Philippus Of Opus
Philip (or Philippus) of Opus () was a philosopher, astronomer, and mathematician. He was a member of Plato's Academy and after the master's death, edited his last work, ''Laws''. He is generally considered the author of the Platonic ''Epinomis'' (''On the Laws''), a follow-on conversation among the same interlocutors. Ancient evidence for Philip Not much is known about Philip other than that given above. He received several mentions in the centuries after his death, but other than acknowledging his fame, little beyond the above information was provided. The most important references are those by Diogenes Laërtius, who wrote short biographies of many early philosophers, and the 10th century CE ''Souda'', a catalog of several thousand persons and terms from antiquity. In his biography of Plato, Diogenes wrote:Some say that Philip the Opuntian transcribed his work, ''Laws'', which was written in wax ooden tablets coated with wax They also say that ''Epinomis'' is his.And in anoth ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Opus, Greece
Opus ( or Ὀπόεις) was an ancient Greek city that was the chief city of a tribe of Locri, who were called from this place the Opuntian Locrians, and the territory, the Opuntian Locris. It was located on the coast of mainland Greece opposite Euboea, perhaps at modern Atalanti. Its harbor was at Kynos. It stood at the head of the Opuntian Gulf, a little inland, being 15 '' stadia'' from the shore according to Strabo, or only a mile according to Livy. Opus was believed to be one of the most ancient towns in Greece. Pindar's ninth Olympian ode concerns Opus. It was said to have been founded by Opus, a son of Locrus and Protogeneia; and in its neighbourhood Deucalion and Pyrrha were reported to have resided. It was the native city of Patroclus, and it is mentioned in the Homeric Catalogue of Ships as one of the Locrian towns whose troops were led by Ajax the Lesser, son of Oileus the king of Locris, in the ''Iliad'' There were games called Aiantea and an altar at Opu ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Thales Of Miletus
Thales of Miletus ( ; ; ) was an Ancient Greek pre-Socratic philosopher from Miletus in Ionia, Asia Minor. Thales was one of the Seven Sages, founding figures of Ancient Greece. Beginning in eighteenth-century historiography, many came to regard him as the first philosopher in the Greek tradition, breaking from the prior use of mythology to explain the world and instead using natural philosophy. He is thus otherwise referred to as the first to have engaged in mathematics, science, and deductive reasoning. Thales's view that all of nature is based on the existence of a single ultimate substance, which he theorized to be water, was widely influential among the philosophers of his time. Thales thought the Earth floated on water. In mathematics, Thales is the namesake of Thales's theorem, and the intercept theorem can also be referred to as Thales's theorem. Thales was said to have calculated the heights of the pyramids and the distance of ships from the shore. In scien ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Pliny The Elder
Gaius Plinius Secundus (AD 23/24 79), known in English as Pliny the Elder ( ), was a Roman Empire, Roman author, Natural history, naturalist, and naval and army commander of the early Roman Empire, and a friend of the Roman emperor, emperor Vespasian. He wrote the encyclopedic (''Natural History''), a comprehensive thirty-seven-volume work covering a vast array of topics on human knowledge and the natural world, which became an editorial model for encyclopedias. He spent most of his spare time studying, writing, and investigating natural and geographic phenomena in the field. Among Pliny's greatest works was the twenty-volume ''Bella Germaniae'' ("The History of the German Wars"), which is Lost literary work, no longer extant. ''Bella Germaniae'', which began where Aufidius Bassus' ''Libri Belli Germanici'' ("The War with the Germans") left off, was used as a source by other prominent Roman historians, including Plutarch, Tacitus, and Suetonius. Tacitus may have used ''Bella Ger ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Hipparchus
Hipparchus (; , ; BC) was a Ancient Greek astronomy, Greek astronomer, geographer, and mathematician. He is considered the founder of trigonometry, but is most famous for his incidental discovery of the precession of the equinoxes. Hipparchus was born in Nicaea, Bithynia, and probably died on the island of Rhodes, Greece. He is known to have been a working astronomer between 162 and 127 BC. Hipparchus is considered the greatest ancient astronomical observer and, by some, the greatest overall astronomer of classical antiquity, antiquity. He was the first whose quantitative and accurate models for the motion of the Sun and Moon survive. For this he certainly made use of the observations and perhaps the mathematical techniques accumulated over centuries by the Babylonians and by Meton of Athens (fifth century BC), Timocharis, Aristyllus, Aristarchus of Samos, and Eratosthenes, among others. He developed trigonometry and constructed trigonometric tables, and he solved se ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Callippus
Callippus (; ; c. 370 BC – c. 300 BC) was a Greek astronomer and mathematician. Biography Callippus was born at Cyzicus, and studied under Eudoxus of Cnidus at the Academy of Plato. He also worked with Aristotle at the Lyceum, which means that he was active in Athens prior to Aristotle's death in 322 BC. He observed the movements of the planets and attempted to use Eudoxus' scheme of connected spheres to account for their movements. However, he found that 27 spheres were insufficient to account for the planetary movements, and so he added seven more for a total of 34. According to the description in Aristotle's ''Metaphysics'' (XII.8), he added two spheres for the Sun, two for the Moon, and one each for Mercury, Venus, and Mars. Callippus made careful measurements of the lengths of the seasons, finding them (starting with the spring equinox) to be 94 days, 92 days, 89 days, and 90 days. This variation in the seasons implies a variation in the speed of the Sun, called the "sol ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Eudoxus Of Cnidus
Eudoxus of Cnidus (; , ''Eúdoxos ho Knídios''; ) was an Ancient Greece, ancient Greek Ancient Greek astronomy, astronomer, Greek mathematics, mathematician, doctor, and lawmaker. He was a student of Archytas and Plato. All of his original works are lost, though some fragments are preserved in Hipparchus' ''Commentaries on the Phenomena of Aratus and Eudoxus''. ''Theodosius' Spherics, Spherics'' by Theodosius of Bithynia may be based on a work by Eudoxus. Life Eudoxus, son of Aeschines, was born and died in Cnidus (also transliterated Knidos), a city on the southwest coast of Anatolia. The years of Eudoxus' birth and death are not fully known but Diogenes Laertius, Diogenes Laërtius gave several biographical details, mentioned that Apollodorus of Athens, Apollodorus said he reached his wikt:acme#English, acme in the 103rd Olympiad (368–), and claimed he died in his 53rd year. From this 19th century mathematical historians reconstructed dates of 408–, but 20th century schola ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Abdera, Thrace
Abdera () is a municipality in the Xanthi regional unit of Thrace, Greece. In classical antiquity, it was a major Greek ''polis'' on the Thracian coast. The ancient polis is to be distinguished from the municipality, which was named in its honor. The polis lay 17 km east-northeast of the mouth of the Nestos River, almost directly opposite the island of Thasos. It was a colony placed in previously unsettled Thracian territory, not then a part of Hellas, during the age of Greek colonization. The city that developed from it became of major importance in ancient Greece. After the 4th centuryAD it declined, contracted to its acropolis, and was abandoned, never to be reoccupied except by archaeologists. During the Early Middle Ages, a new settlement emerged near the ancient city. It was called Polystylon (), and later considered as the New Abdera (). In 2011 the modern municipality of Abdera was synoecized from three previous municipalities comprising a number of modern settl ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Democritus
Democritus (, ; , ''Dēmókritos'', meaning "chosen of the people"; – ) was an Ancient Greece, Ancient Greek Pre-Socratic philosophy, pre-Socratic philosopher from Abdera, Thrace, Abdera, primarily remembered today for his formulation of an atomism, atomic theory of the universe. Democritus wrote extensively on a wide variety of topics. None of Democritus' original work has survived, except through second-hand references. Many of these references come from Aristotle, who viewed him as an important rival in the field of natural philosophy. He was known in antiquity as the ‘laughing philosopher’ because of his emphasis on the value of cheerfulness. Life Although many anecdotes about Democritus' life survive, their authenticity cannot be verified and modern scholars doubt their accuracy. According to Aristotle, Democritus was born in Abdera, on the coast of Thrace. He was a polymath and prolific writer, producing nearly eighty treatises on subjects such as poetry, harmon ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Colophon (city)
