Hasil untuk "History of the Greco-Roman World"

Sergiu Balacci, Valentina Ciochină, Ion Balan

The study analyses the symbolism of the colour red throughout history, highlighting how its meanings have changed from sacredness and sacrifice in ancient civilisations to authority, nobility and redemptive suffering in the Middle Ages, and then to passion, power, individuality and urgency in the modern and contemporary era. In the greco-roman world, red was associated with blood, war, glory, and deified love, while in the Middle Ages it became a central symbol of ecclesiastical authority and spirituality. Today, the color is a visual sign of protest, marketing, or medical interventions, enshrined in international symbols such as the Red Cross and Red Crescent, which mark protection and neutrality in armed conflicts. By correlating historical, artistic, and scientific sources, the research shows that red is not just a chromatic presence, but a fundamental visual language, capable of reflecting the duality of life and humanity - between life and death, eros and thanatos, protection and danger.

V. Stavniuk

The figure of Aristotle is marked in the history of world civilization, including by its reception, one of the most famous manifestations of which is often considered to be Raphael's "School of Athens". In my opinion, in this work Raphael could embody the ideas about Plato and Aristotle that were familiar to his (Renaissance, and therefore "turning") era ("paradigmatic" - in the spirit of Thomas Kuhn, or "epistemic" - in the spirit of Michel Foucault). Discussions on how consciously, or indeed if consciously at all, Raphael did this are still ongoing today and are essentially interdisciplinary. Alongside the iconographic and iconological methods traditional for art historians, it is quite possible that for historical studies whose object (or even subject) is the reception of civilizational heritage in general and ancient Greco-Roman civilization in particular, it is worth using not only historiographic but also historiological methods. The question of the "messages" that, according to supporters of the "Angeletics Theory", Raphael could have encoded in this fresco also remains debatable. The reading of these possible messages will depend not only on "what is perceived", but also on "who perceives" (because quidquid recipitur secundum modum recipientis recipitur). To some, the figures of Plato and Aristotle in Raphael's fresco remind them of their role in European and world culture throughout post-antique history. Someone will recall that Aristotle was perceived by Dante as "Il maestro di color che sanno." And someone may notice "Nicomachean Ethics" for the first time, joining the circle of those who are looking for moral assessments of our present in the context of the "rehabilitation of practical philosophy" and the "Aristotelian ideal of life" - as opposed to the "ideal of modern life", with its utilitarianism rather than practicality. In the context of the obvious crisis of the moral world order, the desire for moral "evaluativeness" of many institutions and authorities, the appeal to the sources ("Ad fontes!" of Renaissance humanists) is becoming increasingly relevant; as well as to the authority of Aristotle, who at the systemic level initiated the theoretical understanding of ethics in its integrity, in the broad, in my opinion, contexts of the historical realities of ancient Greek civilization and its (non-Greek) neighbors.

Murat Tozan

Recent environmental crises underscore the critical importance of understanding the historical dynamics of the interrelationship between humans and nature. In this context, the approach of Environmental History has placed the interactions between human societies and nature at the core of its inquiry. Socio-Ecological Modeling, encompassing Environmental History within an interdisciplinary framework, aims to analyze the long-term historical dimensions of these interactions. Ancient Greco-Roman authors, although not always intending to do so, provide valuable information about the physical setting and environmental conditions of the Mediterranean world. The writings of the renowned orator Aelius Aristides on Smyrna contain the most comprehensive data regarding the city’s environmental characteristics in the 2nd century AD; through aspects such as topography, water sources, winds, earthquakes, and epidemics, they offer insights into the interactions between nature and humans. This study aims to explore how various environmental features and phenomena influenced the spatial organization, collective memory, and urban life of ancient Mediterranean cities over the long term, with a particular focus on Aelius Aristides’ accounts of ancient Smyrna.

Christophe Pébarthe

The content of Homeric poems has frequently been seen as clear evidence of the long‑lasting existence of an agonistic mentality in ancient Greece. Competition would have been a cardinal value. This conclusion is based on a particular manner of reading Homer. However, historians, aided by philologists, can envisage a different one. The chariot race in book 23 of the Iliad appears not as a struggle for victory, but as an institution designed to reproduce the social positions of the participants. Far from being agonistic, the Homeric world is permeated by uncertainties about the legitimacy of men exercising authority over others. This social context evokes the 8th century, and reinforces the hypothesis that this is the period of the first realization of the Homeric poems.

Favi, Federico

Recensione di Recensione di Ingrosso, P. (a cura di) (2024). Menandro, Sicioni. Introduzione, testo, traduzione e commento. Lecce: Pensa Multimedia, 406 pp.

GigaWorld Team, Angen Ye, Boyuan Wang et al.

