After graduating from the Literae Humaniores course, which after the mid-nineteenth century came to revolve around Plato’s Republic, Walter Pater’s (1839-1894) professional duties spanning thirty years at Oxford were those of a philosophy teacher and lecturer of Plato. This thesis examines Pater’s deep engagement with Platonism in his work, from his earliest known piece, “Diaphaneitè” (1864), to his final book, Plato and Platonism (1893), treating both his criticism and fiction, including his studies on myth. Plato is an ideal philosopher, critic, and artist to Pater, exemplifying a literary craftsman who blends genres with the highest authority. Platonism is a point of contact with several of Pater’s contemporaries, such as Arnold and Wilde, from which we can take new measure of their critical relationships regarding aestheticism and Decadence. Pater’s idea of aesthetic education takes Platonism for its model, which heightens one’s awareness of reality in the recognition of form and matter. Platonism also provides a framework for critical encounters with figures across history, such as Wordsworth, Michelangelo and Pico della Mirandola in The Renaissance (1873), Marcus Aurelius and Apuleius in Marius the Epicurean (1885), and Montaigne and Giordano Bruno in Gaston de Latour (1896). In the manner Platonism holds that soul or mind is the essence of a person, Pater’s criticism, evident even in his fiction, seeks the mind of the author, so that his writing enacts Platonic love. Through close reading, we highlight his many references to Plato, identify Platonic subjects and themes, and explore etymological nuances in the very selection of his words, which often reveals a Platonic tendency of refinement towards immateriality, from seen to unseen beauty. As a teacher and an author Pater helped shape Oxonian Platonism, and through his writing we examine how Platonism informs his philosophy of aesthetics, history, myth, epistemology, ethics, language, and style.

This thesis examines the reception of Pindar in Hellenistic poetry. More specifically it examines texts of three major Hellenistic poets: Theocritus of Syracuse, Callimachus of Cyrene and Posidippus of Pella. The texts discussed have been selected on the basis of two principles: (i) genre and (ii) subject matter. They include texts that inscribe themselves in the tradition of encomiastic, and more specifically, Pindaric poetry either through the generic discourse which they partake in or through the employment of myths that Pindar had used in his own odes. Throughout the thesis it is argued that the connections with Pindaric passages are carried out on the basis of ‘allusions’ which are picked up by the readers. This term is employed to describe one of the ways in which intertextuality functions. Following the model of Conte and Barchiesi, the discussion insists on the distinction between allusions to specific Pindaric passages and allusions to epinician generic motifs that can best be illustrated through Pindaric passages. The aim of the discussion for each case of textual correspondence suggested is to describe the means whereby this connection is suggested to the reader and to propose a ‘meaning’ for it. In this sense, equal emphasis is given to the detailed examination of all texts that partake in the intertextual connection suggested, i.e. to Pindaric and Hellenistic alike.

The aim of this project is to account for the widespread reception of the epics of Homer and Virgil by American poets of the twentieth century. Since 1914, an unprecedented number of new poems interpreting the Iliad, Odyssey and Aeneid have appeared in the United States. The vast majority of these modern versions are short, combining epic and lyric impulses in a dialectical form of genre that is shaped, I propose, by two cultural movements of the twentieth century: Modernism, and American humanism. Modernist poetics created a focus on the fragmentary and imagistic aspects of Homer and Virgil; and humanist philosophy sparked a unique trend of undergraduate literature survey courses in American colleges and universities, in which for the first time, in the mid-twentieth century, hundreds of thousands of students were exposed to the epics in translation, and with minimal historical contextualisation, prompting a clear opportunity for personal appropriation on a broad scale. These main matrices for the reception of epic in the United States in the twentieth century are set out in the introduction and first chapter of this thesis. In the five remaining chapters, I have identified secondary threads of historical influence, scrutinised alongside poems that developed in that context, including the rise of Freudian and related psychologies; the experience of modern warfare; American national politics; first- and second-wave feminism; and anxiety surrounding poetic belatedness. Although modern American versions of epic have been recognised in recent scholarship on the reception of Classics in twentieth-century poetry in English, no comprehensive account of the extent of the phenomenon has yet been attempted. The foundation of my arguments is a catalogue of almost 400 poems referring to Homer and Virgil, written by over 175 different American poets from 1914 to the present. Using a comparative methodology (after T. Ziolkowski, Virgil and the Moderns, 1993), and models of reception from German and English reception theory (including C. Martindale, Redeeming the Text, 1993), the thesis contributes to the areas of classical reception studies and American literary history, and provides a starting point for considering future steps in the evolution of the epic genre.

