Few have paid attention to the role that pan-Hellenic religious norms play in Thucy-dides‟s The Peloponnesian War. This thesis investigates the trope of religious sacrilege in the form of violated sacred space. By examining how this trope functions within his chosen rhetori-cal presentation, I will argue that a secular interpretation of Thucydides does not accord with what he tries to accomplish within his narrative, and that scenes describing such sacrilege actual-ly function in crucial ways to support a major premise of his work. Two specific instances of sacrilege will be examined: the civil war on Corcyra in 427 BCE; and the Battle of Delion in 424/3 BCE. I will demonstrate that Thucydides incorporates sacrilege to serve as evidence for his readers that the Peloponnesian War was the worst war the Greek-speaking world had everexperienced, and that religio-cultural norms, however unanimously conceived and internally ob-vious, are inherently fragile and unstable.

My dissertation investigates Thucydides’ presentation of Sparta. By viewing the war through Sparta, one is confronted with debates on the moral dimensions of war. Sparta decries the imperialism of Athens as unjust and while the Athenians imply that such claims are merely Spartan ‘hypocrisy’ and therefore that Sparta does not truly take justice seriously, my study contends that the Spartan concern with justice and piety is genuine. While the Athenians present a sophisticated and enlightened view of what they believe guides all political actions (a view most scholars treat as Thucydides’ own) my study argues that Sparta raises problems for key arguments of the ‘Athenian thesis.’ Through a closer study of Thucydides’ Sparta, including his neglected Book 5, I locate details of both Sparta’s prosecution of the war and their regime that must be considered before agreeing with the apparent sobriety and clear-sightedness of the Athenians, thus leading the reader into the heart of Thucydides’ view of morality in both foreign affairs and domestic politics. A portion of this research is currently being prepared as an article-length study on the broad and important issue of hypocrisy in foreign affairs among states.

This thesis expands upon the notion that Thucydides’ plague narrative in his History of the Peloponnesian War punctuates his argument for the unique greatness of the Peloponnesian War. Through the plague, Thucydides displays the collapse of Greek society’s standards and practices. He does this by describing a plague which does not conform to 5th century BCE Greek medical ideas. Balance, human art, and divine intervention all fail in their attempts to restore the health of the individual and society. Thucydides portrays the plague as a narrative aggressor whose intent is to topple Athens and its ideals. Lucretius’ plague narrative, because it narrates the same historical moment but from a different perspective, is then discussed in order to demonstrate how other authors have used Thucydides’ technique.

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This study aims to examine the historical accuracy and historical usage in Ubisofts video-game Assassin’s Creed Odyssey. The study also examines the game’s potential to be used in teaching history in the upper secondary schools. The tools of the analysis are based on four different categorization models to analyze historical games and their didactic abilities. I have made some modifications to the different models, mainly because of the time-limit of this study. Furthermore, I have presented a crucial and relevant selection of previous research in the field of historical computer games, along with a summarizing description of the game-series Assassin’s Creed. The results from this study shows that the game is heavily influenced by history, and the historical accuracy can be noticed throughout the game. However, the game mixes the historical accuracy with fictional and fantastic elements in order to make the story and narrative of the game more intriguing and playable. The potential of the game in the upper secondary school is found to be problematic, mainly because of the time-limit and economical aspects. Nevertheless, the historical content of the game can easily be connected to the national curriculum, which means that the potential of making use of the game in the classroom should not be entirely dismissed.