World models are emerging as a foundational paradigm for scalable, data-efficient embodied AI. In this work, we present GigaWorld-0, a unified world model framework designed explicitly as a data engine for Vision-Language-Action (VLA) learning. GigaWorld-0 integrates two synergistic components: GigaWorld-0-Video, which leverages large-scale video generation to produce diverse, texture-rich, and temporally coherent embodied sequences under fine-grained control of appearance, camera viewpoint, and action semantics; and GigaWorld-0-3D, which combines 3D generative modeling, 3D Gaussian Splatting reconstruction, physically differentiable system identification, and executable motion planning to ensure geometric consistency and physical realism. Their joint optimization enables the scalable synthesis of embodied interaction data that is visually compelling, spatially coherent, physically plausible, and instruction-aligned. Training at scale is made feasible through our efficient GigaTrain framework, which exploits FP8-precision and sparse attention to drastically reduce memory and compute requirements. We conduct comprehensive evaluations showing that GigaWorld-0 generates high-quality, diverse, and controllable data across multiple dimensions. Critically, VLA model (e.g., GigaBrain-0) trained on GigaWorld-0-generated data achieve strong real-world performance, significantly improving generalization and task success on physical robots without any real-world interaction during training.

Shenyuan Gao, Siyuan Zhou, Yilun Du et al.

World models aim to learn action-controlled future prediction and have proven essential for the development of intelligent agents. However, most existing world models rely heavily on substantial action-labeled data and costly training, making it challenging to adapt to novel environments with heterogeneous actions through limited interactions. This limitation can hinder their applicability across broader domains. To overcome this limitation, we propose AdaWorld, an innovative world model learning approach that enables efficient adaptation. The key idea is to incorporate action information during the pretraining of world models. This is achieved by extracting latent actions from videos in a self-supervised manner, capturing the most critical transitions between frames. We then develop an autoregressive world model that conditions on these latent actions. This learning paradigm enables highly adaptable world models, facilitating efficient transfer and learning of new actions even with limited interactions and finetuning. Our comprehensive experiments across multiple environments demonstrate that AdaWorld achieves superior performance in both simulation quality and visual planning.

G. Lusztig

The history of the canonical basis and crystal basis of a quantized enveloping algebra and its representations is presented

HunyuanWorld Team, Zhenwei Wang, Yuhao Liu et al.

Creating immersive and playable 3D worlds from texts or images remains a fundamental challenge in computer vision and graphics. Existing world generation approaches typically fall into two categories: video-based methods that offer rich diversity but lack 3D consistency and rendering efficiency, and 3D-based methods that provide geometric consistency but struggle with limited training data and memory-inefficient representations. To address these limitations, we present HunyuanWorld 1.0, a novel framework that combines the best of both worlds for generating immersive, explorable, and interactive 3D scenes from text and image conditions. Our approach features three key advantages: 1) 360° immersive experiences via panoramic world proxies; 2) mesh export capabilities for seamless compatibility with existing computer graphics pipelines; 3) disentangled object representations for augmented interactivity. The core of our framework is a semantically layered 3D mesh representation that leverages panoramic images as 360° world proxies for semantic-aware world decomposition and reconstruction, enabling the generation of diverse 3D worlds. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance in generating coherent, explorable, and interactive 3D worlds while enabling versatile applications in virtual reality, physical simulation, game development, and interactive content creation.

Tianren Zhang, Guanyu Chen, Feng Chen

Humans develop world models that capture the underlying generation process of data. Whether neural networks can learn similar world models remains an open problem. In this work, we present the first theoretical results for this problem, showing that in a multi-task setting, models with a low-degree bias provably recover latent data-generating variables under mild assumptions--even if proxy tasks involve complex, non-linear functions of the latents. However, such recovery is sensitive to model architecture. Our analysis leverages Boolean models of task solutions via the Fourier-Walsh transform and introduces new techniques for analyzing invertible Boolean transforms, which may be of independent interest. We illustrate the algorithmic implications of our results and connect them to related research areas, including self-supervised learning, out-of-distribution generalization, and the linear representation hypothesis in large language models.

Andrey Gómez Jiménez

The Coordinación de Investigación, Sede de Occidente and the Posgrado en la Enseñanza del Castellano y la Literatura have published “Nuevos Horizontes de Investigación Volumen II, Clásicos en Occidente: Desde la Antigüedad hasta Hispanoamérica.” The works included in this volume, organized into four sections, explore how the traces of the Greco-Roman world engage in dialogue with the history and literatures of Hispanic America. In this way, the book examines how ancient myths and genres are reconfigured in contemporary creation, how the classical tradition connects with other ancestral worldviews, and what role classical studies play in current intellectual debates. Each chapter adopts an interdisciplinary approach. Overall, the book proposes new avenues for research and academic exchange by situating classical studies within a global framework.

