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The thesis begins by exploring a central problem: while the genre of elegiac exhortation poetry both invites and itself exploits analogies between, on the one hand, the immediate audience and performance setting of the poem and, on the other, the broader civic identities of that audience and larger civic context to which they belong. And yet, the circumscribed social setting for which it was produced, the private aristocratic <I>symposion</I>, complicates the interpretation of seemingly all-embracing political terms such as city, fatherland, country. The thesis challenges the prevailing orthodoxy with the questions, who constitute the city, what expressions of attachment to it mean, and how such expressions function within their poetic and larger social context. By asking what it means for symposiasts to recite in the first person exhortations evocative of those spoken by the heroes of epic, the thesis reveals the elitist claims and pretensions implicit in this heroic role-playing, pretensions which are themselves deeply political. The thesis culminates in an examination of the explicitly political poetry and career of Solon, providing a much-needed study of this figure whose dual career as poet and lawgiver epitomises the stakes involved in the appropriation of poetic traditions in this period. A close reading of Solon 4 demonstrates how the poem carefully situates itself in an adversarial relationship to the martial poetic traditions of epic and elegiac exhortation, while positively embracing the themes of Hesiod and Odyssean epic. The indications of a political stance inherent in these poetic 'situations' provides the basis for a more wide-ranging discussion of the relationship of Solon's poetry to his political career. It concludes by re-evaluating the relationship of Solon to tyranny, and, finally, by offering an interpretation of the importance of Homeric poetry in the political agenda of the Athenian tyrants who followed him.

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The astronomical material in Ovid's Roman calendar, the <I>Fasti</I> has been inadequately treated in past scholarship, and is neglected by contemporary scholars. In my dissertation I deal comprehensively with this material, which forms between one quarter and one third of the total volume of the poem. My approach to the <I>Fasti</I> through its stars aims to combine recent genre-based or "programmatic" reading with a broad culture-historical perspective. I do not study Ovid's stars using the technical methods of mathematical astronomy. The importance of astronomy to the <I>Fasti</I> is not so much scientific as generic. The stars serve to tie the <I>Fasti</I> with hexameter didactic poetry as much as with elegiac models. A primary didactic ancestor is the <I>Phaenomena</I> of Aratus, an astronomical poem written in the C 3<SUP>rd</SUP> BC. The main task of my thesis is to test the scholarly assumption, never fully explored, that the astronomy in the <I>Fasti</I> is influenced by Aratus' <I>Phaenomena</I>. The first four chapters take up this task. My findings, gained through a comprehensive comparison of the astronomical material in the <I>Fasti</I> with corresponding material from the <I>Phaenomena</I>, indicate that the connection between the two poets is not readily quantifiable in terms of direct echo, but inheres in a broader symbolic relationship. Aratus is a poet of Stoicism and of order, Ovid of mythology and shifting political ground. Comparison of these two different entities produces meaning by both their similarity to and divergence from one another. In the final two chapters of my thesis I take the <I>Fasti</I> and its Aratean model out of the purely literary frame and into contemporary politics. The astronomy in the <I>Fasti</I> can be seen to be in keeping with ideas of cosmic empire, in which Greek learning was appropriated to express Roman political domination. At the same time, the stars bring the <I>Fasti</I> into line with the universe of the <I>Metamorphoses</I>, in which catasterism (translation to the stars) is amoral and part of a fluid world-view which is not consonant with political determinism. Through its astronomy, the <I>Fasti</I> both takes on and resists the impulse towards Augustan universalist panegyric.