Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Latin and classical Greek literature'
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Rojcewicz, Stephen J. "Our tears| Thornton Wilder's reception and Americanization of the Latin and Greek classics." Thesis, University of Maryland, College Park, 2017. http://pqdtopen.proquest.com/#viewpdf?dispub=10260313.
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I argue in this dissertation that Thornton Wilder is a poeta doctus, a learned playwright and novelist, who consciously places himself within the classical tradition, creating works that assimilate Greek and Latin literature, transforming our understanding of the classics through the intertextual aspects of his writings. Never slavishly following his ancient models, Wilder grapples with classical literature not only through his fiction set in ancient times but also throughout his literary output, integrating classical influences with biblical, medieval, Renaissance, early modern, and modern sources. In particular, Wilder dramatizes the Americanization of these influences, fulfilling what he describes in an early newspaper interview as the mission of the American writer: merging classical works with the American spirit.
Through close reading; examination of manuscript drafts, journal entries, and correspondence; and philological analysis, I explore Wilder’s development of classical motifs, including the female sage, the torch race of literature, the Homeric hero, and the spread of manure. Wilder’s first published novel, The Cabala, demonstrates his identification with Vergil as the Latin poet’s American successor. Drawing on feminist scholarship, I investigate the role of female sages in Wilder’s novels and plays, including the example of Emily Dickinson. The Skin of Our Teeth exemplifies Wilder’s metaphor of literature as a “Torch Race,” based on Lucretius and Plato: literature is a relay race involving the cooperation of numerous peoples and cultures, rather than a purely competitive endeavor.
Vergil’s expression, sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt [Here are the tears of the world, and human matters touch the heart] (Vergil: Aeneid 1.462), haunts much of Wilder’s oeuvre. The phrase lacrimae rerum is multivocal, so that the reader must interpret it. Understanding lacrimae rerum as “tears for the beauty of the world,” Wilder utilizes scenes depicting the wonder of the world and the resulting sorrow when individuals recognize this too late. Saturating his works with the spirit of antiquity, Wilder exhorts us to observe lovingly and to live life fully while on earth. Through characters such as Dolly Levi in The Matchmaker and Emily Webb in Our Town, Wilder transforms Vergil’s lacrimae rerum into “Our Tears.”
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Mehta, Arti. "How do fables teach? reading the world of the fable in Greek, Latin and Sanskrit narratives /." [Bloomington, Ind.] : Indiana University, 2007. http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?url_ver=Z39.88-2004&rft_val_fmt=info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:dissertation&res_dat=xri:pqdiss&rft_dat=xri:pqdiss:3297125.
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Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, Dept. of Classical Studies, 2007.Title from dissertation home page (viewed Sept. 25, 2008). Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 69-02, Section: A, page: 0602. Adviser: Eleanor W. Leach.
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Werner, Erika Pereira Nunes. "Lá vem a noiva: o epithalamium suas configurações do período helenístico à era flaviana." Universidade de São Paulo, 2011. http://www.teses.usp.br/teses/disponiveis/8/8143/tde-25072011-135922/.
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Esta tese dedica-se ao estudo do gênero poético conhecido como epithalamium, \"epitalâmio\", e sua presença entre as composições poéticas supérstites localizadas temporalmente entre o início do período helenístico e o fim da Antigüidade Clássica. Neste estudo, são analisadas composições poéticas gregas e latinas com o objetivo de identificar as características que seriam associadas a esse gênero ao longo desses séculos.This doctoral thesis is a study about the poetical genre known as epithalamium and its occurrence among the transmitted poetical compositions located between the beginning of the Hellenistic period and the end of the classical antiquity. Greek and Latin poetical compositions are analysed in order to identify the main characteristics that are supposed to be associated to that genre during that time
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Fisher, Elizabeth A. "Planudes' Greek translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses." New York : Garland Pub, 1990. http://catalog.hathitrust.org/api/volumes/oclc/21077839.html.
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Curtis, Lauren. "On with the Dance! Imagining the Chorus in Augustan Poetry." Thesis, Harvard University, 2013. http://dissertations.umi.com/gsas.harvard:10991.
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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
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Meister, Felix Johannes. "Momentary immortality : Greek praise poetry and the rhetoric of the extraordinary." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2015. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:2a2e9801-b29e-485f-bb1d-2eda190de8e1.
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This thesis takes as its starting point current views on the relationship between man and god in Archaic and Classical Greek literature, according to which mortality and immortality are primarily temporal concepts and, therefore, mutually exclusive. This thesis aims to show that this mutual exclusivity between mortality and immortality is emphasised only in certain poetic genres, while others, namely those centred on extraordinary achievements or exceptional moments in the life of a mortal, can reduce the temporal notion of immortality and emphasise instead the happiness, success, and undisturbed existence that characterise divine life. Here, the paradox of momentary immortality emerges as something attainable to mortals in the poetic representation of certain occasions. The chapters of this thesis pursue such notions of momentary immortality in the wedding ceremony, as presented through wedding songs, in celebrations for athletic victory, as presented through the epinician, and at certain stages of the tragic plot. In the chapter on the wedding song, the discussion focuses on explicit comparisons between the beauty of bride and bridegroom and that of heroes or gods, and between their happiness and divine bliss. The chapter on the epinician analyses the parallelism between the achievement of victory and the exploits of mythical heroes, and argues for a parallelism between the victory celebration and immortalisation. Finally, the chapter on tragedy examines how characters are perceived as godlike because of their beauty, success, or power, and discusses how these perceptions are exploited by the tragedians for certain effects. By examining features of a rhetoric of praise, this thesis is not concerned with the beliefs or expectations of the author, the recipient of praise, or the surrounding milieu. It rather intends to elucidate how moments conceived of as extraordinary are communicated in poetry.
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Park, E. C. "Plato and Lucretius as philosophical literature : a comparative study." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2012. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:97c3ba13-d229-429d-83fc-138fcbaf58b1.
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This thesis compares the interaction of philosophy and literature in Plato and Lucretius. It argues that Plato influenced Lucretius directly, and that this connection increases the interest in comparing them. In the Introduction, I propose that a work of philosophical literature, such as the De Rerum Natura or a Platonic dialogue, cannot be fully understood or appreciated unless both the literary and the philosophical elements are taken into account. In Chapter 1, I examine the tradition of literature and philosophy in which Plato and Lucretius were writing. I argue that the historical evidence increases the likelihood that Lucretius read Plato. Through consideration of parallels between the DRN and the dialogues, I argue that Plato discernibly influenced the DRN. In Chapter 2, I extract a theory of philosophical literature from the Phaedrus, which prompts us to appreciate it as a work of literary art inspired by philosophical knowledge of the Forms. I then analyse Socrates’ ‘prelude’ at Republic IV.432 as an example of how the dialogue’s philosophical and literary teaching works in practice. In Chapters 3 and 4, I consider the treatment of natural philosophy in the Timaeus and DRN II. The ending of the Timaeus is arguably an Aristophanically inspired parody of the zoogonies of the early natural philosophers. This links it to other instances of parody in Plato’s dialogues. DRN II.333-380 involves an argument about atomic variety based on Epicurus, but also, through the image of the world ‘made by hand’, alludes polemically to the intelligently designed world of the Timaeus. Through an examination of Plato’s and Lucretius’ polemical adaptation of their predecessors, I argue that even the most seemingly technical passages of the DRN and the Timaeus still depend upon literary techniques for their full effect. The Conclusion reflects briefly on future paths of investigation.
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Neil, Bronwen, and res cand@acu edu au. "A Critical Edition of Anastasius Bibliothecarius' Latin Translation of Greek Documents Pertaining to the Life of Maximus the Confessor, with an Analysis of Anastasius' Translation Methodology, and an English Translation of the Latin Text." Australian Catholic University. Sub-Faculty of Theology, 1998. http://dlibrary.acu.edu.au/digitaltheses/public/adt-acuvp231.30042010.
