The focus of this paper is a first-century pseudepigraphic treatise titled On Human Nature, preserved by Stobaeus and attributed to the Pythagorean Aesara. Whether the treatise is to be ascribed to a woman philosopher named Aesara or the Pythagorean man Aresas is a point of controversy. In what follows, we gloss over the question of the identity and gender of the author and turn to the philosophical content of the treatise. In the surviving fragment, Aesara analyses the structure of the human soul and the relationships among its parts. The human soul becomes a model of law and justice for both the city and the household. Thus, On Human Nature revisits well-known Platonic doctrines, such as the city-soul analogy, the tripartition of the soul and the definition of justice as harmony, providing novel insights into their political implications. In what follows, we argue that Aesara constructs an original psychological theory by supplementing Plato’s tripartite conception of the soul in the Republic with aspects from later dialogues. Specifically, Aesara employs the Laws to stress the political implications of the tripartition and the leading role of νοῦς, and the Timaeus to explain our psychological reactions through physiological phenomena.

Analysing the imageries prevalent among the citizens of the young Turkish Republic in the post-Catastrophe Smyrna/Izmir, this article aims to shed light on the reflections of the destruction, forced migration, and economic provincialization of the ethnically-cleansed city. Aside from regular newspaper reports, travelogues and other popular literature accounts produced by local Muslims also recounted the haunting character of the ravaged region. The common word ‘loss’ in these post-Catastrophe narratives indicates what is apprehended by the imagery and discourse of mourning, trauma, sadness, and nostalgia from the victors’ perspective.

The Parthenon’s structure suggests a thought-out design particularly attentive to light. This includes the orientation of the building towards the rising sun, the placement of windows, the use of barriers and grilles, the translucent marble ceilings, the skylights, and even ‘reflective’ pools of various liquid. These are all devices that, alongside bright materials, may have been used to enhance the experience of visitors to the temple and their encounter with the colossal gold and ivory statue of the goddess Athena. To test the validity and the effect that each of these purported design strategies produced, this article proposes an experiment using advanced 3D digital technologies, along with physically based lighting simulations, to recreate the ambient and architectural conditions that existed in the original temple design. The results suggest that this temple, contrary to long-standing beliefs that imagined the interior as a ‘bright marble space’, was generally quite dark and dim. The subsequent discussion and concluding remarks suggest that the illumination of the chryselephantine statue’s materials through the glow of a lamp, and on rare occasions from the sun, probably represented the pinnacle of the viewing encounters.