Hasil untuk "History of the Greco-Roman World"

Richard de Grijs

[Abridged] In the late nineteenth century, Mars emerged as one of the most intensively reported astronomical objects in the popular press, driven by favourable oppositions, improved telescopic capabilities and growing speculation regarding planetary habitability. I examine how Mars was interpreted in Australian newspapers between the 1870s and 1899, focusing on the ways in which astronomical knowledge was framed, contextualised and debated within a colonial media environment. Drawing on a large collection of digitised newspaper articles, I analyse how observational authority, instrumental credibility and individual expertise were harnessed in press reporting. The paper situates Australian Mars coverage within a global network of scientific communication dominated by metropolitan centres in Europe and North America, while highlighting the distinctive role played by southern-hemisphere visibility. Australian observatories and observers were frequently positioned as contributors of confirmatory observation rather than interpretive leadership, reinforcing a pattern of locally grounded but internationally oriented scientific engagement. The analysis traces a shift from early emphasis on disciplined observation and measurement to later periods characterised by contested interpretations, particularly surrounding the so-called Martian "canals" and the speculative claims advanced by personalities such as Percival Lowell in the USA. By examining how newspapers mediated between observational astronomy, engineering analogies and popular imagination, this study contributes to a broader understanding of how planetary science entered public discourse beyond metropolitan centres. In doing so, it underscores the active role of colonial newspapers in shaping scientific meaning and situates Australian Mars reporting within the wider history of nineteenth-century astronomical culture.

Ekaterina L. Smirnova

The article attempts to identify the characteristics of classical antiquity representation in O.I. Senkovsky’s Library for Reading during 1841–1848 — a time of decline in popularity for the journal and a period of ambiguous perception of the classical heritage in Russian literature. Analysing twenty-four literary and more than thirty scholarly items on Greco-Roman subjects, the study reconstructs Senkovsky’s multifaceted editorial strategy for the popularisation of antiquity. In the literary section, the extracts from the works of classical authors selected by Senkovsky for publication aimed to highlight romantic features in Horace's poetry and Virgil's “Aeneid,” the woman question in Aristophanes' “Lysistrata”, and potential for Christian perception of Sophocles' “Antigone”. They also displayed innovative approaches by younger generation of translators to interpreting masterpieces of classical literature. Works by contemporary poets posited antiquity not as a rejection of modernity, but as a means to better understanding of modern conflicts, values, and anxieties. The key features of the scholarly and critical materials, many written or extensively edited by Senkovsky, were: first, a focus not on political history but on everyday life, material culture, arts, and intellectual history of ancient Greece and Rome; second, an interest not only in the results of recent research but also in the very process of generating new knowledge about classical world; and finally, a deliberately lucid, engaging, public-facing style. Antiquity was thus presented as an appealing civilization with a unique cultural-historical experience, its mysteries still awaiting researchers, and as an inexhaustible source for creative dialogue across times. This model allowed Senkovsky to address both a broad reading public, thereby fulfilling the educational mission of the journal, and the learned elite, inviting them to reflect on the methodology of ancient history, translation from classical languages, and effective ways of presenting specialized issues in classical philology and archaeology to public.

Carlos Ascenso André, Zhang Yunfeng

Apesar de não ser materialmente impossível que à China do século VIII tivessem chegado vestígios da literatura cultivada em Roma nove séculos antes, essa possibilidade não passa de uma fantasia da imaginação. A dupla distância — temporal e geográfica — tornam-na por demais inverosímil. Dito por outras palavras, Li Bai, um dos mais notáveis poetas chineses de sempre e que viveu no século VIII da nossa era, não poderá ter tido qualquer notícia da existência de Horácio, o poeta da corte de Augusto, ou seja, poeta de Roma no século I a.C. Acontece, entretanto, que uma leitura da obra do poeta chinês revela surpreendentes proximidades temáticas com a obra do poeta latino: a fugacidade da vida, o subsequente apelo à fruição do tempo, o modo de celebrar as estações do ano, o canto dos prazeres da existência, são apenas algumas das afinidades temáticas entre ambos que não deixam de causar, senão alguma perplexidade, pelo menos uma certa admiração ou surpresa. Essa é a reflexão proposta neste trabalho, a documentar a universalidade da literatura e dos seus temas, a despeito da enorme diversidade dos seus autores, situados em tempos e em geografias (espaciais e epocais) muito distintas.