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Part I Anastasius Bibliothecarius, papal librarian, translator and diplomat, is one of the pivotal figures of the ninth century in both literary and political contexts. His contribution to relations between the eastern and western church can be considered to have had both positive and negative ramifications, and it will be argued that his translations of various Greek works into Latin played a significant role in achieving his political agenda, complex and convoluted as this was. Being one of relatively few Roman bilinguals in the latter part of the ninth century, Anastasius found that his linguistic skills opened an avenue into papal affairs that was not closed by even the greatest breaches of trust and violations of canonical law on his part. His chequered career spanning five pontificates will be reviewed in the first chapter. In Chapter 2, we discuss his corpus of works of translation, in particular the Collectanea, whose sole surviving witness, the Parisinus Latinus 5095, has been partially edited in this study. This collation and translation of seven documents pertaining to the life of Maximus the Confessor provides us with a unique insight into Anastasius' capacity as a translator, and into the political and cultural significance of the commissioning and dedication of his hagiographic and other translated works in general. These seven documents will be examined in detail in Chapter 3, and compared with the Greek tradition, where that has survived, in an effort to establish the codes governing translation in this period, and to establish which manuscripts of the Greek tradition correspond most closely to Anastasius' (lost) model. In Chapter 4, we analyse consistency of style and method by comparison with Anastasius' translation of the Historia Mystica attributed to Germanus of Constantinople. Anastasius' methodology will be compared and contrasted with that of his contemporary John Scotus Eriugena, to place his oeuvre in the broader context of bilingualism in the West in the ninth century. Part II contains a critical edition of the text with facing English translation and historical and linguistic annotations.
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Platt, Mary Hartley. "Epic reduction : receptions of Homer and Virgil in modern American poetry." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2014. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:9d1045f5-3134-432b-8654-868c3ef9b7de.
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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.
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Taylor, Barnaby. "Word and object in Lucretius : Epicurean linguistics in theory and practice." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2013. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:c0ed507b-6436-4c84-8457-34fa707af79a.
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This thesis combines a philosophical interpretation of Epicurean attitudes to language with literary analysis of the language of DRN. Chapters 1-2 describe Epicurean attitudes to diachronic and synchronic linguistic phenomena. In the first chapter I claim that the Epicurean account of the first stage of the development of language involves pre-rational humans acting under a ‘strong’ form of compulsion. The analogies with which Lucretius describes this process were motivated by a structural similarity between the Epicurean accounts of phylogenetic and ontogenetic psychology. Chapter 2 explores the Epicurean account of word use and recognition, central to which are ‘conceptions’. These are attitudes which express propositions; they are not mental images. Προλήψεις, a special class of conception, are self-evidently true basic beliefs about how objects in the world are categorized which, alongside the non-doxastic criteria of perceptions and feelings, play a foundational role in enquiry. Chapter 3 offers a reconstruction of an Epicurean theory of metaphor. Metaphor, for Epicureans, involves the subordination of additional conceptions to words to create secondary meanings. Secondary meanings are to be understood by referring back to primary meanings. Accordingly, Lucretius’ use of metaphor regularly involves the juxtaposition in the text of primary and secondary uses of terms. An account of conceptual metaphor in DRN is given in which the various conceptual domains from which Lucretius draws his metaphorical language are mapped and explored. Chapter 4 presents a new argument against ‘atomological’ readings of Lucretius’ atoms/letters analogies. Lucretian implicit etymologies involve the illustration, via juxtaposition, of language change across time. This is fully in keeping with the Epicurean account of language development. Chapter 5 describes Lucretius’ reflections on and interactions with the Greek language. I suggest that the study of lexical Hellenisms in DRN must be sensitive to the distinction between lexical borrowing and linguistic code-switching. I then give an account of morphological calquing in the poem, presenting it as a significant but overlooked strategy for Lucretian vocabulary-formation.
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James, Paula. "Unity in diversity a study of Apuleius' Metamorphoses : with particular reference to the narrator's art of transformation and the metamorphosis motif in the Tale of Cupid and Psyche /." Hildesheim ; New York : Olms-Weidmann, 1987. http://catalog.hathitrust.org/api/volumes/oclc/15604421.html.
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Rees, William J. "Cassius Dio, human nature and the late Roman Republic." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2011. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:75230c97-3ac1-460d-861b-5cb3270e481e.
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This thesis builds on recent scholarship on Dio’s φύσις model to argue that Dio’s view of the fall of the Republic can be explained in terms of his interest in the relationship between human nature and political constitution. Chapter One examines Dio’s thinking on Classical debates surrounding the issue of φύσις and is dedicated to a detailed discussion of the terms that are important to Dio’s understanding of Republican political life. The second chapter examines the relationship between φύσις and Roman theories of moral decline in the late Republic. Chapter Three examines the influence of Thucydides on Dio. Chapter Four examines Dio’s reliance on Classical theories of democracy and monarchy. These four chapters, grouped into two sections, show how he explains the downfall of the Republic in the face of human ambition. Section Three will be the first of two case studies, exploring the life of Cicero, one of the main protagonists in Dio’s history of the late Republic. In Chapter Five, I examine Dio’s account of Cicero’s career up to the civil war between Pompey and Caesar. Chapter Six explores Cicero’s role in politics in the immediate aftermath of Caesar’s death, first examining the amnesty speech and then the debate between Cicero and Calenus. Chapter Seven examines the dialogue between Cicero and Philiscus, found in Book 38. In Section Four is my other case study, Caesar. Chapter Eight discusses Caesar as a Republican politician. In Chapter Nine, I examine Dio’s version of the mutiny at Vesontio and Caesar’s speech. Chapter Ten examines Dio’s portrayal of Caesar after he becomes dictator and the speech he delivers to the senate. The Epilogue ties together the main conclusions of the thesis and examines how the ideas explored by Dio in his explanation of the fall of the Republic are resolved in his portrait of the reign of Augustus.
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Griffin, Michael J. "The reception of the Categories of Aristotle, c. 80 BC to AD 220." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2009. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:f4149a7e-2ad0-4d7b-b428-2ba55acf22d3.
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This thesis focuses on the ancient reception of the Categories of Aristotle, a work which served continuously, from late antiquity into the early modern period (Frede 1987), as the student’s introduction to philosophy. There had previously been no comprehensive study of the reception of the Categories during the age of the first philosophical commentaries (c. 80 BC to AD 220). In this study, I have collected, assigned, and analyzed the relevant fragments of commentary belonging to this period, including some that were previously undocumented or inexplicit in the source texts, and sought to establish and characterize the influence of the early commentators’ activity on the subsequent Peripatetic tradition. In particular, I trace the early evolution of criticism and defense of the text through competing accounts of its aim (skopos), which would ultimately lead Stoic and Platonic philosophers to a partial acceptance of the Categories and frame its role in the later Neo-Platonic curriculum.
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Piantanida, Cecilia. "Classical lyricism in Italian and North American 20th-century poetry." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2013. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:4422c01a-ba88-4fe0-a21f-4804e4c610ce.
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This thesis defines ‘classical lyricism’ as any mode of appropriation of Greek and Latin monodic lyric whereby a poet may develop a wider discourse on poetry. Assuming classical lyricism as an internal category of enquiry, my thesis investigates the presence of Sappho and Catullus as lyric archetypes in Italian and North American poetry of the 20th century. The analysis concentrates on translations and appropriations of Sappho and Catullus in four case studies: Giovanni Pascoli (1855-1912) and Salvatore Quasimodo (1901-1968) in Italy; Ezra Pound (1885-1972) and Anne Carson (b. 1950) in North America. I first trace the poetic reception of Sappho and Catullus in the oeuvres of the four authors separately. I define and evaluate the role of the respective appropriations within each author’s work and poetics. I then contextualise the four case studies within the Italian and North American literary histories. Finally, through the new outlook afforded by the comparative angle of this thesis, I uncover some of the hidden threads connecting the different types of classical lyricism transnationally. The thesis shows that the course of classical lyricism takes two opposite aesthetic directions in Italy and in North America. Moreover, despite the two aesthetic trajectories diverging, I demonstrate that the four poets’ appropriations of Sappho and Catullus share certain topical characteristics. Three out of four types of classical lyricism are defined by a preference for Sappho’s and Catullus’ lyrics which deal with marriage rituals and defloration, patterns of death and rebirth, and solar myths. They stand out as the epiphenomena of the poets’ interest in the anthropological foundations of the lyric, which is grounded in a philosophical function associated with poetry as a quest for knowledge. I therefore ultimately propose that ‘classical lyricism’ may be considered as an independent historical and interpretative category of the classical legacy.
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Egea, Carrasco Adolfo. "La poesía gastronómica latina." Doctoral thesis, Universitat de Barcelona, 2015. http://hdl.handle.net/10803/293258.
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El objeto de estudio de la tesis doctoral es el conjunto de textos poéticos latinos que tratan temas culinarios, desde los orígenes hasta las Sátiras de Horacio. Entiendo por ‘poesía gastronómica’ el tipo de composiciones que estudió, para la literatura griega, Enzo Degani, distinguiendo entre dos tendencias distintas, una de carácter ‘didáctico-preceptivo’, otra de tipo ‘ecfrástico-descriptivo’. Los principales representantes griegos de estas dos tendencias son, respectivamente, Arquéstrato de Gela y Matrón de Pítane. En cuanto a los ejemplares romanos estudiados, el estudio se detiene en Horacio, cuando los contenidos gastronómicos en poesía adquieren definitivamente su fisonomía propiamente romana. Se trata, así pues, de un estudio particular dentro del tema más amplio de la recepción de formas y contenidos de la literatura griega en Roma.
El primer capítulo constituye una panorámica amplia de la poesía gastronómica griega. No se circunscribe a los poetas arriba citados del siglo IV, sino que retrocede a los orígenes mismos de la literatura griega (los poemas homéricos y, sobre todo, los yambógrafos arcaicos Ananio e Hiponacte), concediendo un amplio espacio a la comedia griega antigua y media. Se analizan pasajes importantes de Epicarmo y de Aristófanes, así como de Alexis y Eubulo.
El segundo capítulo está dedicado a los Hedyphagetica de Ennio. Tras un pormenorizado análisis de los problemas textuales del fragmento, se estudia la ictionimia usada por el poeta latino, para intentar valorar qué porcentaje de juego literario y qué porcentaje de reflejo de la vida cotidiana romana contiene. Por ello, el estudio del fragmento se complementa con un excurso sobre la temática acerca del pescado y de los pescadores en las comedias de Plauto.
El tercer capítulo estudia la recepción en la sátira de las formas y contenidos de la poesía gastronómica griega a través de los fragmentos de Lucilio de temática gastronómica y de la sátira Menipea de Varrón “Περὶ ἐδεσμάτων”. De Lucilio, se analizan, en primer lugar, las sátiras que atacan el aumento del lujo en la mesa y, en segundo lugar, dos casos particulares: la “cena rustica” y la cena en el marco del “Iter Brundisium”. Estos dos casos se alejan de la tradición griega anterior y constituyen una innovación romana. De Varrón se estudia la mencionada menipea, que contenía, según el resumen que de ella nos ha transmitido Gelio, una lista poética de exquisiteces, en la línea, por tanto, de la poesía gastronómica didáctico-preceptiva. La cuestión de lo "σπουδαιογέλοιον" aparece con especial importancia en estos autores, cosa que constituye una modificación sustancial de la tradición de la poesía gastronómica griega.
El cuarto y último capítulo analiza las dos sátiras gastronómicas de Horacio, una, la 2, 4, se asemeja a la tradición de la poesía de tipo ‘didáctico-preceptivo’, la otra, la 2, 8, parece seguir la de tipo ‘ecfrástico-descriptivo’. Pero esta clasificación se revela ineficaz, por cuanto la 2, 4 no muestra influencias profundas de Arquéstrato y en la 2, 8, no sólo no hay rastos de influencia de Matrón de Pítane, sino que incluye no pocos elementos de la tradición de la poesía gastronómica didáctica. Finalmente, se tratan aspectos como la relación de las sátiras gastronómicas de Horacio con lo "σπουδαιογέλοιον", la presencia del discurso filosófico sobre la frugalidad y su posible interpretación metapoética.Th e main theme of this dissertation is the Roman gastronomical poetry, since its origins in the pre-classic period until Horace’s Satires 2.4 and 2.8. The concept of “Roman gastronomical poetry” is based on the studies on Greek gastronomical poetry by Enzo Degani, who established two main tendences, namely, the “didactic” one (e.g., Archestratus) and the “ekphrastic” one (e.g., Matro of Pitane). Nevertheless, the first chapter covers other authors of di.erents genres, such as Annanius and Hipponax (jambus), or Epicharmus, Aristophanes, Eubulus and Alexis (comedy). Roman authors of the archaic period are studied in detail: Ennius, Lucilius and Varro. Many critical issues affect their texts due to their fragmentary condition. Finally, Horace’s satires 2.4 and 2.8 are studied taking into account the tradition of the gastronomical poetry as reviewed in the precedent chapters. Other issues, such as the concept of "σπουδαιογέλοιον"or the metapoetic interpretation of these satires are analized as well.
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Smith-Laing, Tim. "Variorum vitae : Theseus and the arts of mythography in Medieval and early modern Europe." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2014. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:0f4305c6-3c62-4f89-a3b2-d8204893fdfb.
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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.
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Bonfiglio, Emilio. "John Chrysostom's discourses on his first exile : Prolegomena to a Critical Edition of the Sermo antequam iret in exsilium and of the Sermo cum iret in exsilium." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2011. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:df828fcd-dc2a-47b9-8bb1-c957c9199fb1.
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The Sermo antequam iret in exilium and the Sermo cum iret in exsilium are two homilies allegedly pronounced by John Chrysostom in Constantinople at the end of summer 403, some time between the verdict of the Synod of the Oak and the day he left the city for his first exile. The aim of the thesis is to demonstrate that a new critical edition of these texts is needed before any study of their literary and historical value can be conducted. Chapter one sketches the historical background to which the text of the homilies refers and a concise survey about previous scholarship on the homilies on the first exile, from the time of Montfaucon’s edition until our days. The problem of the authenticity occupies the last part of the chapter. Chapter two investigates the history of the texts and takes into account both the direct and indirect traditions. It discusses the existence of double recensions hitherto unknown and provides the prefatory material for the new critical edition of recensio α of Sermo antequam iret in exilium and of the Sermo cum iret in exsilium. Chapter three comprises the Greek editions of the two homilies, as well as a provisional edition of the Latin version of the Sermo antequam iret in exilium. Chapter four is divided into two parts, each presenting a philological commentary on the text of the new editions. Systematic analysis of all the most important variant readings is offered. The final chapter summarizes the new findings and assesses the validity of previous criteria used for discerning the authenticity of the homilies on the exile.
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Schwartzman, Lauren J. "Contest and community : wonder-working in Christian popular literature from the second to the fifth centuries CE." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2013. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:a3de02f7-18a9-4363-8bbf-cea5a73eb223.
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In this thesis, I hope to demonstrate that what I call the magic contest tradition, that is the episodes of competitive wonder-working that appear in a wide variety of apocryphal and non-canonical Christian texts, made an important contribution to the development of Christian thought during the second to the fifth centuries CE. This contribution was to articulate ‘the way’ to be a Christian in a world which was not isolated from the secular, and not insulated from the reality of the Roman empire. First, I demonstrate that a tradition of texts which feature magic contests exists within the broader scope of non-canonical Christian literature (looking at this literature across communities, regions and time periods). Second, I identify what the major features of the traditions are, e.g. what form the narratives take, what the form for a magic contest is, and what the principles used to build the magic contests are, and how these principles feature in the texts. The principles I identify are power, authority, ritual, and conversion, as well as their use as historical exempla. Third, I discuss what the texts did in the context of the time period, and for the communities that produced and read them: in other words, how did the this tradition work? I show that they served multiple purposes: as tests of faith, religious truth and ways to proclaim such; as constructors and markers of group identity (and the perilous task of identifying the insiders and those who should be outsiders); as calls to unity within the overarching diversity of the times and places, and a unified front for the ‘battle’ against evil. I suggest that the texts present a model for how one could decide what the ‘true faith’ was and how one could practice it in the turbulent environment that early Christians faced both before and after Constantine.
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Roane, Nancy Lee. "Misreading the River: Heraclitean Hope in Postmodern Texts." Oberlin College Honors Theses / OhioLINK, 2015. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=oberlin1431966455.
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Varney, Jennifer. "H.d. And the translation of classical greek literature." Doctoral thesis, Universitat Rovira i Virgili, 2011. http://hdl.handle.net/10803/80714.
