The thesis is a study of the language of Menander Comicus (c.341-292/1 B.C.). The core of the thesis is a partial description of his language. Using a sociolinguistically informed model of koineisation, Menander's language is related to developments in the linguistic history of Greek. The first chapter therefore reviews the literature on Menander's language and details the theory of koineisation that will inform the subsequent chapters; accommodation theory is here of particular importance. The second chapter reviews nominal word-formation, used elsewhere in the literature as a criterion of the Koiné. It is pointed out that word-formation is not a good criterion, as the assessment of productivity patterns in a dead variety is difficult. However, by a detailed philological study of the data in Menander, some conclusions are reached about the productive and non-productive suffixes in Menander. The derivational patterns he attests for the most part look classical, but some changes are detected. The third chapter looks at the phonology and morphology of Menander. It is suggested that the vocalism of Menander betrays some characteristic Koiné developments, while the consonantism is mostly conservative. Noun and pronoun morphology are mostly conservative, while verbal morphology shows some signs of paradigm levelling. This is in line with the developments expected of a koineising variety, which are characterised by levelling. The final chapter is much more descriptive and focuses on syntax, particularly subordinate clauses. Some difficult examples of relative clauses are discussed which may anticipate later developments. Adverbial and complement clauses show that the optative, while morphologically stable, is no longer used in certain syntactic contexts (the oblique optative has more or less disappeared). An overall assessment attempts to distinguish the synchronic and the diachronic conclusions: the thesis deliberately discussed both together. It points out some concrete results establishing some spurious Menandrean texts while discussing the status of Menander's dialect. The main conclusion is that the terms of the debate about Menander's language have been misconceived: 'Attic vs. 'Koiné' is a false dichotomy in fourth-century Attica.

The thesis tests the hypothesis that certain aspects of linguistic variation in Attic prose are related to the type of oral performance, private or public, which the author envisaged for his text. This hypothesis rests on the assumption that authors more or less consciously optimized their texts for their intended communicative situation. A crucial feature of texts optimized for public delivery was clarity, which figures as an essential component of the 'virtue of speech' in the Greek rhetorical thought. In private situations the audience itself could alter the pace of reading or recitation. Clarifications could be sought, and pauses and repetitions would be possible. The case was different with public situations, where the text itself coincided with its performance and it was entirely up to the speaker to determine the way in which the audience would access it. Especially in political and judicial contexts, where important decisions were to be made, public speakers could not afford being unclear. In order to test whether public texts were clearer than private texts, 'clarity' must be defined in a linguistically thorough way. Modern psycholinguistics studies human language comprehension, and experimental research has revealed language-independent mechanisms which can be confidently applied to dead languages. In the thesis, clarity is measured by the number of syntactic, semantic, and referential reanalyses which linguistics structures induce in a given amount of text. This methodology is tested on a corpus of Attic speeches, which includes both texts that were devised exclusively for written circulation and private delivery, and texts that were at least conceived for public delivery, although we do not know to what extent they correspond to the versions which were actually delivered. The difference between the average score of 'public texts' and that of 'private texts' is statistically significant and supports the hypothesis that 'public texts' were generally clearer than 'private texts' for audiences of native speakers.

