This dissertation explores the treatment of the scenic and diegetic space in Aristophanes' Acharnians, Knights, and Wasps, and the comedies' attitude towards a variety of domestic and civic spaces, taking into consideration the cultural context in which the plays were composed. I argue that by using visual creativity and the available staging resources, Aristophanes calls attention to the consequences of the Peloponnesian war on the Athenians' civic and domestic life. Acharnians, Knights, and Wasps all literalize in an imaginative way the impact of the dysfunction of the polis - the assembly, the agora, the boule, the lawcourts - on the oikos and the householder. The plays not only explore what happens to the oikos itself, but also the implications for a polis in which the oikos loses its place of prominence. Acharnians displays an example of the polis' dysfunction in an assembly meeting at the Pnyx, and traces an individual's frustration with this polis and his journey back to his oikos. We witness the reactions of Dikaiopolis and the Acharnians, both of whom have been forced out of their oikoi, have had their properties ravaged, and experience their estrangement with nostalgia or anger. I argue that through a private peace treaty Dikaiopolis is able to return to his oikos, and then expand his domestic space in order to be reintegrated into a functional community. Knights presents an invaded oikos both as allegory for the dysfunction of the polis, and as a way of connecting Athens' foreign policy decisions to the concerns of the individual Athenian householder. The play's allegorical significance, present also in the double persona of Demos who represents both a household master and the people of Athens, conveys the impression that events taking place in the political realm have an impact also on the domestic lives of Athenian citizens. Wasps calls attention to the mismanagement of civic institutions by presenting the contrasting perspectives of a father and a son on particular domestic and civic spaces. Here I argue that the play presents the space of the oikos as a microcosm for the polis of Athens within which social and political divisions can be observed. The play focuses on the lawcourts' accumulation of power within the astu as the single place in which all cases were tried during the war. By making the protagonist Philocleon defy his own oikos, Aristophanes turns his focus onto new problems in the management of individual households, and explores what happens when the oikos or the polis becomes a citizen's primary locus of allegiance. All three plays present their central conflict in terms of a struggle to return to, enter, or escape from the oikos: spatial restrictions on the citizens imposed by war policy (Acharnians); the threat of invasion of the oikos by elements foreign to it (Knights); and the threat to the integrity of the oikos imposed by the dysfunctional jury system (Wasps). The first chapter looks at the importance of the visual component of Greek drama and provides a survey of previous works on this topic. I discuss the stage resources Aristophanes would be using; I explain my choice of examining together Acharnians, Knights and Wasps; and I give an overview of the plays' historical context. Chapters two, three, and four are dedicated respectively to each of the three plays, and examine the space and staging of each play sequentially. In a brief conclusion I suggest that Aristophanes might be considered among the first authors to display interest in domestic economy, by turning the Athenians' focus to the welfare of the oikos and its importance for the prosperity of the polis.

This dissertation examines literary laughter in Latin poetry and, specifically, the ways in which textually-witnessed laughter functions as a guide to reader response and as a genre marker in select Vergilian, Horatian, and Ovidian poems. The introduction first describes the Latin vocabulary of laughter and the risible and then introduces the texts of Augustan poetry to be examined. The remainder of the introduction surveys theoretical treatments of laughter that appear in Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero and underlie three prevailing modern explanations of laughter: the superiority, relief, and incongruity theories. My inquiry is divided into two complementary parts, to each of which I devote three chapters. Part I (Chapters 1, 2, and 3) explores laughter's function as text-directed literary criticism--what I call a textual laugh track. My approach emphasizes that the vocabulary of laughter and the risible as used by Vergil, Horace, and Ovid often functions metacommunicatively, offering to the reader a set of directions for how to respond to particular texts. Part 2 (Chapters 4, 5, and 6) considers laughter's role as a conspicuous piece in the assembling of specific generic puzzles. Horace's Satires, Vergil's Eclogues, and Ovid's Amores all feature the vocabulary of laughter and the risible in their verses, and they utilize this vocabulary to various genre-determined--and genre-determining--ends. My objective throughout the dissertation is to present laughter as a dynamic human behavior that, through its appearance in Augustan literature, not only offers inroads to a specific "cultural psychology" but also proves itself an illuminating point of contact between the ancient and modern world.