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A lo largo de su carrera, la poetisa estadounidense Hilda Doolittle (1886-1961) se comprometió con la mitología clásica. A pesar de que produjo una gran cantidad de traducciones de la tragedia griega, muy pocas investigaciones se han desarrollado sobre esta parte de su trabajo. Con el fin de identificar las influencias y las relaciones de poder que confluyeron en las traducciones de H.D. y que dieron forma a su actividad como traductora, esta tesis no solo analiza las traducciones que hizo durante los primeros años de su carrera (1913-1920), sino que también estudia el contexto en el cual se produjeron dichas traducciones. La principal motivación que impulsa este estudio es la de indagar sobre el trato que H.D. dio al género en sus traducciones y sobre la medida en que los asuntos de género fueron relevantes en su papel como traductora.Throughout her career, the American poet H.D. (1886-1961) engaged with classical myth. Despite the numerous translations from Greek tragedy that H.D. produced, very little research has been carried out into this area of the poet’s work. In order to identify the influences and power relations that fed into H.D.’s translations and shaped her activity as translator, this thesis analyses not only the translations that H.D. produced during the early stages of her career (1913-1920), but also the contexts in which these translations were rendered. The driving force behind this study is the desire to interrogate H.D.’s treatment of gender in her translations and the extent to which questions of gender were relevant to her role as translator.
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Badnall, Toni Patricia. "The wedding song in Greek literature and culture." Thesis, University of Nottingham, 2009. http://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/12089/.
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This thesis examines the Greek wedding song and its function in literature and culture. The genre, hymenaios or epithalamium, has received little scholarly attention, particularly in English (cf. Muth, WS 1954; Tufte, Los Angeles 1970; Contiades-Tsitsoni, Stuttgart 1990, ZPE 1994; Swift, JHS 2006 & DPhil diss.). Yet an examination of the poetry of marriage, a crucial aspect in the study of the ancient world, contributes to our understanding of gender and social relations, as well as literature. Using elements of genre theory, gender studies, anthropology and cultural history, I argue that the epithalamium was part of a ritual of transition; for both the bride and for the community. The archaic epithalamium enacts this transition in lyric; tragic adaptations of the genre explore the consequences when this tradition is unsuccessfully performed. In contrast, the wedding songs of Attic comedy represent a 'happy ever after' ending for the communities of the protagonists, and portray these unions as a Sacred Marriage of man and goddess. The Helenistic epithalamium takes elements of these literary predecessors, and uses them to articulate a transition in marital relations, and literary politics, in the oeuvre of Theocritus. Philia relations in this era evolve to depict a more prominent mutuality between husband and wife, which also underpins the erotic writings of Plutarch. But more importantly, this author develops epithalamial topoi to present marriage as an 'initiation' for the bridal couple, which brings the thesis full-circle to the concept of transition while laying the foundation for one of the central concepts of Menander Rhetor's prescripts.
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Deutsch, Katherine Ariela. "Platonic Footnotes: Figures of Asymmetry in Ancient Greek Thought." Thesis, Harvard University, 2015. http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:26566091.
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In 1953, Maurice Merleau-Ponty claimed, “It is useless to deny that philosophy limps…. [In the philosopher’s] assent something massive and carnal is lacking. He is not altogether a real being.” My dissertation is a critical rereading of the Platonic dialogues and their reception through the lens of one key trope: “limping.” I trace limping through philosophical and literary texts and rhetorical treatises – through authors ranging from Plato, Sophocles, and Hippocrates to Montaigne, Nietzsche, and Derrida. I show that this metaphor, a figure for one-sidedness or deficiency, offers new material for the longest and most-footnoted debate, the debate over Platonic idealism. My project is grounded in a sustained re-examination of Plato’s Phaedo – the most body-denying or “somatophobic” of the Platonic dialogues. I demonstrate how the figure of limping works in conjunction with other metaphors of the body – and the figure of Socrates itself, in all its corporeality – to subvert one-sided or somatophobic readings of the Phaedo and of Platonism.
Part One of my dissertation looks at the rhetoric of the body; Part Two examines the body of rhetoric. Part One asks how Socrates’ body, in its satyr-like ugliness and strangeness, itself constitutes a deformity in ancient Athens. Examining the philosopher’s “body techniques,” I show that the Phaedo – which is framed by Socrates’ legs and feet – is mediated by the body it denies. Part Two closely examines Socrates’ terminology in the Phaedo’s first argument for the immortality of the soul. Focusing on the Greek abhorrence of nature as a “limping” body, I study associated tropes of completion and incompletion, balance and imbalance, and metaphors that rely on somatic, circular, and compensatory structures (among them, the periodos, or sentence, and the diaulos, the double racecourse).
My project, which draws its title from Alfred North Whitehead’s famous characterization of European philosophy as a “series of footnotes to Plato,” concerns itself with the metaphorical feet, legs, and gait of philosophy itself. In examining the “lame inheritance” the ancients have provided the moderns, my project uses the rhetoric of disability and prosthesis to reframe Classical reception studies.Comparative Literature
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Workman, Jameson Samuel. "Chaucerian metapoetics and the philosophy of poetry." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2011. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:8cf424fd-124c-4cb0-9143-e436c5e3c2da.
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This thesis places Chaucer within the tradition of philosophical poetry that begins in Plato and extends through classical and medieval Latin culture. In this Platonic tradition, poetry is a self-reflexive epistemological practice that interrogates the conditions of art in general. As such, poetry as metapoetics takes itself as its own object of inquiry in order to reinforce and generate its own definitions without regard to extrinsic considerations. It attempts to create a poetic-knowledge proper instead of one that is dependant on other modes for meaning. The particular manner in which this is expressed is according to the idea of the loss of the Golden Age. In the Augustinian context of Chaucer’s poetry, language, in its literal and historical signifying functions is an effect of the noetic fall and a deformation of an earlier symbolism. The Chaucerian poems this thesis considers concern themselves with the solution to a historical literary lament for language’s fall, a solution that suggests that the instability in language can be overcome with reference to what has been lost in language. The chapters are organized to reflect the medieval Neoplatonic ascensus. The first chapter concerns the Pardoner’s Old Man and his relationship to the literary history of Tithonus in which the renewing of youth is ironically promoted in order to perpetually delay eternity and make the current world co-eternal to the coming world. In the Miller’s Tale, more aggressive narrative strategies deploy the machinery of atheism in order to make a god-less universe the sufficient grounds for the transformation of a fallen and contingent world into the only world whatsoever. The Manciple’s Tale’s opposite strategy leaves the world intact in its current state and instead makes divine beings human. Phoebus expatriates to earth and attempts to co-mingle it with heaven in order to unify art and history into a single monistic experience. Finally, the Nun’s Priest’s Tale acts as ars poetica for the entire Chaucerian Performance and undercuts the naturalistic strategies of the first three poems by a long experiment in the philosophical conflict between art and history. By imagining art and history as epistemologically antagonistic it attempts to subdue in a definitive manner poetic strategies that would imagine human history as the necessary knowledge-condition for poetic language.
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Sonin, Joanne Faye. "The verbalisation of non-verbal communication in classical Greek texts." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 1999. https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/251681.
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My Ph.D. thesis constitutes an investigation into the ways in which non-verbal communication (NVC) is represented and relayed by ancient authors through the use of the written word. This written expression of NVC can be represented in conjunction with oral communication, or independently of it, offering intentionally chosen insight into particular perspectives, concepts or situations. The reasons why a specific author, or authors, chose to include certain non-verbal details are considered, as is the cultural, symbolic, and literary significance of each example. The thesis approaches the subject from historical, anthropological, sociological and philosophical perspectives, while retaining an appreciation of the chronological and methodological limitations of studying the behaviour of a society which cannot be directly experienced. My thesis is intended to fill a gap in the historical scholarship of classical Athens as, with a few notable exceptions, the study of NVC remains virtually ignored by ancient historians and classicists. Indeed, most of the research in this area belongs to the discipline of art history and does not include a thorough consideration of the subject through the use of literary and historical sources. My research of NVC includes the study of gesture and body language, as well as investigations into kinesics, manipulable elements of appearance, autonomic nervous system responses, haptics, posture, gait, and mobility. Within these areas of inquiry there exist sub-divisions that must also be taken into consideration, e.g., gender, age, socio-economic status, and race. Furthermore, the symbolism and meaning of any element of NVC do not remain static, and the changes and alterations occurring within the means of communication of the society under investigation are critical to any attempt at understanding the role of NVC in that community. The point of departure for my research is the Attic orators. However, the scope of my work is by no means limited to oratory. Descriptions of NVC are used throughout Greek prose and verse, allowing a web of comparable and conflicting usage to be unravelled. Of particular interest to my work is the influence of early physiognomies and physiognomical thought on the textual usage of the body. In order to establish continuity or change in the attitudes and understanding of NVC in antiquity, the texts I consider are not restricted to the classical period, but spread into adjacent centuries. For methodological reasons, I have divided this dissertation according to body part or function, and have chosen particular aspects of NVC for detailed analysis, both on a practical and on a theoretical level. While each body movement represents a certain emotion or symbolises a particular response or message, bodily traits and actions need also be considered within the wider context of Greek thought. Bodily movement and expression are evaluated in relation to basic Greek concepts such as the psyche, the body, schema, beauty, civic ideals and values, etc. My thesis deals with NVC both as an expression of the ideal and as a possible reflection of reality, taking into consideration its role both as a means to fantasise and as a tool of criticism.
