This thesis investigates the reception and transformation of Roman ideas of friendship in the Merovingian kingdoms of sixth-century Gaul. The barbarian invasions of Late Antiquity were once seen as the cause of a cataclysmic rupture in Roman culture but I argue that Merovingian elites drew widely from Classical traditions of friendship in their culture and social organisation. Using the poems, letters, and saints’ lives of Venantius Fortunatus (c. 530/540-609?), an Italian-born aristocrat who made his career writing for and about members of Gaul’s elite, I show that the Classical relationship of patronage was subsumed into friendship. Fortunatus has more often been relegated to scholarly footnotes than studied in his own right, but when his works are taken seriously as sources for the mentality of his age our picture of Merovingian society and its debt to Classical culture comes into sharper focus. Fortunatus expressed the relationship between himself and his addressees in terms of parity and equality, as well as dependence and deference, which changes how we understand the structure of the early medieval elite: alongside the patronal language of vertical hierarchy, these linguistic friendships facilitated the creation of horizontal networks through ties of mutual benefit, obligation, and affection. I argue that elite men and women used the hyper-literate conventions of epistolary culture to organise themselves into networks. Such networks were made and maintained to help their members navigate a post-imperial world which remained culturally Roman. The major contribution of my thesis is thus to provide a model for using letters and poems, literary sources medieval historians rarely exploit in full, to chart the social and cultural transition between the later Roman world and the early Middle Ages.

No description available.

No description available.

The Books of Catullus consists of a completely new translation of Catullus’s poems divided into the three ‘books’ some scholars have agreed is the right order of the poems. These ‘books’ are divided as book one 1-60, book two 61-64, book three 65-116. This main text is prefaced by six essays: ‘Starting Line,’ ‘The Flâneur: Catullus, Martial, Baudelaire, Frank O’Hara,’ ‘Catullus and Modernism,’ ‘The Question of Voice in Catullus,’ ‘The Accessibility of Catullus,’ and ‘Sourcing the Origin: Translations of Catullus since 1950’. The essays together have an aesthetic of their own, reflecting what I take to be the most important features in ‘the books’ of Catullus: the key feature is a flâneurist wandering. The essays are speculative and diverse in their enquiry, and are not only representative of the ‘matter’ of thought which was going on behind the translations, but also represent the ‘form’ and circumstances that that thinking took place in. So the essays wander through and around questions relating to the gaze, collecting, ‘occasion’ and voice, the modern and Modernism, the contemporary, accessibility and difficulty, coterie and the evolution and practice of translation itself, in general, and in relation to Catullus in particular. If the essays wander (and wonder) in these ways, as a flâneur might conduct his perambulations, they also reflect the ‘form’ of the ‘books’. The poems are anchored by metrical form, they ‘wander’ around, through and across other possible categorical orderings as diverse as genre (lyric, elegy, epigram, hymn, translation, verse-letter, ‘epyllion,’ etc.); theme (love, loss, friendship, rivalry, marriage, adultery, politics, sexuality, etc.); length (the poems vary in length from two lines to in excess of four hundred), and so on. George A. Sheets in his essay ‘Elements of Style in Catullus’ (Skinner 2007, 190) sums up the poems in this way: ‘the single most characteristic aspect of Catullan “style” is its protean character’. Other epithets can be added: quotidian, contingent, exploratory, speculative. The essays, therefore, reflect this ‘protean character’ of the poems in how they address the reader: they can be chatty, informal, formal, comical, serious, academic, intellectual (and intelligent), playful, precise, digressive, ‘occasional,’ accessible, difficult, ‘modern’ – all rich characteristics of the poems – in short the art of the poems can be found in the expression of the essays.

John D.C. Little. / Includes bibliographical references.

This dissertation aims to study the reception of the Latin poet Horace in the Italian Renaissance, taking into consideration works composed in several different genres both in Latin and Italian vernacular between 1498 and 1600. This thesis follows five main pathways of investigation: 1) to study the Renaissance biographies of the poet; 2) to analyse several exegetical works both in Horace’s single texts and his whole corpus; 3) to study the Italian translations written both in prose and verse which were made during the Cinquecento; 4) to study in depth those who imitated Horace in their lyrical and satirical poems composed in Italian; and 5) to examine those Neo-Latin poetical works (mainly pertaining to the lyrical and satirical genres). This dissertation points out that the numerous and various forms of Horatian reception help to evaluate the real flourishing of sixteenth-century interest in the Latin poet, interest that reflects the fact that Horace was part of the new Renaissance canon of classical authorities. Within the sixteenth-century conflict of cultures, Horace appears as one of the main protagonists of the critical and literary scenes, as is shown by the attention that his works received from the point of view of editions, commentaries, and translations respectively, as well as by the fact that his texts were placed at the centre of several literary imitative practices, his example being able to offer the Renaissance one important basis upon which to found part of its new culture. Indeed, Horace allowed the emergence of an ethical strain to the Renaissance lyric, as well as contributing to the provision of rules for sixteenth-century literary criticism.

Classics and Modern European Languages / M.A. (Classics)

M.H.A. Davis. / Bibliography: leaves 30-33. / "January, 1979." / U.S. Air Force Office of Sponsored Research Grant AFOSR 77-3281 Department of Energy Contract EX-76-A-01-2295

This dissertation attempts at a systematic study of the life, personality and thought of the second-third/eighth-ninth century Persian Sufi (Muslim Mystic) Abu Yazid al-Bistami.

Classics and Modern European Languages / M.A. (Classics)