Colophon (; ) was an ancient city in Ionia. Founded around the end of the 2nd millennium BC, it was likely one of the oldest of the twelve cities of the Ionian League. It was located between Lebedos (120 Stadion (unit of length), stadia to the west) and Ephesus (70 stadia to its south). Its ruins are south of the town Değirmendere in the Menderes, İzmir, Menderes district of İzmir Province, Turkey. The city's name comes from the word κολοφών, "summit", (which is also the origin of the bibliographic term "colophon (publishing), colophon", in the metaphorical sense of a 'crowning touch',) as it was sited along a ridgeline. The term ''colophony'' for rosin comes from the term ''colophonia resina'' ( ''Kolophōnia rhētinē''), resin from the pine trees of Colophon, which was highly valued for increasing friction of the bow hairs of stringed musical instruments. History According to Apollodorus of Athens, Apollodorus and Eutychius Proclus, Proclus, the mythical seer C ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Xenophanes
Xenophanes of Colophon ( ; ; – c. 478 BC) was a Greek philosopher, theologian, poet, and critic of Homer. He was born in Ionia and travelled throughout the Greek-speaking world in early classical antiquity. As a poet, Xenophanes was known for his critical style, writing poems that are considered among the first satires. He composed elegiac couplets that criticised his society's traditional values of wealth, excesses, and athletic victories. He criticised Homer and the other poets in his works for representing the gods as foolish or morally weak. His poems have not survived intact; only fragments of some of his work survive in quotations by later philosophers and literary critics. Xenophanes is seen as one of the most important pre-Socratic philosophers. A highly original thinker, Xenophanes sought explanations for physical phenomena such as clouds or rainbows without references to divine or mythological explanations, but instead based on first principles. He distinguished ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Samos
Samos (, also ; , ) is a Greek island in the eastern Aegean Sea, south of Chios, north of Patmos and the Dodecanese archipelago, and off the coast of western Turkey, from which it is separated by the Mycale Strait. It is also a separate regional unit of the North Aegean region. In ancient times, Samos was an especially rich and powerful city-state, particularly known for its vineyards and wine production. It is home to Pythagoreion and the Heraion of Samos, a UNESCO World Heritage Site that includes the Eupalinian aqueduct, a marvel of ancient engineering. Samos is the birthplace of the Greek philosopher and mathematician Pythagoras, after whom the Pythagorean theorem is named, the philosophers Melissus of Samos and Epicurus, and the astronomer Aristarchus of Samos, the first known individual to propose that the Earth revolves around the Sun. Samian wine was well known in antiquity and is still produced on the island. The island was governed by the semi-autonomous P ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Pythagoras
Pythagoras of Samos (; BC) was an ancient Ionian Greek philosopher, polymath, and the eponymous founder of Pythagoreanism. His political and religious teachings were well known in Magna Graecia and influenced the philosophies of Plato, Aristotle, and, through them, Western philosophy. Modern scholars disagree regarding Pythagoras's education and influences, but most agree that he travelled to Croton in southern Italy around 530 BC, where he founded a school in which initiates were allegedly sworn to secrecy and lived a communal, ascetic lifestyle. In antiquity, Pythagoras was credited with mathematical and scientific discoveries, such as the Pythagorean theorem, Pythagorean tuning, the five regular solids, the theory of proportions, the sphericity of the Earth, the identity of the morning and evening stars as the planet Venus, and the division of the globe into five climatic zones. He was reputedly the first man to call himself a philosopher ("lover of wi ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |