Telesilla of Argos

Telesilla, (flourished 5th century BC, Argos), was an famous ancient female Greek poet. She wrote lyric poetry dedicated to Apollo and Artemis, of which only brief fragments remain.

She was listed by Antipater of Thesalonike (c. 15 BC) as one of the great Nine Female Lyric Poets of Greece (along with Praxilla, Moiro, Anyte, Sappho, Erinna, Corinna, Nossis, and Myrtis).

She was involved in the education of girls for choral performance. While she was famous during her life for her poetry, she was equally respected by later writers for driving the Spartan forces from her home city of Argos in 494/493 BC.

Argos was probably the base of Dorian operations in the Peloponnese (c. 1100-1000 BC), and from that time onward it was the dominant city-state of Argolis. During the Battle of Sepeia, the Spartan king Cleomenes made short work of the Argive forces and marched on Argos itself, where Telesilla reportedly stirred up her countrywomen to defend the walls.

According to Pausanias, Cleomenes had three options; 1- to attack the city and be defeated by women, which would be the greatest disgrace, 2- to attack and defeat the women, which would be a dishonourable victory or 3- to leave and save his honour. Frustrated, Cleomenes chose the third option and withdrew his forces and left the city untouched.
Telesilla of Argos

Philo Byzantius (ca. 280 BC – ca. 220 BC) – Greek engineer and physicist

Philo Byzantius also known as Philo Mechanicus, was a Greek engineer, physicist, and writer on mechanics, who lived during the latter half of the 3rd century BC. Philo was a student of the famed engineer Ctesibius.

He descended from the city of Byzantium, lived in Rhodes and eventually settled in Alexandria. He was probably younger than Ctesibius, though some place him a century earlier. He compiled numerous treatises on applied mechanics, the most important of which is Michaniki Syntaxis (Mechanical Syntax).

Philo was one of the greatest engineers of the Hellenistic period, a pioneer in mechanics and the construction of automata. He was one alongside many illustrious scholars who worked in Alexandria, the most highly advanced spiritual center in the Western World at the time.

He constructed pneumatics, machines which functioned with the use of compressed air, levers, tools and hourglasses. In Alexandria, Philo invented the chain pump. This comprised a set of pots attached to a chain or belt that was moved by a rotating wheel.

Philo also described the force pump which was invented by the engineer Ctesibius of Alexandria. This pump is composed of two cylinders with pistons that were moved by means of connecting rods attached to opposite ends of a single lever.

In the field of mathematics, Philo formulated an alternative proof to the proposition of Euclid 1.8 and also devised an approximate solution to the problem of doubling the cube using the so-called Philo line.
Philon Byzantius (ca. 280 BC – ca. 220 BC) – Greek engineer and physicist

Greek historian -Diocles of Peparethus

Flourished during late 4th – early 3rd century BC, Diocles of Peparethus a historian from the Greek island of Peparethus.

He wrote about the foundation of Rome, and whom Q. Fabius Pictor is said to have followed in a great many points.

It is the generally accepted view that Fabius Pictor found the narrative structure of this foundation story in the work of Diocles of Peparethus. Regarding th mythical founder Romulus, Diocles relied heavily on local Italic folk tales and the concept of an original single founder, a storyline habitual in the histories of the Wetsern Greek writers of his time.

Diocles of Peparethus appears to have been a figure of note, well-travelled, and abstemious; Athenaeus cites Demetrius of Scepsis to attest that Diocles "drank cold water to the day of his death".
Greek historian -Diocles of Peparethus

Plutarch - The Greek biographer, historian, essayist, and moralist

Lucius Mestrius Plutarchus, better known simply as Plutarch, was a Greek writer and philosopher who lived between c. 45-50 AD and c. 120-125 AD.

Plutarch was born in Chaeronea, a city of Boeotia in central Greece around 45–47 AD to an ancient aristocratic Theban family. He began studying at Athens with a Platonist philosopher named Ammonius.

Plutarch is believed to have had a liberal education at Athens, where he studied physics, rhetoric, mathematics, medicine, natural science, philosophy, Greek, and Latin literature.