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Zourgou, Anna. "The judgement of Paris in ancient Greek art and literature." Thesis, University of Nottingham, 2018. http://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/51092/.
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The Judgement of Paris has been one of the most influential and popular myths throughout antiquity. Significant work has been done by previous scholars on the collection and analysis of artistic representations of the Judgement. This thesis is also looking into the Judgement of Paris in ancient Greek art, but it mainly focuses on the collection and analysis of the references to the myth in Greek literature from the eighth century B.C. to the second century A.D. Special attention is paid to recurring themes and ideological implications that the Judgement story raises, as well as to the interaction between those themes and specific genres. The detailed account and analysis of the references available sheds light not only on the perception of the myth itself, but also on conceptions of morality, beauty, gods, free choice, responsibility and even humour in antiquity. Through this thesis it is possible to see the transformations of the Judgement of Paris throughout centuries of literature, from its very first appearance in Homer’s Iliad to the enjoyable world of Lucian, realising the vast possibilities of this mythological tradition.
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Cartlidge, Benjamin John. "The language of Menander Comicus and its relation to the Koine." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2014. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:37b595ee-b259-4947-bd81-abdd034b5d88.
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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.
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Baker, Renan. "A study of a late antique corpus of biographies (Historia Augusta)." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2014. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:4722d4da-5f09-4306-837f-45c6cf69ec21.
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This thesis provides a fresh investigation of a collection of Roman imperial biographies conventionally known as the 'Historia Augusta'. The thesis supports the authenticity of the texts included in this corpus, in particular the claims they make about their dates, authorship, and scope, through philological, literary, prosopographical, and historical arguments. It shows that this corpus of texts, if the main conclusions are accepted, potentially improves our understanding of the tetrarchic-Constantinian era. It also explores the wider implications for the historiography of the fourth century; the transmission and formation of multi-author corpora in antiquity and the middle ages. It also suggests that the canon of Latin imperial biographies be widened. The thesis has two parts. Part I explores the actual state of the corpus, its textual transmission, and relation to other texts. It shows that the ancient and medieval paratexts presented the corpus as a collection of imperial biographies. The paratexts are compatible with the authorial statements in the main text. It then explores the corpus' medieval transmission, and the interest medieval scholars had in such texts. This part suggests that the corpus’s current state explains well the inconsistencies found in it. Finally, it shows that words and phrases, once thought peculiar to the corpus and the holy grail of the forgery argument, are intertextual links to earlier texts. Part II explores chronological statements and historical episodes relevant to the Diocletianic-Constantinan period. It establishes the actual dates of each author, and suggests that the confusion found in these biographies is similar to that of other contemporaries. The few apostrophes are shown to be authentic, and the historical and prosopographical passages are shown to represent, and improve our understanding of, the zeitgeist and history of the period. The final conclusion weaves the various arguments together, and emphasises the authenticity and significance of the corpus' texts. It suggests separating the composition of the texts from the disinterested formation of the corpus as a whole, as part of a new hypothesis and further lines of enquiry.
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Jong, Albert de. "Traditions of the Magi : Zoroastrianism in Greek and Latin literature /." Leiden ; New York ; Köln : E. J. Brill, 1997. http://catalogue.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cb36966419z.
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Hammond, Rhona Bobbi. "The influence of the classical tradition on the poetry of Derek Walcott." Thesis, Open University, 2001. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.368004.
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Bocksberger, Sophie Marianne. "Telamonian Ajax : a study of his reception in Archaic and Classical Greece." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2016. https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:a9bacb2a-7ede-4603-9e6a-bf7f492332ed.
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This thesis is a systematic study of the representations of Telamonian Ajax in archaic and classical Greece. Its aim is to trace, examine, and understand how and why the constitutive elements of his myth evolved in the way they did in the long chain of its receptions. Particular attention is paid to the historical, socio-cultural and performative contexts of the literary works and visual representations I analyse as well as to the audience for which these were produced. The study is divided into three parts, each of which reflects a different reality in which Ajax has been received (different with respect to time, place, or literary genre). Artistic representations of the hero, as well as his religious dimension and political valence, are consistently taken into account throughout the thesis. The first part - Ajax from Salamis - focuses on epic poetry, and thus investigates the Panhellenic significance of the hero (rather than his reception in a particular place). It treats the entire corpus of early Greek hexameter poetry that has come down to us in written form as the reception of a common oral tradition which each poem has adapted for its own purpose. I establish that in the larger tradition of the Trojan War, Ajax was a hero characterised by his gift of invulnerability. Because of this power, he is the figure who protects his companions - dead or alive - par excellence. However, this ability probably also led him to become over-confident, and, accordingly, to reject Athena's support on the battlefield. Hence, the goddess's hostility towards him, which she demonstrated by making him lose the reward of apioteia (Achilles' arms). His defeat made Ajax so angry that he became mad and committed suicide. I also show how this traditional Ajax has been adapted to fit into the Iliad's own aesthetics. The second part - Ajax in Aegina - concentrates on the reception of Ajax in the victory odes of Pindar and Bacchylides for Aeginetan patrons. I argue that in the first part of the fifth century, Ajax becomes a figure imbued with a strong political dimension (especially with regard to the relationship between Athens and Aegina). Accordingly, I show how the presence of Ajax in Pindar's and Bacchylides' poems is often politically charged, and significant within the historical context. I discuss the influence this had on his representation. Finally, the third part moves to Athens, as I consider Ajax's reception during three distinct periods: the sixth century, the first half of the fifth century, and finally the rest of the classical period. I equally insist on the political dimension of the figure. I demonstrate that his figure undergoes a shift of paradigm in the early fifth century, which deeply affects his representation. By following in the footsteps of Ajax, this study prompts a series of reflections and comments on each of the works in which the hero features as well as on the relationship of these works to the historical context in which they were produced.
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Chen, Jingling. "An Acropolis in China: The Appropriation of Ancient Greek Tradition in Modern Chinese Literature." Thesis, Harvard University, 2016. http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:33493311.
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This dissertation explores the transcultural relationships between modern China and ancient Greece, with a view toward appreciating how Greek philosophical and literary visions have been received, reformulated, and repurposed by Chinese writers from the turn of the twentieth century to the Cultural Revolution that began in 1966. The project is a combination of intellectual inquisition and textual analysis. Contextualized in the narrative of modern Chinese intellectual history, my study focuses on critical analysis of certain literary texts that contain or appropriate Greek elements. The objective of this study is to uncover the sophisticated transcultural practice in Chinese writers’ creative representation of what they consider the original source of the Western civilization. This in turn has contributed to the making of new intellectual trends that characterize modern Chinese culture. While constructing “a Greek layer” in the characteristics of Chinese modernity, these intellectuals’ reception of Greek imagery was also conditioned by their own political and cultural purposes. This reception was a process of appropriation that turned ancient Greece into an integral element in the formulation of a new cultural subjectivity of modern China, a course defined by David Damrosch as to mobilize elements derived from the foreign works within a vital and ongoing home tradition. This dissertation considers the Chinese translations of, introductions to, and commentaries on texts of Greek antiquity as recreations adapted to the domestic context. My study does not only analyze what has been rendered and changed in the translations of the broad term when compared with the original texts, but also treat the translations as reformulated texts that succeeded in representing Greek imagery as an internal part of the intellectual history of modern China. As the first comprehensive study of the multi-layered literary relationships between ancient Greece and modern China, this study aims to better understand the modernization of Chinese literature and culture in the context of transculturation.East Asian Languages and Civilizations
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Cairns, Douglas Laidlaw. "The concept of Aidos in Greek literature from Homer to 404 BC." Thesis, University of Glasgow, 1987. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/1379/.
