Thesis (Ph.D.)--McMaster University, 2005. / Supervisor: Howard Jones. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 264-272). Also available via World Wide Web.

Literary histories of specific genres like tragedy or epic typically concern themselves with influence and deviation, tradition and innovation, the genealogical links between authors and the forms they make. Renaissance scholarship is particularly suited to these accounts of generic evolution; we read of the afterlife of Senecan tragedy in English drama, or of the respective influence of Virgil and Lucan on Renaissance epic. My study of epic poetry differs, though: by insisting on the primacy of material conditions, social organization and especially information technology to the production of literature, I present a discontinuous series of set pieces in which any given epic poem—the Iliad, the Aeneid, or The Faerie Queene—is structured more by local circumstances and methods than by authorial responses to distant epic predecessors. Ultimately I make arguments about how modes of literary production determine the forms of epic poems. Achilleus’ contradictory and anachronistic funerary practices in Iliad 23, for instance, are symptomatic of the accumulative transcription of disparate oral performances over time, which calls into question what, if any artistic ‘unity’ might guide scholarly readings of the Homeric texts. While classicists have conventionally opposed Virgil’s Aeneid to Lucan’s Bellum Civile on aesthetic and political grounds, I argue that both poets endorse the ethnographic-imperialist ideology ‘virtus at the frontier’ under the twin pressures of Julio-Claudian military expansion and the Principate’s instrumentalization of Roman intellectual life in its public library system. Finally, my chapter on Renaissance English epic demonstrates how Spenser and Milton grappled with humanist anxieties about the political utility of the classics and the unmanageable archive produced by print culture. It is my hope that this thesis coheres into a narrative of a particularly long-lived genre, the epic, and the mutations and adaptations it underwent in oral, manuscript, and print contexts.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago, Dept. of Classical Languages and Literatures, December 2003. / Includes bibliographical references. Also available on the Internet.

The thesis seeks to investigate primarily the philosophical treatises with the title pe?? [?] which were written in the Hellenistic period, that is from the age of Alexander to the end of the Roman Republic. It aims to discover their contents, purposes, similarities and differences, and so to illuminate the attitudes of philosophers and other educated men to the Hellenistic monarchies. Each work discussed is put as far as possible in its historical context in order to demonstrate the relationship between philosophical theory and political practice, and in order to show how philosophers influenced and were influenced by the kings they advised. The Introduction discusses the origins and growth of ideas about kingship in the archaic and classical periods: it treats in outline the main influences on later thought. Part I deals with the known evidence for works pe?? [?]. Chapter 1 concerns treatises addressed to Alexander or written during his lifetime. In particular the evidence for Aristotle's relationship with Alexander is discussed in connection with his alleged pe?? [?]; his section on kingship in book iii of the Politics is analysed; and the Arabic treatise recently discovered is shown to be a forgery of Roman imperial date. The works of Xenocrates and Anaxarchus are also discussed. This chapter is particularly concerned with the rivalries between the various philosophers around the figure of Alexander. Chapter 2 deals with the other Hellenistic treatises whose authorship is known, by philosophical schools - the Peripatetics, Epicureans, Stoics, and 'Pythagoreans'. Chapter 3 gives the fragmentary evidence from papyri and Suidas. Part II attempts to fill out this picture, and show the inter-relationship between native and Greek traditions in the world of Hellenistic literature, by taking three extant prose works where a theoretical attitude to kingship can be seen. Again these works are discussed in detail, reconstructed where necessary, and an attempt is made to date them and relate them to their historical background. Chapter 1 deals with the work of Hecataeus of Abdera on Egypt, and especially the section on Pharaonic kingship (preserved in Diodorus book i). Chapter 2 discusses the letter of Aristeas to Philocrates, and especially the relationship between the section on kingship which it contains and the purpose of the work as a whole. Chapter 3 is an analysis of Philodemus, On the Good King according to Homer, which attempts to show the purpose of the work, and the limitations on the use of ideas of kingship in the Roman political world of the late Republic. There are four appendices, the last of which contains a translation of the new text of the Arabic letter of Aristotle to Alexander On Government, by myself and S.M. Stern; it is given here purely for the convenience of the examiners, since it is unpublished, and should not be considered part of the thesis proper.

The broad objective of this dissertation is an interdisciplinary study uniting historical linguistics, classical philology, and comparative poetics in an attempt to investigate archaic Greek poetic texts from a diachronic perspective. This thesis consists of two parts. The first part, “Etymology and Poetics”, is devoted to several cases where scantiness of attestation and lack of semantic information render traditional philological methods of textual interpretation insufficient. In such cases, the meaning of a word has to be arrived at through linguistic analysis and verified through appeal to related poetic traditions, such as that of Indo-Iranian. Chapter 1 proposes a new interpretation for the enigmatic word ἀάατο̋, the Homeric epithet of the waters of the Styx, which is shown to have meant ‘sunless’. Chapter 2 deals with the word ἀριδείκετο̋, argued to mean ‘famous’: this solution finds support in the use of the root *dei̯k- in the poetic expression “to show forth praise”, found in Greek choral lyric and the Rigveda. Chapter 3 investigates the history of the verbs ἰάπτω ‘to harm’ and ἰάπτω ‘to send forth (to Hades)’. Chapter 4 improves the text of Pindar (O. 6.54), restoring a form ἀπειράτωι. Chapter 5 discusses the difficult word ἀμαυρό̋, establishing for it a meaning ‘weak’ and proposing a new etymology. Finally, Chapter 6 places Alc. 34 in the context of comparative mythology, with the object of reconstructing the history of the Lesbian lyric tradition. The second part, “Grammar of Poetry”, shifts the focus of the inquiry from comparative poetics to the language of early Greek poetry and its use. Chapter 7 addresses the problematic Homeric aorist infinitives in -έειν, showing how these artificial forms were created by allomorphic remodeling driven by metrical necessity; the problem is placed in the wider context of the debate about the transmission and development of Homeric epic diction. The metrical and linguistic facts relating to the distribution of infinitives are further discussed in Chapter 8, where it is argued that the unexpected Aeolic form νηφέμεν in Archil. 4 should be viewed as an intentional allusion to the epic tradition, specifically, the famous midsummer picnic scene in Hesiod. / Linguistics

This dissertation investigates how Augustan poetry imagines, redefines and reconfigures the idea of the chorus. It argues that the chorus, a quintessential marker of Greek culture, was translated and transformed into a peculiarly Roman phenomenon whereby poets invented their relationship with an imagined past and implicated it in the present. Augustan poets, I suggest, created a sustained and intensely intertextual choral poetics that played into contemporary poetic debates about the power of writing versus song and the complexity of responding to performance culture through multiple layers of written tradition. Focusing in particular on Virgil’s Aeneid, Propertius’ Elegies and Horace’s Odes, the dissertation uses a series of case studies to trace the role played by scenes of embedded choral song and dance in Augustan poetics. The scene is set by comparing how a range of texts respond differently to a single fundamental aspect of Greek choral culture—the figure of the chorus leader—and by establishing Catullus as an important predecessor to Augustan choral discourse. The dissertation then turns to explore how choral language and imagery become involved in some of the central issues of Augustan poetry: Latin love poetry’s construction of female desirability and male anxiety, the creation of poetic authority in Augustan lyric and elegy, and the search for the origins of Roman ritual in Virgil’s Aeneid. Finally, these embedded scenes are juxtaposed with Horace’s Carmen Saeculare, a text composed, remarkably, for choral performance on the Roman civic stage, which is shown to activate the choral metaphor that had been created by the Latin literary imagination. By demonstrating Augustan poetry’s engagement with this aspect of Greek performance culture, the study sheds new light on the relationship between Greek and Roman poetry, shifting the focus from the reinvention of Greek genres and the study of particular sites of allusion towards an understanding of the complex dynamics of reception and reconfiguration at work in these poets’ reappropriation of both a literary and cultural idea. / The Classics

This dissertation is centered around two related questions: How does literature contribute to the creation of identity? How does narrative locate individuals in the world? It studies how both individual and ethnic identity is shaped by the imagined landscapes encountered by the protagonists of the Greek novel over the course of their journeys. In this dissertation, I develop a model for reading the protagonists' travels across the Mediterranean as an integral part of the genre's narrative strategy. I begin by tracing the novels’ conceptual geographies of the Mediterranean world and the relationship between geographical movement and narrative. The core of my project examines three aspects of the imaginary worlds encountered by the novels’ protagonists: exotic animals, the relationship between humans and their natural landscapes, and exotic societies, customs, and religions. My study ends in Meroë, in the tenth and final book of Heliodoros’ Aithiopika. Meroë is a terminus in two senses: located on the edge of the known world, it is the most exotic of any place visited in the extant novels; it also represents the undoing of exoticism. Heliodoros’ novel describes a gradual process in the course of which Meroë becomes a Greek cultural enclave in an alien land, one that is parallel to, and associated with, Delphi, the religious center of the Hellenic world. Using literary and epigraphic sources alongside ancient visual media and archaeological evidence from Greco-Roman and Egyptian contexts throughout this study, I rethink the relationship between identity, narrative, and the exoticism in the novels. I argue that through their descriptions of wide-ranging travel and exotic locales, the novels reflect a multiplicity of individual ways to be Greek and the many models against which an individual’s Hellenic identity can define itself. The ancient novel is therefore an important expression of Greek identity in the Roman Imperial period. / The Classics

