The Political Face of Late Roman Empresses: Christian Symbols on Coins from the Late Fourth and Early Fifth Centuries
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Ammianus Marcellinus 21.6.3: A Misunderstood Omen
Cum igitur a Mesopotamia reversus, Constantius hoc exciperetur officio, Amphilochius quidam ex tribuno Paphlago, quem dudum sub Constante militantem discordiarum sevisse causas inter priores, fratres, suspiciones contiguae veritati pulsabant, ausus paulo petulantius stare, ut ipse quoque ad parile obsequium admittendus, agnitus est et prohibitus, strepentibusque multis, et intueri lucem ulterius non debere clamantibus, ut perduellem, et obstinatum, Constantius circa haec lenior solito, “Desinite” ait “urgere hominem ut existimo sontem, sed nondum aperte convictum, et mementote quod, siquid admisit huius modi, sub obtutibus meis conscientiae ipsius sententia punietur, quam latere non poterit,” et ita discessum est. Postridie ludis Circensibus idem ex adverso imperatoris (ubi consueverat) spectans, repentino clamore sublato, cum certamen opinatum emitteretur, diffractis cancellis, quibus una cum pluribus incumbebat, cunctis cum eo in vanum excussis laesisque leviter paucis, interna compage disrupta, efflasse spiritum repertus est solus, unde Constantius ut futurorum quoque praescius exsultabat.
Reid on Hypotheses and the Ether; A Reassessment
In recent years historians of science have come to see that Thomas Reid’s Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man had a profound impact on the development of British methodological thought in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. Larry Laudan has argued that Reid was “the first major British philosopher to take Newton’s opinions on induction, causality, and hypotheses seriously”; and that Reid was thereby instrumental in changing the character of British methodological discourse in the Enlightenment.(1) Geoffrey Cantor has examined in detail the influence of Reid’s critique of ether theories and hypotheses in the Essays on leading protagonists in the nineteenth-century debates surrounding the wave theory of light,(2) and Richard Olson has traced the origins of the scientific style of British physics in the Victorian period to the writings of Reid and other Common Sense philosophers. (3) As well as delineating Reid’s influence, Laudan, Cantor, and Olson have attempted to identify the problems to which he addressed himself in articulating his methodology, and they have analysed with some care the internal structure of his methodological views. Thanks to the work of these historians, therefore, we have a fairly comprehensive picture of Reid’s methodology and its fortunes in the nineteenth century.