Plutarch:

(46-120 AD) Greek biographer and essayist, known primarily for his Parallel Lives and Moralia. He is classified as a Middle Platonist.   His surviving works were written in Greek, but intended for both Greek and Roman readers.  Plutarch's influence declined in the 19th and 20th centuries, but it remains embedded in the popular ideas of Greek and Roman history. One of his most famous quotes was one that he included in one of his earliest works. "The world of man is best captured through the lives of the men who created history."

 

Socrates:

(469-399 BC)  Athenian philosopher, founder of Western philosophy; known only through accounts of classical writers (notably his students Plato & Xenophon), and the plays of Aristophanes.  Plato’s dialogues are the most comprehensive accounts of Socrates to survive, though it is unclear the degree to which Socrates himself is obscured by Plato.  In the dialogues Socrates has become renowned for his contribution to ethics; we also find Socratic irony and the Socratic method, a tool used in a wide range of discussions, a type of pedagogy in which a series of questions is asked to draw individual answers, but also encourage fundamental insight into the issues.  He also contributed to epistemology.

 

Perzeval:

a character appearing in European Medieval (12th century) literature; one of King Arthur's legendary Knights of the Round Table; most well known for being the original hero in the quest for the Grail before being replaced in later literature by Galahad.  In the earliest story, of Chrétien de Troyes' Perceval, the Story of the Grail, he meets the crippled Fisher King and sees a grail, not yet identified as "holy"; he fails to ask a question that would have healed the injured king. Upon learning of his mistake he vows to find the Grail castle again and fulfill his quest.

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Hamlet:

Prince Hamlet is the title character and protagonist of Shakespeare's tragedy Hamlet (1600); the Prince of Denmark, nephew to the usurping Claudius, and son of King Hamlet, the previous King of Denmark. At the play’s start, he struggles with whether, and how, to avenge the murder of his father, and struggles with his own sanity along the way. By the end  Hamlet has caused the deaths of Polonius, Laertes, Claudius, & 2 other acquaintances.

 

Werther: * see Endnote 31

the protagonist of Goethe’s Sturm und Drang novel, The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774); Werther is a young artist with a sensitive and passionate temperament; in rural Wahlheim he meets Charlotte, a beautiful young girl caring for her siblings after the death of their mother. He falls in love with her but she is betrothed to Albert.  Ends badly for Werther.

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Vita Nuova by Dante: see Endnote 32

Italian for "The New Life", published 1295; an expression of the medieval genre of courtly love using a combination of both prose and verse. 

 

Hellas:

name for ancient Greece.

 

Phaistos:

refers to a Bronze Age archaeological site at modern Phaistos, in south central Crete; the name, Phaistos, survives from ancient Greek references to a city in Crete of that name, shown to be at or near the current ruins; ancient Phaistos was located south of Heraklio, the second largest city of Minoan Crete.  

 

Schliemann:

(1822-1890)  German archaeologist; along with Arthur Evans, Schliemann was a pioneer in the study of Aegean civilization in the Bronze Age.  He was an advocate of the historicity of places mentioned in the works of Homer; the excavator of Hissarlik (presumed to be the site of Troy), along with the Mycenaean sites Mycenae and Tiryns.  His work lent weight to the idea that Homer's Iliad and Virgil's Aeneid reflect historical events.

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Aeschylus:

(525-455 BC) Greek tragedian, described as the father of tragedy.  Aristotle states he expanded the number of characters allowing conflict among them (characters previously had interacted only with the chorus).  First to present plays as a trilogy (his Oresteia).  Only seven of his 70-90 plays have survived.  At least one of his plays was influenced by the Persians' second invasion of Greece: The Persians.  It is the only surviving Greek tragedy concerned with contemporary events.  War was so prominent in his life that his epitaph commemorates his participation at Marathon, not his plays!

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pre-Socratic philosophers:

ancient Greek philosophy before Socrates; they rejected traditional mythological explanations of the phenomena they saw around them in favour of more rational explanations.  It is difficult to determine their arguments for while they produced texts, none have survived in complete form.  All we have are occasional textual fragment & quotations by later philosophers (Aristotle called them "physicists" as they sought natural explanations).

 

Tao:

a Chinese word signifying 'way' or 'path',  more loosely 'doctrine'; in traditional Chinese philosophy and religion, the Tao is the intuitive knowing of "life" that cannot be grasped wholehearted as just a concept but is known through actual living experience of one's everyday being.  It reverses the typical order of values: emphasizes the weak over the strong, the feminine over the masculine, the water that wears down the rock, the space between things rather than the things themselves.

 

Pausanias:

(110 -180 AD) a Greek traveller and geographer, famous for his Description of Greece, a lengthy work that describes ancient Greece from his first-hand observations; it provides crucial information for making links between classical literature and modern archaeology.

 

Thuthmosis:

(1479 -1425 BC) Thutmose III was the 6th Pharaoh of the 18th Dynasty; created the largest empire Egypt had ever seen; no fewer than seventeen campaigns were conducted, and he conquered from Niya in North Syria to the Fourth Cataract of the Nile in Nubia.  He was buried in the Valley of the Kings as were the rest of the kings from this period in Egypt.