Adversus Iudaeos in the Sermon Written by Theodore Syncellus on the Avar Siege of AD 626

A sermon attributed to Theodore Syncellus (Theodoros Synkellos) is considered as one of the basic sources for the study of the Avar siege of Constantinople in AD 626. Therefore, the most historians paid more attention to the analysis of its historical background than to its ideological content. From the ideological point of view, the document serves as an evidence that a fear for the future of the Empire and its capital Constantinople began to rise within emerging Byzantine society. The Avar siege served its author mainly as a model for developing his polemics with imaginary Jewish opponents and their religion. It deserves to be included in a long succession of similar polemical treatises, which have existed in Christianity from its earliest times.The research for this paper was financially supported by VEGA 1/0427/14. The finalisation of this paper was supported by an internal grant of the Faculty of Philosophy of Comenius University (Bratislava) n. FG08/201

Hedonism Before Bentham

The hedonistic theories of Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill are both widely known. Hedonism before Bentham, however, is much less known and, hitherto, no systematic presentation of hedonism’s early history has been written. In this paper I seek to fill this gap in the literature by providing an overview of hedonism in early Indian and ancient Greek thought (Sections 1-4), in Roman and Medieval thought (Section 5), and from the Renaissance until the Enlightenment (Section 6)

How Zwicky already ruled out modified gravity theories without dark matter

Various theories, such as MOND, MOG, Emergent Gravity and $f(R)$ theories avoid dark matter by assuming a change in General Relativity and/or in Newton's law. Galactic rotation curves are typically described well. Here the application to galaxy clusters is considered, focussed on the good lensing and X-ray data for A1689. As a start, the no-dark-matter case is confirmed to work badly: the need for dark matter starts near the cluster centre, where Newton's law is still supposed to be valid. This leads to the conundrum discovered by Zwicky, which is likely only solvable in his way, namely by assuming additional (dark) matter. Neutrinos with eV masses serve well without altering the successes in (dwarf) galaxies.Comment: 10 pages, 2 figures. Matches published versio

Politeness in pronouns : third-person reference in Byzantine documentary papyri

In many languages, a person can be addressed either in the second person singular or second person plural. While the former indicates familiarity and/or lack of respect, the latter suggests distance and/or respect towards the addressee. While in Ancient Greek pronominal reference initially was not used as a ‘politeness strategy’, in the Post-classical period a T-V distinction did develop. In this same period, I argue, another pronominal usage developed: a person could also be addressed in the third person singular. This should be connected to the rise of abstract nominal forms of address, a process which can be dated to the fourth century AD

Theon and the history of the progymnasmata

This paper surveys the evidence for the technical literature on rhetorical progymnasmata. It concludes that the arguments for an early date for Theon’s Progymnasmata are inherently weak, and are inconsistent with the evidence for the text’s currency in late antiquity (especially the fact that it was translated into Armenian). Analysis of a dispute about the classification of Aelius Aristides On the Four in the fourth and fifth centuries shows that Theon and the Sopater whose Progymnasmata are quoted by John of Sardis are both likely to be teachers of rhetoric independently attested in fifth-century Alexandria. It is suggested that the pseudo-Hermogenean Progymnasmata are most likely to be the work of Minucianus; but this conjecture cannot be proved