This dissertation investigates speech, silence, and power in the Tereus, Procne, and Philomela myth in four sources: Sophocles’ Tereus, Aristophanes’ Birds, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and the Pervigilium Veneris. I pose three questions about each work: 1. Whom does the author allow to speak, and whom does he silence? 2. How do speech and silence influence characterization, authority, and power? 3. How does the author’s socio-cultural environment influence the construction of those power hierarchies? Each author constructs a hierarchy of agency determined by communicative and silent roles. Sophocles’ Procne, Aristophanes’ Tereus, Ovid’s Philomela and Procne, and the Pervigilium’s Venus and swallow possess a heightened level of narrative agency that cannot be taken away, even if the ability to speak disappears; on the other hand, conspicuous silencing by the author reduces the narrative agency of characters like Aristophanes’ Procne, Ovid’s Tereus, or the Pervigilium’s narrator. These authorial decisions regarding speech and silence evince shifting engagements with each author’s socio-cultural environment and opportunities for artistic output. Moreover, these four authors also engage in an escalating series of mythic reversals and re-appropriations as they mold the details of the Tereus, Procne, and Philomela story into their narratives. First, Aristophanes reverses Sophocles’ empowerment of Procne and Philomela by effacing the violence of Sophocles’ tragedy; he mutes and objectifies Procne, erases Philomela entirely, and elevates Tereus into the bird-man-ruler paradigm that Peisetaerus hopes to emulate, thereby presenting a normative relationship of vocal man with silent woman in service of the movement of his plot. Then, in Augustan Rome, Ovid comments on the princeps’ increasing control over artistic output by acting as an arbiter of speech and silence, as he affords Philomela and Procne eloquent voices while conspicuously silencing Tereus; he “corrects” the Aristophanic “correction” of Sophocles. Finally, in Late Antiquity, the narrator of the Pervigilium laments his silence caused by constraints within panegyric, a genre that lacks a personal voice, such as that possessed by the swallow. He “corrects” Ovid’s presentation of the swallow’s song as the result of Philomela’s brutalization by casting it as a positive exemplum for his own poetry.

"Exclusion in Sophocles" dass Exklusion als Motiv sich durch alle erhaltenen Sophoklesstücke zieht nebst einiger der längeren Fragmente. Auffällig ist die Vielfalt des Motivs, welches sich auf einen Ausschluss aus der Familie (Elektra), der Stadt (Ödipus-Dramen), der Armee (Philoktet), der Gemeinschaft der Menschen (Tereus) und noch vieles Weitere bezieht. Diese Arbeit sammelt, ordnet und analysiert sophokleische Exklusionsszenarien. Insbesondere wird der Gebrauch von Tropologien des Un/Menschlichen in der extrinsischen Charakterisierung der tragischen Protagonisten herausgestellt sowie damit verbundene Metaphern des Pathologischen, Monströsen, Bestialen und sog. Primitiven als Marker und Auslöser von strukturellen Exklusionen. Dabei wird das Exklusionsmotiv nicht als vollendete Tatsache erfasst, sondern als dynamischer und sich teilweise über ganze Plots hinweg erstreckender Prozess, als Narrativ eines ehemals gut Eingegliederten und von der Gemeinschaft nach und nach Exkludierten. Gleichwohl diese Entwicklung vom tragischen Protagonisten in eloquenten und selbstdarstellerischen Reden vehement kritisiert wird, erwächst im Bereich der Metaphern und rhetorischen Bildsprache der Gemeinschaft eine regelrechte Ausradierung und Neuzuweisung seiner Identität. Durch eine vergleichende Gegenüberstellung beider Standpunkte stellt sich heraus, wie tiefgreifend die als Exkludierend handelnde Gemeinschaft in das Vorantschreiten des tragischen Geschehens involviert ist und die Dramen eben nicht nur—wie in zahlreichen Forschungsstandpunkten festgehalten—die Manci des Exkludierten Protagonisten als moralische Fabel vorführen. / Social exclusion as a literary theme is common to all of Sophocles' fully extant plays as well as some of the longer fragments. The variety of settings is wide, between exclusion from the family like for example in Electra, exclusion from the city as in the case of Oedipus, from a regiment of the armed forces like in Ajax or Philoctetes, or even humankind, like with Tereus. This inquiry sets out to present, taxonomize and unpack Sophoclean discourses of exclusion and their attaining literary tropes of the pathological, the bestial, the brutish, the monstrous, and the so-called uncivilized. The aim is to demonstrate how deeply implicated the whole cast of characters and their language are in the process of a tragedy unfolding, rather than the causes of tragedy being lodged in the doings of one protagonist alone. One key point argued here is that, instead of taking 'the isolation of the tragic hero' as fait accompli, exclusion is a dynamic process that often takes up the entire plot arc of a tragedy. In the space of extrinsic characterization, it is argued that a process of rhetorical erasure and overwriting of identity takes place, where peer groups gradually dismantle a formerly well-established identity and re-assign a new and undesirable one. It is shown how the protagonists seek to resist, lament or somehow negotiate this process through long and expansive speeches of futile self-reinstatement. In the synthesis of both, it is argued that Sophocles' deployment of the theme puts a critical spotlight on the rhetorics of exclusion and its discourses of the bestial, the brutal, and especially the pathological, which embed and frame the work's overall literary, cultural and dramatic effects.