Ancient Greek Texts Research Articles

Surveying the Types of Tables in Ancient Greek Texts

Abstract We may take tables for granted. However, due to a variety of factors, tables were a rarity in the history of ancient Greek culture, used only limitedly in very special contexts and generally in a non-systematic way, except in astronomy. In this paper I present the main types of tables that can be found in ancient Greek texts: non-ruled columnar lists (accounts and other types of informal tables), ruled columnar lists (mostly astronomical tables), and symmetric tables (mainly Pythagorean displays of numbers).

The Syntax of the Genitive Case in Longus’ Novel Daphnis and Chloe

This study aims to explore the syntactic functions and characteristics of the genitive case in the ancient Greek novel “Daphnis and Chloe” by Longus, a text from the 2nd century AD, which exemplifies the “second sophistic” period of rhetorical development. The primary source for this research is the text of “Daphnis and Chloe”, which has been thoroughly analysed to ascertain the usage of the genitive case in various syntactic roles. The research employs descriptive and structural methods of linguistic analysis. The descriptive method identifies and explains instances of the genitive case within the text, while the structural method examines the relationships between these instances and other linguistic elements. The genitive case in the novel is found to perform multiple syntactic functions, including controlling verbs, nouns, adjectives, and expressing various semantic nuances. Detailed examples are provided to illustrate these functions and their impact on the text’s meaning. The findings offer a foundation for further studies of the genitive case in ancient Greek texts, providing significant insights for researchers and linguists interested in ancient Greek grammar and its syntactic constructions. The study enhances understanding of ancient rhetorical techniques and their application in literary texts during the “second sophistic” period.

An embedded diachronic sense change model with a case study from ancient Greek

Word meanings change over time, and word senses evolve, emerge or die out in the process. For ancient languages, where the corpora are often small and sparse, modelling such changes accurately proves challenging, and quantifying uncertainty in sense-change estimates consequently becomes important. GASC (Genre-Aware Semantic Change) and DiSC (Diachronic Sense Change) are existing generative models that have been used to analyse sense change for target words from an ancient Greek text corpus, using unsupervised learning without the help of any pre-training. These models represent the senses of a given target word such as “kosmos” (meaning decoration, order or world) as distributions over context words, and sense prevalence as a distribution over senses. The models are fitted using Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods to measure temporal changes in these representations. This paper introduces EDiSC, an Embedded DiSC model, which combines word embeddings with DiSC to provide superior model performance. It is shown empirically that EDiSC offers improved predictive accuracy, ground-truth recovery and uncertainty quantification, as well as better sampling efficiency and scalability properties with MCMC methods. The challenges of fitting these models are also discussed.

Creativity in the Ancient Greek Philosophy: The Politics of Demiourgein

ABSTRACTWhere does creativity come from and what is its purpose? The paper revisits these ever‐turning questions to correct the prevalent but, arguably, inaccurate historical interpretation of creativity as a concept that emerged in modernity. First, I substantiate that a close study of the ancient Greek texts suggests that although creativity seems to occupy a peripheral position in the ancient philosophical thinking, it is a central, yet, hidden, subject of speculation. Second, I overturn the worn‐out view that the ancient Greek philosophy conceives creativity as a God‐given talent breathed into a fortunate few. Last, I demonstrate that a more encompassing understanding of creativity is implied by several Greek philosophers. To achieve this, (a) I discuss the contemporary interpretations of the ancient notion; (b) I examine the historical origin and etymology of the Greek term demiourgein (“to create”) to discuss its relevant uses; and (c) I develop a nuanced framework for conceptualizing ancient creativity and its interrelation to human agency, politics, and social life.

