Nigeria and the classics最新文献

{"title":"Philoponus","authors":"M. Tuominen","doi":"10.5040/9781350113152","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5040/9781350113152","url":null,"abstract":"John of Alexandria or John the Grammarian, known as John Philoponus (c. 490s–570s), was a philosopher and theologian in 6th-century Alexandria. He first wrote on language, for example on words the meaning of which changes by accent alone, and studied philosophy with Ammonius, son of Hermias and a student of Proclus (411–485). The nickname “lover of toil” might refer to Philoponus’ industriousness, but the epithet was also used of the members of a Christian guild or brotherhood. While Philoponus’ early studies on language are considered as philosophically unimportant, his commentaries and critical treatises show independence and critical acumen, and some of his central contributions have even been taken to anticipate Galileo’s and Descartes’s views. Philoponus started his philosophical career as a commentator on Aristotle, often writing on the basis of the lectures of his teacher Ammonius. However, he grew increasingly independent and took distance from Aristotle and from the Neoplatonism of Ammonius and Proclus. Philoponus’ most famous innovations in philosophy include the arguments for the creation of the universe ex nihilo, the new analysis of prime matter as three-dimensional extension, the explanation of projectile motion by impressed force (later to be called impetus), and the rejection of the fifth element as the matter of celestial bodies that allowed him to use a unified model for explaining both celestial and sublunary motion. As a Christian theologian, Philoponus understood the central notions of the Trinitarian controversy in agreement with the philosophical tradition. He combined this analysis with what has been called his “particularist ontology” according to which universal natures are abstractions and exist only in thought and the Monophysite interpretation of Christ having one nature that is a composite of humanity and divinity. Although Philoponus managed to produce a consistent solution to the problem of the Trinity, his view was interpreted as tritheistic, i.e., as introducing three Godheads to the Trinity, and condemned as heretic in Constantinople (680–681). While the anathema probably decreased Philoponus’ impact in the Christian West in the centuries after his death, his arguments about creation and eternity were influential in the Islamic world, and many Renaissance thinkers recognized his effect on them. In general, it is perhaps somewhat ironic that Philoponus is celebrated as a forerunner of modern natural science while his central innovations are in agreement with Christian doctrine.","PeriodicalId":82164,"journal":{"name":"Nigeria and the classics","volume":"14 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-07-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"91262552","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Marius and Sulla","authors":"F. Santangelo","doi":"10.1093/obo/9780195389661-0352","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/obo/9780195389661-0352","url":null,"abstract":"Gaius Marius (b. 158/157–d. 86 bce) and Lucius Cornelius Sulla (b. 138–d. 78 bce) were the most prominent, and in several respects defining, figures of a phase of Roman Republican history that lasted roughly three decades: from 107, when Marius was elected to his first consulship, to 78 bce, the year of Sulla’s death. Much of that period was marked by the relationship between the two men, who first cooperated very effectively and then engaged in a fierce struggle for power that eventually led to years of civil strife and political violence on an unprecedented scale. Marius held the consulship on seven occasions, while Sulla did so twice, as well as holding a dictatorship that enabled him to enact a set of wide-ranging, far-reaching, and controversial measures. This bibliography seeks to achieve a workable balance between chronological and thematic approaches, and between narrative and interpretation. Speaking of an “age of Marius and Sulla” risks failing to do justice to the complexity of a period that was marked by other major developments, such as the initiatives of Saturninus and Glaucia (104–100 bce); the Social War (91–88 bce), which ended with the inclusion of the Italian communities south of the Po River into the Roman citizen body; and the first war against King Mithridates in the Greek East (88–85 bce). These events are covered in what follows only insofar as they are relevant to the study of Marius and Sulla; yet these two men are central to any of the main developments of this historical period, and readers who seek general guidance on these topics will find some orientation in this bibliography.","PeriodicalId":82164,"journal":{"name":"Nigeria and the classics","volume":"47 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-07-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"89895533","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Roman Kingship","authors":"Christopher Smith","doi":"10.1093/obo/9780195389661-0349","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/obo/9780195389661-0349","url":null,"abstract":"The Romans developed an account of their early history which was organized by the reigns of seven kings. By the 1st century bce, they had settled on a standard chronology for these kings, and in the following sequence: Romulus 753–717, Numa Pompilius 716–674, Tullus Hostilius 673–642, Ancus Marcius 641–617, Tarquinius Priscus 616–578, Servius Tullius 578–534, Tarquinius Superbus 534–509. It is clear from archaeological evidence that Rome from the 8th to the 6th century bce was in a period of significant growth and transformation. There are a number of exciting