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The introduction deals briefly with the question of the classification of societies as shame or guilt-cultures, and the position is taken that, firstly, such a distinction has no real basis in human psychology and, secondly, that its application to the differences between ancient Greek culture and our own is largely superficial. The challenge to the shame-culture/guilt culture antithesis continues in the chapter on Homer, of which one of the central topics is the extent to which Homeric man possesses an internal conscience. The fundamental association of aidos with popular opinion is noted, and the terms which describe both the kind of situation or conduct which merits censure and the censure itself are studied, with a particular view to their relevance to competitive and co-operative standards. It is concluded that there is no basis for a subordination of the co-operative to the competitive in the vocabulary of the poems, although it is certainly the case that many characters are more concerned with failure in the latter sphere. This, however, is in no way part of the moral ideology of either the poet or his characters. The main areas of operation of aidos are identified: its role in battle and as fear of disgrace in general, its relevance to the co-operative standard of philia, its concern with positive regard for others, especially suppliants and guests and the particular form which the concept takes with regard to sex, especially in women. These are broadly the categories which also obtain in subsequent chapters. Instances of the relevant terms in the poetry from Hesiod to Pindar are largely heterogeneous, but particularly worthy of note are Hesiod's remarks on the ambivalence of aidos (a notion also present in Homer), Solon's application of the verb, aideomai, to his lack of concern for the misguided opinions of others, and the association of qualities like aidos and loyalty to one's friends, itself promoted by aidos, with arete, both moral and social, in Theognis. In the Tragedians, attention is paid first of all to the role of aidos etc. in the motivation of characters, then to its importance in the thematic structure of the plays, and only then, and with some caution, to the possibility that the usage of the tragedians may reflect changes in the society outside the plays. In Aeschylus, the operation of the concept in the above-mentioned categories is, briefly, surveyed, but the bulk of the chapter is concerned with its role in the psychology of characters faced with an acutely difficult choice: here the inhibitory force of aidos is apparent, as it frequently provokes crises of indecision. Such indecision, moreover, is often an important sign that all is not well. The psychological insight of Aeschylus, it is argued, is very far from elementary, but, of the three tragedians, it is Sophokles who makes most use of aidos in the psychology and motivation of his characters. In all but two of the extant tragedies aidos etc. have a central thematic importance: the possibility of conflicting ideas of aidos, a topic perhaps suggested by sophistic relativist theory, is frequently explored, and one demand of traditional aidos is often set against another. Sophistic discussions of the nature of aidos are particularly in evidence in two plays, the Ajax and the Philoktetes, which both reveal the operation of the concept as an internal form of conscience which can work without reference to the `other people' whose judgement is often mentioned in the context of the aidos-reaction. This appreciation of the internal aspect of aidos corresponds with Demokritos' view of its operation in the conscience of the individual. Sophistic ideas are even more readily apparent in Euripides, although they are much less closely integrated into the psychology of individual characters than they are in Sophokles. Relativism is also important in the younger poet, and a particular feature of his
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Uchitel, Alexander. "Mycenaean and Near Eastern economic archives." Thesis, University College London (University of London), 1985. http://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/1317733/.
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The present research was conducted. with the aim of better understanding of Linear B texts through the help of the Near Eastern parallels. The method chosen was the comparison between individual texts and groups of texts and not between the 'models' reconstructed for this or that society. Several restrictions for such a comparison were set up. The comparison itself was limited to the problems of manpower (lists of personnel, ration lists, land-surveys). The best parallels for Mycenaean records of work-teams (male and female) were found among the Sumerian documents from the period of the Third Dynasty of Ur, for the quotas of conscripts from specific villages - in Ugarit, and for the texts dealing with the land tenure and the organisation of the cultic personnel - among the Hittite cuneiform texts and Luwian hieroglyphic Kululu lead strips. The attempt was made to reconstruct the structure of the productive population in Mycenaean Greece and to find its place among other societies of the Ancient World.
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Prodi, Enrico Emanuele. "Pindar's Prosodia : introduction, text, and commentary to selected fragments." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2013. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:3c75c05c-30f3-45b3-8e12-896ffe687a7b.
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This dissertation examines the surviving remains of the two books of Pindar’s Prosodia. The introduction falls into four parts. The first is concerned with gathering the evidence for the books, through a review of their ancient testimonia (Chapter 1) and of the indirect and direct transmission of their fragments (Chapter 2); the second is concerned with the prosodion as a poetic genre, with some introductory remarks (Chapter 3) followed by an investigation of the collected evidence for the notion of prosodion in describing poetic texts (Chapter 4) and in later scholarship and generic theory (Chapter 5); the third combines the results of the first two into an analysis of the surviving fragments of Pindar’s Prosodia and an inquiry on the generic principles that shaped the collection (Chapter 6); the fourth consists of a descriptive catalogue of the papyrus manuscripts that contribute to the text of Pindar’s Prosodia (Chapter 7). The critical text of the eighteen main fragments and groups of fragments is followed by an introduction and line-by-line commentary to six of them, nos. 1, 2, 3, 5, *6, and *7 (= fr. 89 Snell-Maehler and ‘Paeans’ 14, 15, 6.123-183, 17, and 18).
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Strazdins, Estelle Amber. "The future of the second sophistic." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2012. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:6ca95d02-246c-4dee-be90-675278ac5e92.
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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.
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Phipps, S. R. "The styles and voices of non-dramatic Greek poetry in the fourth century BC." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2011. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:b4003441-7b02-4441-b5c6-8990d62dad9d.
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This thesis is an investigation into the styles and voices of the non-dramatic Greek poetry of the fourth century BC. This has been a neglected area of study in Greek literary history, and the extant poems of the fourth century have either been largely ignored or regarded contemptuously by modern critics. I seek to redress this balance by providing close readings of surviving poems, and aim to show that contrary to widespread opinion, there are signs that this is a period of dynamic creativity. The first section looks more closely at the various factors that have led to a neglect of fourth-century poetry, including issues of periodization, the transmission of texts and the canonisation of poetry, the impact of musical and technological innovations and of social changes. Scholarship on late-classical Greek art is also discussed as a comparison. I then turn to discuss specific texts in depth, focussing on the way poems characterise themselves through speakers and addressees. I begin with inscribed poetry (epigrams and hymns), in which I observe tendencies both to conform to a generic model and occasionally to produce more apparently literary-conscious works. The sometimes intrusive presence of the learned author-narrator is discussed in ‘bookish’ poems; the final section is devoted to various kinds of sung poetry, including enkomia, burlesque and parody. Although the texts I analyse are diverse in genre and character, they are sufficient to point to a wider vitality of literary activity throughout the century.
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Kelly, Michael. "Jealousy in love relations in Greek and Roman literature /." [St. Lucia, Qld.], 2005. http://www.library.uq.edu.au/pdfserve.php?image=thesisabs/absthe18555.pdf.
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Nikolaev, Alexander Sergeevich. "Diachronic Poetics and Language History: Studies in Archaic Greek Poetry." Thesis, Harvard University, 2012. http://dissertations.umi.com/gsas.harvard:10489.
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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
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Dasteridou, Magdalini. "Fear and Healing Through the Serpent Imagery in Greek Tragedy." Thesis, Harvard University, 2015. http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:24078361.
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This work explores how the tragic poets, by means of snake imagery, convey the notion of disease. Moreover, it examines how snake imagery contributes to the process of healing through the emotion of fear that it triggers. My analysis of the tragedies in which the three main tragedians employ snake imagery builds upon findings from ancient authors that refer to snakes and their characteristics, and upon the findings of contemporary scholars. My overall method relies on tools from structuralism and psycholinguistics. Through snake imagery the tragic poets portray disease as it manifests itself through arrogance, deception, physical pain, and madness. For this purpose the poets employ images inspired by the particular anatomy and behavior of the snake.