Jie Zhu, Leye Wang

Text-to-image diffusion model since its propose has significantly influenced the content creation due to its impressive generation capability. However, this capability depends on large-scale text-image datasets gathered from web platforms like social media, posing substantial challenges in copyright compliance and personal privacy leakage. Though there are some efforts devoted to explore approaches for auditing data provenance in text-to-image diffusion models, existing work has unrealistic assumptions that can obtain model internal knowledge, e.g., intermediate results, or the evaluation is not reliable. To fill this gap, we propose a completely black-box auditing framework called Feature Semantic Consistency-based Auditing (FSCA). It utilizes two types of semantic connections within the text-to-image diffusion model for auditing, eliminating the need for access to internal knowledge. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our FSCA framework, we perform extensive experiments on LAION-mi dataset and COCO dataset, and compare with eight state-of-the-art baseline approaches. The results show that FSCA surpasses previous baseline approaches across various metrics and different data distributions, showcasing the superiority of our FSCA. Moreover, we introduce a recall balance strategy and a threshold adjustment strategy, which collectively allows FSCA to reach up a user-level accuracy of 90% in a real-world auditing scenario with only 10 samples/user, highlighting its strong auditing potential in real-world applications. Our code is made available at https://github.com/JiePKU/FSCA.

Daniel De Dios Allegue, Jinke He, Frans A. Oliehoek

Transformers have shown strong ability to model long-term dependencies and are increasingly adopted as world models in model-based reinforcement learning (RL) under partial observability. However, unlike natural language corpora, RL trajectories are sparse and reward-driven, making standard self-attention inefficient because it distributes weight uniformly across all past tokens rather than emphasizing the few transitions critical for control. To address this, we introduce structured inductive priors into the self-attention mechanism of the dynamics head: (i) per-head memory-length priors that constrain attention to task-specific windows, and (ii) distributional priors that learn smooth Gaussian weightings over past state-action pairs. We integrate these mechanisms into UniZero, a model-based RL agent with a Transformer-based world model that supports planning under partial observability. Experiments on the Atari 100k benchmark show that most efficiency gains arise from the Gaussian prior, which smoothly allocates attention to informative transitions, while memory-length priors often truncate useful signals with overly restrictive cut-offs. In particular, Gaussian Attention achieves a 77% relative improvement in mean human-normalized scores over UniZero. These findings suggest that in partially observable RL domains with non-stationary temporal dependencies, discrete memory windows are difficult to learn reliably, whereas smooth distributional priors flexibly adapt across horizons and yield more robust data efficiency. Overall, our results demonstrate that encoding structured temporal priors directly into self-attention improves the prioritization of informative histories for dynamics modeling under partial observability.

Nihal Ahmad, Talha Manzoor, Ijaz Haider Naqvi

The operational lifetime of energy-harvesting wireless sensor nodes is limited by availability of the energy source and the capacity of the installed energy buffer. When a sensor node depletes its energy reserves, manual intervention is often required to resume node operation. While lowering the duty cycle would help extend the network lifetime, this is often undesirable, especially in time-critical applications, where rapid collection and dissemination of information is vital. In this paper, we propose a context-aware energy management policy that helps balance the two opposing objectives of timely data collection and dissemination with energy conservation. We capture these objectives through the Value of Information (VoI) of observations made by a sensor node and the State of Energy (SoE) of the energy buffer. We formulate the energy management policy as a Model Predictive Control (MPC) problem which computes device sampling and transmission frequencies to maximize a defined utility criterion over a finite, receding, time-horizon. In the process, we also develop a unique mathematical representation for VoI, that adequately captures aspects related to continuity in monitoring, urgency of dissemination, and representation of the phenomena being observed. In the end, we use data collected from a real-world flash flood event, to evaluate our decision framework across multiple scenarios of energy availability.

