Plutarch’s
On the Malice of Herodotus
and the Writing of History in the Greco-Roman World
John Marincola
The essay, On the Malice of Herodotus, which has come down to us in the corpus of Plutarch, has often been considered a problematic work because of its hostile tone, the object of its attack, and the quality of its argumentation. This book seeks to set the work in the larger context of the standards and traditions of Greek and Roman historiography and classical criticism more generally as they had developed in antiquity. Individual chapters explore Plutarch’s place in the critical reputation of Herodotus in antiquity, the nature and importance of historiographical style, the ‘signs and tokens’ used by Plutarch to convict Herodotus of malice, the particular kind of polemic on display in the essay, its relationship to Plutarch’s Parallel Lives, Plutarch’s own attempts to rewrite the famous incidents narrated by Herodotus, and the importance ancient critics placed on determining the disposition of the historian. The book shows that throughout the essay Plutarch, although often revealing a distinctive take on his subject, is none the less working in a recognizable tradition using methods and approaches that many of his predecessors had employed and which are essential to acknowledge and understand in order to arrive at a more comprehensive evaluation of how the Greeks and Romans wrote history.
Episodes from the history of infinitesimals
Mikhail G. Katz
Infinitesimals have seen ups and downs in their tumultuous history. In the 18th century, d'Alembert set the tone by describing infinitesimals as chimeras. Some adversaries of infinitesimals, including Moigno and Connes, picked up on the term. We highlight the work of Cauchy, Noël, Poisson and Riemann. We also chronicle reactions by Moigno, Lamarle and Cantor, and signal the start of a revival with Peano.
World-in-World: World Models in a Closed-Loop World
Jiahan Zhang, Muqing Jiang, Nanru Dai
et al.
Generative world models (WMs) can now simulate worlds with striking visual realism, which naturally raises the question of whether they can endow embodied agents with predictive perception for decision making. Progress on this question has been limited by fragmented evaluation: most existing benchmarks adopt open-loop protocols that emphasize visual quality in isolation, leaving the core issue of embodied utility unresolved, i.e., do WMs actually help agents succeed at embodied tasks? To address this gap, we introduce World-in-World, the first open platform that benchmarks WMs in a closed-loop world that mirrors real agent-environment interactions. World-in-World provides a unified online planning strategy and a standardized action API, enabling heterogeneous WMs for decision making. We curate four closed-loop environments that rigorously evaluate diverse WMs, prioritize task success as the primary metric, and move beyond the common focus on visual quality; we also present the first data scaling law for world models in embodied settings. Our study uncovers three surprises: (1) visual quality alone does not guarantee task success, controllability matters more; (2) scaling post-training with action-observation data is more effective than upgrading the pretrained video generators; and (3) allocating more inference-time compute allows WMs to substantially improve closed-loop performance.
History-Guided Video Diffusion
Kiwhan Song, Boyuan Chen, Max Simchowitz
et al.
Classifier-free guidance (CFG) is a key technique for improving conditional generation in diffusion models, enabling more accurate control while enhancing sample quality. It is natural to extend this technique to video diffusion, which generates video conditioned on a variable number of context frames, collectively referred to as history. However, we find two key challenges to guiding with variable-length history: architectures that only support fixed-size conditioning, and the empirical observation that CFG-style history dropout performs poorly. To address this, we propose the Diffusion Forcing Transformer (DFoT), a video diffusion architecture and theoretically grounded training objective that jointly enable conditioning on a flexible number of history frames. We then introduce History Guidance, a family of guidance methods uniquely enabled by DFoT. We show that its simplest form, vanilla history guidance, already significantly improves video generation quality and temporal consistency. A more advanced method, history guidance across time and frequency further enhances motion dynamics, enables compositional generalization to out-of-distribution history, and can stably roll out extremely long videos. Project website: https://boyuan.space/history-guidance
The Routledge Handbook of Comparative World Rhetorics: Studies in the History, Application, and Teaching of Rhetoric beyond Traditional Greco-Roman Contexts, ed. Keith Lloyd
James Bezotte
Hore si quod sanguinem minuare debes: un horario semanal para la sangría (con un apéndice sobre el término iouius, ‘jueves’)
Arsenio Ferraces Rodríguez
Edición crítica, traducción y comentario de un calendario semanal que señala las horas favorables para efectuar una sangría en cada día de la semana. En apéndice se ofrece una explicación sobre el término iouius, que debe ser restituido en el texto y que hasta ahora no estaba atestiguado como nombre del jueves en ninguna fuente conocida.