Clement of Alexandria, active in the second half of the second century AD, is one of the first Christian authors to explain and defend the nascent religion in the terms of Greek philosophy and in relation to Greek paideia. His major work, the Stromateis, is a lengthy commentary on the true gnosis of the Christian faith, with no apparent overarching structure or organisational principle, replete with quotations from biblical, Jewish, Greek 'gnostic' and Christian works of all genres. This thesis seeks to read this complex and erudite text in conversation with what has been termed the ‘Second Sophistic’, the efflorescence of elite Greek literature under the Roman empire. We will examine the the text as a performance of authorial persona, competing in the agonistic marketplace of Greek paideia. Clement presents himself as a philosophical teacher in a diadoche from the apostles, arrogating to himself a kind of apostolic authority which appeals to both philosophical notions of intellectual credibility and Christian notions of the authentic handing down of tradition. We will also examine how the work engages key thematic concerns of the period, particularly discourses of intellectual eclecticism and ethnicity, challenging both Greek and Roman forms of hegemony to create a space for Christian identity. Lastly, this thesis will critically examine the Stromateis' intertextual relationship with the Homeric epics; the Iliad and the Odyssey are used as a testing ground for Christian self-positioning in relation to Greek culture as a whole. As we trace this variable relationship, we will also see the cross-fertilisation of reading strategies between Homer and the bible; these developing complex allegorical methods not only presage the rise of Neoplatonism, but also lay the foundations for changes in cultural authority which accompany the Christianisaton of the Roman empire in the centuries after Clement.

This thesis brings to light evidence for the circulation and first-hand reception of Aristotle's Poetics in sixteenth-century England. Though the Poetics upended literary thinking on the Continent in the period, it has long been considered either unavailable in England, linguistically inaccessible to the Greekless English, or thoroughly mediated for English readers by Italian criticism. This thesis revisits the evidentiary basis for each of these claims in turn. A survey of surviving English booklists and library catalogues, set against the work's comprehensive sixteenth-century print-history, demonstrates that the Poetics was owned by and readily accessible to interested readers; two appendices list verifiable and probable owners of the Poetics respectively. Detailed philological analysis of passages from Sir Philip Sidney’s Defence of Poesie proves that he translated directly from the Greek; his and his contemporaries' reading methods indicate the text circulated bilingually as standard. Nor was Sidney’s polyglot access unusual in literary circles: re-examination of the history of Greek education in sixteenth-century England indicates that Greek literacy was higher and more widespread than traditional histories of scholarship have allowed. On the question of mediation, a critical historiography makes clear that the inherited assumption of English reliance on Italian intermediaries for classical criticism has drifted far from the primary evidence. Under these reconstituted historical conditions, some of the outstanding episodes in the sixteenth-century English reception of the Poetics from John Cheke and Roger Ascham in the 1540s to Sidney and John Harington in the 1580s and 1590s are reconsidered as articulate evidence of reading, thinking about, and responding to Aristotle's defining contribution to Renaissance literary thought.

This dissertation aims at providing a new critical edition of the fictitious Letters of the Courtesans attributed to Alciphron (late 2nd or early 3rd century AD). The first part of the introduction begins with a brief survey of the problematic dating and identification of Alciphron, followed by a general overview of the epistolary genre and the letters of Alciphron. The main part of the introduction deals with the manuscript tradition. Eighteen manuscripts, which contain some or all of the Letters of the Courtesans, are described and the relationship between them is analyzed based on complete collations of all the manuscripts. The conclusion, which is illustrated by a stemma codicum, is that there are four primary manuscripts from which the other fourteen manuscripts derive: Vaticanus gr. 1461, Laurentianus gr. 59.5, Parisinus gr. 3021 and Parisinus gr. 3050. The introduction concludes with a brief chapter on the previous editions, a table illustrating the selection and order of the letters in the manuscripts and editions, and an outline of the editorial principles. The guiding principle for the constitution of the text has been to use conjectural emendation sparingly and to try to preserve the text of the primary manuscripts wherever possible. The critical apparatus has been divided into a main apparatus below the text, which reports variant readings from the primary manuscripts and a small selection of conjectures, and two appendices which report scribal conjectures from the secondary manuscripts and conjectures by modern scholars with bibliographical references. A third appendix has also been added which lists all conjectures adopted into the  text. The parallel translation, which is accompanied by brief explanatory notes on names and places, is literal and serves as a complement to the commentary, which primarily deals with matters of textual criticism. In the commentary problematic passages are discussed, especially where an emendation has been adopted or where the present edition differs from previous editions. After the three appendices the dissertation ends with a bibliography.