This thesis tackles a conspicuous absence in current scholarship on ancient theatre. Amid the recent scholarly interest in the rapid expansion of the theatre industry from the late fifth-century BC onwards, no study has been made of a central, defining even, element of ancient Greek drama at that time – the chorus. Instead, what we find is a widespread assumption concerning the fourth-century dramatic chorus, particularly with regard to the comic chorus, still prevalent in today’s scholarship: ‘The history of the dramatic chorus is one of decline both quantitatively and qualitatively’, states one of the more detailed recent reviews of the evidence for dramatic choral culture in the ancient world (Csapo and Slater 1995:349). The thesis focuses on the literary sources available to us concerning fourth-century dramatic choruses in Athens. The material is divided into three sections. The first section addresses the important testimony of Aristotle concerning the choruses of his day, particularly in the Poetics (chapter one). The second section analyses the choral text in the (probably fourth-century) Rhesus (chapter two), the interpolated choral passages in the Iphigenia at Aulis and Seven Against Thebes (chapter three), and the choruses of Aristophanes’ Assemblywomen and Wealth, as well as extant fragments of fourth-century comedy (chapter four). The third section is a survey of how the chorus is used in a wide range of fourth-century texts (chapter five), and gives special attention to Plato’s somewhat idiosyncratic presentation of the chorus in his works (chapter six). These analyses show 1) that ‘decline’ is an inappropriate term to describe the development of the chorus and 2) the creativity with which the chorus is used and thought about in fourth-century drama and society. The thesis aims to provide an elucidation of dramatic choral activity in the fourth century and to provoke further interrogation of the assumptions commonly held about the development of both the ancient chorus and ancient drama as a whole.

This is a study of love (erōs) in Plato’s Symposium. It’s a study undertaken over three chapters, each of which serves as a stepping stone for the following and addresses one of three primary aims. First: to provide an interpretation of Plato’s favored theory of erōs in the Symposium, or as it’s referred to here, a theory of Platonic love. This theory is understood to be ultimately concerned with a practice of living which, if developed correctly, may come to constitute the life most worth living for a human being. On this interpretation, Platonic love is the desire for Beauty, ultimately for the sake of eudaimonic immortality, manifested through productive activity. Second: to offer a reading of the Symposium which attends to the work’s literary elements, especially characterization and narrative structure, as partially constitutive of Plato’s philosophical thought on erōs. Here it’s suggested that Platonic love is concerned with seeking and producing truly virtuous action and true poetry. This reading positions us to see that a correctly progressing and well-practiced Platonic love is illustrated in the character of the philosopher Socrates, who is known and followed for his bizarre displays of virtue and whom Alcibiades crowns over either Aristophanes or Agathon as the wisest and most beautiful poet at the Symposium. Third: to account for how to love a person Platonically. Contra Gregory Vlastos’ influential critical interpretation, it’s here argued that the Platonic lover is able to really love a person: to really love a person Platonically is to seek jointly for Beauty; it is to work together as co-practitioners in the art of love. The art of Platonic love is set up in this way to be explored as a practice potentially constitutive of the life most worth living for a human being.

Euripides’ Electra has long been one of the playwright’s most controversial works. This book offers a reading of the play concentrating on its language, which is analysed by applying a variety of modern linguistic approaches: conversation analysis, pragmatic theories of speech acts and inference, politeness theory, the study of the interplay of gender and language, paroemiology, and the study of discourse cohesion. The first three chapters argue for the Peasant, Electra and Orestes, respectively, that their linguistic behaviour constitutes a vital part of their characterisation. The Peasant’s (ch. 1) sturdy morality is established by the way his language becomes more forceful when he touches on ethical questions; it is then tested in his conversations with Electra, where his language is suggestive of a conflict between his morals and his desire to please his royal wife. Electra herself (ch. 2) is characterised initially by the inability to communicate successfully with those around her — a disconnect which is suggestive of the fundamental incongruity of her circumstances. This adds a dimension to her motivations, which, as a force driving Electra’s linguistic behaviour, remain highly stable throughout the play up until the matricide. Another consistent feature of Electra’s language is the way it is patterned by her gender. Orestes’ characterisation in the early part of the play is ingeniously kept to a minimum through his sustained disguise. Various aspects of his language, but particularly his use of gnomai, contribute to that disguise, which involves a suppression of emotion, an avoidance of self-reference, and the exertion of control over the flow and topic of his conversation with Electra. We can only interpret a dramatic text if we know what it says, and if we know who says what. In chapter 4, I argue that the linguistic approaches I adopt can also help us in making a determination about textual-critical problems, particularly concerning the issue of speaker-line attribution (two notorious cases are discussed: 671-84 and 959-87). The final two chapters deal with longer speeches. In the messenger scene (ch. 5), Euripides uses linguistic devices to create an ebb and flow of suspense, and to manipulate audience expectation. In the agon (ch. 6), differences in the way Clytemnestra and Electra structure their speeches, particularly their narrationes, reveal much about their different (and fundamentally irreconcilable) viewpoints and approaches.

