This dissertation is about how dominant identity is constructed through the centering and incorporation of marginal and subaltern subjectivities in Ancient Greek thought, with some preliminary consideration of the Classical Age but chiefly devoted to a study of Hellenistic poetic aesthetics at Ptolemaic Alexandria. The thesis argues ultimately for a specifically Queer and Afrocentric reading of the ArgonautikaI use postcolonial methods, tactics, and strategies to theorize the genealogical intersection(s) of gender and race, and explore the ancient roots of racism. I am indebted in my work to Critical Race Theory, Gender and Queer Theory, Intersectionality Theory and Decolonial Studies. Guided by the millennial discourses of the Coloniality of power and the contributions of Aníbal Quijano and his intellectual heirs to critical thought and theory—positing the fundamental and central functions of epistemological thought, knowledge-production and the control and regulation of knowledge within oppressive social orders as specifically and particularly interrelated practices in the European colonialism of Modernity, and enabling us to deconstruct out of our contemporary knowledge and social practices the oppressive consequences in Modernity as a result of the aftermath of Old World regimes in the New World—the argument throughout this dissertation subjects monuments of Classical Greek literature to an analysis that traces loosely a genealogy of how ideology and identity were constructed and fabricated in imperial contexts in the aftermath of the Greco-Persian Wars, during which time Hellenic peoples were first exposed to Empire, and some great portions of the Greek-speaking world came under the dominion of the Achaemenid imperial regime. In a manner of speaking, this dissertation deconstructs the intersections of identity, including gender (and ethnicity) and “race”, at pivotal moments in the history of Greek Antiquity. Principal test-cases for this study analyze monumental texts produced in societies under the hegemony of “democratic” imperial authority at Athens in the 5th Century BCE and Ptolemaic Egypt in the 3rd Century, in the aftermath of Alexander’s conquests. This dissertation explores how the control and regulation of racialized and ethnic marginalities and subalternities is critical to civic and political structures in the Classical Age, as well as how the interrelated concept of the gendered other, in artistic expressions of knowledge and authority—high literary monuments—functioned critically to reify and justify imperial and colonial practices in the Ancient Greek World. Chapter 1 consists primarily of readings of the Wesir-Heru (“Osiris-Horus”) dynastic succession myth from Egypt in representations of kingship and dynastic succession particularly in Africa and African spaces in the texts of Pindar, Herodotos, and Aiskhylos, including an exploration of the what at the instigation of Jackie Murry I call the Imagistic Poetics of Pindar and Aiskhylos in comparative consideration of Egyptian symbolic literary culture, including even the mdw-ntjr (“hieroglyphs”), and an especially instructive close reading of the center of the Agamemnon. To support my readings of Aiskhylos’ interactions with Egypt and Egyptian thought, I also consider how Aiskhylos interacted with the legacy of the Danaid myth. Situated in their proper historical contexts these readings demonstrate that during the height of the Achaemenid Empire in the Mediterranean World, which coincides incidentally with what we call the Greek Classical Age, Hellenism and Africanism were not mutually exclusive. In fact, as we see early in Chapter 1 with Pindar, Africanism is coextensive with Panhellenism. Furthermore, and critically, as part of my readings of gender as racialized—i.e., constructed under the Ancient Greek linguistic paradigms that govern “racial” otherness (genos)—I show that Blackness, beyond representing masculinity and the male body in the Greek artistic and visual imagination, is separable notionally in the Ancient Greek imagination, and in critical contrast to the modern and contemporary situation, from Africanism. In order to perform this work, I call upon archaeology and material evidence to render a more coherent picture of the networks of culture accessible in the micro- and macro-regions of an interconnected and transnational Ancient Mediterranean. In Appendixes to Chapter 1, I also provide brief readings of intertextuality in the Hellenistic reception at Alexandria of Classical Greek interactions with Egypt, Libya, and the African cultural past and show the embeddedness of that interaction in literary encounters especially, a fact evident from the Classical Greek texts. Chapter 2 explores the Hellenistic origins of Afro-Greek subjectivity in the literary record with Theokritos at Alexandria. I explore “race” in the West and the formation of Greek ethnicity in the East as a “kairological” artistic and poetic projection that exposes of the roots of 3rd-century universalist and globalist Ptolemaic imperial ideology. I also explore Space and identity, the social imaginary, and consequent(ial)ly the gendering of space in the poetry of Poseidippos. In my readings, we see texts engaged intimately with discourses about Sovereignty, and implicitly with the history of Rome and Qrt-ḥdšt (“Carthage”). Chapters 3 and 4 function as a pair or couple. After a full historical and social contextualization of Ptolemaic Alexandria in the Hellenistic Age of the 3rd Century BCE, as well as an exploration of an inclusive range of Queer (including “LGBTQ+”) subjectivities in Alexandrian poetry in Chapter 3, in Chapter 4 I argue that in the Argonautika of Apollonios Rhodios Medeia represents a Queer woman who endures systematic heteronormative and patriarchal oppression, or heterosexism. This opens up Book 4 of the Argonautika for fertile close readings of the inclusive and all-encompassing aesthetics that constitute Hellenistic poetry, including authentically Kemetic (“Egyptian”) voices. The Epilogue provides a roadmap for applying these analytic tools to the Latin Literature of Rome.

This is a study of Epicurus garden in Athens in the 300´s bce, and the method of rehabilitation applied in the garden of Alnarp today at the Swedish University of Agricultural Science. The study aims to pinpoint areas of comparison in methods of healing in a garden environment, in Epicurus garden versus the rehabilitating garden of Alnarp. To make this comparison I have split my analysis into four parts, the conversational therapy, the hierarchy, the garden and its community, and finally the isolation from society. This is a qualitative study, and methods used is, amongst others, hermeneutics.The essay ends with a final discussion of the finds, which conclude that although very different contexts in both time and space, it is easy to find similarities between the two.

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The information about the first-century synagogue provided by Flavius Josephus must be handled with care when used in historical reconstructions. Josephus was a skilled rhetorician who was ideologically invested in the presentation of this institution. Due care must therefore be placed on understanding the context of his various mentions of synagogues within the overall rhetorical context of his works if we are interested in historical reconstruction of this Jewish institution. However, the tendentious nature of Josephus’ writings does not preclude historical study, not least because the assumptions and ideologies inherent in this tendenz are themselves historical. Especially in his later works (Antiquitates judaicae, Vita, and Contra Apionem), we find a deliberate presentation of the synagogue as a viable, supra-local rallying point for the Jews throughout the known world, as this institution represents an assembly in which the customs and Law of Judaism may be practiced and disseminated following the loss of the Temple and the Land. Even in the earliest work of Josephus, Bellum judaicum, we find a tendentious presentation of the synagogue as a ‘holy place’ whose precincts were breached due to the impiety of the Jewish insurgents and certain non-Jewish troublemakers. Due to the rhetorical nature of Josephus’ writings and the many hermeneutical issues that arise when we deal with space, the language of Edward Soja’s spatial theory is utilized, where heuristically profitable, in order to distinguish between the ‘spaces themselves’ (firstspace), the ideals held by the author regarding the institution (secondspace), and the combination of the two in the experience represented in the passages (thirdspace). It is precisely the rhetoric with which Josephus presents the synagogue that will lead us to a better understanding of the ideological importance that synagogues had in the lives of the communities and individuals inhabiting these spaces during the period in question. / Dissertation / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

The dissertation re-examines a fragmentary and understudied group of nearly 150 portrait statues representing Hellenistic kings. The surviving portrait statuary comprises a small fraction of those originally produced for kings in marble, bronze, gilded bronze, and other materials during the Hellenistic period. The corpus of extant statuary presents many interpretive challenges, from fragmentary conditions to often uncertain provenance, and from unrecognizable physiognomies of rulers to unstandardized royal iconographies. Most previous scholarship was concerned with identifying kings in their portraits, unfortunately without much success. As a result, the portraits have received relatively little attention over the past few decades, despite robust and relevant scholarly advances related to Greek portraiture and Hellenistic kingship. While most studies have focused on identifying faces and interpreting portraits in thecontext of specific reigns, the present study collates the art historical, archaeological, and textual evidence for royal portraits’ forms, iconographies, and original placements to gain a fuller understanding of the corpus. Analysis of surviving royal statue bases, literary accounts, honorific decrees detailing royal portrait commissions, and royal portraits in other media (e.g., coins, seals, bronze figurines, mosaics, etc.) reveals that royal portrait statues were often more diverse, conspicuous, theatrical, and divinizing than portrait statues representing non-royal individuals. The study demonstrates the resonances between these portrait features and the marvelous bodily adornments, choreographed movements, and calculated performances of kings' real bodies in royal rituals and spectacles, ultimately revealing that like the staged appearances of kings, Hellenistic royal portrait statues were conceived as conspicuous material syntheses of royal actors and royal roles.

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No description available.

Il est reconnu que la poésie hellénistique a donné à l’expression du sentiment amoureux une importance inédite, mais la rupture que constitue ce fait littéraire par rapport aux œuvres du passé n’a cependant pas toujours été suffisamment mise en avant. Cette étude propose donc d’examiner les spécificités de cette représentation de l’amour et de montrer qu’elle ressortit principalement au registre pathétique. Ainsi, dans une perspective diachronique, elle s’attache tout d’abord à rappeler les particularités de la représentation de l’amour dans la poésie des époques archaïque et classique, et à montrer notamment le rôle secondaire qu’y tient cette thématique. Puis, après avoir analysé les caractéristiques, complexes mais toujours éminemment négatives, que les poètes hellénistiques attribuent à l’amour, essentiellement réduit pour eux à l’ἔρως, elle examine les modalités précises de son expression pathétique, une innovation importante grâce à laquelle la thématique amoureuse a pu accéder en littérature au rang d’un véritable sentiment. Cette étude permet enfin de montrer que la représentation pathétique du sentiment amoureux est l’une des clefs pour comprendre plusieurs caractéristiques et enjeux fondamentaux de la poésie hellénistique, à propos de laquelle il convient de parler d’une véritable poétique de l’amour. En effet, le pathétique amoureux peut s’y lire comme un paradigme méta-poétique qui ne reflète pas seulement les nouvelles valeurs esthétiques de l’époque hellénistique mais également les conditions, inédites, de création et de réception des œuvres littéraires, en particulier dans leurs rapports, aussi étroits qu’ambigus, aux cours royales et à la tradition. / Hellenistic poetry attributed an importance to love never encountered in poetry before. This literary break with the past has only ever received scant attention. This study sets out to examine the specifics of how love was represented and to show how it essentially emerges from the pathetic register. From a diachronic perspective, the study aims to focus on the particular characteristics of the representation of love in the poetry of the classical and archaic periods, and above all demonstrate the secondary role the theme was accorded. After an analysis of the complex, but always eminently negative, characteristics, attributed to love by Hellenistic poets, which, to them, is essentially reduced to ἔρως, the study examines the precise modalities of its expression through pathos, an important innovation through which the theme of love became recognised as a genuine feeling in literature. This study ultimately enables us to show that the pathetic representation of love is one of the keys to understanding several characteristics and fundamental issues of Hellenistic poetry, through a genuine poetics of love. Romantic pathos can indeed be interpreted here as a meta-poetic paradigm which does not only reflect the new aesthetic values of the Hellenistic age but also the new conditions of creation and reception of literary works, in particular in their close and ambiguous relationships with royal courts and tradition.

Partendo da un punto di vista lessicale, la ricerca si ripropone di investigare la presenza di elementi musicali all’interno della produzione epigrammatica del periodo ellenistico, con riferimenti, talora, anche ad autori più tardi. Sono stati analizzati due tipi di fonti: epigrammi di tradizione letteraria (che includono componimenti dall’Anthologia Palatina, dal Nuovo Posidippo, e dal materiale raccolto da Gow e Page) ed epigrafi (che comprendono iscrizioni dagli Steinepigramme aus dem Griechischen Osten e dalle Inscriptions métriques de l’Égypte greco-romain), in modo tale da poter agire su un campo di indagine coerente e bilanciato. Il materiale è stato articolato in due sezioni principali, “Mousikà stoikheia” e “Organikè mousa”, rispettivamente dedicate alle categorie musicali e agli strumenti musicali. L’analisi, partendo dalla ricostruzione della potenzialità semantica di ogni termine, basata sull’origine etimologica e sullo sviluppo letterario e teorico, e procedendo attraverso l’interpretazione delle occorrenze più significative all’interno dei testi epigrammatici, evidenzia una particolare sensibilità verso la componente musicale, richiamando sia la terminologia specifica musicale sia, più spesso, il tradizionale trattamento di alcuni temi appartenenti alla tradizione letteraria. Il presente lavoro include anche una Appendice finale, nella quale sono indicizzati i termini emersi durante l’indagine testuale. / Starting from a lexical point of view, this research aims at investigating the presence of musical elements within the epigrammatic production of the Hellenistic period, with references also to later authors. Two kinds of sources have been analysed: literary epigrams (including poems from the Greek Anthology, the New Posidippus, and the material collected by Gow-Page) and epigraphic epigrams (including inscriptions from Steinepigramme aus dem Griechischen Osten and Inscriptions métriques de l’Égypte greco-romain), in order to have a coherent and balanced field of investigation. The material has been divided into two main parts, “Mousikà stoikheia” and “Organikè mousa”, referred to musical categories and musical instruments. The analysis, starting from the reconstruction of the potential musical meaning of each term, based on etymology and literary and theoretical development, and going on through the interpretation of the most relevant occurrences of the term in epigrammatic texts, shows a particular sensibility towards the musical element, recalling both the terminology of musical theory and, more often, the traditional treatment of some themes belonging to the literary tradition. A final Appendix provides an index with the terms found during the textual investigation.