Culture

A trading, isolated, city-state
The island of Ethax has a rather odd cultural scene. Florence and Venice feed into it, but it also has its own oddities and eccentricities. The thing that strikes people most is how relatively insignificant the Church is. It's still one of the most powerful institutions in the city-state, but it doesn't command the fear/power that the. This is a side-effect of the Church being both purely local and somewhat confused; they're working on integrating Christianity but it turns out to be quite a challenge to spontaneously change religions. As a result of this schizophrenic schism, the Church is fairly ineffective when it comes to influence.

Unlike its brethren, the ruler and merchants of the city don't have that much interest in culture, since they prefer ridiculous amounts of money. However, when most of the economic power is held by a university, some interesting forms of science and art are bound to emerge, even if not sanctioned by the state. One of the stranger art forms that has emerged is a form of magnetic kinetic sculpture. They are designed like Rube Goldberg machines. The most recent one (at least worth speaking of) is a lodestone powered magnetic cloud. It contains powdered iron mounted on a pedestal of highly magnetic lodestone which holds it up. Another Rube Goldberg machine is basically a small, 3d jigsaw puzzle made out of iron gears. Currently it is assembled to resemble a basic version of the city's coat of arms; however it can be customised by anyone with the appropriate skill. As a result the motto has now been mangled into something rather humorous and also not entirely suitable for publication; the people are too amused by it to take it down.

Literary tradition
The city also has a strong literary tradition. They admire Greek in much the same way that most of the Florentine humanists admire Latin. Latinists are in a minority here, and often endure jabs about how the Romans ripped off the Greeks; Petrarch would hate this place. The nobility and scientists of the city tend to produce official and fancy documents in Greek (only the most fancy, since Greek is hard), and were the first to design the Greek printing press.

Writers in the city are limited by the fact that much of the population is still illiterate. However, it's only the lower classes and so nobody cares about them. Science fiction and rags to riches are common themes of storytellers and bards. Since they are usually performed rather than read, they still have a tinge of lower-class about them. Some of the best of these are picked up by publishers and printed so that they can be enjoyed by the slightly nerdy scholars and merchants (of which there are surprisingly many) Most written and published works are either poetry or artistic sketches and designs. Theatre exists, but only in an informal aspect, vaguely like Morporkian street theatre. Even then, theatre is less known for the plot and more for the technical feats and bad, slightly raucous jokes- not necessarily in that order.

The philosophers of the city are predominantly natural philosophers, who concern themselves with divining the physical systems of the universe, based on a mix of empiricism and rationalism- they usually use logic to extrapolate (not very rigorously) from past experiments, but their detractors are quick to prove them wrong. As a whole, science advances competitively rather than cooperatively, which works but not very well. Most pure philosophers are theological, trying to reconcile their religion with the facts. They're having some difficulties at the moment, but their 'working hypothesis' is that the Holy Book was corrupted by humans and in itself does not invalidate the idea of a supreme being. This puts most of them at odds with the church except for the extremely polite and cautious ones. Philosophers simply can't win, can they?

In addition to the theologians, history and philosophy are also quite mixed up, to the general benefit of both. Ethaxians consider the history of ideas to be the most important, even above the history of war and politics. Their historians tend to argue that the ultimate cause of something (such as the decline of the Roman Empire) is a result of interacting ideas or beliefs; including technology and religion. As a result philosophy feeds in a lot, and they often send rolls of parchment between departments. Philosophy itself is more focused on the ideas themselves rather than their history or context. It is dedicated to examining and building on the ideas of the Greeks; for them philosophy started and ended with the Hellenists. Most works of philosophy are dedicated to critiquing the Greeks or synthesising the works of ancient philosophers. It could be argued that philosophy is stagnant, but even skimming a tract by a modern (by which we mean renaissance) Ethaxian scholar would prove you wrong. They are filled with scholars trading barbs and rebuttal's, and boldly exploring new philosophical territory, such as deriving a materialist interpretation of platonic forms. In general, their task of reconciling the Grecian theories with modern scientific and philosophical discoveries produces a lot of fascinating and oftentimes ridiculous ideas.