ПЕРЕКЛАД ‘‘ДЕРВЕНСЬКОГО ПАПІРУСУ’’ ЯК НАЙДАВНІШОЇ ЄВРОПЕЙСЬКОЇ «КНИГИ»: МІЖ ОРФІКАМИ І СОФІСТИКОЮ

Presented for the first time (from ancient Greek) is the translation into Ukrainian of the "Derveni Papyrus" one of the most crucial surviving texts identified as belonging to the Orphic tradition. It has been discovered that besides the theogonic and ontological worldview, it also traces epistemological and ethico-anthropological issues. The thesis is substantiated that the author of the ancient Greek text considers unbelief and irrationality as synonymous concepts, thereby emphasizing that knowledge is always linked with faith in a broad context.

Applying case study methodology for teaching Philology students reading ancient greek texts: theoretical principles

Applying case study methodology for teaching Philology students reading ancient greek texts: theoretical principles

The task and future of New Testament Studies

In the light of various new tendencies in New Testament Studies, this article charts out the task for future students and researchers in the field. Within the frame of newer socio-cognitive discourse studies, it builds on the semiotic foundation that controlled interpretation of the ancient Greek text as a complex sign-system enabling the community of professional readers to construct meaning fitting the text. Such interpretations need to simulate the interpretation process within the original epistemic community. The article aims to reassess the role of exegesis in Testament Studies and a redesign of its sub-disciplines.Contribution: The article makes an original contribution to realign the hermeneutical task to interpret the text in the New Testament with socio-cognitive discourse studies. It follows trends in reception studies in distinguishing semantic interpretation from the various uses of such consensual text and conforms to interpretation of the New Testament in the realm of faculties of theology and within academic and public discourse.

Cross-modal iconicity in songs about weeping

Abstract The article explores cross-modal iconic relations in nine diverse Western-music songs ranging from 1600 to 2015, all of them thematizing dysphoric weeping. Initial input comes from five recurrent features observed in ancient Greek texts associated with performative events, including the prominence of sound, interjections and strong self-referentiality, repetitions and refrains, the motif of endlessness, and tears associated with streams of water, dew, and libation liquids. The analysis adopts Peirce’s conceptual distinction between image, diagram, and metaphor iconicity, although the continuum reading proposed by several scholars is ultimately favored. The sample turns out to offer plenty of evidence of iconic relations. Interjections, falsetto, verbal repetitions, musical repetitions, musical rendering of sighs and endlessness, ostinato patterns, downward notes, and water images (rain and rivers), all of this is shown to substantiate cross-modal iconicity encompassing weeping, lyrics, music (including musical notation), and images, in different combinations. Quantitative investigations confirming/disconfirming and adding iconicity patterns, and comparative analyses linking Western and non-Western lament traditions constitute desiderata for future work.

(Re)-Killing of a Sacred Deer: Myths, Ecology, and Hegemony in Murathan Mungan’s Deer Curses

Abstract This article traces the motif of the deer hunt from ancient Greek texts to its reinterpretation in contemporary Turkish literature. The motif, which appears frequently in both ancient Greek myths and the legends of Central Asian warrior Turkish societies, is reproduced as a fusion in the works of contemporary Turkish writer Murathan Mungan (*1955). The meanings attached to the motif take on a different dimension during this reproduction, which has implications for themes such as taboo, transgression, and the hierarchy of animal-human relationships in folk narrative. An analysis of Mungan’s play Deer Curses can aid in elucidating the points of folk narrative in regard to these themes and anthropocentrism. This article thus investigates how the motif of the deer hunt, among other deer-related motifs, is revived in a contemporary literary work and what type of conclusions it may bring in analyzing human-animal relationships, as well as hegemony, through a symbolic reading of this relationship.

Creating a large-scale diachronic corpus resource: Automated parsing in the Greek papyri (and beyond)

AbstractThis paper explores how to syntactically parse Ancient Greek texts automatically and maps ways of fruitfully employing the results of such an automated analysis. Special attention is given to documentary papyrus texts, a large diachronic corpus of non-literary Greek, which presents a unique set of challenges to tackle. By making use of the Stanford Graph-Based Neural Dependency Parser, we show that through careful curation of the parsing data and several manipulation strategies, it is possible to achieve an Labeled Attachment Score of about 0.85 for this corpus. We also explain how the data can be converted back to its original (Ancient Greek Dependency Treebanks) format. We describe the results of several tests we have carried out to improve parsing results, with special attention paid to the impact of the annotation format on parser achievements. In addition, we offer a detailed qualitative analysis of the remaining errors, including possible ways to solve them. Moreover, the paper gives an overview of the valorisation possibilities of an automatically annotated corpus of Ancient Greek texts in the fields of linguistics, language education and humanities studies in general. The concluding section critically analyses the remaining difficulties and outlines avenues to further improve the parsing quality and the ensuing practical applications.