Within the context of tragedy, and through the fear that it triggers, the snake imagery encourages self-knowledge and healing through self-correction.
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Roussou, Stephanie. "Pseudo-Arcadius' Epitome of Herodian's Περὶ καθολικῆς προσῳδίας : with a critical edition and notes on Books 1-8." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2011. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:235409a4-7f6c-4495-83b3-41f8291f46d4.
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This thesis is a new edition of the Preface and Books 1-8 of Pseudo-Arcadius’ Epitome of Herodian’s Περὶ καθολικῆς προσῳδίας. It includes an introduction, critical apparatus, apparatus of parallel passages and notes on the text, and is intended as a contribution to modern Herodianic studies. Most of our knowledge of Greek accentuation is due to Herodian’s lost Περὶ καθολικῆς προσῳδίας. The main sources for this work, an epitome misattributed to Arcadius and another by John Philoponus, do not have modern critical editions. Lentz’s only collected edition of Herodian’s works (1867-70) is difficult to work with, because Lentz attempts to reconstruct Herodian’s work rather than to lay out the surviving evidence. The new critical edition of Pseudo-Arcadius’ Epitome is a response to the need for new and separate editions of the sources for the Περὶ καθολικῆς προσῳδίας. A new edition of this text is important because the previous two editions (Barker 1820, Schmidt 1860) have many weaknesses; neither editor examined all the surviving manuscripts, and they did not read the manuscripts themselves but used copies made by other people. My new examination of all the surviving manuscripts, excepting some very late and uncontroversially derivative manuscripts, comes to a new conclusion about their interrelations. The two manuscripts which I am the first to employ turn out to be the only non-derivative manuscripts, and therefore by far the most important. They enable us to improve the text significantly. My introduction includes a substantial new evaluation of the interpolated or doubtful sections in the epitome, whose study is impeded by confusion as to their date and relationships to other works. It also discusses the authorship of this epitome, and its grammatical terminology and concepts. Another innovation is the apparatus of parallel passages. The collection of other texts that have derived material from Herodian shows the extent of Herodian’s influence on later grammatical texts. The parallel passages, as witnesses to Herodian’s text in some form, often enable us to correct the text of Pseudo-Arcadius’ Epitome. A further contribution of my thesis consists of the commentary, which discusses corrupt passages, features of the text that have never been explained before, and places where specific details of the epitomator’s methods can be identified. The commentary also provides argumentation supporting decisions taken in editing the text, and other helpful information for the understanding of the text.
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van, Emde Boas Evert H. "Linguistic studies in Euripides' Electra." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2011. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:dbecc2f8-f980-4a33-9fdc-20d8c1329dc5.
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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.
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Slattery, Samuel Robert. "Editions of a selection of literary, paraliterary, and documentary papyri from Oxyrhynchus." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2013. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:00f55cac-1a3a-4e63-8ac9-65d7febd6bd8.
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This thesis presents twenty-one unpublished Greek literary and documentary texts from Oxyrhynchus kept in the Sackler Library, Oxford. Each papyrus is identified, transcribed, and edited with a detailed introduction and notes largely in accordance with the conventions and format of presentation of The Oxyrhynchus Papyri (London 1898–). The literary texts are diverse in content. The item of especial interest is a new fragment from Sophocles’ Tereus, which joins a quotation from Stobaeus’ Anthologium. It provides new information on the play’s dramatis personae and the long vexed question of where the quotation is to be located in the play. Another new text is the remains of an unknown hexameter poem on a mythical subject which refers to the Lapiths and Centaurs. From the known texts, a minute fragment of Polybius’ Historiae, a fragment Plutarch’s Alexander and two fragments of Plato’s Philebus stand out due to the rarity of these texts. The documentary texts illustrate a variety of matters tending on social, economic, fiscal, and legal aspects of life in Roman and late antique Oxyrhynchus. Of the texts from the Roman period, a text dealing with the execution of a testamentary bequest and another text concerning a summons to the prefect’s conventus are notable for the information which they provide on the functioning of testamentary bequests and the practice of litigation respectively. Of the four texts from the Byzantine period, an Oxyrhynchite lease of land is of special importance due to the comparative rarity of documents of this kind from Oxyrhynchus and because it exhibits a number of points of interest, not least that the lessee is a colonus adscripticius. A ‘sale on delivery of wine’ also involves a colonus adscripticius. The other document of special interest is a large private letter which concerns various matters of business from a man who claims to be in a precarious situation.
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Zhou, Sharon. "Engineering Ingenium: Improving Engagement and Accuracy With the Visualization of Latin for Language Learning." Thesis, Harvard University, 2015. http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:14398527.
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The goal of Ingenium is to prompt beginning Latin students to think consciously and critically on Latin grammar prior to translating a sentence, while engaging them with the grammar in an intuitive and hands-on way. Learners commonly make errors in reading Latin, because they do not fully understand the impact of Latin’s grammatical structure—its morphology and syntax—on a sentence’s meaning. Synthesizing instructional methods used for Latin and artificial programming languages, Ingenium visualizes the logical structure of grammar by making each word into a puzzle block, whose shape and color reflect the word’s morphological forms and roles. Ingenium is designed so that students do not focus on words in isolation, but make logical connections between words and group words together, so that the number of elements involved in the translation, or the cognitive load, is instantly reduced. For this reason, puzzle blocks only fit together if there is sound grammatical logic, preventing students from making syntactic errors and allowing them to experiment in a mistake-free environment. The blocks also serve to abstract out the grammatical terminology in favor of visual representation, making it easy for Ingenium to supplement current methods of Latin instruction and to maximize its adoption potential.
The audience of Ingenium is novice Latin students. When students’ experience and confidence are at their lowest, they will benefit most from an interface that is not exclusively text-based, but engaging, hands-on, familiar, and intuitive. To evaluate Ingenium, I conducted an experiment with 67 beginning Latin students, measuring objective engagement, emotional and cognitive engagement, learning, change in self-efficacy, cognitive load, and accuracy in sentence translation with Ingenium over a traditional text-based interface as the baseline control. From the study, students, when using Ingenium, reported considerably higher levels of engagement and learning, opted to perform more optional problems, and completed translation exercises with substantially greater accuracy than when using the traditional interface. Ingenium has demonstrated its potential to be a powerful tool in improving students’ engagement, learning, and accuracy in reading Latin. Thus, Ingenium supports Latin pedagogy by introducing the following research-based innovations:
- An approach to learning a natural language through hands-on interactions with the logic of its grammar
- A method of visually and intuitively representing technical grammatical concepts
- A tool that can effectively engage early learners of Latin with the grammar of the language
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Parmar, Hiteshkumar Chimanlal. "Strabo and India." Thesis, University of Edinburgh, 2016. http://hdl.handle.net/1842/23448.
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Scholarship on Strabo’s Geography has long noticed that the procedure adopted by the author in his account of India is inconsistent with the method he follows elsewhere (Puskás 1993). On the one hand, it has been argued that, while describing the subcontinent, the author quotes so extensively from his sources that he allows practically no space for his own reasoning. Such a writing strategy is unlike the practice he normally adopts (Dueck 2000:180-6). On the other hand, after stressing that the geographical writing may only draw on reliable sources and that the reports on India are unreliable (Geography, 2.1.9 C 70), Strabo writes his own account on the subcontinent by drawing on authors he deemed untrustworthy (Geography, 15.1.1-73 C 685-720). This procedure clearly shifts from the method he follows across his work. However, very few studies have been dedicated exclusively to the matter and this thesis proposes to fill the lacuna. In fact, within Strabonian studies, one trend has tended to analyse individual regions described in Geography (Andreotti 1999), while another has examined themes permeating the book (Clarke 2001 and Engels 1998). The description of India has been widely used to reconstruct relevant aspects of ancient history (Karttunen 1997 and Parker 2008). However, little attention has been paid to the author’s conception of India, which will be the main focus of this thesis. By analysing what Strabo selected from his sources and by considering a network of concepts pervading his work, we will see that apparent inconsistencies serve a number of purposes. In Chapter 1, it will be argued that the inclusion or omission of a given detail related to India was relevant for the political agenda underlying the text. In view of the literature produced at the time and the data made available today by the archaeological research on Indo-Roman trade, Strabo’s account shares the ideology underlying the Res Gestae Divi Augusti. Yet, at times, his text lies between a panegyric and a satire of the Roman Empire. Chapter 2 will show that the author creates an image of India that served to support the aforementioned political agenda. By portraying native kings in association with luxury and corruption, the text refers to traditional Greek conception of the East and this has a bearing on the depiction of the Roman Empire. In Chapter 3, we will see that Strabo’s description addresses ethical questions that were left unsolved by Greek philosophical schools at the time, namely, education for women and the relationship between the philosophical way of life and political compromise. Within this setting of philosophical reflection, the text provides a sound set of moral illustrations, exempla, complete with brief autobiographical remarks.
