The Eternal Boy is a Greek Tragedy that considers the consequences of the Great God Pan’s death.

Since the mid-1970s, classical scholars have taken a new interest in the study of women in antiquity. Prior to this time, the cultures of Ancient Greece and Rome were studied, like much world history, from a masculine perspective. The literature in the growing field of feminist research is centered on the misogyny of these ancient cultures. Although I agree with their observation that women were subordinate and not afforded the exact same freedom as men, I also believe something is missing in their assessment of women in antiquity, especially with regard to the moral virtues embraced by the culture of the Ancient Greeks and the mythic medium through which those beliefs were transmitted. This thesis presents the characters of Penelope from The Odyssey and Clytaemnestra from The Oresteia as paradigms, or role models, of good and evil for all of Greek society's members. I argue against the view held by some feminist scholars that regard the female characters of Greek myth merely as illustrating the misogyny of Greek culture. Those particular feminist views, in addition to being anachronistic, are based on too narrow an understanding of Greek society and the role that myth plays in that culture. By contrast, I argue that these archetypes represent any member of society and should not be considered, on a scholarly level, merely as examples of misogyny. Because of the important role that myth provided and the equivalent value of the freedom afforded to each sex in fulfilling their societal roles under the conditions of life within Greek culture, these two female characters represent the paradigms of the ideal and the ignoble for that society's entire citizenry. Greek myths and the characters within them are actually expressive of the consequences of the actions of any individual and provide Greek society with a lesson on appropriate behavior within one's role in the larger order of society.

In Book IV of Paradise Regained, Satan tempts Christ by offering him the learning of the Greek philosophers, poets, and orators. Christ's response is a vehement denigration of Greek literature, which seems to contradict the praise of the classics found in Milton's prose works of the 1640s. Interpreting the condemnation of Greek learning in Paradise Regained as a modification of the poet's early attitudes, the present study examines the biographical, political, theological, and scientific factors which influenced Milton's thought and altered his opinions on the value of classical literature.

Inspired by Vladimir Nabokov’s metafiction novel Pale Fire and with Joseph Campbell’s research in comparative mythology and religion in mind, I explore the act of mythmaking and the composition of metafictional text in this work of fiction. The myth aspect combines elements of Classical, biblical, medieval, Romantic, and original materials to form a product that should strike readers as both familiar and alien, demonstrating Campbell’s notion of the monomyth as well as the ongoing tradition of mythmaking that continues to captivate both readers and writers. The metafictional portion of the text emphasizes a reader’s relationship to a work of fiction, a scholar’s relationship to his or her scholarly work, and a subtext’s relationship to its primary text. Combining the texts encourages the reader to read critically and reevaluate his or her conceptions of genre in order to piece together the greater story of tyranny and rebellion.

This thesis analyses the relationship between Marcus Porcius Cato Censorius and his eldest son, Marcus Porcius Cato Licinianus, considering its importance for Cato's public image and political career, investigating its place within some of the central cultural debates of the 2nd century BC, and looking at the impact which this relationship had upon received impressions of Cato the Censor as presented by later Latin authors. This is done primarily through the examination of the written works which Cato addressed to Licinianus, the extant fragments of which are presented here, with a translation and commentary, in the first modern edition to treat these texts as a unified project. The subsequent sections of this thesis set the works which Cato addressed to his son within the context of the general cultural debate and individual political competition which engaged Rome's ruling elite during this period; Cato's adoption of a paternal persona within these works is related to the character's popular appeal in the military sphere and on the comic stage; and the didactic pose and agricultural instruction featured in these texts is used to illuminate some of the challenges posed to Cato's successful performance of his duties as censor. A final section considers the reappropriation of Cato's relationship with his son as found in the De officiis of Cicero, the Institutio oratoria of Quintilian, and the anonymous Disticha Catonis. This thesis suggests that the Censor's relationship with his son, and the works which he addressed to the young man, played a more significant part in Cato's public image and political career than has hitherto been acknowledged. These texts illuminate some of the finer points of Cato's clever political strategy and they offer fresh insight into the popular culture and elite competition of the period in which he lived. The relative importance of this relationship within Cato's public life helps to explain the popularity of later images of the Censor as a paternal and educational figure and offers us a better understanding of modern conceptions of Cato.

