There are several narratives told by Ovid in both the Fasti and Metamorphoses and, excluding the rape of Persephone, there has been little or no analysis of them. This thesis is the first focused comparison of all of the twice-told tales in the Metamorphoses and the Fasti. This thesis presents a close-reading of four of the most substantial twice-told tales, the rape of Callisto, the rape of Europa, the apotheosis of Romulus, and the death of Hippolytus. We find that the Metamorphoses and Fasti are woven together with strong invitations to compare between the two texts. Broadly this thesis finds that genre and, in particular, interest in divine action is an important distinguishing feature between the twicetold tales; divine action being present to a greater degree in the Metamorphoses narratives. This thesis then surveys the remaining twice-told tales with an emphasis on their position within the text. Here we find that the twice-told tales are positioned so as to increase the intertextual pull between the Metamorphoses and Fasti. Comparison of the twice-told tales also reveals insights into the individual texts, and in this respect the Fasti, as the lesser investigated of the two texts, particularly benefits. We argue that the twice-told tales in the Fasti reveal that the Fasti is a text characterised by the flux of genre and tone. Sexual comedy, a theme found to be present in several twice-told tales, is an important part of the way the Fasti maintains this flux. Comparison of twice-told narratives is then complemented by a comparison of a non-narrative discourse on animal sacrifice. This thesis demonstrates that comparison of this non-narrative episode is both invited with strong verbal echoes, and reveals useful insights into the two versions. Non-narrative operates in a similar way to narrative in the Metamorphoses and Fasti.

This thesis studies the phenomenon of kinship in Thucydides’ History. Kinship is traditionally viewed in relation to the domestic domain. In Thucydides, however, xyngeneia/xyngenes – the terms denoting kinship – are more frequently used to indicate colonial and/or racial ties between cities. It is this type of xyngeneia, together with other types of relatedness between cities, communities and ethnic groups that are the focus of my investigation. Both these two categories of collective kinship ties were highly exploitable and effective in the sphere of politics, by the application of what has been termed ‘kinship diplomacy’. The constant reshaping of mythical narratives in relation to their historical and political contexts is central to my project. My thesis is divided into five chapters. Chapter 1 is a general introduction, including a typology of kinship, my theoretical underpinnings, and method of work. In chapter 2, I explore comprehensively the challenging variety of the language of kinship in Thucydides; in chapter 3, I discuss in detail the phenomenon of xyngeneia between a metropolis and its apoikia, in its ethical, emotional and practical dimension, through the case of Korinth and its two more conspicuous apoikiai in the work: Kerkyra and Syracuse. Chapters 4 and 5 concentrate on the two major belligerent cities, Dorian Sparta and Ionian Athens, respectively, and they both fall into two parts; their first part examines xyngeneia ties, and the second, ties of relatedness (i.e. types of connections outside descent). Both chapters offer discussions of test-cases, generally organised in terms of geography and ethnicity. Informed by recent anthropological work on social forms and experiences of relatedness, and by the sociology of ethnicity and emotions, and using kinship between cities and communities for the first time as an angle from which Thucydides’ text can be examined, my thesis aims to offer new insights from the narratological, stylistic and historical points of view.

