended by Chrysippus: that Dion survives while the seemingly unscathed Theon perishes. For replies to critics, see my publications of 1997 and (especially) 2004.

Among Aristides' extant works there are five speeches concerning the city of Smyrna, namely the first Smyrnaean oration (17), a monody for Smyrna (18), a letter to I Marcus and Commodus concerning Smyrna (19), a palinode for Smyrna (20) and the second Smyrnaean oration (21). The historical context and purpose of Orr. 18, 19 and 20 are well known and uncontroversial. In contrast, although the dating of Orr. 17 and 21 relative to the others is not in doubt, their context (...) and purpose have been divergently interpreted. In this note I will reargue the case that the dominant modern scholarly tradition, which conceives the speeches as invitations to the emperors Marcus and Commodus respectively to visit Smyrna, is wrong. Rather the speeches were addresses of welcome to two proconsuls, father and son, on their respective arrivals in Smyrna. Secondly, I will briefly indicate the general significance of this identification. (shrink)

That the Vergilian commentary by Aelius Donatus – one of the most influential late-antique commentaries that have not survived – was extant in the ninth century and available to some Carolingian scholars is still a widespread belief. The evidence in support of this thesis is said to have been provided by the Harvard Servianist J. J. H. Savage in three articles published between 1925 and 1931. In these articles, Savage claimed that a few marginal notes in one of the (...) ninth-century primary witnesses to the DS scholia, the so-called ‘Vergil of Tours’ (Bern, Burgerbibliothek, Ms. 165), were drawn almost directly from Donatus’ commentary and that a marginal note in a roughly coeval Servian witness (Bern, Burgerbibliothek, Ms. 363) provided information about a place where a copy of the commentary could be found. A re-examination of the two manuscripts shows that the evidence adduced by Savage does not stand scrutiny and that the terminus post quem for the loss of Donatus’ commentary should be antedated by at least one century. (shrink)

In the first act of Terence'sAndria, we find a dialogue between the old man Simo and Sosia, the freedman, with the former explaining why he has decided to arrange a false wedding for his young son Pamphilus. He has, in fact, learned that his son, despite being betrothed, has had a relationship with another girl and that—quite a serious matter—the fiancée's father, Chremes, has heard about the clandestine affair. In verses 144–9 Simo reports on the not-altogether friendly meeting he has (...) had with Chremes, who is furious about the complete disrespect that has been shown to his daughter; Simo's only defence is to attempt to deny the truth (146:ego illud sedulo negare factum). (shrink)

The ancient puzzle of Dion and Theon has given rise to a surprising array of apparently implausible views. For example, in order to solve the puzzle, several philosophers have been led to deny the existence of their own feet, others have denied that objects can gain and lose parts, and large numbers of philosophers have embraced the thesis that distinct objects can occupy the same space, having all their material parts in common. In this paper, I argue for an (...) alternative approach: I claim that human beings have ordinary parts—hands, heads, feet, and so on—but no extraordinary parts, such as ‘foot-complements’, the existence of which is essential to the puzzle. I rebut three objections to this approach: an objection that it is unacceptably metaphysically arbitrary, an objection that the view is incompatible with versions of the puzzle involving decapitation, and an objection concerning masses of matter. If we can believe that there are such things as hands and feet without involving ourselves in paradox, and without accepting large numbers of co-located material objects that share all their material parts, then that is what we should do. My view is the only known alternative which allows this. (shrink)

In the Armenian tradition of Ailios Theon’s Progymnasmata two otherwise unknown historians occur. By examining the context of the passage and comparing it with authors like Philostephanos, it is made plausible that the ‘unknown’ historians are Phileas of Athens and Skymnos of Chios, whose names are misspelled in the Armenian text.

Among Aristides' extant works there are five speeches concerning the city of Smyrna, namely the first Smyrnaean oration , a monody for Smyrna , a letter to I Marcus and Commodus concerning Smyrna , a palinode for Smyrna and the second Smyrnaean oration . The historical context and purpose of Orr. 18, 19 and 20 are well known and uncontroversial. In contrast, although the dating of Orr. 17 and 21 relative to the others is not in doubt, their context and (...) purpose have been divergently interpreted. In this note I will reargue the case that the dominant modern scholarly tradition, which conceives the speeches as invitations to the emperors Marcus and Commodus respectively to visit Smyrna, is wrong. Rather the speeches were addresses of welcome to two proconsuls, father and son, on their respective arrivals in Smyrna. Secondly, I will briefly indicate the general significance of this identification. (shrink)

Dion is a human person, Lefty is his left foot, and Theon is Lefty-Complement, a proper part of Dion. Lefty is annihilated and Dion survives left-footless. After Lefty’s annihilation Theon, if he survives, occupies the same region as Dion. I suggest that this scenario be understood as a fusion case in which Dion and Theon, initially overlapping but distinct, are identical after Lefty’s annihilation and propose an account of proper names that allows us to say that Dion (...) and Theon have ‘become identical’ without commitment to occasional identity or other controversial metaphysical doctrines. The proposed solution employs the semantics developed by Wolfgang Schwarz to address the ‘paradox of occasional identity’, posed by puzzle cases of fission, to deal with the problem of Dion and Theon, a body-minus puzzle. (shrink)

In his book Περὶ τῆς τοῦ λόγου συντάξεως Michael Syncellus includes a section on the rules for accenting prepositions that occur in anastrophe. This section is also part of the chapter on the accentuation of prepositions preserved in the Τονικὰ παραγγέλματα by John of Alexandria, an important epitome of Aelius Herodian's lost work Περὶ καθολικῆς προσῳδίας. Further below, Michael's treatment of the various functions of the conjunction ἤ/ἦ again presents very strong similarities with the corresponding unit of the chapter (...) on the accentuation of conjunctions in the Τονικὰ παραγγέλματα. In this article I first argue that Michael's sections, which have gone entirely unnoticed by students of the Cath. Pr., have drawn directly upon the Cath. Pr., and I identify the ways in which they add to our picture of Herodian's and John's aforementioned works. Then I turn my attention to John's chapter on the accentuation of prepositions: I provide additional evidence to support Eduard Hiller's view that it does not form a coherent whole, and I discuss the implications of this problematical structure for defining the contents of Book 18 and the Appendix of the Cath. Pr. (shrink)

: To honor Bernard Goldstein, this article highlights in the "Defense of Theon against George of Trebizond" by Regiomontanus (1436-1476) themes that resonate with leading strands of Goldstein's scholarship. I argue that, in this poorly-known work, Regiomontanus's mastery of Ptolemy's mathematical astronomy, his interest in making astronomy physical, and his homocentric ideals stand in unresolved tension. Each of these themes resonates with Gold- stein's fundamental work on the Almagest, the Planetary Hypotheses, and al-Bitruji's Principles of Astronomy. I flesh out (...) these tensions with an intriguing interpretation of the history of astronomy, in which Regiomontanus contrasts the two-dimensional "eccentric astronomy" attributed to the Almagest and the Arabs with the three-dimensional spheres of the "later" astronomers. A similar contrast reappears when Regiomontanus portrays as a "fictitious art" an astronomy that does not go beyond the accommodation of computations to the appearances. To conclude, I use Regiomontanus's expression to reinstate (pace Goldstein and Barker in this journal, 1998) fictionalism as an actor's category in Osiander and sixteenth-century astronomy. (shrink)