Chapter 1 begins with an overview of Neo-Latin as a scientific language. By the mid-fifteenth century, Latin had been the Western European lingua franca of science and learning for more than a millennium. However, the stylistic preferences of humanist authors, who tried to imitate classical texts, especially their vocabulary, presented a challenge in many areas, but above all in the sciences, where a new-found wealth of knowledge required an equal number of new names. Important debates on how far nonclassical words were to be tolerated and the hierarchy of res and verba are also analysed in this chapter.

In Extra Help you will see how easy it is to understand the perfect system using the pattern we have followed so far for the verb. In the Extra Material you’ll discover the range of uses of the perfect system.

Aristotle’s understanding of natural objects as matter-form compounds raises important questions about how this hylomorphic view applies to living beings. More specifically:

1. (1) Is the form of living compounds ‘pure,’ that is essentially independent of matter, or ‘true-gritty,’ that is, essentially matter-involving?

2. (2) In his standard view, the form is prior to matter and the compound. But how can the form of living compounds meet this priority requirement if it is ‘true-gritty’?

3. (3) If, by contrast, the form of living compounds is ‘pure,’ how can it be the principle of material and changeable living compounds?

I argue that in De Partibus Animalium (PA), too, forms of living compounds are ‘true-gritty.’ They are also, however, prior to living compounds and their matter. PA offers evidence for a distinction between the type of matter that is essential to form and that of living compounds, which is not essential to but posterior to the form.

This chapter focuses on the Julian reform and its place under Augustus. Scholars sometimes take Caesar’s shift to a solar year to be obvious, and they often view his new calendar as marking a complete break with its predecessor. Instead, his reform should be viewed as a proclamation of his extraordinary position in the polity, and in it, he took great care to maintain the significance of the old calendar’s dates. Augustus gave the calendar an important role in his new order, for he used it as the basis of his efforts to make the political and religious order. Scholars sometimes view his efforts as an attempt to assert a monarchical vision of the polity or of some larger, more universal order. Instead, his use of the calendar reveals considerable continuity with the republican past.

This chapter looks upon eighth-century activity in transmission, authorship, and mentoring as being basic to theoretical and historical grounding. Ibn Sallām provides an emphasis on poetry as a combination of craft, perceptive subtlety, and informativeness. He reiterates that, for pre-Islamic society, poetry was the public register. In line with his prominent mentors, his Ranks of Champion Poets emphasizes the role of meticulous transmitters and philologists who were then bent on filtering and authenticating transmission to uncover forgeries. His attention to forgeries would soon become not only exciting material for new generations of critics and philologists, but also a basis for a tenth-century backlash aimed at ninth-century scholars who showed excessiveness in the random application of theft. Ibn Sallām’s notes on untrustworthy transmitters would become the mainstay of the accusatory discourse of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Orientalists like Margoliouth. Lyall’s response to Margoliouth’s blanket negation of ancient poetry as forgery modeled on the Qurʾān builds on logic and vast knowledge so as to demonstrate that forgery requires prior models that should have existed in pre-Islamic times.

A topic of such enormous presence in the literary and cultural lives of societies could not be concluded. As long as humanity and speech survive, possibilities of dialogic, multilingual, conversational, and borrowing sites remain a fact of the human condition. Survival entails repetition. This is not opening the gate to textual and documented thefts that take over not only meanings and expressions, which have been the focus of some Arab classicists between the sixth and eighteenth centuries, but also segments and portions of another’s intellectual property. While the early focus of those classicists on meanings and expressions was dismissed by many philologists and critics during those august periods of dialogue, visible self-arrogation of works or pieces and portions of them still provokes condemnation. Even artificial intelligence tries to evade en bloc thefts.

The project’s focus is on the calendar of republican Rome and the Julian reform, and its chief concern is its cultic and juristic significance. Cult rested most directly on rites, but it also involved law, which identified who might legitimately perform certain acts and where and when they might do so, and ideas about how the world worked, which might be implicit and poorly defined. The calendar’s days, months, and year were the crucial units, and all were tied in complicated ways both to the heavens and the activities of Rome’s priests and magistrates. In the ancient world, polities often sought to establish a homology with the heavens, ruled by the gods, and here calendars were crucial instruments. Studies of the Roman calendar often obscure these relationships, and studies of cult often devalue the importance of law.

Extra Help with Basic Sentences: present tense, nominative and accusative. Extra Material focusses on the different contexts in which Greek uses the present tense.

This chapter seeks to trace the history of On the Parts of Animals (hereafter PA) and the impact it had up to the Byzantine era and Michael of Ephesus, the first systematic commentator of Aristotle’s biological works. The first section examines a variety of works and passages until Galen’s time, delving deeper into the case of the ps.-Aristotelian On Breath. The second section focuses on Galen’s On the Usefulness of the Parts: Despite the fact that Galen argues that this treatise is part of the tradition of the PA, it emerges that Aristotelian zoology is discussed in late antiquity and the Middle Ages based on the study of other zoological treatises (or their epitomes) and not of the PA. The third section examines Michael’s commentary and especially his comments on the marrow and the brain. It is shown that Michael’s scholiastic activity contributes genuinely and substantially to the circulation of Aristotle’s thought in philosophical circles of the time.

In this chapter, our attention will shift from narratives to the law materials present in the Pentateuch. These portions include the Book of the Covenant, tabernacle instructions, purification laws, holiness legislation, and a collection of priestly laws. The laws of Torah, better understood as instruction, represent the central feature of living in covenant relationship with Yahweh. Most notable are the Ten Commandments, whose value has remained virtually unsurpassed in the human history of ethics. These “Ten Words” (Hebrew), combined with Israel’s narrative story and covenant with Yahweh, set the trajectory for the rest of the Bible.

The form in which the independent lists of laws were originally preserved in ancient Israel closely parallels that of other known law codes in the ancient Near East. Israel’s Torah instruction also exhibits certain affinities with later Greek developments, particularly in its expansion and placement within the narrative framework. Importantly, the emphasis on the writing of the covenant law marks a turn from preliterate ancestral religion to a literate Mosaic faith, and helps ensure the preservation of a sacred text for all time.