The thesis focuses on the theory of tragedy in Germany around 1800, and has two primary aims: to demonstrate the importance of idealist thought for contemporary approaches to tragedy and the tragic; and to revise the intellectual historiography of the classic phase in German letters. It traces reflection on Greek tragedy from the Querelle des anciens et des modernes in France around 1700 through the aesthetic systems formulated in Germany around 1800. Two intellectual developments are emphasized: the historicist consciousness that develops throughout the eighteenth century and places Greek tragedy more radically in its cultural context than ever before; and the idealist philosophy of art, which seeks to restore a measure of universality to the ancient genre, seeing it as the manifestation of a timeless quality of ‘the tragic.’ These two impulses, historicizing and universalizing, it is argued, are fundamental to modern understanding of Greek tragedy. The genealogical method seeks to establish a greater continuity with earlier eighteenth-century thought than is generally recognized, and to refute the teleologies that dominate accounts of idealist thought. A reconstruction of the central texts of Schiller, Schelling, Hegel, and Hölderlin reveals that the theory of tragedy around 1800 is in large part a reflection on history, an effort to understand how ancient literature can be meaningful in modernity. Greek tragedy becomes the ground for an engagement with the pastness of antiquity and its possible presence. Idealist theories, far from dissolving particularity in abstraction, seek a mediation between philological historicism and philosophical universalism in considering Greek tragedy. A genealogy of the tragic suggests that such mediation remains a vital task for scholars of the Classics.

This thesis explores the anxieties and opportunities that attend fame and posterity in the second sophistic and how they play out in both literary and monumental expressions of cultural production. I consider how elite provincials in the Roman empire, who are competitive, bi- or even tri-cultural, status-driven, often politically active, and engaged in cultural production, attempt to construct a future presence for themselves either through the composition of literature that is aimed (at least in part) at the future or through efforts to write themselves into the landscape of their native or adopted cities. I argue that the cultural and temporal perspective of these men drives their multifarious, playful, and self-reflexive approach to the production of literature or monuments. For those men engaged in the ‘second sophistic’, in the narrower, Philostratean definition, there is an ever present tether on their creative efforts, in that for contemporary success they must immerse themselves in the culture of classical Athens; and the prominent practice of epideictic oratory, with its promotion of improvisation and lack of repetition, discourages the kind of literary effort that aims at eternity. At the same time, their attempts to build themselves into the hearts of cities is less restricted, in that those who possess or have access to sufficient wealth can grant elaborate benefactions which essentially stand as monuments to their financer. Nevertheless, their belated position with respect to the Greek literary canon and the heights of political and cultural prestige invested in classical Greece infuses the cultural efforts of the second sophistic with a sense of pathos that acknowledges the impossibility of creating and controlling one’s future reputation regardless of how much effort is applied. At the same time, this impossible position, rather than limiting them, endows these men with a varied, self-ironizing, intertextual, intermedial, and unique approach to cultural production that actively engages with the inescapable and laudable past in order to carve a lasting impression on the literary and physical landscape of the Roman empire.