History of the Greco-Roman World, Greek language and literature. Latin language and literature
Antropônimos descritivos na Ilíada
Tatiana Alvarenga Chanoca
Este artigo parte da premissa de que os nomes próprios em Homero são significativos, e que seu significado estaria relacionado ao seu portador ou ao contexto em que este aparece, descrevendo-o de alguma maneira. Assim, este trabalho busca estudar os possíveis significados dos nomes dos guerreiros menores da Ilíada – ou seja, guerreiros cuja participação no poema é mínima e sobre os quais poucas informações são fornecidas (ou mesmo nenhuma além do nome) –, a fim de comprovar que sua inclusão no poema não foi aleatória.
History of the Greco-Roman World, Philology. Linguistics
A Brief History of Space VLBI
Leonid I. Gurvits
Space Very Long Baseline Interferometry is a radio astronomy technique distinguished by a record-high angular resolution reaching single-digit microseconds of arc. The paper provides a brief account of the history of developments of this technique over the period 1960s-2020s.
Note on episodes in the history of modeling measurements in local spacetime regions using QFT
Doreen Fraser, Maria Papageorgiou
The formulation of a measurement theory for relativistic quantum field theory (QFT) has recently been an active area of research. In contrast to the asymptotic measurement framework that was enshrined in QED, the new proposals aim to supply a measurement framework for measurements in local spacetime regions. This paper surveys episodes in the history of quantum theory that contemporary researchers have identified as precursors to their own work and discusses how they laid the groundwork for current approaches to local measurement theory for QFT.
en
physics.hist-ph, quant-ph
María del Carmen Encinas Reguero, Milagros Quijada (eds). Tragic Rhetoric. The Rhetorical Dimensions of Greek Tragedy
Bononcini, Leonardo
Del Carmen Encinas Reguero, M.; Quijada Sagredo, M. (eds) (2021). Tragic Rhetoric. The Rhetorical Dimensions of Greek Tragedy. Roma: Aracne. Le Rane Studi 69, 412 pp.
Greek language and literature. Latin language and literature, History of the Greco-Roman World
The Galactic Chemical Evolution of phosphorus observed with IGRINS
G. Nandakumar, N. Ryde, M. Montelius
et al.
Phosphorus (P) is considered to be one of the key elements for life, making it an important element to look for in the abundance analysis of spectra of stellar systems. Yet, there exists only a handful of spectroscopic studies to estimate the P abundances and investigate its trend across a range of metallicities. We have observed full HK band spectra at a spectral resolving power of R=45,000 with IGRINS instrument. Abundances are determined using SME in combination with 1D MARCS stellar atmosphere models. The investigated sample of stars have reliable stellar parameters estimated using optical FIES spectra (GILD; Jönsson et al. in prep.). In order to determine the P abundances from the 16482.92 Angstrom P line, we take special care of the CO($ν=7-4$) blend. We determine the C, N, O abundances from atomic carbon and a range of non-blended molecular lines (CO, CN, OH) which are aplenty in the H band region of K giant stars, assuring an appropriate modelling of the blending CO($ν=7-4$) line. We present [P/Fe] vs [Fe/H] trend for 38 K giant stars in the metallicity range of -1.2 dex $<$ [Fe/H] $<$ 0.4 dex. We find that our trend matches well with the compiled literature sample of prominently dwarf stars and limited number of giant stars. Our trend is found to be higher by $\sim$ 0.05 - 0.1 dex compared to the theoretical chemical evolution trend in Cescutti et al. 2012 resulting from core collapse supernova (type II) of massive stars with the P yields from Kobayashi et al. (2006) arbitrarily increased by a factor of 2.75. Thus the enhancement factor might need to be $\sim$ 0.05 - 0.1 dex higher to match our trend. We also find an empirically determined primary behaviour for phosphorus. Furthermore, the phosphorus abundance is found to be elevated by $\sim$ 0.6 - 0.9 dex in two metal poor s-enriched stars compared to the theoretical chemical evolution trend.
en
astro-ph.SR, astro-ph.GA
Carlos F. Noreña, Nikolaos Papazarkadas (Edd.): From Document to History. Epigraphic Insights into the Greco-Roman World.
U. Huttner
The “School of Paris” – A Personal View from Outside
Hans-Joachim Gehrke
The paper’s starting point is the distinction of different traditions, which shape scholarship in the classics at an international level. In a very personal perspective, it gives important examples of the impact the “School of Paris” and French intellectual concepts in a broader sense had, and still have, on the author’s scholarly biography, particularly in his dealing with topics of anthropology, geography, religion, and the imaginaire in general.