Esther Eidinow

This study explores the hidden histories offered by Greco-Roman myths of metamorphosis, and what they may reveal about the lived experience of ancient men and women. It investigates the role of the body, and the embodied experiences of emotions in these stories, arguing that these narratives of transformation allow us to glimpse aspects of our historical subjects which in other sources remain largely unseen. In these narratives of metamorphosis we discover ancient worldviews: they disclose the perceived interrelationships of human, non-human, and more-than-human entities. They show us that the human body was understood not only as a part of an extended network of beings, but also to consist of, and interact with, the same substances that were believed to comprise the surrounding landscapes: earth, air, fire, and water. By grouping together stories according to these elements, this study highlights the patterns that underline different metamorphoses, comparing the experiences of male and female protagonists. These stories, it argues, express risks of transgressions, both for individuals and for the wider community. They tell us about the dangers perceived to be inherent in social roles and in relations with the gods. They describe bodies both at risk and of risk. And among those risks are extreme emotions, appearing as both cause and result of these startling bodily changes. These are narratives of the body that capture one of its most ephemeral aspects: the experience of intense, even traumatic emotions, in which a person and the world around them comes to seem transformed. Drawing on psychological research, this study suggests that these stories evoke experiences that persist across time and place, conveying an experience of the emotional body that speaks to us still.

Maria Sandali

The Second Sophistic is defined as the period of letters "rebirth" and the "rewriting" of the Greek past. The emperors of the time, mainly the Flavians, contributed to this development by highlighting the art of rhetoric through the writing of works and the establishment of schools. The Romans were aware of Greek tradition and Greek models, which they promoted, wishing to promote their political ideology and propaganda. The rhetoricians of the time, the sophists, engaged with and imitated the earlier classical authors. The historical past was a topic of interest. The reworking of familiar historical and mythological themes was a preoccupation in the schools of rhetoric, the result of which were "declamations", i.e. discourses of embellished presentation of the past. One of the rewriting subjects of the Greeks' history was the Persian Wars. Greco-Persian battles were extremely popular, as Spawforth (1994) and Swain (1996) note, ideologically serving both the Greeks and the Romans. The encouragement of this practice was accompanied by the provision of privileges and facilities, as literature was placed at the service and constituted a form of legitimization of the emperor's and the imperial state's role in protecting both halves of the civilized world.

Sarah May

This is a review of Hadrian's Wall: Exploring Its Past to Protect Its Future edited by Marta Alberti and Katie Mountain, published in 2022 by Archaeopress.

Beatrice Girotti

Le epistole cristiane sono state oggetto di numerosi studi storici, filologici, retorici e letterari. L’analisi qui presentata intende individuare l'incidenza dell'intenzione co-municativa e il valore della ripetitività di alcuni termini e concetti rari, fino ad oggi parzialmente trascurati dalla critica. In particolare ci soffermeremo sul nesso oculus petulans presente nell'epistolario di Gerolamo: attraverso letture e confronti anche con espressioni simili e confortati da alcune interpretazioni proposte riguardo alla petulantia cristiana, verranno messi in luce temi ricorrenti sulla sessualità, sulla reli-giosità e sull’elemento femminile nell'Epistolografia dei Padri (ma non solo), che confermano il forte valore unitario del messaggio cristiano e il valore strategico del mezzo epistolare.

Citti, Francesco

Forty years after the first edition of the Greek poem Bessomachos by G. Pascoli, composed during his teaching period in Matera (Lexis, 1, 1988), some lesson plans and testimonies are presented here that contribute to a better understanding of the educational project in which the poem was included, and to identifying some germs of the Garibaldian patriotic epos that accompanied the poet in his last years.

Hagit Attiya, Michael A. Bender, Martin Farach-Colton et al.

A data structure is called history independent if its internal memory representation does not reveal the history of operations applied to it, only its current state. In this paper we study history independence for concurrent data structures, and establish foundational possibility and impossibility results. We show that a large class of concurrent objects cannot be implemented from smaller base objects in a manner that is both wait-free and history independent; but if we settle for either lock-freedom instead of wait-freedom or for a weak notion of history independence, then at least one object in the class, multi-valued single-reader single-writer registers, can be implemented from smaller base objects, binary registers. On the other hand, using large base objects, we give a strong possibility result in the form of a universal construction: an object with $s$ possible states can be implemented in a wait-free, history-independent manner from compare-and-swap base objects that each have $O(s + 2^n)$ possible memory states, where $n$ is the number of processes in the system.

