This thesis looks closely at Propertius’ reception of the Antigone mythology in Propertius 2.8. First, I lay the groundwork to argue that Propertius is consciously receiving the Antigone mythology as found in Sophocles’ eponymous tragedy. I show through a close examination of language and themes that Propertius and Sophocles share semiotic markers of eroticized death that reveal Propertius’ intentional use of Sophocles’ tragedy, as opposed to other scholars who argue that Propertius is engaging with a later lost tradition of Haemon in Hellenistic poetry. After connecting Propertius with Sophocles, I explore the motif of eroticized death in mythological literature. I highlight four types of eroticized death with brief examples: 1) the suicide/intentional death of the lover at the death of the beloved by outside forces, 2) the mourning/survival of the lover at the accidental death of the beloved, 3) the suicide of the beloved at the abandonment of the lover, and 4) the intentional murder of the lover by the beloved because of betrayal. I then show that Propertius’ threat of murder and violence does not fit any of these categories and that he is innovating upon the theme of eroticized death. I then look closely at why a new type of eroticized death, one that is more extreme than other types, finds itself in the genre of poetry, which argues to depart from the world of masculine violence. I show that suicide occurs because of the poet’s insistence on being both poet and character of poetry, causing him to do harm to himself. The threat of the puella’s murder occurs because she embodies poetry itself, and the poet has become frustrated with the quality of his poems. Finally, I explore how readers can respond to violence towards a woman who is fictional and representative of poetry and argue that despite her identity residing in poetry that there is still concern for discussion about real domestic violence toward ancient women in erotic contexts.

This thesis is an attempt at a partial interpretation of Lucan's epic The Civil War (Bellum Civile). It pays special attention to the character of Caesar, who turns out to be at the centre of the poet's narrative and to whom the essential themes presented by the poet are related. The introduction of the work points to the importance of interpreting inconsistencies in the Roman epic (O'Hara), which has become the methodological basis for the submitted literary analyses of Lucan's work. Indeed, modern Lucan research (Henderson, Masters, Roller, O'Hara) shows that the fragmentation and inconsistencies of the individual voices, scenes and events in the epic are the artistic intent of the author and mirror the theme of his work - the deeply divided world in the civil war - in the form of his narrative. The main part of the work is devoted to analysing the passages of the epic in which the character of Caesar has a central position and which prove to be essential in the interpretation of the overall narrative of the work. These analyses show that one of the prominent themes of the epic is the theme of power. As can be seen from Caesar's characterization and his actions in the first five books of the epic, the character of Caesar is shrouded in an image of monstrosity and unstoppability, which, however,...

Catulle, dans le poème 64, invente une ekphrasis d’un nouveau genre : au lieu de décrire une œuvre d’art dans sa matérialité pour la mettre sous les yeux des lecteurs selon la tradition rhétorique, il fait parler son personnage principal, Ariane. En quoi la figure d’Ariane a-t-elle permis à Catulle d’entériner une évolution de l’ekphrasis entamée par la littérature hellénistique, à savoir la focalisation non sur la matérialité de l’objet, mais sur son sens, une réflexion sur les liens entre vision et diction ? Il convient d’éclairer ce poème majeur de la littérature latine en le réintégrant, d’une part, aux multiples représentations figurées d’Ariane dans l’Antiquité et, d’autre part, à la lignée des ekphraseis précédentes, concept entendu au sens de « texte consacré à une œuvre d’art » pour inclure descriptions mais aussi narrations ou courts dialogues comme ceux des épigrammes ecphrastiques. En particulier, la prise de parole de l’objet d’art se révèle un topos épigrammatique hellénistique qui nécessite une étude systématique. Ce motif, baptisé topos de l’illusionnisme de l’art, mesure la qualité d’une œuvre d’art à sa capacité à sembler sur le point de parler, se mouvoir ou prendre vie. La typologie de ce topos met en évidence l’évolution de l’esthétique et de la relation entre poésie et arts figurés. Le poème 64 de Catulle se révèle alors reprendre ce topos – comme de nombreux textes après lui – pour constituer une surenchère illusionniste dans l’ekphrasis où l’œuvre d’art prend vie. La poétique de Catulle trouve un éclairage nouveau qui permet de mieux tracer la réception de l’esthétique alexandrine à Rome et l’influence de Catulle sur les poètes latins postérieurs. / This interdisciplinary dissertation uses text and image studies, intertextuality and metapoetics to analyze the relationships between vision and diction in ekphraseis understood as texts devoted to works of art, and particularly in Catullus’s canonical poem 64. Poem 64 has puzzled many critics by its “disobedient ekphrasis” of a coverlet: not only does it scarcely describe its subject, but it turns into a long monologue by Ariadne, the main figure woven into the coverlet. I argue that, far from disregarding the coverlet, Catullus elaborates on a topos of Hellenistic ekphrastic epigrams that measures an artwork’s value by its illusionist capacity to “seem about to speak” and “come to life”. My extensive classification of the epigrammatic variants of this topos reveals its presence in Catullus through specific keywords. Ariadne’s representation on the coverlet is so lifelike that it starts to speak. Instead of following the critical tradition which considers Ariadne’s speech as another instance of epic or tragic monologue, I analyze it as a major Catullan innovation, in dialogue with the aesthetic debates of his day. Bringing together Hellenistic and Roman figurative arts and literatures sheds a new light on Catullan poetics and, more generally, on the reception of Alexandrian aesthetics in Rome and on Catullus’s influence on posterior Latin poets.