The thesis is a contribution to the study of early Greek poetics. It surveys general terms for speaking and singing in early Greek poetry from a foothold in performance theory, narratology and the ethnography of speaking, examining the pragmatics of these terms, the values and ideas about poetics, performance, literary tradition and textuality that they imply, and the contribution they make to the self-fashioning of poetic voice. The main focus is the interaction of early fifth-century choral melos’ with older hexameter traditions (Homer, Hesiod, and the Hymns), though Attic tragedy and comedy are also taken where necessary into account. The argument, which attempts both to correct old misprisions through a more thorough reading of the primary sources and to provide new interpretations of familiar texts, falls into three main parts. The first is a study of the most important Greek terms for song and singing: hymnos, melos, molpe, oime, and aoide. The second chapter studies the values that attach to song, and aoide and related concepts in particular, examining how the terms and implied values of Homeric and Hesiodic singing are used in the metapoetic discourse of fifth-century praise-poetry to articulate a complex vision of song’s tradition and functions. The third chapter begins with a survey of speech-terms (particularly epos, mythos, and logos) across the corpus of early Greek song, designed to elucidate the background of meanings available to early fifth-century poets. It continues with a close examination of how speech-terms are used, together with words for song, to create the sense of a speaking voice so crucial to melic praise, to mark themes and phases in the lyric argument, to express a sense of the ode as a verbal object with an existence both in and outside performance, and to articulate a wider sense of oral tradition. The conclusions draw the main themes of the argument together in an analysis of types of melic textuality and voice. The material in the chapters is supplemented by appendices which provide both discussion of key passages, and catalogues of important material to which the text alludes, but which it does not discuss in detail.

Although it has never been doubted that Athenian oratory was performed, only a limited amount of scholarly attention has been devoted to this dimension of the corpus. Scholarly opinion has often considered it an impossible task to reconstruct performance through an interpretation of the text. At best, scholars have tended to connect performance with delivery, but without examining texts in such a way as to reconstruct a holistic view of it, or they have examined the convergences between oratory and theatre. This thesis aims to enhance current research by arguing that performance encompasses the possibility of more subtle communication between the speaker and the audience than mere delivery and that aspects of the transmitted texts allow glimpses into the performative dimension of speeches, whether or not these connect with the practice in the theatre. This work examines direct/sensory and cognitive/emotional performative techniques in Aeschines 2, 3 and Demosthenes 18, 19. Direct/sensory performative techniques refer to gestural and vocal ploys of delivery, as well as information about the staging of the speech – everything that has to do with the senses of sight and hearing. Cognitive/emotional techniques include the portrayal of characters as well as a wide range of rhetorical strategies that have an “audience-orientated” end: to enable the speaker to elicit the audience’s verbal or non-verbal reaction, engage their emotions, create a certain disposition in them towards himself and his opponent, and hence, affect their verdict. The introduction to the thesis offers a discussion of performance and explains the aims and methodology of the research. Part I analyses the performative dimension of the oratorical techniques that are outlined briefly in the Introduction. Part II (embassy speeches) and Part III (crown speeches) explore the way Aeschines and Demosthenes write for performance and what the impact of their choices was for their audience.

For almost two millennia the dismissive judgement of pseudo-Longinus on Bacchylides has influenced the reception of his work. This underestimation of Bacchylides has persisted in modern scholarship even after papyrus discoveries recovered the primary text for research. This relative lack of interest is reflected in a still very limited bibliography. The thesis, which draws on current Reception Theory, aims to reposition Bacchylides in both the field of Greek Lyric Poetry and modern scholarship. The dissertation analyses the path of Bacchylides in time, and focuses especially on the poetry and criticism that was crucial for canonisation and survival of both Bacchylides and the rest of the lyric poets. Chapter 1 deals with the geographical movement of Bacchylides in his lifetime, examined against the background of the commissions of Pindar and Simonides. Chapter 2 focuses on Bacchylides’ relationship with Athens and echoes of his poetry in Greek drama (tragedy and Aristophanic comedy), while Chapter 3 on Herodotus tests the Athenian evidence and offers a pan-Hellenic look at lyric reception. Reception of lyric by Plato and the Peripatetics in Chapter 4 is the transitional stage from Classical Athens to the Hellenistic era. Chapter 5 discusses the move from song to written texts. Finally, Chapter 6 focuses on Hellenistic scholarship on lyric poetry and on the establishment of the lyric canon. Two important issues in the thesis are the transmission of texts from oral song-culture to written sources, and the process of canonisation. Bacchylides is a peculiar poetic figure and a paradox; his poetry and survival do not seem to follow the norm and pattern of the rest of the lyric poets. The thesis is an attempt to fill in a gap in modern scholarship and in the process of examining the transmission of Bacchylides’ work in antiquity to clarify the larger process of canonisation and the media through which Greek lyric poetry as a whole reaches Alexandria and survives.

