Diogenes of Oinoanda

Diogenes of Oinoanda

Diogenes of Oenoanda (or Oinoanda) was an Epicurean Greek from the 2nd century AD who carved a summary of the philosophy of Epicurus onto a portico wall in the ancient city of Oenoanda in Lycia (modern day southwest Turkey). The surviving fragments of the wall, which originally extended about 80 meters, form an important source of Epicurean philosophy.

Diogenes (ca. 400-ca. 325 B.C.), a Greek philosopher, was the most famous exponent of Cynicism, which called for a closer imitation of nature, the repudiation of most human conventions, and complete independence of mind and spirit

Strabo

Strabo
Strabo (Greek: Στράβων; 63/64 BC – ca. AD 24) was a Greek historian, geographer and philosopher.

Strabo, who was born at Amaseia (now Amasya in Turkey), traveled to Rome in 44 BC and remained there until about 31 BC. He visited Corinth in 29 BC and in about 24 BC sailed up the Nile.

Although the historical writings of Strabo, including his Historical Sketches, in 47 books, have been almost entirely lost, his Geography, in 17 books, has survived virtually intact. This major geographical work is an important source of information on the ancient world. In it Strabo accepted the traditional description of the Earth as divided into five zones with the oikoumene, or inhabited part, represented as a parallelogram spread over eight lines of latitude and seven meridians of longitude. Where he excelled, however, was in the field of historical and cultural geography and he gave a detailed account of the history and culture of the lands and people of the Roman Empire and of such areas as India, which lay beyond the dominion of Augustus. In this he quoted much from the earlier Greeks, including Eratosthenes, and Artemidorus.

Strabo, not content merely to describe the lands of the civilized world, also wished to understand its enormous diversity. He rejected the simple climatic determinism that he attributed to the Stoic Poseidonius, arguing in its place for the role of institutions and education. Despite the value of this work Strabo seemed to exercise little influence until Byzantine times.

Gaius Plinius Secundu

Gaius Plinius Secundu
Born: 23 A.D.
Birthplace: Como, Italy
Died: 24 August 79 A.D. (Got too close to an erupting volcano)
Best Known As: The author of Natural History

Gaius Plinius Secundas (Pliny the Elder) was a Roman official and military officer who also wrote as a naturalist, biographer and historian. He is most known for his only extant work, a 37-volume Natural History that served as the basis for scientific knowledge for centuries. Pliny wrote in Latin, using mostly Greek sources and his own observations (and vivid imagination). In 79 A.D., when Mt. Vesuvius erupted, Pliny was a naval commander at the Bay of Naples. While attempting to get closer to the volcano and possibly effect a rescue, Pliny was overcome with fumes and died.

His nephew Pliny the Younger also was a writer and historian, as well as a Roman senator.
Gaius Plinius Secundus was a famous Roman scientific encyclopedist and historian. He surveyed all the known sciences of his day, astronomy, meteorology, geography, mineralogy, zoology, and botany. Most of his works are lost, but his book Historia naturalis (Natural History) still exists. No single work of Pliny still exists, but many of them were copied, complete or in excerpts, multiple times. So today numerous copies of many of his works exist, which gives some security that they are authentic.

Plinius was born in Como, studied in Rome and then became soldier, which was a typical career for a Roman aristocrat. He became a cavalry commander in Gallia (France) and Germania (Germany) and a friend of Vespasian. During the reign of Nero he was in foreign countries, which kept him out of harm's way. After Nero died, his friend Vespasian was made emperor in AD 69. So he returned to Rome and took up various public offices.

