Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was a German philosopher. He began his career as a classical philologist before turning to philosophy. He became the youngest person to hold the Chair of Classical Philology at the University of Basel in 1869 at the age of 24, but resigned in 1879 due to health problems that plagued him most of his life; he completed much of his core writing in the following decade. In 1889, at age 44, he suffered a collapse and afterward a complete loss of his mental faculties, with paralysis and probably vascular dementia. He lived his remaining years in the care of his mother until her death in 1897 and then with his sister Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche. Nietzsche died in 1900, after experiencing pneumonia and multiple strokes.
In Norse mythology, Geri and Freki are two wolves which are said to accompany the god Odin. They are attested in the Poetic Edda, a collection of epic poetry compiled in the 13th century from earlier traditional sources, in the Prose Edda, written in the 13th century by Snorri Sturluson, and in the poetry of skalds. The pair has been compared to similar figures found in Greek, Roman and Vedic mythology, and may also be connected to beliefs surrounding the Germanic "wolf-warrior bands", the Úlfhéðnar.
Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite was a Greek author, Christian theologian and Neoplatonic philosopher of the late 5th to early 6th century, who wrote a set of works known as the Corpus Areopagiticum or Corpus Dionysiacum.
In Greek mythology, Proteus is an early prophetic sea god or god of rivers and oceanic bodies of water, one of several deities whom Homer calls the "Old Man of the Sea". Some who ascribe a specific domain to Proteus call him the god of "elusive sea change", which suggests the changeable nature of the sea or the liquid quality of water. He can foretell the future, but, in a mytheme familiar to several cultures, will change his shape to avoid doing so; he answers only to those who are capable of capturing him. From this feature of Proteus comes the adjective protean, meaning "versatile", "mutable", or "capable of assuming many forms". "Protean" has positive connotations of flexibility, versatility and adaptability.
In classical and late antiquity, Illyria was a region in the western part of the Balkan Peninsula inhabited by numerous tribes of people collectively known as the Illyrians.
In fiction, a character is a person or other being in a narrative. The character may be entirely fictional or based on a real-life person, in which case the distinction of a "fictional" versus "real" character may be made. Derived from the Ancient Greek word χαρακτήρ, the English word dates from the Restoration, although it became widely used after its appearance in Tom Jones by Henry Fielding in 1749. From this, the sense of "a part played by an actor" developed. Character, particularly when enacted by an actor in the theater or cinema, involves "the illusion of being a human person". In literature, characters guide readers through their stories, helping them to understand plots and ponder themes. Since the end of the 18th century, the phrase "in character" has been used to describe an effective impersonation by an actor. Since the 19th century, the art of creating characters, as practiced by actors or writers, has been called characterization.
Classicism, in the arts, refers generally to a high regard for a classical period, classical antiquity in the Western tradition, as setting standards for taste which the classicists seek to emulate. In its purest form, classicism is an aesthetic attitude dependent on principles based in the culture, art and literature of ancient Greece and Rome, with the emphasis on form, simplicity, proportion, clarity of structure, perfection, restrained emotion, as well as explicit appeal to the intellect. The art of classicism typically seeks to be formal and restrained: of the Discobolus Sir Kenneth Clark observed, "if we object to his restraint and compression we are simply objecting to the classicism of classic art. A violent emphasis or a sudden acceleration of rhythmic movement would have destroyed those qualities of balance and completeness through which it retained until the present century its position of authority in the restricted repertoire of visual images." Classicism, as Clark noted, implies a canon of widely accepted ideal forms, whether in the Western canon that he was examining in The Nude (1956).
The Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music is an 1872 work of dramatic theory by the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. It was reissued in 1886 as The Birth of Tragedy, Or: Hellenism and Pessimism. The later edition contained a prefatory essay, "An Attempt at Self-Criticism", wherein Nietzsche commented on this earlier book.
The nabla is a triangular symbol resembling an inverted Greek delta: or ∇. The name comes, by reason of the symbol's shape, from the Hellenistic Greek word νάβλα for a Phoenician harp, and was suggested by the encyclopedist William Robertson Smith in an 1870 letter to Peter Guthrie Tait.
Greek tragedy is one of the three principal theatrical genres from Ancient Greece and Greek inhabited Anatolia, along with comedy and the satyr play. It reached its most significant form in Athens in the 5th century BC, the works of which are sometimes called Attic tragedy.
Ptolemy is a male given name, derived from Ancient Greek and meaning 'warlike'. It is formed from the Epic Greek πτόλεμοςptolemos meaning 'war'. The name was used throughout the Greek world, but was particularly popular in ancient Macedon and its nobility. During the Hellenistic period, Ptolemy I Soter, a general of Alexander the Great, founded the Ptolemaic dynasty which ruled their Kingdom in Ancient Egypt. All male rulers of the dynasty bore the name 'Ptolemy', the last being Ptolemy XII Auletes, father of Cleopatra. Common variants include Ptolemaeus (Latin), Tolomeo (Italian) and Talmai (Hebrew).
The Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology is a biographical dictionary of classical antiquity, edited by William Smith and originally published in London by Taylor, Walton and John Murray from 1844 to 1849 in three volumes of more than 3,700 pages. It is a classic work of 19th-century lexicography. The work is a companion to Smith's Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities and Dictionary of Greek and Roman Geography.
In Greek mythology, the Asphodel Meadows or Asphodel Fields was a section of the ancient Greek underworld where the majority of ordinary souls were sent to live after death. It was one of the three main divisions of the underworld along with Elysium, where righteous souls were granted reward, and Tartarus, where vicious souls were granted punishment. In his Odyssey, Homer locates the Fields of Asphodel close to the Land of dreams. He further refers to them as the dwelling place of the spirits of men who have abandoned their earthly labors.
Ipotanes or hippotaynes are mythical creatures. They are usually depicted as being half-human half-horse creatures much different from the centaurs. Although sometimes attributed to Greek mythology, the term appears to have originated at a much later date, and without a definite description; they are first mentioned in John de Mandeville's fourteenth-century Travels. Ipotanes appear in modern works of the fantasy genre.
Greek mythology is the body of myths originally told by the ancient Greeks, and a genre of ancient Greek folklore, today absorbed alongside Roman mythology into the broader designation of classical mythology. These stories concern the ancient Greek religion's view of the origin and nature of the world; the lives and activities of deities, heroes, and mythological creatures; and the origins and significance of the ancient Greeks' cult and ritual practices. Modern scholars study the myths to shed light on the religious and political institutions of ancient Greece, and to better understand the nature of myth-making itself.
Myth is a genre of folklore consisting primarily of narratives that play a fundamental role in a society. For scholars, this is very different from the vernacular usage of the term "myth" that refers to a belief that is not true. Instead, the veracity of a myth is not a defining criterion.
The gens Caninia was a plebeian family at ancient Rome during the later Republic. The first member of the gens who obtained any of the curule offices was Gaius Caninius Rebilus, praetor in 171 BC; but the first Caninius who was consul was his namesake, Gaius Caninius Rebilus, in 45 BC.
In Greek mythology, Hesperia or Hesperie, may refer to the following characters and places: