This thesis offers a fresh appraisal of the wise adviser in Pindar's epinician poetry. By focusing on the prominent figure of Chiron, it shows how Pindar engages with the paraenetic tradition in a way that reveals the distinctive character of the epinician poet. The first part of the study explores the function of Chiron as an interactive model for Pindar as poet-teacher. Chapter 1 examines how the mythical pedagogue enhances the status of the poet as wise adviser by illuminating the moral character of his advice. It shows how the relationship between teacher and pupil in the myth provides a model for that of poet and addressee and enables the poet to present his advice indirectly. In two separate case studies, I explore how Chiron's paradigmatic associations interact with the poet as adviser. In Chapter 2 (Nemean 3), I argue that the poet dramatises the instruction of a pupil as part of a collaborative and interactive form of learning. In Chapter 3 (Pythian 3), I argue that Pindar reconfigures preceptual instruction in a 'dialogue' between two speakers who enact the pedagogic relationship of Chiron and Asclepius. This strategy allows the poet to present his teaching tactfully and authoritatively. I conclude that Chiron is a figure for the poet as tactful and authoritative adviser and contributes to the poet's creation of a 'paraenetic encomium'. Secondly, this study of the reception and remodelling of the paraenetic tradition in Pindar illuminates the distinctive character of his advice and its central importance in Pindar's construction of poetic and moral authority.

This thesis examines the Greek wedding song and its function in literature and culture. The genre, hymenaios or epithalamium, has received little scholarly attention, particularly in English (cf. Muth, WS 1954; Tufte, Los Angeles 1970; Contiades-Tsitsoni, Stuttgart 1990, ZPE 1994; Swift, JHS 2006 & DPhil diss.). Yet an examination of the poetry of marriage, a crucial aspect in the study of the ancient world, contributes to our understanding of gender and social relations, as well as literature. Using elements of genre theory, gender studies, anthropology and cultural history, I argue that the epithalamium was part of a ritual of transition; for both the bride and for the community. The archaic epithalamium enacts this transition in lyric; tragic adaptations of the genre explore the consequences when this tradition is unsuccessfully performed. In contrast, the wedding songs of Attic comedy represent a 'happy ever after' ending for the communities of the protagonists, and portray these unions as a Sacred Marriage of man and goddess. The Helenistic epithalamium takes elements of these literary predecessors, and uses them to articulate a transition in marital relations, and literary politics, in the oeuvre of Theocritus. Philia relations in this era evolve to depict a more prominent mutuality between husband and wife, which also underpins the erotic writings of Plutarch. But more importantly, this author develops epithalamial topoi to present marriage as an 'initiation' for the bridal couple, which brings the thesis full-circle to the concept of transition while laying the foundation for one of the central concepts of Menander Rhetor's prescripts.

How were Greek plays viewed in the fifth century BCE and by deepening our understanding of their visual dimension might we increase our knowledge of the plays themselves? The aim of this study is to set out the importance of the visual (opsis) when considering ancient Greek drama and provide a basis for constructing a form of “visual dramaturgy” that can be effectively applied to the texts. To that end, this work is divided into five sections, which follow a “top-down” analysis of ancient dramatic visuality. The analysis begins with a survey of the prevailing visual culture and Greek attitudes about sight and the eye. Following this is an examination of the roots of drama in the performance of public collective movement forms (what I have called “symporeia”) and their relationships to the environments they moved through, including the development of the fifth century theatre at the Sanctuary of Dionysos Eleuthereus in Athens. The focus then falls on the dramatic mask and it is proposed here that operating in this environment it was the visual focus of Greek drama and the primary conveyer of the emotional content of the plays. Drawing on new research from the fields of cognitive psychology and neuroscience relating to facial processing and recognition, gaze direction, foveal and peripheral vision and neural responses to masks, movement and performance, it is explained how the fixed dramatic mask was an incredibly effective communicator of dramatic emotion capable of eliciting intensely individual responses from its spectators. This study concludes with a case study based on Aeschylus Oresteia and the raising of Phidias’ colossal bronze statue of Athena on the Acropolis and the impact that this may have had on the original reception of the trilogy.

This thesis presents a new Latin text of the Prolegomena and accompanying prefatory material of the Cologne 1642 edition of the Virgil commentary by the Spanish Jesuit scholar Juan Luis De La Cerda. It provides an original English translation of this material along with explanatory notes which focus upon the social, educational, intellectual and political influences that informed La Cerda's work. The notes also take account of some of the rhetorical and stylistic aspects of La Cerda's work. An introduction situates the work in its cultural and intellectual context and provides a clear overview of the structure and composition of the Prolegomena.

This study surveys Galen of Pergamum's (AD 129–c. 216) impact on the Arabic traditions of Plato's Timaeus in the ninth to thirteenth centuries. It draws attention to the important role that Galen's two exegeses On the Medical Statements in Plato's Timaeus (Περὶ τῶν ἐν τῷ Πλάτωνος Τιμαίῳ ἰατρικῶς εἰρημένων) and the Synopsis of Plato's Timaeus played in transmitting the dialogue into Arabic, and thus shaping medieval Arabic thinkers' understanding of its doctrines. The first of these two texts is fragmentary in Greek and Arabic; this study offers a comprehensive overview of the surviving material and reassesses its authenticity. The Synopsis is preserved in a medieval Arabic translation, and my examination of this work reconsiders its attribution to an associate of the famous translator Ḥunayn ibn Isḥāq (d. c. 873 or 877). The analyses of these treatments also highlight Galen's critical approaches to the Timaeus, specifically how he interprets it in light of his medical knowledge and the intellectual context of Middle Platonism. By exploring the use of the Timaeus commentary and Synopsis in the works of ar-Rāzī, al-Bīrūnī, Ibn Sīnā, Mūsā ibn ʿAzrā, Yehuda Halevi, Ibn Rušd, and Mūsā ibn Maymūn, this study shows that Galen's approach helped broaden the dialogue's application to other fields of learning besides philosophy, such as medicine, poetics, and theology.

The goddess Athena is currently perceived through a series of contradictions. She is both warrior and reconciler, killer and patron of the artisan, a goddess who denies her own womanhood and ignores the existence of women. Using Homer's Iliad and Odyssey and the extant complete plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides and Aristophanes, this thesis reconciles each of these contradictions both within themselves and with each other. It finds that Athena had a prominent role as goddess of the polis: as a warrior she protected the polis from the external threat of war, and as a reconciler she protected it from the internal threat of civil strife. As polis goddess, Athena encourages peace and prosperity in her city; this requires that she inspire the artisan with techne, and the politician with wisdom. As polis goddess, Athena was also concerned for the perpetuation of her city and as such protected the children who were to be the future citizens, and the mothers who bore and nurtured them. This thesis argues that, as patron of techne, Athena becomes the patron of all women's work (which was all craft work). From this association the evidence of civic religion and the drama is used to argue for a relationship between Athena and Athenian women which was independent from Athenian men, independent from their relationship with Athena, and just as special. A unified interpretation of Athena as the polis goddess affords us a fuller and more realistic image of her as the goddess of Athens and patron of all its people than does one based on the "Imperial Athena" of the fifth century who represents only one side of Athena's nature.

What happens when we look at others, and when others look at us? How does the experience of looking at or being seen by others shape our perceptions of ourselves? This thesis addresses these questions with reference to a specific historical and cultural moment; I examine scenes of vision and display in the Athenian writer Xenophon's representations of Spartans, Persians and other non-Greek peoples in Asia as a means of investigating the place of Sparta, Persia and the non-Greek in fourth century Athenian thought. Focusing in particular on the Anabasis, Cyropaedia, Lakedaimonion Politeia and Agesilaus, I analyse the representation of the responses of spectators to foreign sights in order to consider how these texts position their readers in relation to Spartans, Persians and others, and also, therefore, how they articulate and interrogate what it means to be Athenian, and what it means to be Greek. I will argue that sight is involved in the construction of Greek identity; that although some of the ways in which Greek identity is represented imply its cohesion, more often Xenophon's scenes of vision reveal the uncertainties and manipulations involved in attempting to imagine or lay claim to Greekness; and that Xenophon reveals the complexities of Panhellenist thought and of the intellectual and political climate of the fourth century. This thesis contributes towards a history of Greek identity and a history of visuality; it also seeks to reappraise Xenophon as a writer, revealing him as a valuable source for Greek conceptions of political power and conflict, and of ethnic, political and cultural selfconsciousness.

This study provides a synoptic account of the development of Latin elegiac poetry from the first century BC to late antiquity. It focuses primarily on a group of texts from the fifth and sixth centuries AD in which elegy once again becomes a medium for sustained poetic lamentation, four hundred years after the death of Ovid, its most famous exponent. These texts are Rutilius Namatianus, De Reditu; Orientius, Commonitorium; Dracontius, Satisfactio; and the elegiac collection of Maximianus. Each work is interpreted in the context of the radical historical changes that were taking place in this period. The study makes particular reference to the influence of Ovid, as it analyses the distinctive formal and narrative modalities by which these poets present a variety of subject matter. It advances the hypothesis that each of the four elegies presents the experience of a traumatic loss or break. As well as providing detailed examination of these important primary texts, this study also invites re-evaluation of the elegiac works of the Augustan period, which have long been canonical in Classics. In so doing, it indicates the potential for a highly developed criticism of previously neglected works of Latin poetry.

This thesis seeks to investigate how translation is influenced by the translator's contexts, dealing with English translations of Homer between 1850 and 1950. English versions of the Iliad and Odyssey by eight translators from different periods are examined chronologically in their historical contexts, with reference to social, political and ideological circumstances. My methodology involves making use of translators' metatexts and other types of texts in combination with comparison of the translated texts. The debate between Matthew Arnold and Francis Newman reveals conflicting ideologies in the nineteenth century: the former committed to promoting a noble template for his society, the latter seeking to reproduce with exacting standards what he perceived as the true peculiarity of the poet. This ideological opposition is reflective of the intrinsic link between translators' interpretations of Homer and attitudes toward translation, and the Victorian age, in social, ideological and political terms. The thesis continues with two more Victorian translators William Morris and J. S. Blackie, focusing on the practice of archaism. Morris translated the Odyssey within a widespread movement of medieval revival. The same applies to Blackie's translation of the Iliad, but his medievalism was connected to the issue of Scottish identity. They idealised history and expressed their vision literalistically through archaising. The focus then changes to examine modernist versions of the Odyssey by Ezra Pound and H. D. Their fragmentary translations were good examples of the modernist project to achieve novelty and originality. Homer represented 'tradition' to engage with in order to pursue the ambition to, in Pound's famous expression, 'make it new'. The modernists took translation as an implement for revisiting the literary tradition. Lastly, this thesis explores mid-twentieth century prose translations by E. V. Rieu and I. A. Richards. Influenced by the egalitarianism of mid-twentieth-century Britain, they attempted to make their translations accessible to everyone. These translations of Homer were targeted at the 'general reader', and for that purpose, Rieu and Richards transformed Homer's originals into novels.

As argued, the connection between Athenian BC society and tragedy - an area of research far from exhausted - should be examined on the basis of an anthropological/cultural, and rather comparatively oriented perspective, rather than a purely historical or literary one. A further defence holds that such an approach explores in a fresh way the connection between the two which is based on a model of self, on the one hand, and Sophocles' and Euripides' characters on the other - both proposed to consist of the same culturally framed, yet diversely expressed components which define an individual actor/self as would be portrayed by anthropological studies. Because of the proposed nexus of variously expressed components, the staged character is seen as an agent who exposes the complexity and ambiguity of one's own self of whom the individual agent was unaware of possessing. The above argument, approached mainly through primary sources, will be defended as follows. After defining in the introduction concepts such as `self' and `performance', the discussion on the components of self and character begins by exploring their background - the ideology and culture of Athens. As argued, because of particular factors linked to economic and military power, Athens is contrasted with other Greek cities, and at the same time, its performance culture becomes the topos of the performing self. The second chapter defends the concepts of self and dramatic character, as well as the elements associating them which are cultural projections of the society, but also are associated with the notion of `self as presented in recent anthropological discussions of human agency. Lastly, the third chapter argues on the actualisation of the self's model on stage; after the comparative analysis of the characters' actions in three plays by Sophocles, and three by Euripides, the conclusion reached is that the proposed model of self, cultural, but also self-reliant, is an entity which is utilised as a model agent of staged characters.