My dissertation investigates the reception of Cicero in the early Roman Empire, focusing on the first 250 years after his death. I show that this reception is primarily constructed by the ancient rhetorical schoolroom, where young Romans first encountered Cicero, reading his speeches and writing Ciceronian declamations. Here they were exposed to a particular version of the man, with emphases often selected for political purposes. When they grew up, that schoolroom image of Cicero continued to permeate their thought and writing. My study unpacks this complex process and lays bare the early Empire's relationship with one of its most significant late Republican predecessors. / The Classics

For the first time, the reception of the poetic legacy of the Latin poet Horace (65 B.C.-8 B.C.) in the poetics courses taught at the Kyiv Mohyla Academy (17th-first half of the 18th century) has become the subject of a wide-ranging research project presented in this dissertation. Quotations from Horace and references to his oeuvre have been divided according to the function they perform in the poetics manuals, the aim of which was to teach pupils how to compose Latin poetry. Three main aspects have been identified: the first consists of theoretical recommendations useful to the would-be poets, which are taken mainly from Horace's Ars poetica. The second aspect is the use of Horace's poetry as a model of word usage, tropes, rhetorical figures, and metrical schemes. Finally, the last important aspect of the reception of Horace is how his works could be imitated and his words or dicta borrowed in the composition of poetry, in which students were expected to exercise as part of the poetics course. The research draws the conclusion that Horace's legacy was of paramount importance in the manuals analyzed: on the one hand the Mohylanian poetics teachers' tendency (after Renaissance literary theorists and critics) to consider poetry within rhetorical categories rendered Horace's Ars Poetica extremely congenial to them. On the other, Horace's ideas were extrapolated from their original context and at times modified to serve a moralistic and "utilitarian" conception of poetry, which considered the latter as an instrumental science that served the ends of moral philosophy. With its metrical virtuosity and brilliant verbal craftsmanship, Horace's poetry provided an excellent model for the introduction of Christian content. The analysis of the way pagan authors (Horace first and foremost) were elaborated in a Christian key in the poetry composed by Mohylanian teachers and pupils indicates that education (and with it the assimilation of the Classics) at the KMA was not extraneous to the integration of ancient learning in Christian thinking as it took place in the different confessional schools of contemporary Western Europe. / Slavic Languages and Literatures

<p>Modern scholars cannot agree how extant fragments of thought attributed to Leucippus and Democritus integrate (or do not) to form a coherent perspective on the ancient Greek world. While a certain degree of uncertainty is unavoidable, given the nature of the evidence available and the fact that Democritus wrote many different works (including at least one in which he deliberately argued against positions that he defended elsewhere), this study demonstrates that we know enough to take a more integrative view of the early atomists (and of Democritus in particular) than is usually taken. In the case of Democritus, this study shows that it makes good sense to read what remains of his works (physical, biological, and ethical) under the presumption that he assumes a single basic outlook on the world, a coherent perspective that informed every position taken by the atomist philosopher. </p><p> Chapter 1 provides an in-depth portrait of the historical and philosophical context in which early atomism was born. As part of this portrait, it offers thumbnail sketches of the doctrines attributed to a representative catalogue of pre-Socratic philosophers to whom published work is attributed (Anaximander, Xenophanes, Heraclitus, Parmenides, Empedocles, Anaxagoras, Philolaus). It demonstrates how each philosopher presumes that his theory offers a universal outlook on human reality, a perspective on the universe which purposely encompasses (and builds into a single theoretical framework) physics and biology and practical ethics.</p><p> Chapter 2 introduces the early atomists as respondents to the pre-Socratic movement before them (a movement which this study refers to as the Critical Tradition). It presents evidence for an integrated reading of early atomist fragments, a reading that construes the Leucippus and Democritus as men of their time (working with and responding to the positions taken by their predecessors in the Critical Tradition).</p><p> Chapter 3 shows how Democritus' ethics arise naturally from his physics via an historical process of development. Like his predecessors in the Critical Tradition and many of his contemporaries, the atomist deliberately imagines nature (physics) providing the raw material from which culture (ethics) naturally and inevitably rises. </p><p> Chapter 4 offers an original reading of extant ethical fragments of Democritus, showing how the atomist uses his unique outlook on the world to develop a practical approach to living well.</p> / Dissertation