Theophrastus

Theophrastus (thēˌōfrăsˈtəs) [Gr.,=divinely speaking], c.372–c.287 B.C., Greek philosopher, Aristotle's successor as head of the Peripatetics. The school flourished under his leadership. He wrote on many subjects, but his works on plants are perhaps the most important of his technical writings. His Characters, a series of sketches of various ethical types, provides a valuable picture of his time. It anticipates such studies as those by Sir Thomas Overbury, John Earle, and La Bruyère.

The following article is from The Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1979). It might be outdated or ideologically biased.

Theophrastus

(“possessor of divine speech”; real name, Tyrtamos). Born circa 372 B.C. in Eresus, Lesbos; died circa 287 B.C. in Athens. Greek philosopher and natural scientist. One of history’s earliest botanists.

Theophrastus studied first with Plato and then with Aristotle. He was the author of A Manual of Rhetoric, which has not been preserved, and of Characters, a collection of 30 short sketches of character types, such as the flatterer and the idle talker. Characters has served as a model for many modern moralists.

WORKS

Les Caractères. Edited by O. Navarre. Paris, 1952.
In Russian translation:
Issledovanie o rasteniiakh. Moscow, 1951.
In [Menander] Komedii [Herodas] Mimiamby. Moscow, 1964.

REFERENCE

Stroux, J. De Theophrasti virtutibus dicendi. Leipzig-Berlin, 1907.

Theophrastus

?372--?287 bc, Greek Peripatetic philosopher, noted esp for his Characters, a collection of sketches of moral types

Collins Discovery Encyclopedia, 1st edition © HarperCollins Publishers 2005

References in periodicals archive ?

In French literature: La Bruyere, Les Caracteres ou les moeurs de ce siecle, first published 1688, "The Characters, or Manners of the Age." Second publication with the addition in 1699 of Les Caracteres de Theophraste traduits du grec ("The Characters of Theophrastus translated from the Greek").

Dwarfs as seventeenth-century cynics at the court of Philip IV of Spain: a study of Velazquez' portraits of palace dwarfs

and Richards, J.F.C., 1956, Theophrastus On Stones: Ohio State University Press, Columbus, Ohio, 238 p.

Archaeological geology of the world's first emerald mine

In the space of a paragraph he turns from the regretful acknowledgment of difference to an unabashedly savant discussion of Theophrastus and a translation of his Characters.

La Bruyere and the "usage" of childhood: The idea of Pedagogy in the caracteres

Fruitlessly consulting the classical botanists Pliny and Theophrastus, their Renaissance followers could not believe that maize was unknown to the Greeks and Romans.

CAUGHT IN A MAIZE OF GENES

In fact, the material's properties have been known since antiquity, and is mentioned in Theophrastus, Cato, Varro, Pliny the Elder, Columella, and Plutarch, classical authors who lived and wrote between the 4th century B.C.

Light, insulating, impermeable

(3) I defend these remarks about the media of olfactory and auditory experience and add an important qualification in my paper "Aristotle and Theophrastus on Sense-Perception through a Medium," Die Philosophie der Antike (forthcoming).

ARISTOTLE ON THE SENSE-ORGANS

Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombast von Hohenheim, who took the name Paracelsus when he was about 20 years old, was born in 1493.

The Scientific Revolution Reshapes the World: Paracelsus

Plinius Secundus (1601 and 1634).(4) In Of Education, Milton writes that after a student learns grammar and reads Aristotle and Theophrastus, 'The like accesse will be to Vitruvius, to Senecas naturall questions, to Mela, Celsus, Pliny, or Solinus'.

Cadmus and Mammon in Pliny the Elder's 'Naturalis Historia' and Milton's 'Paradise Lost.'

The Greek writer Theophrastus (1916) reported the maximum yield for wheat in Babylon as 100-fold over what was sown.

Historical changes in harvest index and crop nitrogen accumulation

With that in mind, the Greek botanist Theophrastus bestowed the goddess's name on an extremely colorful group of flowers.

Heavenly fields

Hep!', a little-known essay from Eliot's last work, Impressions of Theophrastus Such, explaining the claims of Jews to an understanding of their history and aspirations, is a little odd); Eliza Lynn Linton, with her hysterically anti-feminist essay, 'The Girl of the Period'; and 'New Women' of the 1890s such as Mona Caird, Sarah Grand, and Vernon Lee.

Prose by Victorian Woman: An Anthology

Something similar is suggested by a passage of Theophrastus.(19) Here the less penetrating but allegedly more omnidirectional movements of lower-pitched notes are said to be paralleled by the reverberations of instruments equipped with a [GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] or a [GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] (a bronze bell), since these are [GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]; and if one touches the soundbox, or the `horn or arm' of an instrument ([GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] ...

Telestes and the 'five-rodded joining of strings.'

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