This dissertation examines the use of language by major Greek poets of the twentieth century as a means to express their feelings of estrangement towards the Athenian urban environment. In doing so it takes into consideration the history of how the rapid creation of the modern Athens has been reflected in literary representations, beginning with Palamas’ Satirical Exercises (1912). Each chapter begins by setting out the methodological framework of a specific textual device in relation to which representative relevant poems are examined. The introductory chapter focuses on Athens, as a Metropolis, and the changes the city had to go through in order to become an urban capital – highlighting the differences between literary representations in prose and poetry. It also offers a typology of estrangement, taking into consideration various types of estrangement that the city can be felt to provoke. It also asks how a mapping of the city connects to national identity as seen by poets who in most cases are not natives of Athens but newcomers to the city. Chapter I investigates a range of poems with reference to onomastics and as well as social anthropological theories regarding the connection of space and time. Chapter III employs code switching and the theory of liminality to show how poets express their estrangement towards linguistic tropes, that are representative of social mobility and life in the urban context. Chapter IV, finally, investigates the gap between written and oral discourse, especially the poets’ debts to the tradition of the folk songs of ξενιτιά and their effort to include their work in a form of Greek oral tradition. This PhD thesis rehabilitates Palamas as an influential figure for Greek poets’ engagement with modernity and proves continuity in the employment of such textual devices as ways to express urban estrangement, from the beginning of the twentieth century till its end.

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This thesis explores the roles of monsters and monstrosity in ancient Greek literature. Rather than focusing on individual monstrous creatures or mythical figures, it analyses the representations of monsters in three genres: cosmogony, ethnography and biology. Chapter One focuses on three cosmogonic texts: Hesiod's Theogony and two of the Orphic theogonies, the Hieronyman and Hellanicus Theogony and Rhapsodic Theogony. Through these texts I explore the use of monsters in the depictions of the primordial cosmos and the way in which they could be representative not only of a threatening primordial chaos, but also of the creative potential of the beginning of the universe. Chapter Two explores monsters in ethnography, their use in geographic representations of the world and, in particular, the representation of the periphery as a home of monsters and wonders. Thus, examining these creatures in Herodotus' Histories, Ctesias' Indika and Megasthenes' Indika allows an insight into the way that monsters were used in the characterisation of foreign peoples and places, and in the geographical structuring of the world. The exploration of biology in Chapter Three focuses primarily on Aristotle's biological texts. This section considers the way in which monstrous creatures were incorporated into investigations of contemporary Greece, and how monstrous creatures were used in creating a structure and hierarchy of the natural world. These genres all have very different perspectives on the world, and so depict monsters in different ways. However, they are all focused on examining the nature of the universe: cosmogony through its origins, ethnography through ,the different countries that make up the world, and biology through the nature of people and animals. Thus examining monsters in these texts provides an additional insight into the way the world was viewed and constructed in ancient Greek thought

This dissertation asks how individual Greek poets of the seventh and sixth centuries interact with and manipulate the group identities shared with their audiences. By employing a framework derived from Critical Linguistics and Critical Discourse Analysis, I a~alyze these poems both as instances of discourse (,language in use') and as pieces of 'literature'. I ground my analysis in the socio-political context for the Archaic period, during which time intra-elite conflict dominated, and in the performance context of the συμπόδιον, the all-male elite drinking party. I begin with Tyrtaeus, Alcaeus, and Solon in a targeted analysis of their poetry. I examine how each body of work interacts with social, political, and martial identities in the context of Archaic Sparta, Mytilene, and Athens respectively. The three poets, though the identities they present to their audience depend on the particular conditions of πόλις and socio-political situation, use a common set of rhetorical strategies to make their concepts of groupness appealing to their audiences. The fourth chapter examines the body of seventh- and sixth-century monodic poetry, where I found that the same set of rhetorical strategies are fairly consistent across the corpus. These rhetorical strategies work underneath the surface of the poetic text to support the identities and behaviour suggested by the more overt devices of allusions to Homeric heroes, insults, narratives, and so forth. The literary and rhetorical methods for encouraging sameness with the poet/speaker thus complement one another as the poetic text delivers a social message along with its cultural or literary one. This thesis demonstrates that sympotic poetry is 'group poetry' that served to negotiate a group's sense of shared sameness, whether in periods of crisis or not. It presents an analysis of how group identities operate within sympotic poetry along with the methodology for doing so.

