Karen ni Mheallaigh

Moon in the Greek and Roman Imagination (eBook, ePUB)

Myth, Literature, Science and Philosophy

• Format: ePub

Produktbeschreibung

The Moon exerted a powerful influence on ancient intellectual history, as a playground for the scientific imagination. This book explores the history of the Moon in the Greco-Roman imaginary from Homer to Lucian, with special focus on those accounts of the Moon, its attributes, and its 'inhabitants' given by ancient philosophers, natural scientists and imaginative writers including Pythagoreans, Plato and the Old Academy, Varro, Plutarch and Lucian. ni Mheallaigh shows how the Moon's enigmatic presence made it a key site for thinking about the gaze (erotic, philosophical and scientific) and the relation between appearance and reality. It was also a site for hoax in antiquity as well as today. Central issues explored include the view from elsewhere (selenoskopia), the relation of science and fiction, the interaction between the beginnings of science in the classical polis and the imperial period, and the limits of knowledge itself.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Cambridge University Press
• Erscheinungstermin: 22. Oktober 2020
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9781108603188
• Artikelnr.: 62736222

Autorenporträt

Karen ní Mheallaigh is Professor of Greek in the Department of Classics and Ancient History at the University of Exeter. She is the author of Reading Fiction with Lucian: Fakes, Freaks and Hyperreality (Cambridge, 2014).

Inhaltsangabe

Acknowledgements
Abbreviations, text references and translations
Part I. The Moon in the Mythic Imagination: Introduction: to the Moon! Journey into the ancient scientific imagination
1. The Moon in ritual, myth and magic
Part II. The Moon in the Scientific Imagination: 2. Making sense of the Moon: philosophy and science
3. Life on the Moon: between philosophy, science and fantasy
4. The Moon of many faces: Plutarch's great lunar dialogue De facie
Part III. The Moon in the Fantastic Imagination: 5. The imaginary Moon: lunar journeys
6. Selçnoskopia: the Moon-view from fiction to reality
Envoi: the legacy of ancient selenography
Bibliography
Index.