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Imperial Library Of Constantinople
The Imperial Library of Constantinople, in the capital city of the Byzantine Empire, was the last of the great libraries of the ancient world. Long after the destruction of the Great Library of Alexandria and the other ancient libraries, it preserved the knowledge of the ancient Greeks and Romans for almost 1,000 years. A series of unintentional fires over the years and wartime damage, including the raids of the Fourth Crusade in 1204, impacted the building itself and its contents. While there were many reports of texts surviving into the Ottoman era, no substantive portion of the library has ever been recovered. The library was founded by Constantius II (reigned 337–361 AD), who established a scriptorium so that the surviving works of Greek literature could be copied for preservation. The Emperor Valens in 372 employed four Greek and three Latin scribes. The majority of Greek classics known today are known through Byzantine copies originating from the Imperial Library of ...
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Constantinople
la, Constantinopolis ota, قسطنطينيه , alternate_name = Byzantion (earlier Greek name), Nova Roma ("New Rome"), Miklagard/Miklagarth (Old Norse), Tsargrad ( Slavic), Qustantiniya ( Arabic), Basileuousa ("Queen of Cities"), Megalopolis ("the Great City"), Πόλις ("the City"), Kostantiniyye or Konstantinopolis ( Turkish) , image = Byzantine Constantinople-en.png , alt = , caption = Map of Constantinople in the Byzantine period, corresponding to the modern-day Fatih district of Istanbul , map_type = Istanbul#Turkey Marmara#Turkey , map_alt = A map of Byzantine Istanbul. , map_size = 275 , map_caption = Constantinople was founded on the former site of the Greek colony of Byzantion, which today is known as Istanbul in Turkey. , coordinates = , location = Fatih, İstanbul, Turkey , region = Marmara Region , type = Imperial city , part_of = , length = , width ...
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Dictionary Of Greek And Roman Biography And Mythology
The ''Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology'' (1849, originally published 1844 under a slightly different title) is an encyclopedia/biographical dictionary. Edited by William Smith, the dictionary spans three volumes and 3,700 pages. It is a classic work of 19th-century lexicography. The work is a companion to Smith's '' Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities'' and '' Dictionary of Greek and Roman Geography''. Authors and scope The work lists thirty-five authors in addition to the editor, who was also the author of the unsigned articles. The other authors were classical scholars, primarily from Oxford, Cambridge, Rugby School, and the University of Bonn, but some were from other institutions. Many of the mythological entries were the work of the German expatriate Leonhard Schmitz, who helped to popularise German classical scholarship in Britain. With respect to biographies, Smith intended to be comprehensive. In the preface, he writes: Much of th ...
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Siege Of Constantinople (1204)
The sack of Constantinople occurred in April 1204 and marked the culmination of the Fourth Crusade. Crusader armies captured, looted, and destroyed parts of Constantinople, then the capital of the Byzantine Empire. After the capture of the city, the Latin Empire (known to the Byzantines as the ''Frankokratia'' or the Latin Occupation) was established and Baldwin of Flanders was crowned Emperor Baldwin I of Constantinople in the Hagia Sophia. After the city's sacking, most of the Byzantine Empire's territories were divided up among the Crusaders. Byzantine aristocrats also established a number of small independent splinter states, one of them being the Empire of Nicaea, which would eventually recapture Constantinople in 1261 and proclaim the reinstatement of the Empire. However, the restored Empire never managed to reclaim its former territorial or economic strength, and eventually fell to the rising Ottoman Empire in the 1453 Siege of Constantinople. The Byzantine Empire w ...
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Ancient Greek Literature
Ancient Greek literature is literature written in the Ancient Greek language from the earliest texts until the time of the Byzantine Empire. The earliest surviving works of ancient Greek literature, dating back to the early Archaic period, are the two epic poems the ''Iliad'' and the ''Odyssey'', set in an idealized archaic past today identified as having some relation to the Mycenaean era. These two epics, along with the Homeric Hymns and the two poems of Hesiod, ''Theogony'' and ''Works and Days'', constituted the major foundations of the Greek literary tradition that would continue into the Classical, Hellenistic, and Roman periods. The lyric poets Sappho, Alcaeus, and Pindar were highly influential during the early development of the Greek poetic tradition. Aeschylus is the earliest Greek tragic playwright for whom any plays have survived complete. Sophocles is famous for his tragedies about Oedipus, particularly ''Oedipus the King'' and ''Antigone''. Euripides is known ...
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Herculaneum
Herculaneum (; Neapolitan and it, Ercolano) was an ancient town, located in the modern-day ''comune'' of Ercolano, Campania, Italy. Herculaneum was buried under volcanic ash and pumice in the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD 79. Like the nearby city of Pompeii, Herculaneum is famous as one of the few ancient cities to be preserved nearly intact, as the ash that blanketed the town protected it against looting and elements. Although less known than Pompeii today, it was the first, and the only discovered buried Vesuvian city (in 1709) for a long time. Pompeii was revealed only in 1748 and identified in 1763. Unlike Pompeii, the mainly pyroclastic material that covered Herculaneum carbonized and preserved more wood in objects such as roofs, beds, and doors, as well as other organic-based materials such as food and papyrus. According to the traditional tale, the city was rediscovered by chance in 1709, during the drilling of a well. Remnants of the city, however, were already ...
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Stoicism
Stoicism is a school of Hellenistic philosophy founded by Zeno of Citium in Athens in the early 3rd century BCE. It is a philosophy of personal virtue ethics informed by its system of logic and its views on the natural world, asserting that the practice of virtue is both necessary and sufficient to achieve (happiness, ): one flourishes by living an ethical life. The Stoics identified the path to with a life spent practicing the cardinal virtues and living in accordance with nature. The Stoics are especially known for teaching that "virtue is the only good" for human beings, and that external things, such as health, wealth, and pleasure, are not good or called in themselves ('' adiaphora'') but have value as "material for virtue to act upon". Alongside Aristotelian ethics, the Stoic tradition forms one of the major founding approaches to virtue ethics. The Stoics also held that certain destructive emotions resulted from errors of judgment, and they believed people shou ...
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Sophocles
Sophocles (; grc, Σοφοκλῆς, , Sophoklễs; 497/6 – winter 406/5 BC)Sommerstein (2002), p. 41. is one of three ancient Greek tragedians, at least one of whose plays has survived in full. His first plays were written later than, or contemporary with, those of Aeschylus; and earlier than, or contemporary with, those of Euripides. Sophocles wrote over 120 plays, but only seven have survived in a complete form: ''Ajax'', '' Antigone'', ''Women of Trachis'', '' Oedipus Rex'', '' Electra'', '' Philoctetes'' and ''Oedipus at Colonus''. For almost fifty years, Sophocles was the most celebrated playwright in the dramatic competitions of the city-state of Athens which took place during the religious festivals of the Lenaea and the Dionysia. He competed in thirty competitions, won twenty-four, and was never judged lower than second place. Aeschylus won thirteen competitions, and was sometimes defeated by Sophocles; Euripides won four. The most famous tragedies of Sophocles ...
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Attica
Attica ( el, Αττική, Ancient Greek ''Attikḗ'' or , or ), or the Attic Peninsula, is a historical region that encompasses the city of Athens, the capital of Greece and its countryside. It is a peninsula projecting into the Aegean Sea, bordering on Boeotia to the north and Megaris to the west. The southern tip of the peninsula, known as Laurion, was an important mining region. The history of Attica is tightly linked with that of Athens, and specifically the Golden Age of Athens during the classical period. Ancient Attica ( Athens city-state) was divided into demoi or municipalities from the reform of Cleisthenes in 508/7 BC, grouped into three zones: urban (''astu'') in the region of Athens main city and Piraeus (port of Athens), coastal (''paralia'') along the coastline and inland (''mesogeia'') in the interior. The modern administrative region of Attica is more extensive than the historical region and includes Megaris as part of the regional unit West A ...