Although Plutarch visited Athens often, studying their philosophy under Ammonius, and he travelled to both Alexandria in Egypt and Italy, he spent most of his life in his native city and in nearby Delphi.

He lived in his own golden age, during the reigns of Nerva, Trajan and Hadrian. The author of more than 200 works, he is known primarily for his Parallel Lives, biographies that over the centuries have heavily shaped popular ideas of Greek and Roman history.

Plutarch paid special attention to “physics,”, which in antiquity included metaphysics, natural philosophy, psychology and theology.
Plutarch - The Greek biographer, historian, essayist, and moralist

Isocrates (436–338 BC): Ancient Greek rhetorician

Isocrates, the son of Theodorus was born in the deme of Erchia , in the first year of the 86th Olympiad , or B. C. 436 , in the archonship of Lysimachus , a little more than half a century before the birth of Demosthenes , and five years before the breaking out of the Peloponnesian War.

He was about seven years older than Plato. Isocrates was a well-conducted youth, eager to acquire information and to get himself thoroughly educated, became a pupil not only of the Sophists Gorgias and Tisias but also of Socrates.

Rhetoric was his main occupation and no age before his had seen so much care and labour expended on this art.

A certain timidity and feebleness in his delivery prevented him form from specking in public and he was therefore debarred from occupying the high stations which were to the ambitions of his contemporaries.

He taught rhetoric both at Chios and at Athens, and his school was attended by numerous disciples, among whom were Xenophon, Ephorus, Theopompus and other distinguished men of his time.
Isocrates (436–338 BC): Ancient Greek rhetorician

Praxagoras of Cos

Praxagoras was a Greek physician from the island of Kos (fl. end of the fourth century–beginning of third century BCE).

Born in an island with huge medical tradition in ancient Greece, Praxagoras of Cos became an esteemed medico-philosopher and surgeon. The evolution made by the Hippocratic School of Medicine further boosted his talent and helped him perform surgical operations, which were believed impossible for his era.

The theories of Praxagoras of Cos and his followers constitute an important landmark in the history of ancient medical knowledge.

Praxagoras of Cos, influenced by Aristotle, adhered to cardiocentrism and considered the heart as the seat of the soul, of thought and psychic functions, a belief seen also in Ancient Egypt.

He is reported to distinguish between the vessels stemming from the aorta (arteries), on the one hand, and the vessels stemming from the vena cava (veins), on the other, and to separate these types of vessels as if they form two distinct systems.

Praxagoras suggesting that there were in the body miniscule arteries that were responsible for transmitting signals through the body. Some arteries became so thin at their endings that their lumen (koilotès) virtually disappeared. For this final part he used the word “neuron” (νεῦραν), which was the Greek word for ‘cord’ or ‘sinew’.

He also introduced an innovative surgical technique to confront small bowel obstruction, by creating an enterocutaneous fistula.
Praxagoras of Cos

Ctesias of Cnidus

Ctesias was a Greek physician who stayed at the court of the Persian king Artaxerxes II Mnemon from 404 to 398/397.

He was born sometime after the middle of the fifth century B.C.E. in the city of Cnidus in Asia Minor where he was born into the family of the Asclepiads and studied medicine. He was the son of either Ctesiarchos or Ctesiochos, who was himself also probably a doctor as his father before him.

Ctesias of Cnidus was a Greek physician who lived in the last half of the fifth century and into the fourth century B.C.E. He seems to have studied, and possibly practiced medicine at Cnidus.

He served as royal physician to king Artaxerxes II of Persia until 398/397 B.C.E. at which point he returned to Greece where he composed works on the Persian Empire and India.

For seventeen years he resided at the Persian court as royal physician; and among the extraordinary privileges which were enjoyed by that favored class - the court physicians - Ctesias had the opportunity to search the royal archives, the records of the ancient kings; a privilege never accorded to any other Greek.

The works of Ctesias, which do not survive in their original form but only in fragments related by later authors, continue to be of vital importance for the study of the Near East and the western view of India before Alexander.

He stays until the Battle of Cunaxa (401 B.C.E.) where he was a doctor in the army of Artaxerxes II. At the battle he successfully treated the wound of Artaxerxes.