Andrew Maris, Cristina Rea, Alessandro Pau et al.

The "density limit" is one of the fundamental bounds on tokamak operating space, and is commonly estimated via the empirical Greenwald scaling. This limit has garnered renewed interest in recent years as it has become clear that ITER and many tokamak pilot plant concepts must operate near or above the Greenwald limit to achieve their objectives. Evidence has also grown that the Greenwald scaling - in its remarkable simplicity - may not capture the full complexity of the density limit. In this study, we assemble a multi-machine database to quantify the effectiveness of the Greenwald limit as a predictor of the L-mode density limit and compare it with data-driven approaches. We find that a boundary in the plasma edge involving dimensionless collisionality and pressure, $ν_{*\rm, edge}^{\rm limit} = 3.5 β_{T,{\rm edge}}^{-0.40}$, achieves significantly higher accuracy (false positive rate of 2.3% at a true positive rate of 95%) of predicting density limit disruptions than the Greenwald limit (false positive rate of 13.4% at a true positive rate of 95%) across a multi-machine dataset including metal- and carbon-wall tokamaks (AUG, C-Mod, DIII-D, and TCV). This two-parameter boundary succeeds at predicting L-mode density limits by robustly identifying the radiative state preceding the terminal MHD instability. This boundary can be applied for density limit avoidance in current devices and in ITER, where it can be measured and responded to in real time.

Giuseppe Mercuri

J. E. Horvath, R. R. Fernandes, T. P. Idiart

The goal of this article is to give an overview of the current limitations and epistemological barriers in Science and Scientific Philosophy from a very general point of view. We first list and define the types of knowledge nous, doxa and episteme, and the Subject-Observer and Object(s) of study, to proceed showing the different types of barriers that difficult the knowledge of the physical world: limitations in the language, in the logic of the Subject-Observer. Later, we discriminate between technological barriers, (temporary) limits and absolute epistemic barriers. The last type of limits are presented and discussed in some detail: the quantum of action, Planck's scale and quantum gravity (showing the importance of the trans-Planckian scale for structure formation), the cosmological horizon (a limit to the present observable Universe) and the event horizons (disconnecting the inside of some spacetimes from the rest of the Universe). We argue that physical problems in which absolute barriers seem to determine the end of the attainable knowledge, are in fact amenable to be studied, at least indirectly.

Junyang Chen, Xiaoyu Xian, Zhijing Yang et al.

Pose transfer aims to transfer a given person into a specified posture, has recently attracted considerable attention. A typical pose transfer framework usually employs representative datasets to train a discriminative model, which is often violated by out-of-distribution (OOD) instances. Recently, test-time adaption (TTA) offers a feasible solution for OOD data by using a pre-trained model that learns essential features with self-supervision. However, those methods implicitly make an assumption that all test distributions have a unified signal that can be learned directly. In open-world conditions, the pose transfer task raises various independent signals: OOD appearance and skeleton, which need to be extracted and distributed in speciality. To address this point, we develop a SEquential Test-time Adaption (SETA). In the test-time phrase, SETA extracts and distributes external appearance texture by augmenting OOD data for self-supervised training. To make non-Euclidean similarity among different postures explicit, SETA uses the image representations derived from a person re-identification (Re-ID) model for similarity computation. By addressing implicit posture representation in the test-time sequentially, SETA greatly improves the generalization performance of current pose transfer models. In our experiment, we first show that pose transfer can be applied to open-world applications, including Tiktok reenactment and celebrity motion synthesis.