The thesis has been written as part of the AHRC collaborative research project Greek Epic of the Roman Empire: A Cultural History. This project seeks to give the first cultural-historical analysis of the large, underexploited corpus of Greek epic poetry composed in the transformative period between the 1st and the 6th centuries C.E. The thesis focuses on questions of literary identity in one of the most challenging texts from this corpus, the Posthomerica by Quintus of Smyrna (c. 3rd century C.E.). My central contention is that Quintus’ mimicry of Homer represents a radically new formative poetics, suggesting a cultural movement towards mimesis, necromancy and close encounters with the past. After a detailed study of what I term the reanimating culture of imperial Greece (chapter 1), and a comprehensive reanalysis of the compositional techniques of the text (chapter 2), I identify a number of tropes of poetic identity from different ancient literary modes: programmatic proems (chapter 3), memory (4), filiation (5) and temporality (6). I show how Quintus co-opts these themes for his new poetics, to turn the symbolic toolkit of contrast imitation into a defence of writing inter-Homeric epic. This analysis insists on rethinking the nature of the relationship between the poetry of this era and that of previous aesthetic traditions: particularly, I argue against a view of the Posthomerica as Alexandrian, and see it instead pushing back against the Callimachus school of small, new poetry. Ultimately, the thesis aims to show how the Posthomerica could be pivotal for unpinning current critical assumptions about imperial Greek poetry; revealing a palpable shift in tone in the construct of the literary self.

This thesis places Chaucer within the tradition of philosophical poetry that begins in Plato and extends through classical and medieval Latin culture. In this Platonic tradition, poetry is a self-reflexive epistemological practice that interrogates the conditions of art in general. As such, poetry as metapoetics takes itself as its own object of inquiry in order to reinforce and generate its own definitions without regard to extrinsic considerations. It attempts to create a poetic-knowledge proper instead of one that is dependant on other modes for meaning. The particular manner in which this is expressed is according to the idea of the loss of the Golden Age. In the Augustinian context of Chaucer’s poetry, language, in its literal and historical signifying functions is an effect of the noetic fall and a deformation of an earlier symbolism. The Chaucerian poems this thesis considers concern themselves with the solution to a historical literary lament for language’s fall, a solution that suggests that the instability in language can be overcome with reference to what has been lost in language. The chapters are organized to reflect the medieval Neoplatonic ascensus. The first chapter concerns the Pardoner’s Old Man and his relationship to the literary history of Tithonus in which the renewing of youth is ironically promoted in order to perpetually delay eternity and make the current world co-eternal to the coming world. In the Miller’s Tale, more aggressive narrative strategies deploy the machinery of atheism in order to make a god-less universe the sufficient grounds for the transformation of a fallen and contingent world into the only world whatsoever. The Manciple’s Tale’s opposite strategy leaves the world intact in its current state and instead makes divine beings human. Phoebus expatriates to earth and attempts to co-mingle it with heaven in order to unify art and history into a single monistic experience. Finally, the Nun’s Priest’s Tale acts as ars poetica for the entire Chaucerian Performance and undercuts the naturalistic strategies of the first three poems by a long experiment in the philosophical conflict between art and history. By imagining art and history as epistemologically antagonistic it attempts to subdue in a definitive manner poetic strategies that would imagine human history as the necessary knowledge-condition for poetic language.