Ctesias must have served Artaxerxes’ interests well, because in 397 BC he was sent (via Cyprus and Cnidus) to negotiate with Sparta. He seems to have been captured by the locals in Rhodes, where he was tried for serving the interests of Persia; he was acquitted, however, and returned home to Cnidus later in the same year.

At the beginning of the fourth century BCE Ctesias of Cnidus wrote his twenty-three book History of Persia. Ctesias’ Persica, or History of Persia, is one of the most enticing yet most baffling of all literary works from Greek antiquity. Books I–VI included a history of Assyria and the Medes, and the last 10 books were a more detailed account from the death of Xerxes.
Ctesias of Cnidus

Soranus of Ephesus: Greek physician

Soranus of Ephesus (circa AD 98-138) was born in Ephesus on the coast of Asia Minor towards the end of the first century AD, the son of Menandrus and his wife Phoebe.

He trained in the famous medical school of Alexandria and practised in Rome during the rules of Trajan and Hadrian. He died towards the middle of the 2nd AD.

He wrote approximately twenty books dealing with gynaecology, internal medicine, surgery, pharmacology, ophthalmology, medical history, anatomy, embryology and philosophy, most of which are lost.

A part of his work on Acute and Chronic Diseases has survived, in the transcript of Caelius Aurelianus (5th century AD). He wrote also several treatises, on Bandages, on Fractures, as well as Life of Hippocrates.

His work on Gynaecology reflects the views on medical practice during the Roman period and is considered as a leading treatise on the subject, coming down to the middle ages via the School of Salerno.
Soranus of Ephesus: Greek physician

Presocratic philosopher: Parmenides of Elea

Parmenides of Elea, active in the earlier part of the 5th c. BCE, authored a difficult metaphysical poem that has earned him a reputation as early Greek philosophy’s most profound and challenging thinker.

Presocratic philosopher who lived in the southern Italian town of Elea (near the modern town of Agropoli), Parmenides was the first of a group of philosophers who are called Eleatics, the others being Zeno and Melissus.

He was born about 515 BC. Parmenides was a native of the Greek city of Elea, in southwest Italy, A member of a wealthy, influential family, he was said to have served Elea as a statesman lawgiver.

Elea, the Greek colony had been founded about 540 B.C. by Greeks from Ionia, who evidently brought with them the Ionian interest in the origin and development of the visible universe.

One of his teachers was supposedly the immigrant philosopher Xenophanes. Diogenes Laertius says that Parmenides was, at some time in his life associated with the Pythagoreans. Parmenides was known for having live an exemplary life and later Greeks talked on an ideal “Parmenidean life”. He founded a school of philosophy at Elam known as the Eleatic School.

His philosophical stance has typically been understood as at once extremely paradoxical and yet crucial for the broader development of Greek natural philosophy and metaphysics. He has been seen as a metaphysical monist (of one stripe or another) who so challenged the naïve cosmological theories of his predecessors that his major successors among the Presocratics were all driven to develop more sophisticated physical theories in response to his arguments.

He wrote a philosophical poem consisting of a prologue and two parts, of which considerable fragments have survived. The prologue describes Parmenides' meeting with a goddess who reveals the truth outlined in the first part of the poem; of the two possible paths of inquiry, It is and It is not.
Presocratic philosopher: Parmenides of Elea

Update on 6/11/2020

Anaxagoras (c.500 BC – c.428 BC)

Anaxagoras was born in the city of Clazomenae in Asia Minor, during the seventh Olympiad (between 500-497 or 533 BC). He was descendant of an aristocratic noble family. His father Hegesibulus (Ηγησίβουλος), was intellectual and introduced his son to Anaximenes’ philosophy.

Anaxagoras was the first of the pre-Socratic philosophers, who visited Athens in 494 BC, transmitting there the richness and the originallity of Ionian School of philosophy. As a philosopher he taught Archelaus of Athens, Euripides the tragedian, and the demagogue Pericles with whom he remained a friend. He remained a resident of the city of Athens for at least thirty years.