For 5th century Athens, deceit is a contemporary reality; it is also a problem. When Athens thought about deception, which was not often, it applied to it a double standard: to deceive is condemnable in theory, expedient in practice. How does, however, this double standard translate to a genre which neither theorizes nor practises, but invites interpretation of events that are in themselves both multidimensional and -indeed-fictional? (Introduction and Chapter 1). This thesis examines the presentation and interpretation of deceit in a late 5th century tragic context. Sophocles’ Philoctetes is the focus of this enquiry because of deceit’s varied character in the play, and because of its Sophoclean authorship, with all its associations -both in ancient and in modern contexts- of idealism and traditionalism. My thesis argues that polarizations regarding deceit, Philoctetes and its author circumscribe our understanding of all. In terms of deception, instead of a simple condemnation, the play confronts its audience with a misconceived and mishandled deceit, whose limitations are in place precisely to leave space for a deceit that can be structurally, rhetorically and morally appropriate (Chapters 2, 3, 4). At the same time, the failed deceit of the Philoctetes or ‘play within a play’ recreates the viewing experience for the theatre audience, and offers them different models of spectatorship to ponder on when negotiating their own critical approach to performance (Chapter 5). In terms of the Philoctetes, deceit emerges as the overarching element that allows the play to comment on a number of topical and diachronic concerns of 5th century Athens such as morality, rhetoric, friendship, and performative fiction. By revisiting deceit alongside those issues, I hope to demonstrate the multifaceted character of deceit itself, its legitimate position in Athenian life and (tragic) fiction, and the very pragmatic need for its conditioning. Finally in terms of its author, my interpretation of the play’s deceit challenges the conventional perception of Sophocles as a traditional idealist, and replaces it with an (Euripidean) image of a realist and a thinker engaged with the intellectual trends and socio-political demands of his time. I hope that my reading will lead to a new appreciation of the many dimensions of dolos, the Philoctetes, and its dramatist.

Whilst the majority of students of Lycophron’s Alexandra have come to the poem with a particular set of scholarly skills which have limited the thematic scope of their inquiry, the aim of this thesis, by contrast, is to argue that in the poem each detail is a piece of a puzzle, where only the sum of its parts conveys the full meaning of it. The present work is multi-disciplinary and aims to show that heterogeneous elements of the poem, traditionally belonging to different fields of study (literary, historical, archaeological), are in reality markedly interconnected according to patterns that reveal their meaning only when considered in their entirety. The interrelation of these aspects relays on a main unifying principle: the fact that the narrator is a woman. The thesis argues that Cassandra is a convincingly constructed character, and not a mere medium used to give coherence to the numerous stories and episodes that constitute the poem itself. Then, it focuses in particular on how the femininity of Cassandra determines several characteristic aspects of the poem: content selection, focalizing perspective, and the stylistic register in which the prophecy is uttered. The text requires us to consider all these different strands at once in order to appreciate the importance of the poem for the study of the literary presentation of womanhood in Greek culture. The thesis addresses the interaction between Cassandra’s narrative and the marked interest within the text in religious practices, in particular those relating to Cassandra herself. Lycophron’s poetics refers constantly to the world of myth and the past, while actively involving its imagined present readership and also future generations. In this respect the poem is in harmony with experiments, conducted by other Hellenistic poets, with the interaction of different temporal levels.