Multifractal Characterization of Texts for Pattern Recognition: On the Complexity of Morphological Structures in Modern and Ancient Languages.

The study of languages' structure and their organization in a set of well-defined relation schemes is a delicate matter. In the last decades, the convergence of traditional conflicting views by linguists is supported by an interdisciplinary approach that involves not only genetics or bio-archelogy but nowadays even the science of complexity. In light of this new and useful approach, this study proposes an in-depth analysis of the complexity underlying the morphological organization, in terms of multifractality and long-range correlations, of several modern and ancient texts pertaining to various linguistic strains (including ancient Greek, Arabic, Coptic, Neo-Latin and Germanic languages). The methodology is grounded on the mapping procedure between lexical categories belonging to text excerpts and time series, which is based on the rank of the frequency occurrence. Through the well-known MFDFA technique and a specific multifractal formalism, several multifractal indexes are then extracted for characterizing texts and the multifractal signature has been adopted for characterizing several language families, such as Indo-European, Semitic and Hamito-Semitic. The regularities and differences in the linguistic strains are assessed within a multivariate statistical framework and corroborated with a Machine Learning approach that is dedicated, in turn, to investigate the predictive power of the multifractal signature pertinent to text excerpts. The obtained results show a strong presence of persistence, i.e., memory, in the morphological structure of analyzed texts and we claim that this property has a role in characterizing the studied linguistic families. In fact, for example, the proposed analysis framework - grounded on complexity indexes - is able to easily distinguish ancient Greek texts from Arabic ones, as they belong to different language strains, i.e., indo-European and Semitic, respectively. The proposed approach has been proven effective and can be adopted for further comparative studies and for designing new informetrics for further advances in the fields of information retrieval and Artificial Intelligence.

Le ossa di Oreste si trovano in classe La metafora che insegna: proposta per un intervento didattico

This paper aims to propose an integrated model for the analysis of verbal processes in ancient Greek texts and their facilitation in contemporary readers through coherent evidence-based teaching procedures. Rooted in functional contextualism, a philosophy of science in which events are studied in relation to their historical and current environment pursuing the goals of prediction and influence, it applies the model of language and cognition known as Relational Frame Theory to the analysis of verbal processes involved in the decoding of Orestes’ bones oracles described in Hdt., 1.67‑8 and to the extension to these of an existing teaching procedure for the facilitation of naming and metaphorical language. The intervention efficacy will need empirical evaluation by a behavioural analyst.

H21 Acne treatments through the ages

Abstract The search for an effective treatment for acne dates back to 1550 Bc with the Ebers Papyrus, one of the oldest medical documents in the world, mentioning the application of raw honey and sulfur to affected areas. King Tutankhamun is widely believed to have suffered from acne as his tomb was filled with popular acne treatments of the time such as sulfur, sour milk, Aloe vera, myrrh and salt to rid him of his affliction in the afterlife. Much like the Egyptians, ancient Greek texts mention honey and sulfur for the treatment of acne. A Greek physician named Theodosius suggested that patients wipe their spots with a towel while watching a star falling from the sky as he suggested this would result in their spots falling from their faces. The Romans, in addition to the aforementioned honey and sulfur, trialled crocodile meat, cypress oil, sour cheese, leek leaves and cinnamon in their attempts to find a successful treatment. Thomas Bateman wrote in A Practical Synopsis of Cutaneous Disease that a patient reported that bruised parsley cleared her acne. He was also an advocate of remedies used by ancient civilizations. At the turn of the 20th century, American physician W.A. Pusay wrote about the use of ionizing radiation in the treatment of acne. Radiation was widely used in the treatment of acne until the 1960s, when concerns regarding associated secondary carcinogenesis led to the treatment falling out of favour. In the first half of the 20th century, phototherapy was a popular treatment for acne, and quartz mercury vapour lamps, in particular, were used. The most significant advancement in the treatment of acne was the discovery of the utility of synthetic vitamin A. In the 1960s, pharmaceutical company Roche trialled the compound 13-cis-retinoic acid as a treatment for skin cancer. This was ineffective, but it was demonstrated that it was efficacious in the treatment of acne. A study published in 1979 in the New England Journal of Medicine demonstrated that 13 of 14 patients with acne conglobate experienced clearance of their acne. In 1982, the US Food and Drug Administration granted approval for 13-cis-retinoic acid, or isotretinoin, as a treatment for acne. It was introduced in Europe in 1983. Isotretinoin has been a life-changing advance in the treatment of this disease, but its teratogenic effects mean it must be prescribed with education and care.

Seventy Times Seven or Seventy-Seven Times: The Mathematical Formula in Matthew 18:22 and LXX Genesis 4:24

Abstract A survey of the current state of research shows that Matthean scholars are uncertain about the precise value of ἑβδομηκοντάκις ἑπτά in Matt 18:22. An investigation of similar constructions in ancient Greek texts indicates that ἑβδομηκοντάκις ἑπτά denotes the multiplication of seventy by seven and it is best translated “seventy times seven.” Further evidence indicates that the absence of a conjunction between the numerical adverb (ἑβδομηκοντάκις) and the cardinal number (ἑπτά) requires the construction to signify multiplication and not addition. Finally, Jewish literature suggests that the multiplication of seventy and seven signifies a global totality for all that may exist.

The Meaning of agalma, eidôlon, and eikôn in Ancient Greek Texts: A Quantitative Approach Using Computer-Driven Methods and Tools


 This article analyzes the use and meaning of central Greek terms related to images in ancient Greek texts collected in the Diorisis Ancient Greek Corpus (Alessandro Vatri and McGillivray 2018). In contrast to the existing literature on the (religious) status of images in Greco-Roman Antiquity, Judaism, and Christianity, this article applies a mixed-methods approach, combining quantitative and computer-driven examinations with a qualitative analysis of selected sentences. The examination of the use and meaning of agalma, eidôlon, and eikôn considers various religious contexts (Jewish and Christian as well as Greco-Roman polytheistic), thereby embedding this article in the larger framework of comparative religious research on synchronic inter-religious contact.

Thought about action: ergon in Gargantua

Rabelais’s fictional chronicles communicate thought about action, including about the relationship of action to social status. They explore and test the view, which was widespread in the period, that the actions you undertake in life should be determined by your social status. The notion that certain actions properly characterise different social groups because those groups have distinct functions in society is widely communicated by the term ergon in key ancient Greek texts which Rabelais knew in the original. So ergon provides a way into the wider question of Rabelais’s representation of, and relationship to, social hierarchy. That question, explored here in relation to a key sixteenth-century work, was opened up in relation to key seventeenth-century works by Michael Moriarty’s pioneering Taste and Ideology in Seventeenth-Century France (1988).

Tales of Imitation: Palamedes, the Cranes, and Interspecies Learning in Greco-Roman Antiquity

Abstract Building upon new perspectives opened up by human-animal studies in the investigation of the Greco-Roman world, this article focuses on the cultural representation of interspecies learning in Greco-Roman sources. In particular, this study analyzes one of the foundational events of human culture in most societies: the introduction of the alphabet and writing. Among the many texts describing its origins, a few involve an enigmatic encounter between several flying cranes and the Greek hero Palamedes. This article considers the literary evidence regarding Palamedes and the cranes. It deals with folktales and anecdotes, illustrating how humans can learn from animals within the broader context of the transmission of knowledge in Greco-Roman antiquity. A thorough investigation of the ancient cultural encyclopedia will show why cranes could be regarded as teachers of the Greek hero. At the end of this study, it will be possible to identify precisely the constitutive forms of the letters that according to ancient Greek texts Palamedes could have observed by paying attention to the flight arrangements of cranes.

Measuring Diachronic Sense Change: New Models and Monte Carlo Methods for Bayesian Inference

Abstract In a bag-of-words model, the of a word with multiple meanings, for example ‘bank’ (used either in a river-bank or an institution sense), are represented as probability distributions over context words, and sense prevalence is represented as a probability distribution over senses. Both of these may change with time. Modelling and measuring this kind of sense change are challenging due to the typically high-dimensional parameter space and sparse datasets. A recently published corpus of ancient Greek texts contains expert-annotated sense labels for selected target words. Automatic sense-annotation for the word ‘kosmos’ (meaning decoration, order or world) has been used as a test case in recent work with related generative models and Monte Carlo methods. We adapt an existing generative sense change model to develop a simpler model for the main effects of sense and time, and give Markov Chain Monte Carlo methods for Bayesian inference on all these models that are more efficient than existing methods. We carry out automatic sense-annotation of snippets containing ‘kosmos’ using our model, and measure the time-evolution of its three senses and their prevalence. As far as we are aware, ours is the first analysis of this data, within the class of generative models we consider, that quantifies uncertainty and returns credible sets for evolving sense prevalence in good agreement with those given by expert annotation.

The Sacred Flora of India: A Case for Biodiversity Conservation

In ancient Greece, the spirit of conservation of plants and animals was represented by the Goddess Artemis.Numerous ancient Greek texts testify the role played by Artemis in the protection of plant and animal lifeand the same has been depicted in paintings and sculpture of the succeeding period. In India people havebeen worshipping forces and elements of nature from the time of the ancient Indus Valley civilizationthrough various sculptural artefacts like the seals and figurines. Vedic texts, the Ramayana and Mahabharataas well as other religious texts and treatises are full of examples of interdependence on nature. To this day,plants and animals are worshipped throughout the length and breadth of the country. From the Himalayanlandscape in the north and north-east to the southernmost tip of the country, from Eastern to the WesternGhats, people and societies have evolved religio-cultural mechanism for the conservation of natural habitatby way of sacred trees and sacred grooves. Sacred plants like Pipal, Banyan, Siris, Neem, Khejri etc. toanimals are all revered by the people of the subcontinent. Protection of these sacred species through religiousand cultural practices has resulted in their conservation and enrichment of the biodiversity of the regionwhich is very crucial for the overall livelihood of all living beings. The present paper, thus seeks to exploresome of these traits and mechanisms through which the rich biodiversity of the region has been ensured. Itis interesting to note here that people have made it a part of their lives and internalised these practices sothat a better liveable environment is ensured. The onslaught of modernity and development, however, haseroded many of these practices leading to loss of flora and fauna which has ultimately led to many manmadecrises and has disturbed the equilibrium of the planet. The attempt, therefore, should be to ensure thebalance of nature through our long-standing cultural practices in order to avert any catastrophe.

The Significance of the "Ransom Saying" in Mark 10:45

The ransom saying in Mark 10:45 has been variously understood as referring to Jesus's death as a substitutionary sacrifice for the forgiveness of sins, a victory over demonic forces, or an exemplary sacrifice for his followers. This study assesses the relative plausibility of these three interpretations within the broader context of Mark's Gospel. A survey of the primary proposed textual allusions behind the saying and a consideration of the possible meanings of λύτρον ἀντί in light of ancient Greek texts indicate that all three readings are possible. In the broader literary context of Mark, however, the evidence does not support reading the ransom saying as a reference to Jesus's death as a sacrifice for sins or a means of victory over demonic powers. Instead it favors reading the saying as a reference to Jesus's death as an exemplary sacrifice for his followers.