Platonic Psychology: Astronomy

Showing posts with label Astronomy. Show all posts

Sunday, April 17, 2011

Appetitive: Astronomy and the Panathenaic Festival

I found a great piece on Rogue Classicism about ancient astronomy. According to Heritage News, Professor Efrosyni Boutsikas traced changing celestial coordinates and realized that the constellation Draco marked the beginning of the Panathenaia each year. Pretty cool.

Tuesday, January 11, 2011

Reasoning: Doctoral Theses

My mother pointed me to a set of theses on AWOL, and specifically one called "Astronomy and Ancient Greek Cult" by Efronsyni Boutsikas. It looks excellent and I am going to download it on my kindle to read.

One of my best friends was in town for the last two weeks (the one with whom I am planning to learn Sanskrit) and I spent a lot of time catching up with her in between relapsing on my horrible cold that I've had all month and talking about classics rather than doing any work. I have been so distracted I even forgot to translate my Μήδεια for tomorrow! Anyway, nose should go back to the grindstone as I translate Greek and review my Latin so I can finally meet with Propertius II again.

Friday, October 15, 2010

Appetitive/ Reasoning: A Greek Computer

The Antikythera mechanism, is an ancient mechanical calculator (also described as the first known mechanical computer) designed to calculate astronomical positions of the planets. It was recovered in 1900-01 from the Antikythera wreck, but its complexity and significance were not understood until decades later. It is now thought to have been built about 150-100 BC. Technological artifacts of similar complexity did not reappear until the 14th century, when mechanical astronomical clocks appeared in Europe (taken from the blurb on youtube).

Someone sent this video a few weeks ago, but I did not get a chance to check it out until now. it's later than most of the Greek stuff I look at, but it's still somewhat within the time frame. It's incredible to think such an advanced mechanical device came about so early.

Why Platonic Psychology?

Entry types into this blog are divided into three categories: appetitive, spirited, and reasoning to correspond with the three parts of the Platonic conception of the soul. The appetitive portion will most often be humorous content with a classical bent. However, Plato's understanding of appetitive is much broader than that, encompassing the general pleasures of spectacle-- such as theater, both comedy and tragedy-- as well as emotions and bodily pains and pleasures. Sometimes I will stray into one of the more Platonic uses of appetitive. If I can manage it, I will post a weekly translation of a joke or funny phrase into Latin or Greek. The spirited portion (literally timophillic i.e. honor loving) will be my own ideas about Greek and Roman ideas. This section attempts to put me on the map as a classicist with a point of view. The reasoning part will be commentary and reviews on classical texts. I will also try to post a passage for Latin or Greek prose composition, as well as translations of prose passages or poetry in Latin or Greek. I will offer my take on the passage, and if anyone would like to offer their own attempt at the passage, or corrections or criticisms of mine, they will be welcome to do so in a comment on the blogpost or email me at sulpicia3@hotmail.com.

Bread, Roman Poetry, and Other Frivolity

If you're interested in me as well as my commentary about classical texts, visit my personal blog Fragments of Sulpicia (III), in which I discuss my general day-to-day existence, alongside bread recipes, pedagogy, and Roman Love Elegy.

The Roman love elegists, writing at the end of the Roman Republic wrote beautiful poems about their experiences in love, creating the persona or changing the name of a real person on whom to center their poetry. The only extant female poet calls herself Sulpicia, daughter of Servius and constructs her poems around her lover, Cerninthus. In order to write freely, I have taken up her name, Sulpicia, and the names of her characters and the characters of her contemporary love elegists, to refer to people in my own life. A reference list of characters can be found on the righthand side of Fragments of Sulpicia (III).