According to Anaxagoras, the Mind (nous) is infinite and self-powered. Mind is the supreme principle, the greatest power, that is mixed with nothing but it exists alone itself by itself, whereas all other entities include a portion of everything.Mind is the purest of all entities, with a unique authenticity.

It is said that Anaxagoras was the first philosopher who elevated spirit above matter, whereby he started a new era in theology, which is not an isolated opinion since, e.g., Eusebius says that

Anaxagoras and his school were the first in Greece that talked about God. Anaxagoras was the author of a lost work On nature. The work was written in a beautiful and sublime style. As Plato and others relate, it was well-known and popular in Athens in the fifth century BC. Socrates knew the work well. Certain fragments and the major ideas of the work have been passed on by ancient philosophers and doxographers: Plato, Aristotle, Theophrastus, Aetius, Hippolytus, and Simplicius.

In Lampsakos during his last years, Anaxagoras is supposed to have said that the Athenians missed him more than he missed them. He died in 428 BCE, much honored by the Lampsakenes.
Anaxagoras (500 BCE – 428 BCE)

Scylax of Caryanda

Scylax of Caryanda (in Caria), Greek historian, lived in the time of Darius Hystaspis (521‑485 B.C.), who commissioned him to explore the course of the Indus. He was engaged to sail, explore and describe the shore of the Indian Ocean for the needs of the Persian.

Scylax of Caryanda was a pioneer in two ways; he wrote the first Indian logos in Greek, and he was rumored to have visited India.

He started from Caspatyrus and is said by Herodotus to have reached the sea, whence he sailed west through the Indian Ocean to the Red Sea. The exploration of the Persian gulf and Indian ocean lasted for two years and it was finished around 515 BC.

 An account of Scylax’s voyage may have been written and transmitted to later writer. Direct evidence of a written account of Scylax’s explorations comes from Aristotle. In the Politics,the philosopher quotes Scylaxas the source of the statement that in India “the kings are physically very different from their subjects, etc.”

Scylax allegedly completed some books after this voyage: the Periplous, the Periodos Gês, and the Events in the Time of Heracleides King of Mylasa. Few fragments of his Periplous about India remain. They discuss its landscape, plants, political constitution and peoples.
Scylax of Caryanda

Parmenides of Elea

Parmenides was a Presocratic philosopher who lived in the southern Italian town of Elea (near the modern town of Agropoli). He was the first of a group of philosophers who are called Eleatics, the others being Zeno and Melissus.

He was born about 515 BC. Parmenides was a native of the Greek city of Elea, in southwest Italy, A member of a wealthy, influential family, he was said to have served Elea as a statesman lawgiver.

One of his teachers was supposedly the immigrant philosopher Xenophanes. Diogenes Laertius says that Parmenides was, at some time in his life associated with the Pythagoreans. Parmenides was known for having live an exemplary life and later Greeks talked on an ideal “Parmenidean life”. He founded a school of philosophy at Elam known as the Eleatic School.

Parmenides of Elea is the most brilliant and controversial of the Presocratic philosophers. Parmenides of Elea authored a notoriously obscure metaphysical poem that has earned him a reputation as the Presocratic period’s most profound and challenging thinker. He wrote a philosophical poem consisting of a prologue and two parts, of which considerable fragments have survived. The prologue describes Parmenides' meeting with a goddess who reveals the truth outlined in the first part of the poem; of the two possible paths of inquiry, It is and It is not.
Parmenides of Elea

Herodotus of Halicarnassus (c. 485–425 BC)

Herodotus was born to Lyxes and Rhaeo of Caria in Halicarnassus at some point in the first half of the 5th century BC, but left as a consequence of a period of political infighting in which his family was involved.

Herodotus and his brother Theodore belonged to a well-educated privilege class that could afford leisure and extensive travel. He spent much of his adult life traveling the Mediterranean world.

In his travels, Herodotus venture as far as Sicily, north to the Ukraine south to the Nile River, and east to the Black Sea rim as far as the Dnieper River in southwestern Russia.

He is one of the most important historical writers of antiquity. Herodotus' name is inseparable from that of his one surviving work, the Histories, an account of the Persian Wars (490-479 BC), fought between the Persian kings Darius and Xerxes and the cities of Greece and - very broadly defined - of the background to those wars.