Carson Bay, J. W. van Henten

The study of exempla and exemplarity in Mediterranean antiquity touches the methodological borderlines and interest areas of several distinct academic disciplines. Earlier studies focused on semantics and the development from the Greek παράδειγμα to the Roman exemplum. More recently, the field of Classics has tended to examine exemplarity as a phenomenon with a distinctively Roman edge. At the same time, scholars in adjacent disciplines like ancient Judaism and early Christianity have engaged Classics scholarship on this topic in their own work. This paper extends this arena by clarifying aspects of exemplarity within two paradigmatic texts of Hellenistic- and Roman-era Judaism. We examine 1 Maccabees 2:49–68 and Josephus’ Jewish War 6.99–110, both speeches set within “contemporary” histories written by Jewish authors. By examining these ancient Jewish passages, written within the Greco-Roman world, we help add clarity and meaning to what could be “Jewish” about exemplarity in ancient Mediterranean contexts.

Christopher R. Mooney

Abstract:Despite the great esteem for forgiveness in the modern world, recent historical studies have cast doubt on the existence of the practice or even the concept of interpersonal forgiveness in the Greco-Roman world. Classical scholars have noted the prevalence of vengeance in the popular and literary imagination, the scarcity of apology, the subordination of clemency to political power, and the philosophical opposition to forgiveness. The Latin bishop Augustine of Hippo (354–430) surprisingly agreed with this assessment. Augustine, his contemporary Roman critics, and even his congregation understood the church as advocating—even discovering—a novel, difficult practice: unconditional forgiveness. Though Augustine offers no singular treatment of forgiveness, his letters and sermons bear witness to a clearly developed and articulated position: that forgiveness must be preveniently, unconditionally offered but is still necessarily oriented toward the just reform of the offender. Augustine particularly highlights the example of Christ's forgiveness and its union with prayer. Augustine interprets the scandal of unconditional forgiveness in reference to the even greater scandal of love of enemies, which seeks the true good of offenders in accord with justice, rather than satisfaction through a belittling vengeance. Thus, Augustine's view of forgiveness can be best grasped by distinguishing between the offer of forgiveness—forgiving—and the reception of forgiveness—being forgiven. Forgiving is unconditional, but being forgiven occurs through just reform. In this way, the complete arc of forgiveness incorporates both prevenient mercy and justice. In addition to illuminating the place of late antique Christianity in the history of forgiveness, this article shows that Augustine presents a robust account of unconditional forgiveness that is not a passive resignation but rather intrinsic to true justice.

Jesús San Román, F. J. Candel, J. Sanz et al.

Background: Most residents and staff in nursing homes have received full vaccination. Factors related to the immune response to vaccination might be related to the risk of future severe COVID-19 and may guide the need for vaccine boosters. Design: Nursing homes that were tested in a point survey in July-October 2020 were again analyzed after a vaccination campaign in June-July 2021. Immune responses according to IgG against nucleocapsid and spike antigens, and CD4 and CD8 interferon-gamma release assay against spike antigens, were evaluated. Results: A total of 1973 subjects were tested (61.7% residents, 48.3% staff), with a mean (SD) follow-up of 46.4 (3.6) weeks between assessments. More than half of residents and more than a third of staff had evidence of COVID-19 before vaccination; 26.9% and 22.7% had seroreversion of IgG-N, and 8.9% and 4.6% had IgG-N seroconversion at second assessment, respectively. Up to 96.8% of residents and 98.1% of workers had positive IgG-S after a mean of 19.9 (2.1) weeks after vaccination. In residents with vs without a history of COVID-19, IgG-S titers were 4.11 (0.54) vs. 2.73 (0.74) logAU/mL (p < 0.001); in workers these titers were 3.89 (0.61) vs. 3.15 (0.64) logAU/mL (p < 0.001). Linear regression analysis showed that younger age (OR: −0.03 per 10 years-older [95% CI, −0.04 to −0.02], p < 0.001) and evidence of COVID-19 (OR: 1.14 [95% CI, 1.08 to 1.20], p < 0.001) are associated with greater IgG-S titers after vaccination. A direct association was found between IgG-S titers and the intensity of IFN-gamma response against spike antigens. Conclusions: Waning of humoral response and reinfection seems to be more frequent in older as compared to younger adults, although cellular responses shortly after vaccination are comparable between these groups. Younger age and prior COVID-19 are related to greater humoral response after vaccination against SARS-CoV-2.

Solitario, Michele

Brumbaugh, M.E. (2019). The New Politics of Olympos: Kingship in Kallimachos’ Hymns. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, pp xviii, 298