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My thesis takes its start from the oft-used description of Hellenistic poetry as ‘bookish’, but looks beyond the connotations of this label as denoting a milieu which was self-consciously intellectual, and instead considers the more fundamental ramifications of the designation: that Hellenistic poetry was bookish in its form, as much as in outlook. To consider the implications of this, I focus upon a period, and a significant poetic topos, wherein the effects of the book-roll can be most keenly discerned, assessing the impact of the medium upon authorial self- representations - particularly in the construction of authorial personae - undertaken in early Hellenistic poetry (c.323-246 BC). In Part I of the thesis, I assess the evolution of authorial self-representation in epigram, charting developments from the inscribed form of the genre through to the book-epigram collections of the Hellenistic period: I argue that the author acquired a newfound prominence in this medial transition, asserting their presence as a voice within the text as opposed to a figure situated strictly in antecedence to it. I demonstrate this through analyses of Posidippus, Callimachus, Nossis, Asclepiades, and the epigrams ascribed to Erinna, and suggest that we repeatedly observe authors undertaking composite processes of self-representation, as a direct result of the composite context of the book-roll. In Part II of the thesis, I examine the Mimiambs of Herodas. Through the analysis of Mimiamb 8 (in which Herodas constructs an authorial persona, and defines his poetic programme) in conjunction with an appraisal of the metapoetic dimension of the other Mimiambs, I assess the manner in which Herodas undertakes a complex, intertextual process of self-representation. Arguing that the author reflects upon the generic and medial innovations of his poetic practice across his corpus, I demonstrate that this process of reflection complements Herodas’ overt authorial self-representation in Mimiamb 8. In summary, I argue that the impact of the book-roll on authorial self-representation was wide- ranging, but that the most significant consequence of the medium was the evolution of authorial self-representation as a composite, roll-spanning activity.

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This thesis examines the ancient sculptural portraits of poets in relation to the literary reception of their works by investigating a range of contexts for, and interactions with, these objects. Contemporary scholarship has found it productive to examine biographical material relating to ancient poets as evidence for early reception. This thesis explores how the ancient portraits of poets take part in the constructions of these authors, and how they are integrated into the reception of ancient poetry. Recent scholarship has cast doubts over the methodologies conventionally used to relate portraits to the biographical reception of their subjects: there are strong arguments that an individualistic character-based approach to these objects can mislead us about how they were perceived in their various ancient contexts. This thesis takes a different approach by considering the archaeological contexts and literary interactions in which we find these objects, from fourth-century BC Athens to sixteenth-century AD Ferrara. I show how, through these contexts and interactions, the sculptural portraits of poets can engage in keys ways with the literary reception of their subjects: Hellenistic communities use portraits to strengthen their connections to prestigious poets; Roman aristocrats use portraits of poets to signal engagement with Greek culture and therefore elite status; poets are positioned within literary histories and canons through programmatic assemblages; later poets focus on portraits in order to explore their relationships to their predecessors; finally, early modern writers present these portraits as offering an engagement with an absent poet that complements reading the poet’s works. These, then, are the three main concerns of this thesis: communities, canons, and receptions. The case studies examined in this thesis show that the portraits of poets have been engaged in literary reception from antiquity to the present, and that they have raised persistent questions about presence and absence in literary encounters.

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This thesis explores to what degree and in what forms Pindar is dependent upon former traditions of lyric poetry, how he shapes his poetic strategy, and what is distinctive about Pindar as a result of this engagement. It considers to what degree these influences are perceptible to his listeners and what their expectations and experiences would be. It shows how poets and poetry interact in a predominantly song-performance culture and provides a means for understanding Pindar’s style and poetry by showing what is ‘Pindaric’ and what is ‘lyric’ about Pindar. The Introduction describes the environment of Pindar and his audiences. Chapter One proposes categories of interaction. Chapter Two focuses on the articulation of the poetic persona. It considers Pindar’s debts and allusions to Alcman in this respect by analysing their uses of the first-person and descriptions of performance. Chapter Three compares the register, style, metre, and content of a selection of Pindar’s mythical narratives (Pyth. 4, Nem. 10, 169a S-M) with those of Alcman, Stesichorus, Ibycus and Simonides in order to demonstrate the differences and similarities between ‘epic’ and ‘lyric’ narratives. Chapter Four contrasts the exile and reconciliation poems of Alcaeus and Pindar, and shows how Pindar modifies the Alcaic voice when commenting on comparable socio-political situations. It also examines Alcaeus’ Hymn to Apollo and a Pindaric paian. Chapter Five looks at Pindar’s response to the erotic and sympotic praise of Sappho, Ibycus and Anacreon and in way he adapts such praise into the consciously ‘higher’ register of his banquet songs and victory odes. Chapter Six examines Pindar’s strategies of performance criticism on the dithyrambos (70b S-M) compared with examples from Lasus and Pratinas, and it then considers the way Pindar creates and describes his own history of aulos-playing and its practitioners (140b S-M, Pyth. 12). This thesis presents Pindar as a literary and musical historian, commentator, and innovator through the tacit or explicit appropriation of the conventions and distinctive features of his predecessors and contemporaries. It explores the balance that a Pindaric composition strikes between tradition and innovation, and convention and originality.