Robert L. Fowler

This paper surveys the history of the Herculaneum papyri, as well as past, current and future research on the collection. Buried under the ashes of Vesuvius in the eruption of AD 79, the so-called Villa dei Papiri in Herculaneum contains the only library to survive intact from the Greco-Roman world. Soon after its discovery in 1752, it was identified as consisting mainly of works on Epicurean philosophy, especially by Philodemus of Gadara (ca. 110–35 BC). The charcoaled papyrus scrolls, inscribed with charcoal-based ink, present scholars with unique practical challenges. Early attempts to unroll them and read their contents yielded promising results but often resulted in serious damage to the material. Modern imaging techniques have significantly increased the legibility of extant fragments, and with the help of  computerised tomography and machine learning it becomes increasingly possible to distinguish writing from background material in still rolled-up papyri. The Holy Grail of Herculaneum papyrology, namely to unroll and read the scrolls virtually, seems no longer out of grasp.

Lisa Marie Belz

Feminist biblical criticism of Proverbs 1–9 has decried the figure of “Dame Folly” as reinforcing pejorative stereotypes of women that blame women for “the world’s sin and corruption.” To be sure, in the history of Christian biblical interpretation, Proverbs has been read in precisely this way—and with tragic consequences. In fact, Proverbs was used as fuel for the witch-hunting craze that infected the Christian West in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, with its particular focus on women as being especially “addicted” to heresy and “evil superstitions.” Nonetheless, as this essay demonstrates, a reading which denigrates all women universally as blameworthy is not really native to post-exilic Judaism or biblical literature in general before the Hellenistic period. Instead, it emerges with the influence of Hellenism and the misogynist stereotypes endemic to Greek literature, mythology, and even philosophy that distort and blur the lens through which Hellenistic Jews (and later Greco-Roman Christians) read their Scriptures. Through a reading of Proverbs in its own language, its own post-exilic Jewish world, and its own literary context, this essay both recovers the wise women of Israel, so esteemed and valued in post-exilic Judaism, and uncovers the identity of the real fool of Proverbs 9.

Baiquni Hasbi, R. Muhammad

This article provides an alternative historical explanation that challenges the monolithic portrayal of premodern Muslim polities. Prevailing narratives often emphasize Islam as the sole dominant identity, relegating Southeast Asia to the ‘periphery’ of the Islamic world and reducing the Ottoman governance to purely Islamic ideals. This article reconsiders how Muslim polities in the fifteenth century forged legitimacy through strategies that were neither monolithic nor exclusively Islamic. Focusing on the Sultanate of Pasai in Sumatra and the Ottoman Empire in Constantinople, it demonstrates how rulers embedded themselves in multiple traditions, Islamic, Indic, indigenous, and Greco-Roman Christian, at once. Through textual analysis of primary texts, Hikayat Raja-Raja Pasai, Tarih-i Ebü’l Fath, Târih-i Beyân-ı Binâ-yı Ayasofya-yı Kebîr, and History of Mehmed the Conqueror, this study demonstrates that both Pasai and the Ottomans integrated hybrid traditions to construct their sovereignty. Highlighting these multilayered repertoires adopts a polycentric rather than center-periphery framework, one in which Southeast Asia and the Mediterranean emerge as dynamic, interconnected sites of Muslim statecraft.[Artikel ini menawarkan sebuah penjelasan historis alternatif yang ingin menantang gambaran monolitik tentang kerajaan muslim pramodern. Narasi yang dominan selama ini masih cenderung menekankan Islam sebagai identitas tunggal yang mendominasi, sehingga menempatkan Asia Tenggara sebagai “pinggiran dunia Islam” dan mereduksi identitas Kekaisaran Utsmani hanya menjadi sekadar Islam semata. Artikel ini meninjau kembali bagaimana Kerajaan Muslim pada abad kelima belas membangun legitimasi melalui strategi yang tidak bersifat monolitik maupun eksklusif Islami. Dengan studi kasus Kesultanan Pasai di Sumatra dan Kekaisaran Utsmani di Konstantinopel, artikel ini menunjukkan bagaimana para penguasa menggabungkan berbagai tradisi sekaligus, Islam, lokal, Indic, dan Greko-Romawi Kristen. Melalui analisis beberapa teks primer seperti Hikayat Raja-Raja Pasai, Tarih-i Ebü’l Fath, Târih-i Beyân-ı Binâ-yı Ayasofya-yı Kebîr, dan History of Mehmed the Conqueror, kajian ini memperlihatkan bahwa baik Pasai maupun Usmani mengintegrasikan tradisi-tradisi hibrida untuk membangun legitimasi dan kedaulatannya. Untuk menjelaskan khazanah yang berlapis ini, artikel ini mengadopsi kerangka polisentris dari pada model pusat-pinggiran, di mana Asia Tenggara dan Mediterania muncul sebagai pusat-pusat dinamis yang saling saling terhubung dalam praktik Kerajaan Muslim.]