This dissertation examines Roman comedy (comoedia palliata) and its influence from the stage onto the pages of Latin literature. I argue that the plays of Plautus and Terence (and increasingly also their Greek model, Menander) continued to be performed during the late Roman Republic and early Empire. Orators like Cicero impressed their audiences by tapping into fond memories of such performances, and from Catullus onwards, a new generation of authors experimented with ways of ‘updating’ the plays. One popular solution was to have allusions to comedy contrast with neighboring references to other attractions at the Roman festival, ranging from pantomime dances to gladiatorial combats. Especially under the Empire, authors like Horace, Propertius, Ovid, and Juvenal came to blend comedy with elements from darker dramas, such as tragedy or mime. Comedy thus emerged as an indispensible component in the creation of ‘new’ genres like Roman love elegy and Imperial satire, or the new Ovidian branch of Latin epic. In closing, I suggest that the vicarious experience provided by episodic television shows (as described by David Foster Wallace and Umberto Eco) can help explain this enduring popularity of Roman comedy: TV viewers and theatrical audiences both find themselves transported into a world whose rules are slightly easier to grasp than those of their own, and they fantasize about navigating their lives as efficiently as a comedic trickster.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, Dept. of Classical Studies, 2006. / Adviser: William Hansen.

Thesis (doctoral)-Universität, Göttingen, 2008. / Includes bibliographical references and indices.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, Dept. of Classical Studies, 2009. / Title from PDF t.p. (viewed on Jul 15, 2010). Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 70-12, Section: A, page: 4663. Adviser: Timothy Long. Includes supplementary digital materials.

Programm--Univ. Goettingen (Index scholarum Sem. aest. 1890)

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, 2005. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 66-08, Section: A, page: 2919. Adviser: Matthew R. Christ. Title from dissertation home page (viewed Oct. 5, 2006).

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, Dept. of Classical Studies, 2006. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 67-05, Section: A, page: 1721. Adviser: William Hansen. "Title from dissertation home page (viewed June 20, 2007)."

My purpose is to demonstrate Theocritus' treatment of traditional literary genres. I show the specialized character of the bucolic genre by concentrating on the combination of epic, tragic and bucolic elements in selected poems of Theocritus. My concern is the portrayal of characters and character-types from myth and literary tradition and how the traditional literary portrayal has been changed. My discussion of Theocritus' poetic technique is divided into two parts. The first section deals with Theocritus' method of "reducing" or down-grading figures who have previously been presented and accepted as heroes. This section is introduced by a brief survey of the changing attitudes towards heroes in Greek literature from Homer to Theocritus. This is followed by a discussion of four poems which illustrate Theocritus' inversion of the standard portrait. This treatment ranges from a humorous recasting of the status of Polyphemos (Idyll 11) and Herakles (Idylls 13 and 24) to a critical portrayal of the Dioscuri (Idyll 22). The second part deals with the technique operating in reverse. In this section, I show how Theocritus juxtaposes epic themes with 'low-life' scenes and how the characters involved are consequently upgraded or 'elevated1. The four poems I select endow their insignificant protagonists with heroic amplitude. In Idyl 1 1, epic and tragic elements are infused into the portrayal of Daphnis the cowherd. Simaetha in Idyll 2 envisages herself as a Medea in a context of bourgeois reality. The mythological material in Idyll 3 achieves humour from the disparity of the goatherd's rustic simplicicy and his awareness of mythological precedents. Idyll 7 expands the anti-heroic material of the Odyssey and describes a goatherd with a difference. In my conclusion I demonstrate the coherence of Theocritus' treatment of epic and dramatic narrative with his programmatic statements. The passages referred to are the epilogue of Idyll 22 (212-23), the characters cited in Idyll 16 (36-57), Simichidas' speech in Idyll 7 (45-48) and the description of the herdman's cup in Idyll 1. (29-61). In the light of this, I link Theocritus' poetic method to his attitude to the function of literature and its relation to society. / Arts, Faculty of / Classical, Near Eastern and Religious Studies, Department of / Graduate