The first usage of the ship of state allegory is commonly attributed to the seventh century B.C. poet Alcaeus. While it is true that in his corpus of poetry we see the first explicit usage of such imagery, the possibility that it was employed by earlier poets is strong. This thesis is a detailed examination of five fragmentary poems and commentaries, its purpose being to determine Alcaeus' sources of inspiration for the ship of state allegory and to assess the degree of his originality and his effectiveness in using it. After surveying contemporary literary sources for definitions of allegory, it can be established that the ancients viewed it as a lengthened metaphor or metaphorical sequence, employed to veil the meaning of a text. The expressions chosen by Alcaeus to describe the travails of the ship are then examined to determine whether he has directly imitated or adapted phrases from his literary predecessors and if this is so, to assess the effectiveness of the imitation in terms of an allegorical representation of political strife. Although it is evident that Alcaeus adopts images and expressions previously employed, this study reveals that he is creative in assigning new meaning to certain expressions and that he imitates passages for their power to evoke a particular image. The association with the model is subsequently elaborated upon through the employment of unusual choices in vocabulary, either to sustain dual imagery or predispose his audience to think in figurative terms. Thus the evocation of images from earlier authors coupled with key internal allegorical indicators allows Alcaeus to convey successfully to his closed audience their political plight in the guise of danger at sea. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)

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The originating context of myths (as interpretations of events, phenomena, or customs through narrative) can be discovered through a "structurist" approach in which the combination and function of traditional story elements or "motifs" are carefully examined and compared. By analyzing the motifs of the Narcissus myth in such a manner, the original context of the telling of the myth is to be ascertained. Scholars have interpreted the function of the original water-gazing Narcissus as arising from the superstition that one could lose one's soul in turbulent waters or that one could give oneself the evil-eye, but it makes most sense in terms of revelation. The originating context of the myth could then have been the importation of the rite of hydromancy from Egypt to Greece and Rome around 100 B.C. (perhaps by Bolus of Mendes or through the cult of Isis and Osiris), at which time the divinatory prescriptions were explained not rationally as means of hypnotizing a boy-medium, but as narrative elements in a mythological story. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)