13 stories from this place.
Socrates was tried for impiety and corrupting the youth of Athens in 399 BCE. The 500-member jury voted 280 to 220 to convict, then by a wider margin to impose death. He drank hemlock at sunset some weeks later in the prison at the western foot of the Acropolis. He was 70.
Read the story →Eudoxus of Cnidus proposed in the 360s BC that the apparent motions of the planets could be explained by a system of 27 concentric rotating spheres centred on the Earth. Aristotle expanded the model to 55 spheres. The framework substantively defined European cosmology until Tycho Brahe.
Read the story →Hippocrates of Chios was a Greek geometer of the late 5th century BC — not the famous physician of Cos. He was the first European mathematician to compute the exact area of a region bounded by curves, an achievement that opened the path Eudoxus and Archimedes would later complete with the method of exhaustion.
Read the story →Hippocrates of Cos and Hippocrates of Chios were near-contemporaries — both Greek, both prominent in their fields, both with the same first name — and were occasionally confused even by ancient sources. One founded the European medical tradition; the other wrote the first textbook of European geometry.
Read the story →Hyperides was one of the ten canonical Attic orators of the 4th century BC. Almost all of his speeches were lost in late antiquity. Three substantial portions were recovered in 2002 from the same Constantinople prayer book that preserves the Archimedes Palimpsest, using multispectral imaging.
Read the story →When the Emperor Justinian closed the Athenian Academy in 529 AD, the surviving senior pagan philosophers led by Damascius migrated east to the court of the Sasanian Persian king Khusrau I. Khusrau received them with substantial honour, supported their philosophical work for several years, and eventually negotiated their safe return to the Roman Empire in 532.
Read the story →The same Greek sponge divers who found the [Antikythera mechanism](/articles/antikythera-mechanism) in 1900–1901 brought up a 1.96-metre bronze statue of a young man. He is one of perhaps a dozen complete or near-complete classical Greek bronzes that have survived to the present. He has been in Athens for almost 125 years.
Read the story →[Eudoxus of Cnidus](/articles/eudoxus-of-cnidus) — Plato's contemporary and the founder of mathematical astronomy — proposed in the 360s BC that the apparent motions of the Sun, Moon, and five known planets could be explained by 27 concentric spheres rotating around the Earth at different rates and on different axes. The model was the best astronomical framework in the world for the next two centuries.
Read the story →Plato's Academy was founded around 387 BC and closed by Justinian's edict in 529 AD. For most of that nine-century period the Academy was the institutional core of Greek mathematical and astronomical teaching — the lineage that produced Eudoxus, Aristotle, Theaetetus, and most of the substantively classical Greek mathematical tradition.
Read the story →The Antikythera mechanism was not the only thing on the 60 BC Greek shipwreck. Spongers in 1900 brought up four life-size bronze sculptures and a marble youth that nobody could date. Then they found the planetary computer. The other finds have been quietly upstaged for a century.
Read the story →In 529 the Emperor Justinian closed the philosophical schools of Athens. The Academy that traced its descent to Plato had operated for almost 900 years. Its surviving teachers, led by Damascius, walked east into Sasanian Persia. Five years later they walked back.
Read the story →Synesius of Cyrene studied Neoplatonism under Hypatia at Alexandria, became a reluctant Christian bishop of a Libyan port that was being raided by camel-mounted nomads, and wrote his old teacher letters about both. He died around 413. Hypatia was murdered two years later.
Read the story →Before Eudoxus, Greek mathematicians could prove statements about simple shapes. Eudoxus invented the method that let them prove statements about curves.
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