This lengthy history described how the Persian expansion westward after the mid-500 BC was eventually defeated by the Greek’s defense of their homeland in 480 – 479 BC.

His writings are an amalgam of geography and history, framed from firsthand observation as well as secondhand accounts, a mixture of sober historical fact as well as reports of the exotic and miraculous.
Herodotus of Halicarnassus (c. 485–425 BC)

Euclid of Megara

Euclid of Megara, a celebrated philosopher and logician; he was a disciple of Socrates, and flourished about 400 years before Christ.

Euclid of Megara endued by nature with a subtle and penetrating genius, early applied himself to the study of philosophy. The writings of Parmenides first taught him the art of disputation.

Hearing of the fame of Socrates, Euclid determined to attend upon his instructions and for this purpose removed from Megara to Athens.

According to a story told by the Roman antiquarian Aulus Gellius, Euclid of Megara exhibited a singular passion for philosophy.

At the outset of the Peloponnesian War, Athens imposed sanctions against the nearby city of Megara and banned its citizens from entering Athens. Euclid of Megara disguised himself in women’s clothes to attend the lectures of Socrates. He long remained a constant hearer and zealous disciple of the Moral Philosospher.

Euclid went on to found the Megaric school of philosophy, renewed for their delight in paradoxes. One of the nest-known puzzles associated with this school was that of the ‘veiled figure’.
Euclid of Megara

Apollodorus of Artemita (130-87 BC)

This Apollodorus hailed for Artemita which was founded in the Hellenistic age. Despite having long been part of the Parthian Empire, by his lifetime (around 100 BC) Artemita had retained its character as a Greek polis under the rule of the pro-Greek early Arsacrids.

He wrote a work in the called Parthica (on the Parthians) which is referred to by Strabo (geographer 64- 21 BC) and by Athenaeus, who mentions the fourth book of his work.

Parthica is a book about history of Parthian empire comprising at least four volumes. The only surviving parts are a fragment handed down by Athenaeus and several references by Strabo, who in addition, emphasizes the accuracy of Apollodorus’s reports about the Parthian empire.

Inscriptions provided evidence of lectures given by an itinerant orator or philosopher, while a library housed specialist literature on philosophy.

Aside from his use of secondary sources (Alexander historians, early geographers), Apollodorus is a value informant because of his own local investigations, such as the study of the municipal archives of Artemita and Seleucia and the informant he personally collected from his Greek compatriots, as well as merchants and travelers.

The book of Parthica which has got lost dealt not only with Parthia, but also with Bactrian Greeks which had been cut off from the rest of the Hellenistic world since the third century and their invasion in India.

According to Apollodorus of Artemita, the fertility of Bactria’s soil created for the Graeco- Bactrians the power that led them to undertake the conquest of India.
Apollodorus of Artemita (130-87 BC) 

Virgil

Publius Vergilius Maro, usually called Virgil was Rome’s greatest poet producing in Latin the great epic poem the Aeneid, the well-known epic poem of twelve books that became the Roman Empire’s national epic. Virgil became the archetype of future poets well into the Renaissance.

Virgil was born on the 15th of October 70 BC at Andes, a little village near Mantua. His mother’s name was Maia, and his father was probably a small landowner.

Virgil learned country ways in his father’s pottery shop and form anima husbandry, beekeeping and lumbering.  At the age 17, he enrolled on oratory and law at Marcus Epidius’s school in Rome, where the young Octavian and Mark Antony had studied.

Virgil wrote three major works, the Eclogues published I 37 BC, which brought him to the literacy circle of Horace, Pollio, Maecenas and ultimately Octavian (Augustus).

In 37 BC, he and Horace traveled together to southern Italy when he began work on his second major work with Georgics, published in 29 BC.

Then he immediately began work on his third and greatest work, the Aeneid which was unfinished at the time of his death in 19 BC at Brundusium. Until his death at the 51, Virgil labored on the Aeneid, a nationalistic paean to the Trojan prince Aeneas and to Rome’s foundations.
Virgil

Leucippus

It is likely that Leucippus (fl. 440 BC) proposed the atomic system sometime around 440 to 430 BC thus he is contemporary with the other post-Eleatic thinkers Anaxagoras and Empedocles as well as Melissus.