This thesis aims to contribute to the study of the role of the civic past in the public discourse of fourth-century Athens. It does so by close examination of the surviving public speeches of Demosthenes and Aeschines, arguing that presentation of the city’s history in front of mass audiences held singular persuasive potential for public speakers, allowing them to furnish with a more meaningful ethical context both the discussion of issues addressed in the Assembly and the arguments advanced in public trials. Deploying the past convincingly in such settings redounded to speakers’ personal credibility and authority, and Demosthenes and Aeschines – who offer rare examples of paired opposing speeches from the same trials – are selected as ‘case-study’ orators in order to illustrate: i) the importance of the invoking of Athenian historical models, both distant and recent, to Demosthenes’ self-fashioning as a politician; and ii) the extent to which orators made the very question of how to cite the past in public a stake in their wider struggle for political pre-eminence, seeking to be recognized as the ‘true’ and authoritative mediator of this material. These interests are reflected in the organization of the thesis. After an Introduction which discusses key preliminaries, Chapter One argues for Demosthenes’ early recognition of the potential of historical illustration for wider self-presentation, honed over the course of his Assembly career (Chapter Two) to become essential to his self-casting as Athens’s leading statesman. Chapter Three compares Demosthenic and Aeschinean approaches to citing the past in court, in two prosecutions from the mid-340s, and Chapters Four and Five – focusing on the high-profile Embassy and Crown trials – move to argue the importance of each politician’s contestation of the other’s versions of history to their battle over the reputations arising from their careers to date. The Conclusion summarizes, and reflects on some methodological aspects with a view to further work.

In this thesis, I argue that Sophoclean characters take shape through a number of different kinds of interaction. On the most basic level, interaction occurs between characters; interactions between characters, however, provide a framework for interactions between those characters and a variety of more abstract concepts. These interactions, by allowing characters to situate themselves with respect to concepts such as, for example, the social roles which shape the society of the play, provide a more complex picture of the personalities depicted onstage; a fuller view of Antigone’s personality, for example, emerges both from her own interactions with the concept of sisterhood and from the differences between her interactions with that concept and Ismene’s. At the same time, these interactions involve the audience in both the construction and the interpretation of Sophoclean characters; as they watch figures interact with each other onstage, the audience, in turn, interact with their own prior knowledge of the concepts which drive the characters of a play. In my five chapters, I discuss five different areas of interaction. In my first chapter, I look at interactions between characters and myth, arguing that Sophoclean characters emerge out of a tension between novelty and familiarity. In my second chapter, I discuss the interactions between characters and their social roles, looking at the problem of appropriate role performance as it applies to Sophoclean characters. My third chapter deals with characters and their memories; I argue that Sophoclean characters shape and are shaped by their memories of past events depending on shifting present circumstances. In my fourth chapter, I discuss the interactions between characters and the passage of time and suggest that Sophoclean figures are characterized by the ways in which they move through time and respond to its passage. In my final chapter, I look at the use of general statements by Sophoclean characters, arguing that the ability of characters to generalize successfully provides a useful measure of their ability to function in the world of the play.

Η παρούσα μελέτη επιχειρεί να συνδέσει πτυχές του εργασιακού περιβάλλοντος που θεωρούνται ιδιαίτερα διαδεδομένες στον δημόσιο τομέα με συγκεκριμένα χαρακτηριστικά εργασίας τα οποία επηρεάζουν σε σημαντικό βαθμό την εργασιακή ικανοποίηση. Συγκεκριμένα λαμβάνει υπ’ όψην τρε ις μεταβλητές του εργασιακού περιβάλλοντος : τη σαφήνεια οργανωσιακών στόχων, τους διαδικαστικούς περιορισμούς και τη σύγκρουση οργανωσιακών στόχων ενώ από την πλευρά των χαρακτηριστικών εργασίας εξετάζονται τέσσερις μεταβλητές : η σαφήνεια εργασιακού ρόλο υ, η επαναπληροφόρηση,η ποικιλία δραστηριοτήτων και η ανάπτυξη ανθρωπίνου δυναμικού. Τα παραπάνω θα εφαρμοστούν προκειμένου να προσδιοριστεί η εργασιακή ικανοποίηση στην Πολεμική Αεροπορία και συγκεκριμένα στην 116 Πτέρυγα Μάχης / Work Satisfaction at the 116 Combat Wing of Hellenic Air Force.