My study focusses on the laments expressed by Ariadne and Dido in the poems of Catullus, Vergil and Ovid. My study examines the evolution of the character type of the lamenting woman from its Greek origins and portrayal to its presentation in Catullus 64, Aeneid 4 and Heroides 7 and 10. The scholarship and theories of Elizabeth Harvey, Rebecca Armstrong, Bridgitte Libby, Laurel Fulkerson and Sharon James were essential for my understanding and interpretation of these poems. I also consider the implications of male poets writing ventriloquized female voices. Over the course of three chapters, I argue that each of these authors contributes to the development and establishment of a new Romanized theme of the seduced and abandoned lamenting woman and character type. It is evident in each depiction of Ariadne and Dido that the authors build on the standard characterizations in Greek epic and tragedy, and that from these models a new type of lamenting woman emerged. With this project I intend to make a contribution to our understanding of the issues involved in the poetic portrayal of male and female voices in the context of the classical literary tradition of lamenting. / Thesis / Master of Arts (MA) / The aim of this thesis is to examine the motif of the lament of abandoned women in Latin poetry. My study focusses on the laments expressed by the characters of Ariadne and Dido in the ancient poems of Catullus, Vergil and Ovid. My study examines the evolution of the character type of the lamenting woman from its Greek origins and portrayal to its presentation in Catullus 64, Aeneid 4 and Heroides 7 and 10. Over the course of three chapters, I argue that each of these authors contributes to the development and establishment of a new Romanized theme of the seduced and abandoned lamenting woman and character type. With this project I intend to make a contribution to our understanding of the issues involved in the poetic portrayal of male and female voices in the context of the classical literary tradition of lamenting.

In Servius' commentary, there are two elusive statements concerning the ending of the Georgics. Both of these statements seem to imply that Vergil changed the ending of the Georgics and that the Orpheus epyllion as it now stands was a later edition to the poem. The question of whether or not Servius is correct in this assertion is a central question in Vergilian studies. By focusing on the reception of Orpheus prior to Vergil, the Roman Orpheus of Vergil's time, and Vergil's own use of the Orpheus figure, a potential answer emerges to the Servian question. In order to answer this question, the primary inquiry of this paper seeks to find from where Vergil received his Orpheus story. A comprehensive analysis of references to Orpheus in ancient literature leads to the conclusion that before the first-century B.C.E. the primary narrative of Orpheus is not one of failure. Rather, Orpheus appears to successfully retrieve his wife from the underworld. Orpheus does not appear as an important figure in Roman literature until the second half of the first-century when nearly at the same time as Vergil is writing the Georgics Orpheus' popularity explodes in Roman art and literature. Yet, Vergil does not seem to be the source of Orpheus' popularity in Rome, nor does Vergil seem to be inventing a new narrative in which Orpheus fails. The missing source for Vergil's Orpheus figure appears to belong to the first-century. Orpheus appears as a central figure in the Georgics, the Eclogues, the poems of Propertius, and the Culex. Each of these works is rife with references to the poetry of Cornelius Gallus. Given Gallus' prominence in first-century Roman poetry, his close association with Orpheus, the Servian claims of a laudes Galli in the fourth Georgic, and the rise of Orpheus' popularity in the second half of the first-century, Gallus seems a likely source for Vergil's Orpheus.

The purpose of this study of William Morris’s 1875 translation of Vergil’s Aeneid is to rehabilitate this translation after more than a century of almost total critical neglect. Following an introductory chapter that situates Morris within the context of emerging theories that seek to characterise the problems that are unique to classical translation activity and the nature of “retranslation” as promulgated by Laurence Venuti and others, I examine Morris’s preparation for this massive classical task, interrogating the extent and character of his classical education at Marlborough College and Oxford University in the 1850s. I then examine his “two Aeneids” – an illumination on vellum of Vergil’s epic in Latin, begun in 1874 with Edward Burne-Jones but never completed, and his subsequent unadorned translation of the Aeneid into English, which he completed in 1875 and which was published by the end of that same year – in a third chapter that engages what little criticism is available on the illuminations, before describing and interpreting them for the reader (plates are also provided as an Appendix.) My fourth chapter, the centrepiece of the dissertation, constitutes a close critical reading of Morris’s translation alongside the Latin original, and the final chapter rounds out the discussion by way of addressing the spotty critical treatment of this lengthy work of classical translation, after which I situate Morris within the history of English translations of the Roman epic by means of theory: namely, Antoine Berman’s “retranslation hypothesis”, Lawrence Venuti’s concept of “doubly-abusive fidelity”, and Siobhan Brownlie’s proposal for a post-structuralist retranslation theory. I conclude that a just interpretation of Morris’s achievement will begin with an understanding of his aesthetic, ethnic, and political motivations, and I conclude that his Aeneids are a unique and valuable contribution to late Victorian classical translation praxis.

In a 2005 work, Yasmin Syed concluded that the Aeneid created for ancient readers an idea of Romanness that was inclusive for all and not founded along strict genetic lines. Under this hypothesis, the Aeneid offers a sort of blueprint for becoming Roman, one in which biological descent from Aeneas is unnecessary. Syed reached this conclusion by analyzing themes of ethnicity and gender, in particular the ethnic other represented by the epic's female characters. This was accomplished in the manner so often chosen by Vergil scholars-by limiting analysis to the first half of the epic. The work concludes with an exhortation for others to extend the effort into Books VII-XII. Such an extension is undertaken here, but the conclusion reached is somewhat different than what Syed imagined. Instead of a blueprint for disparate people in conquered lands to become Roman, the second half of the epic empowers these groups by demonstrating that Rome could not exist without them. Roman power to rule, imperium, was not brought to the Romans by Aeneas. It is a product of what Vergil described as Itala virtute, or Italian manliness. The second half of the epic provides not a blueprint for citizenship but the schematics of the Roman state, one in which the mother city would have no ability to rule were it not for the Italian peoples. Vergil accomplishes this message by thoroughly emasculating both Aeneas and Turnus before their final confrontation. That scene is read here as one of copulation, the Italian ground serving as the marriage bed in a struggle to found Rome. But with both men portrayed as effeminate in this final scene, and imperium removed as one of the prizes in the battle by Jupiter himself, the offspring born of what must be read as two mothers rather than two fathers must itself be weak and impotent. Without the strength of the Italians, Rome will not succeed.

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To address every aspect in which Cleopatra VII asserted her right to rule and maintain the favor of her own subjects and of Rome would be far too large a task for anything less than a book-length treatment. Rather than attempt to address multiple issues, this thesis addresses just one aspect of Cleopatra's political strategy to visualize her legitimacy as ruler: namely a combination of masculine and feminine elements in her iconography. This thesis will then follow the same themes in elements of Cleopatra's visual rhetoric was seized upon by the poets of Augustan Rome, who used it to the opposite effect, making her out to be unfit to rule. In the case of Cleopatra's visual rhetoric, the emphasis shifts in different periods, as Cleopatra adapted her rhetorical strategy to her personal circumstances and her intended audience, at times emphasizing certain masculine elements and at other times focusing on feminine. The Roman authors, on the other hand, see Cleopatra's status in ruler as a usurpation of the masculine rule and therefore monstrous and unspeakable. In order to take the queen and fit her into a Roman world view, they make use of various types of women customary to Classical literature to confine her to a role appropriate”from their perspective"for a woman. In every case, however, gender is used to demonstrate Cleopatra's legitimacy, or perceived lack thereof.

In this dissertation I have offered studies on selected aspects of the third book of the Georgics, the second 'published' work of Vergil. The Georgics is a didactic poem in four books in which Vergil presents a discussion of various aspects of farming, advice on the maintenance of the land, the planting of crops with special attention to the cultivation of the vine and the olives and the keeping of livestock and bees. At various points in his presentation, Vergil suspends his didactic approach to offer comment on contemporary problems, the political corruption and chaos evident throughout all of Italy. These editorial intrusions by the concerned poet have prompted modern critics to transcend the limited critical approach which views the Georgics as nothing more than an agricultural manual in verse, and to appreciate the broader philosophic design of the poem. Within the technical framework of his poem Vergil is offering a vision of civilization with important moral and political implications for his age. In spite of this enlightened critical approach to the poem as a whole, the third book of the Georgics has suffered from scholarly neglect. Structurally its position in the poem is crucial: Vergil abandons the preoccupations with the vegetable world and inanimate Nature which characterize books I and II, and turns to animate representatives of Nature, cattle, horses, sheep, and goats, whose lives are marked by passionate involvement and turmoil. The principal themes of book III are love and death, and although Vergil never directly abandons his preoccupation with animals, I believe that he does intend his discussion to have important moral and political implications for men as well. In my study of the third Georgic I have emphasized a vital political direction for Georgic III: Vergil uses his agricultural material as metaphor and the principal representatives of the domestic agrarian world as symbols in his vision of concern for the fate of Rome and all of Italy. I have begun my study with a consideration of the changing agricultural patterns in the Italian peninsula during the last two centuries of the Republic in order to expose the glaring discrepancy between patterns of land utilization in peninsular Italy in the late Republic and the simple, subsistence farming which Vergil discusses in the Georgics. Vergil was aware of the agricultural conditions of his age and obviously did not intend his treatise to be interpreted literally as a technical manaal. A close comparison of his technical material with the agricultural discussion provided by Varro in the De Re Rustica, Vergil's principal source for his agricultural precepts, offers strong evidence of a basic disparity between the sophisticated artistic presentation of the third Georgie and the uninspiring prosaic aspects of his subject matter, and additional proof that Vergil intends a broader design for the third Georgie, a philosophic statement about man and the world. This broad direction is confinned by a consideration of the echoes of Lucretius' philosophic poem, the De Rerum Natura, which we find in Georgie III. Lucretius introduced a discussion of sex and plague into his own poem and Vergil profitsfran the example of his predecessor. But he never resorts to slavish imitation, but leaves behind Lucretius' preoccupation with abstract philosophical principles to offer his own vision of hope in a living ruler, Octavian. The ultimate message of Georgie III is intrinsically connected with the final book of the series. With his discussion of apiculture Vergil offers a vision of order, control, and political comnunity which cancels his earlier concerns with disorder and divisive passion. In the epyllion which concludes the poem, Vergil turns directly to the world of men, Aristaeus, the farmer, and Orpheus, the poet. With the miraculous tale of bougonia, the resurrection of a swarm of healthy new bees from the rotting corpse of a steer, Vergil offers a dramatic representation of regeneration which dispels the pessimistic obsession with death with which book III concludes, and signals optimistic hope for the political future of Rome. The tragic story of Orpheus, on the other hand, confirms Vergil's earlier judgment on passion and its destructive hold on the lives of men. At the same time, with the figure of Orpheus, Vergil considers the role of the poet in society and raises an issue which is not resolved concerning the possibilities for creative expression in the new regime. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Gaius Julius Caesar is not only the most well-known figure in Roman history, but he is also one of the most difficult to understand. Since his assassination, Caesar has played an important role in discussions of political power, imperial government, tyranny, and tyrannicide. While there have been literary treatments of Caesar from William Shakespeare to the present, little has been done to trace the image of Caesar through the Middle Ages and into the Renaissance. The present work attempts to fill that hole by examining portrayals of Caesar in medieval and early Renaissance texts. An examination of specific authors such as Geoffrey of Monmouth, John of Salisbury, Thomas Aquinas, Dante, Petrarch, Salutati, and Bruni, clearly demonstrates that Caesar was consistently portrayed as the first emperor and used to represent the Roman Empire. As the first emperor, representations of Caesar figured significantly in debates about the power of the Church and the Empire, the benefits and downfalls of imperial government, and tyrannicide. Authors were influenced in their portrayals of Caesar by the classical portrayals found in the works of Vergil, Lucan, and Suetonius. Each author's interpretation of Caesar was also impacted by the political and intellectual milieu in which he flourished. Analysis of Caesar's image over this time period serves not only as a part of Caesar historiography, but also provides insight into the ways that scholars write history to understand the world around them.

William Clarke (1976) and Nathan Greenberg (1980) offer an objective framework for the study of alliteration in Latin poetry. However, their definition of alliteration as word initial sound repetition in a verse is inconsistent with the syllabic nature both of the device itself and also of the metrical structure. The present study reconciles this disparity in the first half of the Aeneid by applying a similar method to syllable initial sound repetition. A chi-square test for goodness-of-fit reveals that the distributions of the voiceless obstruents [p], [t], [k], [k^w], [f], and [s] and the sonorants [m], [n], [l], and [r] differ significantly from a Poisson model. These sounds generally occur twice per verse more often than expected, and three or more times per verse less often than expected. This finding is largely consistent with existing observations about Vergil's style (e.g. Clarke, 1976; Greenberg, 1980; Wilkinson, 1963). The regular association of phonetic features with differences in distribution suggests phonetic motivation for the practice.

Since her first appearances, Venus has captivated the minds of poets. Her depictions in poetry are tied to each generation’s ideals of sexuality and beauty, and as morals and expectations of female behaviour change, so too do portrayals of the goddess. This thesis examines the shifting portrayals of Venus in poetry during a time of great social upheaval: the age of Augustus. The social and moral discourse of the period influenced the portrayals of Venus as the post-Civil War generation grappled with the newfound peace, a staunchly moralistic emperor who claimed descent from the goddess, and a series of legislations that reshaped the image of an ideal Roman woman. While the age of Augustus is overflowing with Latin poets, this thesis will dedicate itself to three: Vergil, Horace, and Ovid. Within their works, we can see the importance of the goddess’ portrayals and how their evolution can reflect Rome’s social, political, and moral climate. Vergil presents a transformed goddess, a morally upstanding mother who engages in the political and domestic spheres. Horace stands on the precipice of change, his Venus straddling the edges of elegy and epic. He recognizes and responds to a political, Augustan goddess before returning to more traditional elegiac matters. Our final source, Ovid, is seemingly traditional in his portrayals of the goddess. Closer examination of his works, however, reveals how Ovid’s Venus transformed from the traditional goddess of love and sexuality to become an empress in her own right. After the introduction of the lex Julia and Augustus’ portrayals of the goddess, the poets of his age used Venus as an exemplum of moral (or immoral) behaviour, motherhood, and dynastic pursuit.