This study sets out to reveal the groundbreaking use of monody in the late plays of Euripides: in his hands, it is shaped into a potent and flexible instrument for representing emotion and establishing new narrative and thematic structures. Engaging with the current scholarly debate on music, affect, and characterization in Greek tragedy, I examine the role that monody plays in the musical design of four plays of Euripides, all produced in the last decade of his career: Ion, Iphigenia in Tauris, Phoenician Women, and Orestes. These plays are marked by the increased presence of actors’ song in proportion to choral song. The lyric voice of the individual takes on an unprecedented prominence with far-reaching implications for the structure and impact of each play. The monodies of Euripides are a true dramatic innovation: in addition to creating an effect of heightened emotion, monody is used to develop character and shape plot. In Ion, Iphigenia in Tauris, Phoenician Women, and Orestes, Euripides uncouples monody’s traditional and exclusive connection with lament. In contrast to the work of Aeschylus and Sophocles, where actors’ song is always connected with grief and pain, in these four plays monody conveys varied moods and states of mind. Monody expresses joy, hope, anxiety, bewilderment, accusation, and deliberation. Often, and simultaneously, it moves forward narrative exposition. The scope and dramatic function of monody grows and changes: passages of actors’ lyric become longer, more metrically complex, more detached from the other characters onstage, and more intensely focused on the internal experience of the singer. In the four plays under discussion we see a steadily increasing refinement and expansion of the form, a development that rests upon the changes in the style and function of contemporary music in the late fifth century. By 415 B.C., many formal features of tragedy had become highly conventionalized, and determined a set of expectations in the contemporary audience. Reacting against this tradition, Euripides successively redefines monody: each song takes over a traditional Bauform of tragedy, and builds upon it. The playwright uses the paired monodies of Ion to pose a conflict of ideas that might otherwise be conveyed through an agon. In Iphigenia in Tauris the heroine’s crisis and its resolution are presented in lyrics, rather than as a deliberative rhesis. In Phoenician Women, Antigone, Jocasta, and Oedipus replace the Chorus in lamenting the fall of the royal house. Finally, the Phrygian slave in Orestes sings a monody explicitly marked as a messenger speech that inverts the conventions of the form to raise questions about objectivity and truth in a disordered world. In examining these four plays, I hope to show some of the various potentials of this new Euripidean music as a major structural element in tragic drama, insofar as it can heighten emphasis, allow for the development of emotional states both subtle and extreme, reveal and deepen character, and mirror thematic movements. Euripides establishes monody as a dramatic form of considerable versatility and power. The poetry is charged with increased affect and expressivity; at the same time it articulates a new self-consciousness about the reciprocal capacities of form and content to shape one another. Here we may discern the shift of sensibility in Euripides’ late work, which proceeds pari passu with an apparent loosening of structural demands, or what one with equal justice might recognize as an increase in degrees of freedom. As the playwright repeatedly reconfigures the relationship between form and content, the range of what can happen onstage, of what can be said and sung, expands.

Protreptic is a form of rhetoric, textual and oral in form, which exhorts its recipients to reorient their lives both morally and intellectually. Plato frequently portrays Socrates' use of this rhetoric with interlocutors who are enticed by the moral and political views of figures from Athens' intellectual culture. During these conversations Socrates attempts to persuade his interlocutors to reorient their lives in a way that conforms more closely to his own moral and intellectual practice of philosophy. Plato's depiction of protreptic, however, also exerts a protreptic effect on readers of his dialogues. Plato's writing thus performs a dual function, simultaneously depicting instances of protreptic at work and attempting to exert a protreptic effect on readers. In this dissertation I argue that understanding this dual function of Plato's writing is inseparable from understanding his conception of philosophy. I analyze the structure of protreptic in Plato's writing by identifying four aspects essential to an interpretive method that takes full stock of the protreptic function of Plato's dialogues. These aspects are (1) the proper recipient of protreptic; (2) the persuasive means available to protreptic; (3) the immediate target of persuasion; (4) the ultimate philosophical aim toward which protreptic advances the recipient. While some of these aspects must be determined with respect to particular dialogues, those that concern the form of Plato's writing—such as the means of persuasion and ultimate philosophical goals—can inform a general approach to Plato's dialogues. The means that Socrates uses to persuade his interlocutors are sometimes affective, influencing their emotions, and other times intellectual, appealing to them exclusively with logical argument. I argue that a combination of these means into a form I call “provocative-aporetic” better accounts for the means that Plato uses to exert a protreptic effect on readers. Aporia is a simultaneously intellectual and affective experience, and the way that readers choose to respond to aporia has a greater protreptic effect than either affective or intellectual means alone. The Republic is a crucial dialogue for studying protreptic because it addresses the ultimate moral and intellectual ends toward which Plato hopes to reorient readers, and puts the various protreptic means at Socrates' and Plato's disposal on full display. The dialogue offers both an argument for a life committed to virtue, and an outline of the theoretical insights—mathematical and dialectical—that philosophers may hope to gain from more serious study. It also portrays Socrates in conversation with characters of a variety sufficient to show his rhetorical and argumentative repertoire. In this dissertation I carry out a reading of the Republic according to the four aspects of the structure of protreptic discussed above. More specifically, I identify moments at which Glaucon and Adeimantus answer Socrates' questions in such a way that they concede to Socrates the truth of premises that contradict their defense of the unjust life. These moments reveal that the central point of dispute in the Republic concerns the nature of moral agency— particularly the functions of reason, desire, and habituation for moral agents. Accordingly, I identify two models of agency—a Technē Model and a Virtue Model— that ground their respective defenses of justice and injustice, and hold their own assumptions about reason, desire, and habituation within their respective moral psychologies. Glaucon and Adeimantus' moments of capitulation, function as moments of aporia for readers, who are then provoked to overcome the aporia by explaining why the capitulation is reasonable. In doing so, we gain an account how Glaucon and Adeimantus are coaxed to abandon their original views about justice, injustice, and moral agency and to accept those of Socrates. This account in turn yields insight into protreptic by depicting how Socrates brings about a reorientation toward philosophy from within a non-philosophical perspective.

The capture of Constantinople by the Ottoman armies of Mehmed II in 1453 was a cataclysmic event that reverberated throughout Renaissance Europe. This event intensified the exodus of Byzantines to Italy and beyond and they brought along with them the heritage of Greek antiquity. Laonikos Chalkokondyles contributed to the Renaissance with his detailed application of Herodotos to the fifteenth century, Apodeixis Historion, and made sense of the rise of the Ottomans with the lens of ancient history. The Apodeixis was printed in Latin, French, and Greek and was widely successful. The historian restored Herodotean categories of ethnicity, political rule, language, and geography to make sense of contemporary events and peoples. This was a thorough study of ancient historiography and Laonikos thus parted ways with previous Byzantine historians. I refer to Laonikos' method as "revolutionary classicizing", to describe the ways in which he abandoned the ideal of lawful imperium and restored the model of oriental tyranny when he described the nascent Ottoman state. What appears to be emulation of the ancient classics was radical revival of political concepts such as city-states as ethnic units, freedom defined as independence from foreign rule, law-giving as fundamental aspect of Hellenic tradition which did not encompass the Christian period. Laonikos has often been studied in the context of proto-nationalist historiography as he had composed a universal history, wherein he had related extensive information on various ethnic and political units in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. However, such proto-nationalist application does not fully capture Laonikos’ classicizing interests. Laonikos referred to his contemporaries as Hellenes, not because he was a nationalist who defined political identity only by recourse to language and common history. Rather, Laonikos believed that Hellenic identity, both referring to paganism as well as ethnicity, was relevant and not bankrupt. Importantly, we introduce manuscripts that have not yet been utilized to argue that Hellenism as paganism was living reality for Laonikos, his Platonist teacher Plethon, and their circle of intellectuals in the fifteenth century.

This study considers the role of tragedy in Ovid’s Metamorphoses as demonstrated in four different episodes, those of Cadmus, Hercules, Hippolytus, and Medea. I have identified two main themes that the episodes share, namely, generic tension, particularly between epic and tragedy as emphasized by intertextual allusion to Virgil’s Aeneid, and the use of apotheosis as a means of not only transforming the character in question, but also signalling a generic shift, more appropriate for Augustan Rome. However, Ovid’s treatment of tragedy varies dramatically from one narrative to the next. Cadmus’ civic foundation is plagued with tragic themes and his apotheosis occurs only by later substitution. Hercules and Hippolytus achieve relatively standard deifications by pushing past the boundaries of their tragedies, but their refashioned selves are called into question. And the apparent apotheosis of Medea is even less straightforward, as she appears forever preserved in tragedy through meta-literary self-consciousness.

Zugl.: Jena, Univ., Diss., 2007