Two books are attributed to Leucippus: On Mind and The Great World System (Makrokosmos). The Great World System was Leucippus principle work.

Leucippus is unanimously held to be founder of the Greek atomic theory. The uncertainty which prevails in the biographical notices of the first philosophers is strikingly illustrated by the conflicting accounts transmitted to us of the circumstances of his life.

Together, Leucippus and Democritus are often called the ‘early’ atomists, to distinguish them from their famous later successors, Epicurus and his school, who took over and developed their teaching.
Leucippus

Eudemus of Rhodes (c.370 BC - c.300 BC)

Eudemus was a student of Aristotle and an associate of Theophrastus. Following the death of Aristotle he went back to Rhodes and founded a school there. Though it seems his school did not survive his death, Rhodes nonetheless was the home of several philosophers in the Peripatetic tradition.

Like Theophrastus he wrote a history of astronomy. He also wrote a history of mathematics and treatises on arithmetic astrology, geometry and physics.

Around 320 BC, Eudemus wrote a formal history of Greek mathematics. No longer extant it was summarised in the fifth century CE by Proclus (411-485 BC). From this and other scattered sources it appears that Thales (624- 547 BC) was the first to start and prove certain elementary geometric theorems, although it is not known exactly what the concept of ‘proof’ may have meant to him.
Eudemus of Rhodes (c.370 BC - c.300 BC)

Euclid of Alexandria

The most famous mathematician of all time was one of the first scholars to move to Alexandria. His name was Euclid. It is believed that he was the son of Naucrates and the grandson of Zenarchus or of Berenice, that he was of Greek descent and that he lived in Damascus although he had been born in Tyre.

Euclid lived and taught in Alexandria at the same time as Ptolemy I was still wandering the halls of the Greta Library.

His main work the Elements of Geometry, and he was called Euclid of Alexandria, because that city is the only one with which he can be almost certainly connected.

The thirteen books of the Elements show mathematics at its most elegant, with problems solved in concise logical ways. Euclid’s Elements is so well organized that it remained the standard geometry textbook until the twentieth century.

He was probably educated in Athens and if so, he received his mathematical tarring at the Academy, which was the outstanding mathematical school of the fourth century and the only one where he could have gathered easily all the knowledge that he possessed.

Euclid the Alexandria died around 270 BC.
Euclid of Alexandria

Hypatia of Alexandria (370-415)

Regarded as the first woman in history to teach advanced mathematics, Hypatia of Alexandria was a mathematician, scientist and philosopher. Hypatia was born sometime around AD 370 when women stayed at home, only the men went to school, held jobs and became involved in government.

She lived during paganism’s last stand against the encroaching Christian religion and in sense personally represented the conflict between pagan Greek science, philosophy and mathematics on the other hand and the Christian religions and political empire on the other.

Hypatia was very young when her mother died so she spent most of her childhood with only her father.

Because Theon was a professor and an administrator at the University of Alexandria, Egypt, Hypatia spent much of her time there while growing up. She attended classes, joined discussions, and studied with her father. Theon encouraged Hypatia, in her quest for knowledge and taught her mathematics, science, including astronomy and philosophy.

It was with her father that she help to compile older mathematical works and a more popular edition of Euclid’s ‘Elements’ which was used almost exclusively by Greek teachers after her time.

When she was teenager, Hypatia traveled to Athens, Greece, and attended the school taught by Greek biographer Plutarch.

Hypatia taught at the Neoplatonic School in Alexandria, becoming the school’s director around AD 400. She taught Neo-Platonism, a branch of philosophy, developed in the third century by Plotinus of Egypt and Iamblichus of Syria.

Hypatia wrote a number of books, including the Astronomical Cannon and commentaries on Arithmetica by Diophantus and the astronomical works by Ptolemy.

Hypatia also edited On the Conics of Apollonius, which defined the conic sections that came to be known as the parabola, hyperbola and ellipse.
Hypatia of Alexandria (370-415)