finds which have been related to the historical account. This account however was the product of a long period of development, and the narrative as it developed came to reflect the contemporary concerns of Roman politics. So research on Roman kingship has to take account of both the possibility of genuine history underlying the account, and the literary and artistic motivations which led to the transformations of the story over time. The relationship between these two is the subject of significant methodological discussion, on a spectrum from attempts to directly relate the historical account to archaeological finds, to significantly more skeptical claims that connections are coincidental and that the historical record is wholly unreliable. The third strand of investigation is institutional history and includes the controversy over the so-called leges regiae, the alleged legal precursors to the codification of law in the Twelve Tables from the mid-5th century bce, and the transformation of the Roman constitution into one characterized by shared time-limited office-holding. A quite different approach sees the kings as encoding deep mythological structures, and argues for a reconceptualization of the early history of Rome as a mythical rather than a historical sequence. Although this has been less popular recently, aspects of this scholarly approach have been influential in other fields of study. This is particularly true of social anthropology and the history of religion, where Dumézil’s classification of the Roman kings has been influential but controversial (see section Roman Kings and Indo-European Mythology).","PeriodicalId":82164,"journal":{"name":"Nigeria and the classics","volume":"63 6 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-06-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"77588156","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Roman Italy, 4th Century bce to 3rd Century ce","authors":"J. Patterson","doi":"10.1093/obo/9780195389661-0348","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/obo/9780195389661-0348","url":null,"abstract":"The history of Roman Italy is a vast subject, so the topics highlighted and the bibliography presented here are inevitably highly selective. The geographical scope is limited to Italy south of the river Po (Sicily and Sardinia, as provinces in antiquity, are excluded); the notional starting point chosen is the late 4th century bce (when Rome reorganized its alliances to create a structure which, in less than a hundred years, subjugated most of the peninsula); the (equally notional) conclusion is the reign of Diocletian, when Italy was subjected to taxation and subdivided into provinces. While the history of Roman Italy under the Republic can be seen as a narrative punctuated by episodes of warfare (the Samnite Wars, the conquest of Sicily, Hannibal’s invasion of Italy, the Social War, the Civil Wars), and the first sections of the article, after General Overviews and Key Background Works are roughly structured in this way, material on the history of Italy under the Empire can more appropriately be organized in thematic form. After an introduction to Rome and Italy under the Principate, much of the remainder of the article is thus divided between The Cities of Imperial Italy and The Italian Countryside. Under the first heading is gathered material on city administration, on local elites and sub-elites, and on civic buildings, as well as some key individual urban sites. The second heading covers material on rural Italy under the Republic (by way of background), on issues of population and migration, on the rural properties of the senatorial elite and the emperors, on agriculture and land division, on the archaeological techniques used to reconstruct settlement in the ancient landscape, on sanctuaries, and on the alimenta of the early 2nd century ce. The article concludes with a selection of studies of particular regions (underlining the significant degree of regional variation to be found across Italy). Publications in English are particularly highlighted where available, but (not surprisingly) many fundamental books and articles on Roman Italy have been published in Italian (or other European languages), and these too are included, so far as possible. There is some intersection between some of the topics covered here and other articles in the Oxford Bibliographies collection; in these cases, the relevant Oxford Bibliographies articles have been cited and the reader is referred to them for more bibliographical detail, while a limited number of key pieces of scholarship is cited here.","PeriodicalId":82164,"journal":{"name":"Nigeria and the classics","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-04-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88366824","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Aristotle's Categories","authors":"L. Castelli","doi":"10.1093/obo/9780195389661-0347","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/obo/9780195389661-0347","url":null,"abstract":"If there are one text and one doctrine which have been integral to Western philosophy almost without interruption, be it in the form of endorsement and defense or in the form of criticism, those are a short treatise, ascribed to Aristotle and usually known under the title Categories, and the doctrine of a primitive division of being into highest genera: the categories. Since the “rediscovery” of Aristotle’s writings and their organization in a corpus in the wave of enthusiasm for classical Greek philosophy in the 1st bce, all aspects of this work have been the object of debate. Controversies concern the very authenticity of the work, its title, its general philosophical scope, and all sorts of more specific issues emerging from the single chapters. It is difficult