L’objet de cette thèse de doctorat est un homme d’État (diplomate, politique et stratège) de la guerre du Péloponnèse qui a marqué la production littéraire de son siècle, avant de devenir une figure historique présente dans la littérature grecque et latine jusqu’à la fin de l’Antiquité tardive. Son dessein n’est pas de composer une nouvelle biographie d’Alcibiade, mais de proposer une étude renouvelée du personnage en prenant en considération les spécificités du corpus littéraire (genres, aspects fragmentaires, éloignement chronologique, idéologies etc.) et en intégrant les sources archéologiques et épigraphiques, trop peu mobilisées dans les précédentes études biographiques.Le titre de la thèse, Alcibiade entre hybris et tolma (entre démesure et audace) chez Thucydide, décrit par les termes grecs eux-mêmes l’ambivalence du portrait d’Alcibiade dans le corpus des sources littéraires. Il est l’homme des excès, de la démesure, des violences, de l’audace et des grands projets. Son sous-titre, Approche critique des sources, indique la nécessité d’un réexamen détaillé d’un vaste corpus de textes antiques. Nous démontrons cette nécessité dans notre introduction, tout en établissant les problèmes inhérents au texte de Thucydide. / The subject of this PhD is actually a stateman (a diplomat, a politician, a strategist) of the Peloponnesian war who influenced the literary production of his century even before he became a historical figure in Greek and Latin literature, up until late Antiquity. The purpose of this dissertation is not to write a new biography of Alcibiades but to carry out a renewed study of the character by taking into account the specificities of the literary body of works (genres, fragmentary aspects, distance in time, ideologies, etc.) and integrating archaeological and epigraphic sources which have been sidelined too often in previous biographies.The dissertation’s title itself, Alcibiades, between hybris and tolma (between immoderation and boldness) in Thucydides’ work describes even in Greek the ambivalence of Alcibiades’ portrait in literary sources. He is a man of excess, of transgression, of violence, of boldness and great perspectives. The subtitle, A critical approach of sources, indicates that it is necessary to reexamine in a detailed way a vast and detailed body of works. The introduction shows that this reexamination is necessary, though it also shows how difficult it is to study Thucydides’ text.

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In this study, I challenge previous assumptions on Thucydides’ silence on gender in the History in order to understand this erasure as a central component of the historian’s attempt at asserting authorial control over a narrative of crisis. My project investigates the gendered strategies employed by Attic tragedy and historiography to represent defiant speakers – characters who challenge traditional speech, like Antigone or the Corcyreans, or those who speak ambiguously, like Cassandra and Alcibiades – in the context of 5th century Athens. Rather than offering a historical reconstruction of the relationship between Thucydidean historiography and drama, my project presents a theoretical reorientation of how the two genres can and should be read in parallel. Methodologically, I integrate close readings with the insights afforded by Anne Carson’s creative engagements with antiquity in order to analyze how gender structures the meaning-making systems in these narratives. Following a chronotropic trajectory, this dissertation investigates how gender refracts through the ways in which the tragedians and Thucydides represent issues of time, space and place, and perception; it then ends by returning to time to offer a critical re-evaluation of the receptions and afterlives of Greek tragedy and history. Ultimately, this study offers a methodology that helps us model a parallel reading of Attic tragedy and Thucydidean historiography; not in order to “test out” the historicity of tragedy against Thucydides’ account, but rather to use tragedy to fill the gap of gender in the History. Probing this dialogue – a dialogue informed as much by silence and omission as by contact and shared vocabulary – among ancient and modern, tragic and historiographic, originary and receptive models of literary entanglement challenges us to rethink the political potential of transgressive speakers within canonical narratives, and to reflect on the role that gender has in shaping these discursive tensions.

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Before 1891, it was commonly accepted that the most important source for the rule of the Four Hundred in Athens in 411 BCE was Thucydides' description. The situation changed thanks to the publication of the Aristotelian treatise On the Athenian Constitution, whose version of events differed markedly from Thucydides' one. There followed many attempts at determining which of the two versions was most reliable, or at combining the two versions. These controversies are the focal point of this thesis, but its ambitions are not limited to them: its ambition is also to reconstruct the chronology of the rule of the Four Hundred as precisely as is possible in context of the Peloponnesian war; and to formulate the limitations that are imposed on us by the character of sources at our disposal. Continuity of the coup with earlier developments and its impact on subsequent events are dealt with more briefly.