Cicero

Cicero
Born: 6 January 106 B.C.
Birthplace: Arpinum (now Arpino, Italy)
Died: 7 December 43 B.C. (assassination)
Best Known As: Roman statesman who stood up to Marc Antony
Name at birth: Marcus Tullius Cicero

Cicero was the greatest speaker among the many famous statesmen of ancient Rome. He practiced law and studied philosophy in Greece before holding a rising sequence of important jobs in the Roman Empire. In 64 BCE he became Consul, the highest office in Rome. As Consul he won fame for his orations against Cataline, the head of a secret conspiracy to seize the government. Always a staunch supporter of the Republic, Cicero was eventually forced from office by his enemies, and when Julius Caesar consolidated his power in 48 BC, Cicero went into political retirement. During this time he wrote his famous essays on happiness, on old age, and on friendship. Upon Caesar's assassination in 44 BCE, Cicero returned to public life and delivered a series of scathing speeches (the "Phillipics") against Marc Antony. This proved to be Cicero's undoing: when Antony took power in a triumvirate with Octavian and Marcus Lepidus, Cicero was declared an outlaw and killed by Antony's men in 43 BCE.

After Cicero's death, his head and right hand were taken to Antony, who had them placed on public view on the rostrum where Cicero had made many of his famous speeches.

Caesar

Caesar
Gaius Julius Caesar (ca. 140 BC–85 BC) was a Roman senator, supporter and brother-in-law of Gaius Marius, and father of Julius Caesar, the later dictator of Rome.

Caesar was married to Aurelia Cotta, a member the of Aurelii and Rutilii families, and had two daughters, both named Julia, and a son, Julius Caesar, born in 100 BC.[1] He was the brother of Sextus Julius Caesar, consul in 91 BC[2] and thus the son of Gaius Julius Caesar.

Epicurus

Epicurus (Greek: Έπίκουρος, Epikouros, "upon youth"; Samos, 341 BC – Athens, 270 BC) was an ancient Greek philosopher and the founder of the school of philosophy called Epicureanism. Only a few fragments and letters remain of Epicurus's 300 written works. Much of what we know about Epicurean philosophy derives from later followers and commentators.

For Epicurus, the purpose of philosophy was to attain the happy, tranquil life, characterized by aponia, the absence of pain and fear, and by living a self-sufficient life surrounded by friends. He taught that pleasure and pain are the measures of what is good and bad, that death is the end of the body and the soul and should therefore not be feared, that the gods do not reward or punish humans, that the universe is infinite and eternal, and that events in the world are ultimately based on the motions and interactions of atoms moving in empty space

Lucretius

Lucretius

Titus Lucretius Carus (ca. 99 BC- ca. 55 BC) was a Roman poet and philosopher. His only known work is the epic philosophical poem on Epicureanism De Rerum Natura, On the Nature of Things.

Very little is known about Lucretius's life. One source of information is St. Jerome, writing 400 years after Lucretius's death and with a possible desire to discredit him. He mentions Lucretius in the Chronica Eusebii. Here we find the following notice: "Titus Lucretius the poet is born. Later he was driven mad by a love potion, and when, during the intervals of his insanity, he had written a number of books, which were later emended by Cicero, he killed himself by his own hand in the 44th year of his life." In most manuscripts this notice is entered under the year 94 BC, but in others under 93 or 96. This gives us the following alternative dates for Lucretius's life and death: 96-53/52, 94-51/50, and 93-50/49.

Marcus Terentius Varro

Marcus Terentius Varro

Marcus Terentius Varro (116 BC – 27 BC), also known as Varro Reatinus to distinguish him from his younger contemporary Varro Atacinus, was a Roman scholar and writer.He studied under the Roman philologist Lucius Aelius Stilo, and later at Athens under the Academic philosopher Antiochus of Ascalon.

Steinthal

Steinthal

Heymann or Hermann Steinthal (born at Gröbzig, Anhalt, May 16, 1823; died at Berlin March 14, 1899) was a German philologist and philosopher.

He studied philology and philosophy at the University of Berlin, and was in 1850 appointed privat-dozent of philology and mythology at that institution. He was a pupil of Wilhelm von Humboldt, whose Sprachwissenschaftliche Werke he edited in 1884. From 1852 to 1855 Steinthal resided in Paris, where he devoted himself to the study of Chinese, and in 1863 he was appointed assistant professor at the Berlin University; from 1872 he was also privat-dozent in critical history of the Old Testament and in religious philosophy at the Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judenthums. In 1860 he founded, together with his brother-in-law Moritz Lazarus, the Zeitschrift für Völkerpsychologie und Sprachwissenschaft, in which was established the new science of racial psychology. Steinthal was one of the directors (from 1883) of the Deutsch-Israelitische Gemeindebund, and had charge of the department of religious instruction in various small congregations.