to tell what factors exactly determined the extraordinary historical and philosophical relevance of this short text over the centuries. One feature of it which certainly played some role is that the Categories looks like an introduction to philosophy, to the inquiry into what there is and to the reflection about the way in which we think and speak about reality—or, at least, this is the impression it gave to many generations of philosophers. In fact, the Categories came to occupy a particular place in the curriculum of philosophical studies not only for those interested in Aristotelian or Peripatetic philosophy, but, more generally, for all those interested in philosophy. This place within the history of philosophy explains the enormous amount of literature devoted to this work in the last two thousand years. This bibliography is meant to provide initial orientation with respect to the main issues raised by this relatively well known and at the same time puzzling and fascinating little text. The bibliography is divided into two main parts: the first part includes the references to general works (critical editions, translations, bibliographies, commentaries, and collections of essays), whereas the second part provides references to the literature on more specific topics (authenticity, title, early reception, and specific issues concerning the single chapters or groups of chapters). In compiling select bibliographies one must, by definition, make some choices. This bibliography aims at some balance between classic studies and more recent contributions, which also include bibliographical references to the earlier literature.","PeriodicalId":82164,"journal":{"name":"Nigeria and the classics","volume":"64 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-02-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87005481","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Greek Vase Painting","authors":"T. Smith","doi":"10.1093/obo/9780195389661-0346","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/obo/9780195389661-0346","url":null,"abstract":"Greek vase-painting is one of the best studied areas of classical antiquity. Figure decorated pottery, often called “vases,” was produced in large quantities in many regions of the ancient Greek world. Although decorated pottery had been made in Greece since prehistoric times, the field of Greek vase-painting is a branch of classical archaeology which focuses on vessels produced between the late Geometric and late classical/early Hellenistic periods (8th–3rd century bce). Early modern connoisseurs and collectors during the 18th century were attracted to Greek vases coming out of tombs in Italy, often mistakenly considering them to be Etruscan rather than Greek. Formal study of vases began during the late 19th century, but it was throughout the 20th that the sub-discipline truly gained momentum. Through the efforts of J. D. Beazley (b. 1885–d. 1970), a professor at Oxford University, the black- and red-figure vases of Athens (also termed “Attic”) which survive in enormous quantities were categorized according to painter and published in his magisterial lists (Attic Black-Figure Vase-Painters, 1956; Attic Red-Figure Vase-Painters, 1963; see Beazley 1956 and Beazley 1963 under Connoisseurship and Attribution). Beazley concentrated on attributing unsigned works, and his attributions remain for many scholars an important framework for the study of Greek vases. A. D. Trendall (b. 1909–d. 1995) created a similar typology for the Greek vase-painters of South Italy and Sicily. Also foundational is the Corpus Vasorum Antiquorum, launched by the Louvre in 1922 (see under Digital and Special Resources), which provides illustrated catalogues of Greek vases from museum collections, and also continues to feature vital information about individual vessels. Since the death of Beazley, research on Greek vase-painting has evolved greatly. The 1980s and 1990s saw increased attention to vase iconography, including studies of both myth and everyday life. At the same time, there emerged an updated series of regional studies for vases made outside of Athens, including those of Corinth, Boeotia, Laconia, East Greece, and western Greece. These studies too have focused to an extent on painter attribution, production, and distribution, while important developments in archaeological science have greatly benefited our understanding of local fabrics and techniques. In recent decades, scholarship has shifted toward contextual studies that emphasize social, historical, and religious functions and meanings of vases and their images. At present, there is an interest in the role of archaeological context and how it may have impacted the choices of both artist and consumer.","PeriodicalId":82164,"journal":{"name":"Nigeria and the classics","volume":"34 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-11-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82126620","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Apuleius's Platonism","authors":"Christina Hoenig","doi":"10.1093/obo/9780195389661-0345","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/obo/9780195389661-0345","url":null,"abstract":"Lucius Apuleius (c. 125–after 170 ce), of the North African city Madaura, was a Roman philosophical writer of the 2nd century ce. Apuleius’s identity is thrown into an interesting light by his notorious description of the narrator of his comic novel Metamorphoses, perhaps his most famous work, as a relative of Sextus of Chaeronea, who, in turn, was a relation of the Middle Platonist Plutarch. It is possible that this reference indicates merely an intellectual affiliation with Sextus and the Platonic school. From Apuleius’s Florida, a collection of epideictic orations, we learn that he undertook philosophical