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Griffins, Cyclopes, Monsters, and Giants--these fabulous creatures of classical mythology continue to live in the modern imagination through the vivid accounts that have come down to us from the ancient Greeks and Romans. But what if these beings were more than merely fictions? What if monstrous creatures once roamed the earth in the very places where their legends first arose? This is the arresting and original thesis that Adrienne Mayor explores in The First Fossil Hunters. Through careful research and meticulous documentation, she convincingly shows that many of the giants and monsters of myth did have a basis in fact--in the enormous bones of long-extinct species that were once abundant in the lands of the Greeks and Romans. As Mayor shows, the Greeks and Romans were well aware that a different breed of creatures once inhabited their lands. They frequently encountered the fossilized bones of these primeval beings, and they developed sophisticated concepts to explain the fossil evidence, concepts that were expressed in mythological stories. The legend of the gold-guarding griffin, for example, sprang from tales first told by Scythian gold-miners, who, passing through the Gobi Desert at the foot of the Altai Mountains, encountered the skeletons of Protoceratops and other dinosaurs that littered the ground. Like their modern counterparts, the ancient fossil hunters collected and measured impressive petrified remains and displayed them in temples and museums; they attempted to reconstruct the appearance of these prehistoric creatures and to explain their extinction. Long thought to be fantasy, the remarkably detailed and perceptive Greek and Roman accounts of giant bone finds were actually based on solid paleontological facts. By reading these neglected narratives for the first time in the light of modern scientific discoveries, Adrienne Mayor illuminates a lost world of ancient paleontology.

Paleontology --- Science, Ancient. --- Vertebrates, Fossil --- History. --- Paleontology - Greece - History. --- Paleontology -- Greece -- History. --- Paleontology - Rome - History. --- Paleontology -- Rome -- History. --- Science, Ancient --- Geology --- Earth & Environmental Sciences --- History --- Ancient science --- Science, Primitive --- Fossilogy --- Fossilology --- Palaeontology --- Paleontology, Zoological --- Paleozoology --- Historical geology --- Zoology --- Fossils --- Prehistoric animals in motion pictures --- Science

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Interest in Theophrastus, Aristotle's pupil and successor as head of the Peripatetic School, has increased considerably since the 1992 publication of Theophastus of Eresus: Sources for his Life, Works, Thought and Life . Now comes an extensive commentary on the ethical sources. It considers Theophrastus in relation to Aristotle, to other members of the Peripatos and to the Stoic philosophers who became Theophrastus' rivals. Special attention is given to Theophrastus' insistence that virtue by itself cannot guarantee happiness. Also to the difference between manners and moral virtue, the relation between innate character and fate, the value of marriage and how animal behavior relates to that of human beings.

Science, Ancient --- Philosophy, Ancient --- Philosophers --- Biography --- Sources --- Theophrastus --- Theophrastus. --- Scholars --- Ancient philosophy --- Greek philosophy --- Philosophy, Greek --- Philosophy, Roman --- Roman philosophy --- Ancient science --- Science, Primitive --- Science --- History --- Feofrast --- Theophrast --- Théophraste --- Theophrastos --- Teofrasto --- Theophrastus, --- Θεόφραστος --- Science, Ancient - Sources --- Philosophy, Ancient - Sources --- Philosophers - Greece - Biography - Sources

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Great change has pervaded the evaluation of this text, since it was first published by Diels in 1893: it appeared to be a text consisting of notes on an introductory course of medicine, badly copied by a scribe or an uneducated pupil, probably written in the age of Domitian or Trajan. Its most disturbing aspect was the presence of a doxography on the causes of disease, attributed to Aristotle, recording numerous doxai of 5th and 4th century physicians and philosophers, including Hippocrates, who constituted the crux of the controversy, because the figure ill accorded with the image that had taken shape in nineteenth-century historiography. In recent years new insights have shown that actually it is an autograph, an unfinished draft, that the author, to be dated to 1st cent. AD, excerpted earlier derivative literature but has also views of his own, that the doxography derived from 'Aristotle' is to be clearly placed in the early Peripatetic setting, that the physiological section, which follows, has a background of school practice in dialectical argument, that the main authorities "ed in the text (Herophilus, Erasistratus and Asclepiades) have different roles (Herophilus's is the most positive) but the authors always feels at liberty to confute their opinions and treats them as characters of the same scientific context.

Medicine, Greek and Roman. --- Medicine --- Médecine grecque et romaine --- Médecine --- Philosophy --- Early works to 1800. --- Philosophie --- Ouvrages avant 1800 --- Medicine, Greek and Roman --- Médecine grecque et romaine --- Médecine --- Clinical sciences --- Medical profession --- Human biology --- Life sciences --- Medical sciences --- Pathology --- Physicians --- Greek medicine --- Medicine, Roman --- Medicine, Unani --- Roman medicine --- Tibb (Medicine) --- Unani medicine --- Unani-Tibb (Medicine) --- Medicine, Ancient --- Health Workforce --- Medicine, Greek and Roman - Early works to 1800 --- Medicine - Philosophy - Early works to 1800 --- Papyrology, Ancient Science and Medicine, Ancient philosophy, Greek texts.