Thōmata (Marvels & Wonders)
The marvels of distant lands — strange beasts, colossal monuments, and natural curiosities — singled out for report precisely because they astonish.
Thōmata (Ionic for thaumata, 'wonders') are the remarkable things of far-off places that ethnographic and geographic writers flag as worth recording because they provoke amazement: unusual animals, gigantic buildings, exotic peoples, and odd natural phenomena. Herodotus (5th century BCE) repeatedly highlights the thōmata of Egypt and other lands, and in the Hellenistic period the impulse hardened into a genre of its own, paradoxography, the collecting of wonders. This taste for marvels runs through ancient geography and history as a recurring marker of the noteworthy.
How it traveled
- Mirabilium auscultationesChalcis · -322explains
- Geographiae ChrestomathiaAmaseia · 24explains
- Naturalis HistoriaRomeexplains
- De Natura AnimaliumRomeexplains
- De Rubro Mari—explains
- Life of Apollonius of TyanaAthensexplains
- Mirabilia de aquis—explains
- Historia Ecclesiastica—explains
- Paraphrases in Dioynsium Periegetam—explains
- Antiquitates RomanaeRomeexplains
- HeroicusAthensexplains
- Historia ecclesiastica (fragmenta ap. Photium)—explains
- Facta et Dicta MemorabiliaRomeexplains
- Varia HistoriaRomeexplains
Key passages(20)
Mirabilium auscultationes · Pseudo-Aristotle
Naturalis Historia · Pliny, the Elder
Naturalis Historia · Pliny, the Elder
Naturalis Historia · Pliny, the Elder
Facta et Dicta Memorabilia · Valerius Maximus
Heroicus · Philostratus the Athenian
Naturalis Historia · Pliny, the Elder
Naturalis Historia · Pliny, the Elder
Naturalis Historia · Pliny, the Elder
Naturalis Historia · Pliny, the Elder
Naturalis Historia · Pliny, the Elder
Naturalis Historia · Pliny, the Elder
Naturalis Historia · Pliny, the Elder
Historia Ecclesiastica · Evagrius, Scholasticus