studies, broadly construed, during a sojourn in Athens that lasted several years and that may have been spent in the intellectual vicinity of the Middle Platonist Calvenus Taurus. Apuleius is thus commonly grouped with the Middle Platonists (see also the separate Oxford Bibliographies article “Middle Platonism” for a general discussion and various Greek and Roman representatives), a label that has become rather problematic, since it appears to streamline intellectual currents of Platonism that have been shown to vary significantly. Alternative terms, such as “post-Hellenistic” philosophy, have been suggested, but the term “Middle Platonism” is still widely used, with the caveat, however, that it ought to refer to a chronological timeframe, roughly the 1st century bce until Plotinus, rather than a homogenous philosophical outlook. The most conspicuous element in Apuleius’s own philosophical output is a rather complex demonology, designed to ensure that divine providential care permeates the entire cosmos. Other features of his writings are what may be regarded as trademark attributes of his time: a tendency to fit Plato’s thought into a digestible, handbook-style system, instead of practicing critical inquiry or exegesis; a religious interpretation of philosophical doctrine, no doubt informed by his close affiliation with various mystery cults contemporary with him; and an emphasis on rhetoric as a suitable means of conveying philosophical wisdom, a feature in line with the literary and cultural taste of the Second Sophistic. Reluctance to accept Apuleius’s standing as a philosopher is a modern phenomenon. He was held in high esteem for his role as a Platonic philosopher already during his lifetime, and St. Augustine would later single him out, in Book 8 of his City of God against the Pagans, as one of the noblest disciples of Plato—a description that is then followed, it is true, by a devastating critique of Apuleius’s doctrine on demons.","PeriodicalId":82164,"journal":{"name":"Nigeria and the classics","volume":"78 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-11-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"79282597","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Minor Socratics","authors":"A. Brancacci","doi":"10.1093/obo/9780195389661-0342","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/obo/9780195389661-0342","url":null,"abstract":"Minor Socratics (Socratici minori, Petits Socratiques, Kleine Sokratiker) are conventionally labelled the direct disciples of Socrates that already in Antiquity were known as Sokratikoi. Indeed, they founded the so-called “Socratic Schools” or “Minor Socratic Schools.” From this perspective, it was understood that Plato was the “major” Socratic. During the 20th and 21st century a new critical approach emerged which gradually separated Plato from the group of the Socratics as such. In this way, because of the complexity of his thought and its huge theoretical influence (in Antiquity and beyond), Plato gained his own place in the history of ancient philosophy. As a consequence of that, scholarship prefers today to easily label as “Socratics” those philosophers who have been called for a long time “Minor Socratics.” The Socratics are as follows: Antisthenes of Athens, Euclides of Megara, Aristippus of Cyrene, Phaedo of Elis, and Aeschines of Sphettus. According to the ancient historiography, Antisthenes founded the Cynic school (while the modern scholarship tends to make Diogenes of Sinope the founder of Cynism); in his turn, Euclides of Megara founded the Megarian school (a school that seems to be strictly connected with the so-called Dialectic school, although the links of the two movements have been not yet entirely clarified); Phaedo of Elis was the founder of the Eliac school, whose thought was later followed by the Eretrian school, which was founded by Menedemus of Eretria; finally, Aristippus of Cyrene founded the Cyrenaic school. Aeschines of Sphettus was the only Socratic philosopher who did not found an own school. The terms Sokratikos and Sokratikoi were coined very early, during the last decades of the 4th century bce. They are already attested in the Peripatetic Phaenias of Eresus. Phaenias wrote a book On the Socratics, and this fact proves that the group of the Socratics had been already established before the Hellenistic historiography. Moreover, Phaenias explicitely refers to Antisthenes (= SSR V A 172). On this regard, also the testimonium on Antisthenes (= SSR V A 22) by the historian Theopompus of Chios is very important. In Diogenes Laertius one can find more complex distinctions. In II 47 the “most representative” successors of Socrates, who were called Socratics, are Plato, Xenophon, and Antisthenes. Within the same passage Diogenes Laertius specifies that, among the ten Socratics that the tradition knows, “the most illustrious” are four: Aeschines, Phaedo, Euclides, and Aristippus. The division of these “ten Socratics notorius to the tradition” cannot be identified with the division of the ten schools of ethics, of whom Diogenes Laertius speaks in the proemium of his work (I 18–19). However, much of these schools ideally developed from Socrates, because they were founded either by the Socratics or by their pupils.","PeriodicalId":82164,"journal":{"name":"Nigeria and the classics","volume":"8 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-11-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88100878","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Scholia","authors":"Lara Pagani","doi":"10.1093/obo/9780195389661-0343","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/obo/9780195389661-0343","url":null,"abstract":"The word σχόλιον (“scholion,” Lat. scholium), a diminutive of σχολή, means originally “short note” or “brief explanation.” Today “scholia” designates, in a technical meaning, the amalgam of various comments scattered in the margins of medieval manuscripts of ancient literary works. Their contents descend ultimately from ancient commentaries, treatises, lexica, glossaries, and other scholarly products, via a long process of excerpting, insertion, and recombination of materials of different origins. The scholiastic corpora represent thus the outcome of a compilation of heterogeneous sources, designed to be systematically arranged in the margin of the manuscript, alongside the literary work commented upon, in order to both supply a multifaceted reading aid and preserve the ancient learned heritage. A significant debate has arisen about the period when the birth of the scholiography should be dated, whether in late antiquity or in the early Byzantine age. We possess a substantial amount of Greek scholiastic corpora, especially to a certain number of poets of the Archaic and Classical ages and, to a progressively lesser extent, to the most prominent of the Hellenistic poets; to some didascalic poets; and to prose-writers such as historians, rhetoricians, philosophers. The most plentiful and remarkable of the Greek scholiastic corpora is represented by the scholia to the Homeric poems, which probably convey the richest legacy of the philological and exegetical activity of the Hellenistic scholars. In the Latin field, Late Antique MSS bearing exegetical excerpta in their margins do survive, and we can sometime grasp a long-term process of “circular” tradition: from separate commentaries to the scholia, compiled from different sources and accompanying the literary text; from these ones again to the compilation of autonomous and organic commentaries; and from the last products in turn to a new extraction of materials designed for marginal annotation. The whole of this phenomenon is often called “scholiography,” in the wide meaning of “exegetical annotations” (sometimes applied also to the authorial work of a specific grammarian), though some scholars recognize the origin of scholiography (in the strict sense) to the Latin classical authors between the 8th and the 9th centuries ce. The most prominent remains of Latin scholiastic literature are the ancient commentaries to Virgil, Terence, and Horace, but interesting material related to Cicero, Ovid, Germanicus, Lucan, Statius, Persius, and Juvenal also survives.","PeriodicalId":82164,"journal":{"name":"Nigeria and the classics","volume":"25 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-11-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"78226287","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Maritime Archaeology of the Ancient Mediterranean","authors":"Justin Leidwanger, E. S. Greene","doi":"10.1093/obo/9780195389661-0339","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/obo/9780195389661-0339","url":null,"abstract":"Maritime archaeology of the classical world explores the traders, travelers, pirates, fishermen, and warriors who sailed the ancient Mediterranean and its adjacent waters. Within the Greco-Roman Mediterranean, the sea and the distinctive opportunities it afforded for communication and interaction feature centrally to narratives of human development. Evidence for the socioeconomic world of seafaring comes not only from archaeological analysis of coastal and submerged sites, but also from literary and iconographic depictions of vessels, seafaring practices, and maritime life more broadly. From a methodological perspective, maritime archaeology involves survey and excavation both underwater and along the shore, focusing on shipwrecks, ports and harbors, inundated landscapes, as well as formerly submerged but now silted sites. These explorations require the adoption and adaptation of traditional archaeological practices alongside methods that borrow from the marine sciences. Maritime archaeology took hold early in the Mediterranean, where it owes its roots to the scientific exploration of ancient ships and harbors as some of the most sophisticated technologies among premodern societies. After more than a half century of focused explorations and detailed analyses, scholars have outlined diachronic development and regional patterns of Mediterranean shipbuilding techniques and seafaring practices. At the same time, survey work in recent decades has rapidly increased the bulk dataset while bringing new shores and deeper waters into the evolving picture of maritime connections. The vast numbers of shipwrecks recorded to date reveal long-term trends across the entire Mediterranean world; the prevalence of sunken merchant cargos and diverse ports allows increasingly sophisticated approaches to this data as a source for big-picture social and economic history. Along with the reconstruction of trade routes, networks of interaction and dynamic maritime landscapes have earned important places in this ongoing research. Increasing emphasis on interdisciplinary approaches that engage with earth sciences (geoarchaeology, oceanography, etc.) and social sciences (network science, economic theory, etc.) brings new tools for understanding an environmental and institutional context of the structure, scale, and drivers behind seaborne mobility and interaction. All the while, the intensely studied material remains of ventures lost at sea continue to offer unparalleled glimpses into the personal lives of the diverse individuals who integrated this ancient Mediterranean world through the goods, news, ideas, and values they carried from port to port.","PeriodicalId":82164,"journal":{"name":"Nigeria and the classics","volume":"8 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-09-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88398714","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}