Democritus

Democritus

Democritus (Greek: Δημόκριτος, Dēmokritos, "chosen of the people", aka The Laughing Philosopher) was a pre-Socratic Greek materialist philosopher (born at Abdera in Thrace ca. 460 BC - died ca 370 BC). Democritus was a student of Leucippus and co-originator of the belief that all matter is made up of various imperishable, indivisible elements which he called atoma (sg. atomon) or "indivisible units", from which we get the English word atom. It is virtually impossible to tell which of these ideas were unique to Democritus and which are attributable to Leucippus.

Krates

Krates
Crates, of Mallus in Cilicia (modern day Southeastern Anatolia Region, Turkey), was a Greek language grammarian and Stoic philosopher of the 2nd century BC, leader of the literary school and head of the library of Pergamum. His chief work was a critical and exegetical commentary on Homer. He is also famous for constructing the earliest known globe of the Earth.

He was born at Mallus in Cilicia, and was brought up at Tarsus, and then moved to Pergamon, and there lived under the patronage of Eumenes II, and Attalus II. He was the founder of the Pergamon school of grammar, and seems to have been at one time the head of the library of Pergamon.

He visited Rome as ambassador of either Eumenes, in 168 BC, or Attalus in 159 BC. Having broken his leg and been compelled to stay there for some time, he delivered lectures which gave the first impulse to the study of grammar and criticism among the Romans.

Aristarch

Aristarch

Aristarchus or Aristarch of Samothrace (Άρίσταρχος, 220?–143 BC?) was a grammarian noted as the most influential of all scholars of Homeric poetry. He was the librarian of the library of Alexandria and seems to have succeeded his teacher Aristophanes of Byzantium in that role.

He established the most historically important critical edition of the Homeric poems, and he is said to have applied his teacher's accent system to it, pointing the texts with a careful eye for metrical correctness. It is likely that he, or more probably, another predecessor at Alexandria, Zenodotus, was responsible for the division of the Iliad and Odyssey into twenty-four books each. According to the Suda, Aristarchus wrote 800 treatises (ὑπομνήματα) on various topics, all lost but for fragments preserved in the various scholia.

Accounts of his death vary, though they agree that it was during the persecutions of Ptolemy VIII of Egypt. One account has him, having contracted an incurable dropsy, starving himself to death while in exile on Cyprus.

The historical connection of his name to literary criticism has created the term aristarch for someone who is a judgmental critic.

Homer

Appendix447-448
(names searching)

荷馬（'`Oμηρος，約前9世紀─前8世紀），相傳為古希臘的遊吟詩人，生於小亞細亞，失明，創作了史詩《伊利亞特》和《奧德賽》，兩者統稱《荷馬史詩》。 沒有確切證據證明荷馬的存在，所以也有人認為他是傳說中被構造出來的人物。而關於《荷馬史詩》，大多數學者認為是當時經過幾個世紀口頭流傳的詩作的結晶。

荷馬時期（西元前12世紀——西元前8世紀）
　　荷馬時期是根據荷馬史詩的作者名字來命名的，也就是氏族社會末期。荷馬時期為希臘神話的形成期，也是造型藝術的萌芽期。荷馬時期最早的造型藝術作品是幾何風格的陶瓶，造型簡樸，大小不一，多用於敬神和陪葬。即使是雕刻作品，也多為幾何形的，沒有細節刻畫。因此，這一時期又被稱為“幾何風格時期”。 這時，希臘半島的人民繼承和發展了原始人積累的習俗及對世界的想像，他們的文化遠不及深受古埃及和兩河流域影響的海島上的愛琴文化成熟。盲人詩人荷馬把幾百年以至上千年來廣泛流傳的民間傳說、歌謠、關於對天地起源、歷史未來、人生嚮往等神話整理出兩部不朽的文藝作品，也就是這兩部作品為後來希臘美術的發展方向奠定了基調，成了希臘美術取之不盡的素材和源泉。