Diss. / Includes bibliographical references.

This thesis will explore how social and political conditions in archaic Greece affected the composition of poetry for female choral performance. My primary source material will be the poetry of Alcman and Sappho. I examine the evidence suggesting that poems by both Alcman and Sappho commented on political issues, using this as a basis to argue that women in archaic Greece may have had a more vocal public presence that has previously been imagined. Rather than viewing female performance as a means of discussing purely feminine themes or reinforcing the idea of a disempowered female gender, I argue that the poetry of Alman and Sappho gives parthenoi an authoritative public voice to comment on issues in front of the watching community. Part of this authority is derived from the social value of parthenoi, who can act as economically and socially valuable points of exchange between communities, but I shall also be looking at how traditional elements of female performance genre were used to enhance female authority in archaic Sparta and Lesbos. Once this has been established, this thesis will proceed to examine how public female performance dealt with major political and social issues in the archaic world. I shall argue that the performance of parthenoi did focus on primarily feminine concerns such as marriage, desire, and abduction, but that it could also be an opportunity to discuss much broader political themes that were of major importance to the entire polis. Alcman and Sappho use their poetry as a vehicle to comment on the society in which their poetry was composed, both discussing threats to order and representing solutions for a stable society. The content of female performed poetry was often composed as much for a male audience as for the performers themselves, using traditional female performance as a means of commenting on the current political climate. Through arguing these factors, the intention of this thesis is to suggest a much more prominent public role for archaic Greek females than has previously been recognised.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1980. / Typescript. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 169-175).

No description available.

Alcman's Partheneion has a deserved reputation as an ambiguous and allusive fragment of Greek poetry; it has engendered a great amount of debate regarding every facet of the poem. This thesis investigates the ritual context and the propitiated deity of the Partheneion from an inter-cultural perspective. I integrate the relationship which flourished between Greece and the Near East with Alcman's poetry. This approach aims to situate the poem in the larger world of the Eastern Mediterranean and connect it to traditions of female goddesses worshiped in biblical Israel, Phoenicia and ancient Babylon. I also demonstrate that there are connections between the ritual context of Alcman's poetry, sung and danced by a chorus of young women, to similar cults celebrated by cultures throughout the Near East, both contemporaneous as well as more ancient.