Follows the extraordinary record of ancient Greek thought on Hyperborea as a case study of cosmography and anthropological philology.

As an invaluable resource for students and general audiences investigating Ancient Greek culture and history, this encyclopedia provides a thorough examination of the Mediterranean world and its influence on modern society. All Things Ancient Greece examines the history and cultural life of Ancient Greece until the death of Philip II of Macedon in 336 BCE. The encyclopedia shows how the various city-states developed from the Bronze Age to the end of the Classical Age, influencing the Greek world and beyond. The cultural achievements of the Greeks detailed in this two-volume set include literature, politics, medicine, religion, and the arts. This work has entries on the various city-states, regions, battles, culture, and ideas that helped shape the ancient Greek world and its societies. Each entry delves into detailed topics with suggested readings. Many entries include sidebars containing primary documents from ancient sources that explore ancillary ideas, biographies, and specific examples from literature and philosophy. Readers, both students of ancient history and a general audience, are encouraged to interact with the material either chronologically, thematically, or geographically.

The essays collected in this volume examine manifestations of our sublime cosmos in ancient literature and its reception. Individual themes include religious mystery; calendrical and cyclical thinking as ordering principles of human experience; divine birth and the manifold nature of divinity (both awesome and terrifying); contemplation of the sky and meteorological (ir)regularity; fears associated with overpowering natural and anthropogenic events; and the aspirations and limitations of human expression. In texts ranging from Homer to Keats, the volume's chapters apply diverse critical methods and approaches that engage with sublimity in various aesthetic, agential and metaphysical aspects. The ancient texts – epic, dramatic, historiographic and lyric – treated here are rooted in a remote world where, within a framework of (perceived) celestial order, literature, myth and science still communicated profoundly, a tradition that continued in literary receptions of these ancient works. This volume honours the intellectual legacy of Thomas D. Worthen, a scholar whose expertise and insights cut across multiple disciplines, and who influenced and inspired students and colleagues at the University of Arizona, USA, for over three decades. Beyond clarifying temporally and culturally distant contemplations of the human universe, these essays aim to inform the continuing sense of wonder and horror at the sublime heights and depths of our ever-changing cosmos.

In Miletus, about 550 B.C., together with our world-picture cosmology was born. This book tells the story. In Part One the reader is introduced in the archaic world-picture of a flat earth with the cupola of the celestial vault onto which the celestial bodies are attached. One of the subjects treated in that context is the riddle of the tilted celestial axis. This part also contains an extensive chapter on archaic astronomical instruments. Part Two shows how Anaximander (610-547 B.C.) blew up this archaic world-picture and replaced it by a new one that is essentially still ours. He taught that the celestial bodies orbit at different distances and that the earth floats unsupported in space. This makes him the founding father of cosmology. Part Three discusses topics that completed the new picture described by Anaximander. Special attention is paid to the confrontation between Anaxagoras and Aristotle on the question whether the earth is flat or spherical, and on the battle between Aristotle and Heraclides Ponticus on the question whether the universe is finite or infinite.