Overview
Eratosthenes
(c. 276—194 bc) Greek scholar, geographer, and astronomer
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Ammon
Greek and Roman form of the name of the Egyptian god Amun. Ammon's son is an epithet of Alexander the Great, from the story in Plutarch of Alexander's visit to the temple of Ammon in Egypt, where he ...
ancient scholarship
GreekIn one sense of the term, scholarship began when literature became a central element of education and the prescribed texts had to be explained and interpreted to pupils in a class. An early ...
Andreas
(d. 217 bc),physician and court doctor of Ptolemy (1) IV (Philopator), follower of Herophilus. Works: Νάρθηξ (a pharmacopoeia, with descriptions of plants and roots); Περὶ δακέτων (on snake-bites); ...
Androsthenes
Of Thasos, companion of Nearchus, subsequently (324 bc) explored Bahrain and the Arabian coast. His Circumnavigation of India (Fragmente der griechischen Historiker 711) was exploited by ...
Antichthon and Antipodes
The Greeks were aware at an early stage that the Atlantic coast of Europe was not the limit of the inhabited, or habitable, world. Homer and Hesiod, perhaps with knowledge ...
Apollodorus
Of Athens (c.180–after 120 bc), the last of a series of intellectual giants in Alexandria.His Chronicle was based on the researches of Eratosthenes, although it extended coverage beyond the death of ...
Apollonius of Rhodes
Apollonios Rhodios lived in Alexandria in the third and second centuries b.c.e. and eventually became head of the great library there. He wrote the story of the voyage of the Argonauts and the Golden ...
Archimedes
(c. 287–212 bc),Greek mathematician and inventor, of Syracuse. He is famous for his discovery of Archimedes' principle, a law stating that a body totally or partially immersed in a fluid is subject ...
Aristophanes
Of Byzantium (probably c.257–180bc) succeeded Eratosthenes as head of the Alexandrian Library (c.194 bc). He was a scholar of wide learning, famous for his linguistic, literary, textual, and ...
Arrian
c. ad 86–160.Born in Nicomedia, he held local office and pursued studies with Epictetus, whose lectures he later published. In Greece between 108 and 112 he attracted the friendship of Hadrian, who ...
askoliasmos
(ἀσκωλιασμός), a country sport in Attica. The players tried to keep their balance while jumping on an inflated and greasy wine-skin (ἀσκός). It was probably played at many festivals, and ...
bematists
The surveyors of Alexander (3) the Great. Of known bematists Philonides of Crete was a celebrated distance runner, and others (notably Baeton and Diognetus) had literary aspirations. Their ...
Cleomedes
(c. 2nd c. ad)Writer of a Greek treatise on astronomy, ‘Elementary Theory of the Heavens’, valuable for what it preserves of earlier mathematical and philosophical writers, notably Posidonius and ...
constellation
Any of the 88 areas into which the celestial sphere is divided for the purposes of identifying objects, as adopted by the International Astronomical Union in 1922 (see Table 3, Appendix). In 1930 the ...
Cyrene
An ancient Greek city in North Africa, near the coast in Cyrenaica, which from the 4th century bc was a great intellectual centre, with a noted medical school.See also Simon of Cyrene.
dedication
Many manuscript literary works in the early modern period bear an author's dedication, or dedicatory epistle, among the preliminaries to the main text, as do many printed books. They will ...
Dicaearchus
Of Messana,Greek polymath and prolific writer, pupil of Aristotle and contemporary of Theophrastus and Aristoxenus: fl. c.320–300 bc. Fragments only survive of his works, but they show a remarkable ...
didaskalia
Lit. ‘teaching’, came to be used in Greece as the standard term for the production of a performance at a dramatic festival. Dithyrambs, tragedies, satyr‐plays (see satyric drama), and comedies were ...
Dionysius ‘Periegetes’
(‘the Guide’), Greek author, in Hadrian's time (?), of Περιήγησις τη̑ς οἰ̑κουμένης (‘Geographical Description of the Inhabited World’) in 1,185 hexameters (for schoolboys?), describing in pseudo-epic ...
Encyclopedias and Dictionaries
We can hardly avoid grouping together these two categories of reference works because the distinction between them was only worked out after the fact, as ancient scholarship evolved. For our ...