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Hellenistic
In Classical antiquity, the Hellenistic period covers the time in Mediterranean history after Classical Greece, between the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BC and the emergence of the Roman Empire, as signified by the Battle of Actium in 31 BC and the conquest of Ptolemaic Egypt the following year. The Ancient Greek word ''Hellas'' (, ''Hellás'') was gradually recognized as the name for Greece, from which the word ''Hellenistic'' was derived. "Hellenistic" is distinguished from "Hellenic" in that the latter refers to Greece itself, while the former encompasses all ancient territories under Greek influence, in particular the East after the conquests of Alexander the Great. After the Macedonian invasion of the Achaemenid Empire in 330 BC and its disintegration shortly after, the Hellenistic kingdoms were established throughout south-west Asia ( Seleucid Empire, Kingdom of Pergamon), north-east Africa ( Ptolemaic Kingdom) and South Asia ( Greco-Bactrian Kingdom, Indo-Gree ...
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Homer
Homer (; grc, Ὅμηρος , ''Hómēros'') (born ) was a Greek poet who is credited as the author of the ''Iliad'' and the ''Odyssey'', two epic poems that are foundational works of ancient Greek literature. Homer is considered one of the most revered and influential authors in history. Homer's ''Iliad'' centers on a quarrel between King Agamemnon and the warrior Achilles during the last year of the Trojan War. The ''Odyssey'' chronicles the ten-year journey of Odysseus, king of Ithaca, back to his home after the fall of Troy. The poems are in Homeric Greek, also known as Epic Greek, a literary language which shows a mixture of features of the Ionic and Aeolic dialects from different centuries; the predominant influence is Eastern Ionic. Most researchers believe that the poems were originally transmitted orally. Homer's epic poems shaped aspects of ancient Greek culture and education, fostering ideals of heroism, glory, and honor. To Plato, Homer was simply the one ...
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Monothelitism
Monothelitism, or monotheletism (from el, μονοθελητισμός, monothelētismós, doctrine of one will), is a theological doctrine in Christianity, that holds Christ as having only one will. The doctrine is thus contrary to dyothelitism, a Christological doctrine that holds Christ as having two wills (divine and human). Historically, ''monothelitism'' was closely related to monoenergism, a theological doctrine that holds Jesus Christ as having only one energy. Both doctrines were at the center of Christological disputes during the 7th century. Theological notions related to the ''oneness'' of Christ's will emerged as a result of some earlier Christological controversies, that were related to monophysitism as formulated by Eutyches (d. 456), and miaphysitism as formulated by non-Chalcedonian followers of Cyril of Alexandria (d. 444). Since the notion of Christ's ''one nature'' implied the ''oneness'' of his will, ecclesiastical and political elites of the Eastern ...
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Philippikos Bardanes
Philippicus ( la, Filepicus; el, Φιλιππικός, Philippikós) was Byzantine emperor from 711 to 713. He took power in a coup against the unpopular emperor Justinian II, and was deposed in a similarly violent manner nineteen months later. During his brief reign, Philippicus supported monothelitism in Byzantine theological disputes, and saw conflict with the First Bulgarian Empire and the Umayyad Caliphate. Biography Philippicus was originally named Bardanes (; hy, Վարդան, Vardan , italic=yes ); he was the son of the patrician Nicephorus, who was of Armenian extraction from an Armenian colony in Pergamum. The Armenian background of Philippicus has been supported by Byzantinist historians Peter Charanis and Nicholas Adontz, and disputed by Anthony Kaldellis. Kaldellis adds that Bardanes was probably born and raised in the Byzantine realm, as his father Nicephorus possibly was. Contemporaneous sources attest to Bardanes' tutoring, scholarly interests, learning and elo ...
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