Literary histories of specific genres like tragedy or epic typically concern themselves with influence and deviation, tradition and innovation, the genealogical links between authors and the forms they make. Renaissance scholarship is particularly suited to these accounts of generic evolution; we read of the afterlife of Senecan tragedy in English drama, or of the respective influence of Virgil and Lucan on Renaissance epic. My study of epic poetry differs, though: by insisting on the primacy of material conditions, social organization and especially information technology to the production of literature, I present a discontinuous series of set pieces in which any given epic poem—the Iliad, the Aeneid, or The Faerie Queene—is structured more by local circumstances and methods than by authorial responses to distant epic predecessors. Ultimately I make arguments about how modes of literary production determine the forms of epic poems. Achilleus’ contradictory and anachronistic funerary practices in Iliad 23, for instance, are symptomatic of the accumulative transcription of disparate oral performances over time, which calls into question what, if any artistic ‘unity’ might guide scholarly readings of the Homeric texts. While classicists have conventionally opposed Virgil’s Aeneid to Lucan’s Bellum Civile on aesthetic and political grounds, I argue that both poets endorse the ethnographic-imperialist ideology ‘virtus at the frontier’ under the twin pressures of Julio-Claudian military expansion and the Principate’s instrumentalization of Roman intellectual life in its public library system. Finally, my chapter on Renaissance English epic demonstrates how Spenser and Milton grappled with humanist anxieties about the political utility of the classics and the unmanageable archive produced by print culture. It is my hope that this thesis coheres into a narrative of a particularly long-lived genre, the epic, and the mutations and adaptations it underwent in oral, manuscript, and print contexts.

Literary histories of specific genres like tragedy or epic typically concern themselves with influence and deviation, tradition and innovation, the genealogical links between authors and the forms they make. Renaissance scholarship is particularly suited to these accounts of generic evolution; we read of the afterlife of Senecan tragedy in English drama, or of the respective influence of Virgil and Lucan on Renaissance epic. My study of epic poetry differs, though: by insisting on the primacy of material conditions, social organization and especially information technology to the production of literature, I present a discontinuous series of set pieces in which any given epic poem—the Iliad, the Aeneid, or The Faerie Queene—is structured more by local circumstances and methods than by authorial responses to distant epic predecessors. Ultimately I make arguments about how modes of literary production determine the forms of epic poems. Achilleus’ contradictory and anachronistic funerary practices in Iliad 23, for instance, are symptomatic of the accumulative transcription of disparate oral performances over time, which calls into question what, if any artistic ‘unity’ might guide scholarly readings of the Homeric texts. While classicists have conventionally opposed Virgil’s Aeneid to Lucan’s Bellum Civile on aesthetic and political grounds, I argue that both poets endorse the ethnographic-imperialist ideology ‘virtus at the frontier’ under the twin pressures of Julio-Claudian military expansion and the Principate’s instrumentalization of Roman intellectual life in its public library system. Finally, my chapter on Renaissance English epic demonstrates how Spenser and Milton grappled with humanist anxieties about the political utility of the classics and the unmanageable archive produced by print culture. It is my hope that this thesis coheres into a narrative of a particularly long-lived genre, the epic, and the mutations and adaptations it underwent in oral, manuscript, and print contexts.

Numerous examples of the "digital scholarly edition" exist online, and the genre is thriving in terms of interdisciplinary interest as well as support granted by funding agencies. Some editions are dedicated to the collection and representation of the life's work of a single author, others to mass digitization and preservation of centuries' worth of texts. Very few of these examples, however, approach the task of in-text interpretation through visualization. This project describes an approach to digital representation and investigates its potential benefit to scholars of various disciplines. It presents both a digital edition as well as a framework of justification surrounding said edition. In addition to composing this document as an XML file, I have digitized a 1794 English translation of Virgil's Aeneid and used a customized digital markup schema based on the guidelines set forth by the Text Encoding Initiative to indicate a set of poetic figures—such as simile and alliteration—within that text for analysis. While neither a translation project nor strictly a poetical analysis, this project and its unique approach to interpretive representation could prove of interest to scholars in several disciplines, including classics, digital scholarship, information management, and literary theory. The practice serves both as a case-in-point as well as an example method to replicate with future texts and projects.

<p>The Phaenomena, written by Aratus of Soli in 276-274 B.C., enjoyed immense popularity in antiquity and was translated into Latin verse by Marcus Tullius Cicero, Germanicus Caesar and Rufius Festus Avienus, and into Latin prose by an anonymous author writing in the seventh century A.D. Previous studies of these works have provided important observations about individual aspects of the Latin poems and this thesis seeks to add to the understanding and appreciation of the works by comparing in detail the three verse translations and, where appropriate and possible, the prose Aratus Latinus, with the Greek original and with each other.</p> <p>The first chapter examines the problem of the popularity of the Greek Phaenomena down to the Renaissance and the second chapter investigates the nature of translation as a Roman literary phenomenon. The five chapters which follow include statistical surveys, based on both scansion of the poems and on computer-concordances compiled for the thesis, and stylistic analyses in order to elucidate the degree to which the translations were dependent upon and independent from the Greek model and the similarities and differences amcng the translations them.selves. Chapter III investigates four aspects of metre (metrical patterns, first and fourth foot, elision, and caesurae and diaereses). Chapter rv examines the quantity of sound and, in particular, initial consonantal alliteration. Chapter V contains a discussion of compound adjectives and epithets and Chapter VI, a discussion of special astronomical vocabulary (words of brightness, color terms and four special words: uis, laetus, tristis, crinis). Chapter VII investigates Greek words and Latin archaisms in the Latin translations and establishes evidence for Cicero's creation of a uniquely Latin poem through the use of Latin archaisms. The final chapter discusses further the emergence of a distinctly Roman Phaenomena, for Germanicus in the use of references to aspects of Roman life and for Avienus in the area of borrowings from the previous Latin translations of Aratus' poem. It concludes with a study of the ways in which each of the verse translators alter the emphasis of the original by reshaping its theme, thereby emphasizing the extent to which the translators went beyond their Greek model to create individual and original Latin works.</p> / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Since the mid-1970s, classical scholars have taken a new interest in the study of women in antiquity. Prior to this time, the cultures of Ancient Greece and Rome were studied, like much world history, from a masculine perspective. The literature in the growing field of feminist research is centered on the misogyny of these ancient cultures. Although I agree with their observation that women were subordinate and not afforded the exact same freedom as men, I also believe something is missing in their assessment of women in antiquity, especially with regard to the moral virtues embraced by the culture of the Ancient Greeks and the mythic medium through which those beliefs were transmitted. This thesis presents the characters of Penelope from The Odyssey and Clytaemnestra from The Oresteia as paradigms, or role models, of good and evil for all of Greek society's members. I argue against the view held by some feminist scholars that regard the female characters of Greek myth merely as illustrating the misogyny of Greek culture. Those particular feminist views, in addition to being anachronistic, are based on too narrow an understanding of Greek society and the role that myth plays in that culture. By contrast, I argue that these archetypes represent any member of society and should not be considered, on a scholarly level, merely as examples of misogyny. Because of the important role that myth provided and the equivalent value of the freedom afforded to each sex in fulfilling their societal roles under the conditions of life within Greek culture, these two female characters represent the paradigms of the ideal and the ignoble for that society's entire citizenry. Greek myths and the characters within them are actually expressive of the consequences of the actions of any individual and provide Greek society with a lesson on appropriate behavior within one's role in the larger order of society.