Aristotle’s indebtedness to τὰ ἔνδοξα, the views of ‘the wise’ and ordinary beliefs, is a consensus among Aristotle scholars. However, the endoxic material in Aristotle’s ethical treatises has been significantly understudied, since culturally loaded ideas in his work are usually dismissed as ‘prejudices’. This creates a lacuna in our knowledge of the reputable views that form the starting point of Aristotle’s argumentation. Existing scholarship has not systematically addressed the questions regarding the nature and the sources of the endoxic material in Aristotle’s work, and the extent to which τὰ ἔνδοξα influenced Aristotle’s ethical discussions. As a result, we fail to appreciate the way in which Aristotle constructed his philosophical system by reworking the raw material of his culture. This thesis aims to fill this gap in Aristotelian scholarship with respect to the concepts of wealth and honour, which figure prominently among Aristotle’s ‘external goods’. It explores the work of Aristotle from a diachronic perspective, aiming to situate it in its historical context and to examine Aristotle’s views as part of a long-standing debate in Greek ethical thinking. The aim of this study is to investigate how and to what extent traditional views about wealth and honour contributed to the formulation of Aristotle’s discussion, and to ascertain how the philosopher responded to these ideas and reformulated them to fit his own philosophical framework. Chapter 1 provides the general framework for the discussion of wealth and honour in the main body of the thesis (Chapters 2-5), namely the place of external goods in Aristotle’s conception of εὐδαιμονία. Chapters 2 and 3 deal with the concept of wealth, the modes and extent of its acquisition and the virtues of character that regulate its proper use; Aristotle’s views are examined in the light of relevant views expressed in the works of archaic poets, most notably Solon, Theognis, Pindar, Hesiod, and the Homeric epics. Chapters 4 and 5 address the concept of honour and the virtue of ‘greatness of soul’, which is one of the most controversial of Aristotle’s virtues of character.

In this thesis, I interpret Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War utilizing models of game theory to distil the abstract strategic structures that Thucydides illuminates. It is possible by close analysis of the narrative to extract an implicit descriptive theory embedded in the narrative, never made explicit but a consistent presence wherever characters, groups and nations interact. Game theory in its informal structure (i.e. without deploying the full formal apparatus of mathematics) offers a valuable extension to narratology, a narrative theory already successfully introduced into Classical studies. The thesis studies Thucydides’ conception of the agon (contest/competition) in its basic framework from simple strategic and dynamic games to games with boundedly rational players. I argue that Thucydides describes a tropology of interaction by inferring motivations from observed actions. Chapter 1 and 2 discuss Thucydides’ method of reading the minds of historical agents to explore historical causation in simultaneous move and sequential move environments, respectively. Chapter 3 discusses agents with incomplete information and also agents who take irrational decisions. Thucydides allows room in his narrative for players to miscalculate or make conjectures when faced with an interactive environment. He writes history as a description of similar types of potentially recurrent events and sequences linked by a causal chain, whose outcomes are only probabilistically predictable. Whilst analysing different types of interactions, the study aims to explore different game theoretic models based on Thucydides’ tropology of interaction, in order to identify in the final chapter new research directions for rational actor models as well as stochastic environments for the benefit of political science.

This thesis presents an edition of eighteen previously unedited texts from the papyri excavated at Oxyrhynchus by Grenfell and Hunt. All are documentary and range in date from AD 55 to 387. The subject matter of these documents covers a range of activities which ostensibly reflect the day-to-day business of town and country, but on closer inspection give a deeper insight into broader topics concerning Roman and Byzantine Egypt. Although the documents seem diverse, the theme which links them is that which Lewis called “the silent majority, the men, women and children in the middle and bottom strata of society in their daily lives.” It reveals that which constitutes ‘the ordinary’ in this society and the everyday challenges faced by them: people find themselves in financial difficulty and take out a loan (001 and 013, both eranos loan contracts, a rarely attested type); a male and a female slave are sold to yet another master (002 and 012); an abandoned child is given a reprieve (007); two slaves are emancipated (003 and 006, the latter being the only Greek example of the payment of tax on a manumissio inter amicos); farmers hope for a good inundation (004 and 009); and ship-owners and skippers receive and transport tax grain along the Nile (010 and 014-018). All the documents present philological and prosopographical information which is new or can serve to consolidate or amend previous theories. The thesis contains a number of appendices which amend or update currently available information on a number of topics (e.g. Appendix III, Alexandrian Phyle-Deme pairings) and highlight some new thoughts on previously held opinions (e.g. Appendix VIII, Neo-natal Exposition in Roman Egypt).