Lee Hagewood

This article examines Paul’s speech to the Ephesian elders at Miletus in light of the use of exempla in ancient historiography. This examination proceeds by situating the exemplarity of history within ancient conceptions of historical recurrence and human nature, surveying the use of exempla in ancient historiography, and considering in what ways Luke’s presentation of Paul’s example is like and unlike such uses. Particularly relevant for this study is the application of a cycle of exemplarity operative in the broader Greco-Roman world as presented by Matthew B. Roller. The article argues that Luke’s presentation of Paul as an exemplum mostly corresponds to that of other ancient historians, although key differences are due to his subject matter and theological concerns.

Kasereka Kavwahirehi

V.-Y. Mudimbe, a distinguished figure in African philosophy, novelist, poet, essayist and influential scholar across multiple fields – including African studies, cultural studies, literature, linguistics, history and anthropology – passed away on Monday 21 April 2025, in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. From the University of Lubumbashi in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (then known as Zaire), where he began his academic career, to Stanford and Duke Universities, as well as educational institutions in Europe and Latin America, V.-Y. Mudimbe distinguished himself by deconstructing the discourses that, from Greco-Roman antiquity to the present, have influenced the understanding of the African world and shaped representations of Africa and Africans in global thought as a paradigm of difference. This lifelong work aimed to expose the limitations of these discourses and their inability to speak about or describe their subject without imposing categories rooted in another historical experience – the Western experience, regarded as the standard and the ultimate measure of all other historical experiences.

Haoyu Xiong, Russell Mendonca, Kenneth Shaw et al.

Deploying robots in open-ended unstructured environments such as homes has been a long-standing research problem. However, robots are often studied only in closed-off lab settings, and prior mobile manipulation work is restricted to pick-move-place, which is arguably just the tip of the iceberg in this area. In this paper, we introduce Open-World Mobile Manipulation System, a full-stack approach to tackle realistic articulated object operation, e.g. real-world doors, cabinets, drawers, and refrigerators in open-ended unstructured environments. The robot utilizes an adaptive learning framework to initially learns from a small set of data through behavior cloning, followed by learning from online practice on novel objects that fall outside the training distribution. We also develop a low-cost mobile manipulation hardware platform capable of safe and autonomous online adaptation in unstructured environments with a cost of around 20,000 USD. In our experiments we utilize 20 articulate objects across 4 buildings in the CMU campus. With less than an hour of online learning for each object, the system is able to increase success rate from 50% of BC pre-training to 95% using online adaptation. Video results at https://open-world-mobilemanip.github.io/

Pierre Pontier

Abstract : In a speech that Isocrates presents as a last praise of Athens, the place of royalty seems at first sight secondary. However, a close analysis of the speech shows that the political reflection is based on a network of references to kingship that can be seen in the prologue, in the constitutional discussion and in the contrasting figures of the Great King, Agamemnon, Theseus and the Spartan kings. By highlighting some of these figures (Agamemnon and Theseus in particular), refraining from criticizing the Spartan kings, Isocrates tries to promote a specific model of democracy and a political project in line with his panhellenic ideals, despite his lost illusions and his old age.

Medda, Enrico

Todd, S.C. (2020). A Commentary on Lysias, Speeches 12-16. Oxford: Oxford University Press, xi + 754 pp.

Ram Sagar

The Aryabhatta Research Institute of Observational Sciences (ARIES), a premier autonomous research institute under the Department of Science and Technology, Government of India has a legacy of about seven decades with contributions made in the field of observational sciences namely atmospheric and astrophysics. The Survey of India used a location at ARIES, determined with an accuracy of better than 10 meters on a world datum through institute participation in a global network of Earth artificial satellites imaging during late 1950. Taking advantage of its high-altitude location, ARIES, for the first time, provided valuable input for climate change studies by long term characterization of physical and chemical properties of aerosols and trace gases in the central Himalayan regions. In astrophysical sciences, the institute has contributed precise and sometime unique observations of the celestial bodies leading to a number of discoveries. With the installation of the 3.6 meter Devasthal optical telescope in the year 2015, India became the only Asian country to join those few nations of the world who are hosting 4 meter class optical telescopes. This telescope, having advantage of geographical location, is well-suited for multi-wavelength observations and for sub-arc-second resolution imaging of the celestial objects including follow-up of the GMRT, AstroSat and gravitational-wave sources.