Anthropology, History of the Greco-Roman World
A Brief Historical Perspective on the Consistent Histories Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics
Gustavo Rodrigues Rocha, Dean Rickles, Florian J. Boge
It will be presented in this chapter a historical account of the consistent histories interpretation of quantum mechanics based on primary and secondary literature. Firstly, the formalism of the consistent histories approach will be outlined. Secondly, the works by Robert Griffiths and Roland Omnès will be discussed. Griffiths' seminal 1984 paper, the first physicist to have proposed a consistent-histories interpretation of quantum mechanics, followed by Omnès' 1990 paper, were instrumental to the consistent-histories model based on Boolean logic. Thirdly, Murray Gell-Mann and James Hartle's steps to their own version of consistent-histories approach, motivated by a cosmological perspective, will then be described and evaluated. Gell-Mann and Hartle understood that spontaneous decoherence could path the way to a concrete physical model to Griffiths' consistent histories. Moreover, the collective biography of these figures will be put in the context of the role played by the Santa Fe Institute, co-founded by Gell-Mann in 1984 in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where Hartle is also a member of the external faculty.
en
physics.hist-ph, quant-ph
The Cambridge Economic History of the Greco-Roman World by Walter Scheidel, Ian Morris, and Richard Saller (review)
Josiah Osgood
Vir Romanus – probus, honestus, benevolus? Postulowane cechy Rzymianina a wizerunki władców dynastii julijsko-klaudyjskiej w wybranych passusach dzieł antycznych
Edyta Gryksa
The aim of the article is an attempt to present a dichotomic image of the Roman ruler. It is concentrated on traditional features, understood as postulated in relation to person in power, such as justice, honesty, modesty and self-control. All of them belong to the canon of virtutes Romanae, and obedience toward them was characteristic of Roman society until the fall of Carthage. Along with its fall, the disappearance of true morality can be observed. The important turning point there is the reign of Augustus who, by undertaking the revival of old values, introduces a new order to the state. The article describes the rulers of the Julio-Claudian dynasty, and the emphasis is placed on a dualistic image of their behaviour (positive versus negative) presented in ancient texts by Tacitus, Suetonius, Velleius Paterculus and Florus.
History of the Greco-Roman World, Greek language and literature. Latin language and literature
History entanglement entropy
Leonardo Castellani
A formalism is proposed to describe entangled quantum histories, and their entanglement entropy. We define a history vector, living in a tensor space with basis elements corresponding to the allowed histories, i.e. histories with nonvanishing amplitudes. The amplitudes are the components of the history vector, and contain the dynamical information. Probabilities of measurement sequences, and resulting collapse, are given by generalized Born rules: they are all expressed by means of projections and scalar products involving the history vector. Entangled history states are introduced, and a history density matrix is defined in terms of ensembles of history vectors. The corresponding history entropies (and history entanglement entropies for composite systems) are explicitly computed in two examples taken from quantum computation circuits.
The B. B. Newman Spelling Theorem
Carl-Fredrik Nyberg-Brodda
This article aims to be a self-contained account of the history of the B. B. Newman Spelling Theorem, including the historical context in which it arose. First, an account of B. B. Newman and how he came to prove his Spelling Theorem is given, together with a description of the author's efforts to track this information down. Following this, a high-level description of combinatorial group theory is given. This is then tied in with a description of the history of the word problem, a fundamental problem in the area. After a description of some of the theory of one-relator groups, an important part of combinatorial group theory, the natural division line into the torsion and torsion-free case for such groups is described. This culminates in a statement of and general discussion about the B. B. Newman Spelling Theorem and its importance.
Where Dreams May Come: Incubation Sanctuaries in the Greco-Roman World, by Gil H. Renberg. Leiden; Boston : Brill 2017 (Book Review)
Megan Nutzman
A Changing Dichotomy: The Conception of the "Macroscopic" and "Microscopic" Worlds in the History of Physics
Zhixin Wang
This short essay traces the conceptual history of micro- and macroscopicity in the context of physical science. By focusing on three distinct episodes spanning five centuries, we show the scientific and philosophical meanings of this antonym pair, despite never being far from "the small" and "the large," have been evolving as the frontier of science advances. We analyze the intellectual and material impetus for these movements, and conclude that this conceptual history reflects the changing interaction between the natural world and humankind.
en
physics.hist-ph, physics.pop-ph