Knowledge, Text and Practice in Ancient Technical Writing

Marco Formisano is Professor of Latin Literature at Universiteit Gent, Belgium. He has published extensively on ancient technical and scientific writing. His first monograph, Tecnica e scrittura (2001), was dedicated to late Latin scientific texts. He has studied the ancient art of war as a literary genre and its tradition (Vegezio: Arte della guerra romana, 2003 and War in Words: Transformations of War from Antiquity to Clausewitz, coedited with H. Böhme, 2012) as well as Vitruvius (Vitruvius in the Round, co-edited with S. Cuomo, special issue of Arethusa, 2016). He is the editor of The Library of the Other Antiquity, a series devoted to late antique literature. Philip van der Eijk is Alexander von Humboldt Professor of Classics and History of Science at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. He has published on ancient medicine, philosophy and science, comparative literature and patristics. He is the author of Aristoteles: De insomniis, De divinatione per somnum (1994), Diocles of Carystus (2000-1), Philoponus on Aristotle on the Soul 1 (2005-6), Medicine and Philosophy in Classical Antiquity (2005); and Nemesius: On the Nature of Man (with R. W. Sharples, 2008). He has edited Ancient Histories of Medicine (1999) and Hippocrates in Context (2005), and co-edited Ancient Medicine in its Socio-Cultural Context (with H. F. J. Horstmanshoff and P. H. Schrijvers, 1995).

• 1. From words to acts? Philip van der Eijk and Marco Formisano; 2. The poetics of knowledge Marco Formisano; 3. Machines on paper: from words to acts in ancient mechanics Markus Asper; 4. Si quis voluerit: Vitruvius on architecture as 'the art of the possible' Elisa Romano; 5. Caesar's Rhine bridge and its feasibility in Giovanni Giocondo's Expositio pontis Ronny Kaiser; 6. From words to acts: on the applicability of Hippocratic therapy Pilar Pérez Cañizares; 7. Naso magister erat – sed cui bono? On not taking the poet's teaching seriously Alison Sharrock; 8. From technē to kakotechnia: use and abuse of ancient cosmetic texts Laurence Totelin; 9. From discourses to handbook: the Encheiridion of Epictetus as a practical guide to life Gerard Boter; 10. The problem of practical applicability in Ptolemy's Geography Klaus Geus; 11. Living according to the seasons – the power of parapēgmata Gerd Grasshoff; 12. Auctoritas in the garden: Columella's poetic strategy in De re rustica 10 Christiane Reitz; 13. The generous text: animal intuition, human knowledge, and written transmission in Pliny's books on medicine Brooke Holmes; 14. From descriptions to acts: the paradoxical animals of the ancients from a cognitive perspective Pietro Li Causi.