<p>This study presents a new reading of the <i>Perlesvaus</i>, an anonymous thirteenth-century Old French Grail romance bizarrely structured around an Arthurian restaging of the battle between the Old and the New Law. I construe this hyper-violent, phantasmagorical text as a profoundly significant work of “trauma fiction” encoding a hitherto-unrecognized crisis of religious ethics and identity in Western Europe in the first half of the thirteenth century. Combining literary and historical analysis and drawing on current trends in trauma studies, I tie what I term the “deranged discourse” of the <i>Perlesvaus</i> to the brutal onset of internal crusading in southern France (the papal-sponsored Albigensian Crusade, 1209-29), making the case that the collective trauma staged in its narrative perturbations was a contributing factor in the well-documented worsening of Western European antisemitism during this period. One key analytical construct I develop is the “doppelganger Jew”—personified in the <i>Perlesvaus</i> by its schizoid authority figure, Josephus, a conflation of first Christian priest and first-century Romano-Jewish historian—who functions as an uncanny embodiment of powerful, unacknowledged fears that Christians were losing their spiritual moorings and reverting into reviled, scapegoated Jews. Traces of this collective trauma are explored in other contemporary texts, and one chapter examines how the fourteenth-century <i>Book of John Mandeville</i> revives similar fears of collapsing Judeo-Christian identity and unfolds under the sign of the doppelganger Jew.</p>

<p>  </p> <p>     When it comes to advisors in Arthurian legends, Merlin is likely the first name that quickly comes to mind. However, few have recognized that Merlin is more than a supplementary character. Far beyond simply giving counsel, the prophet-mage actually makes a huge contribution to creating and governing the so-called Arthurian world. This project aims to examine the creation and consolidation of the British Merlin’s identity in Arthurian literature (primarily from the twelfth to the fifteenth century), arguing that Merlin is more than a powerful counselor of King Arthur—the prophet-mage is occasionally depicted as a racial “Other” when contrasted with Arthur and his British subjects; at other times, he is a doppelgänger of the legendary monarch who rules the kingdom; and at still other times he is a prophetic builder constructing a future that he envisions in the name of God. The kaleidoscopic representations of Merlin and his identities in Arthurian literature during this period reflect how Others—racial and otherwise, especially those who make temporary appearances at the center of the power structure—are perceived, treated, and exploited to help the British audience establish their common identity as an independent social group living in Britain. This project analyzes and compares, primarily through the lens of critical race theory and analysis of identity construction (both individual and communal), Merlin-texts composed and circulated in Britain from the twelfth century to the fifteenth century. The findings are supported by textual evidence and analyses of contemporary historical, political, and cultural context.</p> <p>     The project begins with a review of current scholarship in Merlin studies and the application of critical race theory in medieval studies. It demonstrates that previous scholarship on Merlin has mostly focused on analyzing what his extraordinary powers represent in the texts and how his prophetic ability was used for various political purposes, such as uniting a fractured community and providing a hopeful outlook to people under oppression. However, no satisfactory attempt has been made to explain how and why such an important character as Merlin only makes limited appearances in Merlin-texts and how his importance is continuously—even more profoundly—felt after his early removal from such texts. The mage’s apparent characteristics of Otherness and his abrupt removal from many Merlin-texts have provided ample grounds for the application of critical race theory. This theoretical approach, though relatively new in medieval studies, allows us to recognize that Merlin, as a racial Other in the center of a power structure, is paradoxically crucial but undesirable for the dominant group that has always perceived him as an outsider.</p> <p>     To highlight Merlin-figures’ much overlooked identity as an outsider, Chapter 1 traces the identities of the pre-Galfridian Merlin-figures in two traditions: Merlinus Ambrosius and Merlinus Caledonius. It demonstrates that while these pre-Galfridian Merlin-figures make hopeful prophecies for a community, they are also estranged from that particular community in different aspects. Their varied outsider identities—like wild man in the forest, warrior in political exile, mad prophet, and mixed-raced child living in the margins of society—constitute fertile grounds for kaleidoscopic portrayals of Merlins to come.</p> <p>     Chapter 2 then focuses on the first Merlin(s) introduced by Geoffrey of Monmouth. Through the lens of critical race theory, this chapter argues that Geoffrey’s Merlin(s) is already racially nuanced in aspects like religion and social status. His newly acquired identity as the son of an incubus endows him and his clan with extraordinary qualities that gradually become essentialized traits marking their identity as racial Others. This paves the way for Merlin’s further alienation and dehumanization in later Merlin-texts in which the abstract quality of Otherness begins to be visually and physically apparent on Merlin’s body. </p> <p>     After establishing Merlin as a racial Other, Chapter 3 proceeds to read Merlin as a doppelgänger of King Arthur—mainly in the Vulgate <em>Estoire de Merlin</em>. Focusing on Merlin’s much debated roles of prophet and architect, this chapter explores how (unlike most prophets in Arthurian literature) Merlin is often heavily—and intimately—involved with the future that he foretells, which makes his prophetic words appear more like personal prophetic blueprints in which he envisions what his world <em>could</em> be like instead of what it <em>ought</em> to have been. Since Merlin and Arthur share almost all traits of their identity except their blood, and Arthur, in many Merlin-texts, could only rule by closely following Merlin’s instructions, texts featuring a powerful Merlin often function as commentaries concerning issues like kingship and political powers of racial Others who “officially” cannot be recognized as holding significant power in communities in which their identities construct them as marginal or secondary. This is manifest in episodes like the disaster of May babies in the Post-Vulgate <em>Suite du Merlin</em> and Thomas Malory’s <em>Morte</em>, in which Arthur takes the action but Merlin takes the blame.</p> <p>     Finally, Chapter 4 examines Thomas Malory’s consolidation of the identities of the English Merlin towards the end of the fifteenth century. Through comparing the different depictions of Merlin among Malory’s <em>Morte</em> and three Middle English Merlin-texts circulating in the English-speaking community during this period, this chapter argues that Malory’s omission of Merlin’s early history is a crucial factor that allows the author to make his Merlin more adaptable to the needs of his contemporary English audience. That is, Malory’s Merlin can be God’s mouthpiece, the son of a devil, a trusted mentor, and an incredulous dream-reader all in one text. By leaving out Merlin’s early history, Malory consolidates the various Merlins into a familiar yet foreign face in the English Arthuriad, a meme-like character that evolves each time we encounter him in the texts. </p>

This study identifies and describes constituents, patterns and distribution of the system –or systems- of demonstratives of a representative selection of early Greek dialects, namely the “Arcado-Cyprian” group: Arcadian and Cyprian, including a short analysis of Pamphylian as well as a discussion of the particle νι/νυ and a brief note on Mycenaean; the “Aeolic” group: Lesbian, Boeotian and Thessalian; and a selection of West Greek dialects, including both “Doric” and “Northwest Greek” dialects: Elean, Cretan, Laconian, Cyrenaean and Theran. It also examines, describes and compares the syntactic functions and, where possible, pragmatic uses of the series of demonstratives in operation in the selected dialects, providing a classification capable of accounting for all uses cross-dialectically, as well as a succinct account of the evolution of the system of demonstratives from Indo-European to “Ancient Greek”. Additionally, it offers a glimpse of the way in which deixis and anaphora seem to have worked in early Greek dialectal inscriptions, addressing the issue of defining demonstrative pronouns, as well as deixis and anaphora in general terms. Finally, this thesis provides the basis for a cross-dialectal comparison of the structure and operation of the different systems of demonstratives, and corrects some general misconceptions about the scope, usage and inter-dialectal connections of some series of demonstratives, particularly with regard to Arcadian and Cyprian. The results of such a study might contribute towards the discussion of the classification and history of the evolution of early Greek dialects.

This thesis offers an approach to the history of mythographical discourse through the figure of Theseus and his appearances in texts from England, Italy and France. Analysing a range of poetic, historical, and allegorical works that feature Theseus alongside their classical and contemporary intertexts, it is a study of the conceptions of Greco-Roman mythology prevalent in European literature from 1300-1600. Focusing on mythology’s pervasive presence as a background to medieval and early modern literary and intellectual culture, it draws attention to the fragmentary, fluid and polymorphous nature of mythology in relation to its use for different purposes in a wide range of texts. The first impact of this study is to draw attention to the distinction between mythology and mythography, as a means of focusing on the full range of interpretative processes associated with the ancient myths in their textual forms. Returning attention to the processes by which writers and readers came to know the Greco-Roman myths, it widens the commonly accepted critical definition of ‘mythography’ to include any writing of or on mythology, while restricting ‘mythology’ to its abstract sense, meaning a traditional collection of tales that exceeds any one text. This distinction allows the analyses of the study’s primary texts to display the full range of interpretative processes and possibilities involved in rewriting mythology, and to outline a spectrum of linked but distinctive mythographical genres that define those possibilities. Breaking down into two parts of three chapters each, the thesis examines Theseus’ appearances across these mythographical genres, first in the period from 1300 to the birth of print, and then from the birth of print up to 1600. Taking as its primary texts works by Giovanni Boccaccio, Geoffrey Chaucer, John Lydgate and William Shakespeare along with their classical intertexts, it situates each of them in regard to their multiple defining contexts. Paying close attention to the European traditions of commentary, translation and response to classical sources, it shows mythographical discourse as a vibrant aspect of medieval and early modern literary culture, equally embedded in classical traditions and contemporary traditions that transcended national and linguistic boundaries.