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Hemingway, Ben. "The dream in classical Greece : debates and practices." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2009. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:d0d272ee-e293-44bf-b8c2-02b68304d22f.
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This thesis aims to address the Greek attitude to their dream experience in the classical period, as it was conceived in theories and engaged with in dream practices. The emphasis is on the relationship between these elements and the wider cultural frames which surrounded them, in order both to illustrate the manner in which culture influences the conception of dreams, and also to use dreams themselves as a mirror to reflect parts of Greek culture. As a study it has been heavily shaped by the approaches to dreams developed by anthropologists, outlined in Chapter 2, who have emphasised the importance of studying dreams intra-culturally. In Chapter 3 I analyse the language that the Greeks used to express their dreaming experience, drawing from it the important way in which language was both determined by, and determined, the Greeks' understanding of the phenomenon. This forms a base for engaging with dream theories in Chapter 4, both the implicit allusions in literature and explicit explanations proposed by philosophers and medical writers. I then explore the theories at work within Greek culture via dreams as we see them active in the lived religion of the polis: I examine in Chapter 5 the dedications set up by individuals on account of spontaneous dreams, and in Chapter 6 the practice of incubation. I then turn to examine specific relationships: in Chapter 7, the association of dreams with status, i.e. the possibility that powerful people would have equally powerful dreams; in Chapter 8, dreams and gender, assessing the possibility that women considered their dreams to be more important than their male counterparts. In Chapter 9, I position dreams within the context of the other divinatory practices of the period, which allows us to see the unique ways in which dream practices functioned in comparison to the other divinatory forms.
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Vatri, Alessandro. "The linguistics of orality : a psycholinguistic approach to private and public performance of classical Attic prose." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2013. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:2ef61a6c-a296-4c00-b7c9-78c5d7b5ffa8.
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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.
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Pateridou, Georgia. "Yannis Psycharis's Greek novels (1888-1929) : didactic narratives, cultural views and self-referentiality." Thesis, University of Birmingham, 2004. http://etheses.bham.ac.uk//id/eprint/7669/.
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The aim of this thesis is to examine Psycharis's Greek novels by focusing on his modes of writing and the ideas manifested in them. Psycharis saw his role as that of an intellectual aiming to reform Greek culture and he fought consistently for the establishment of the demotic - as he understood it as the language of literature. Yet his novels serve as a filter not only for his views on language and literature, but also for other social and philosophical issues of relevance to his time, and even to contemporary readers. I have defined three major areas for examination: the didacticism of the novels, expressed in the themes and in the narrative techniques employed by the author; the overall recurring cultural views presented in them, and the preoccupation with the importance of fiction, the role of literature and of the prose writer. The novels will be examined in chronological order and I shall address each of the three major areas explained above in turn, emphasising the most prominent one in each case. The objective of this thesis is to make Psycharis's Greek novels better known and to indicate the role that he played in the development of Modern Greek prose and culture.
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Voyiatzaki, Evangelina. "The body in the text : James Joyce's Ulysses and the modern Greek novel." Thesis, University of Warwick, 2000. http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/4380/.
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This thesis examines the body's thematization in narrative, and as part of the aesthetic consciousness of the modernist novel. Its starting point is Joyce's pioneering association of Ulysses with the functions of a live body, and the interdisciplinary rationale that his Thomist aesthetics of wholeness enact. Joyce's view of his text as a multi-levelled, reciprocally interdependent hierarchy of various fields, including art and science, as developed in the Linati and Gilbert Schemes, sheds light on the polyphonic and polyglottic narratorial tactics of U. Joyce's enterprise is compared to the Greek modernist novel which developed its innovative techniques in accordance with the general demand for a reorientation of Greek literature toward introspection. The reception of U in Greece coincided with the heyday of this attempt which was characterized by experimentation and was influenced by psychoanalysis, phenomenology and anthropological studies. The three Greek authors in this study, Stelios Xefloudas, Nikos Gavriil Pentzikis, Giorgos Cheimonas, each of them representing a different period in the development of the modem novel, were variously influenced by Joyce's work. The argument particularly focuses on their use of the body in the text in the light of Joyce's work. The foreword, a theoretical introduction, sets forth the terms of the argument. The first chapter is a brief survey of Us reception in Greece. It discusses the quest for the renewal of Greek literature which started around the thirties. Tracing the links of this renewal With Joyce's work, it particularly focuses on the techniques of introspection and their association with the body, as part of the aesthetic consciousness of the inner-orientated or 'introverted' novel. The second chapter is an analysis of Joyce's paradigmatic use of the body in the text. Focusing on the act of creation in comedy, scientific discovery and aesthetic rapture, it discusses the psycho-physiological processes and the cultural psycho-dynamics which are compressed within Q, and support its multi-perspectival and multi-interpretative orientation. Joyce's mock-heroic, his anti-theology, the aesthetics of the androgynous artist, desire in language and bodily interference in the act of writing are seen in relation to the body and in the light of Joyce's explanatory schemes. Chapter three examines Xefloudas's attempted assimilation of Joyce's introspective techniques, in the use of myth, in the questing voyager archetype, and in desire in language through the myth of eternal return. The fourth chapter discusses N. G. Pentzikis's Christian-Freudian-Jungian perspective on Joyce's work and his reworking of Us motifs in a surrealist mode (dream, metamorphosis, free association). His endeavour to subvert his own literary past takes place through the re-writing of Drosmiis's novel, To Mythistorema fis Kytlas Ersis. In this book all elements of Greek modernism are welded together. Pentzikis undoes and redoes the Parnassian novel, drawing heavily upon Q, and the Hellenic and Byzantine legacies which he semi-parodically incorporates into his art. His use of the Rabelaislan body and the grotesque, which reflects his language games, also emulates Joyce's. The fifth chapter deals with Cheimonas, as a successor of the previous authors. Cheimonas revisits all the thematic motifs of Joyce and of the aforementioned Greek authors in the light of contemporary phenomenology, psychoanalysis, psycho-linguistics and deconstruction. In an attempted assimilation of the language of FW and Joyce's preoccupation with the sound of the word, he writes an elliptical prose violated in its syntax, grammar and word-formation. His texts are a journey to the origins of language. Through violent dramatizations of psycho-linguistic theories, these texts aim at revealing the body's voice.
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Bowden, Hugh. "Herodotos and Greek sanctuaries." Thesis, University of Oxford, 1990. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:cf106c48-5008-46c2-a0e8-fcc94b20f159.
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This thesis argues that sanctuaries of the gods played a significant role in the political life of the Greek polis in the archaic and classical periods, and that the politics of the period cannot be understood fully without consideration of religion. It uses the text of Herodotos as a source of evidence about the history and perceptions of the period, but also makes use of other literary and archaeological evidence, so that the resulting models may be considered generally useful for the study of the period. Ch. 1 lays out the background to the subject; ch. 2 is an analysis of the activities related to sanctuaries described by Herodotos; ch. 3 examines sanctuaries as the meeting places of federations of Greek states, as well as investigating the nature of sanctuaries as areas of bounded space, showing that political meetings were frequently, if not always, held in sanctuaries, and that this was perceived as allowing some divine influence on decisions; ch. 4 investigates the dedications made at sanctuaries by foreigners, as part of a diplomatic process, showing that they provided a means of access to the polis as well as the god; ch. 5 compares the dedication of booty at sanctuaries with the construction of the battlefield trophy; ch. 6 argues that Herodotos portrays divine intervention as always happening through sanctuaries; ch. 7 argues that Herodotos' frequent mentions of Delphi are a sign of its importance in Greek history, not his own interest; ch. 8 draws some of these ideas together and suggests some general explanations for the importance of sanctuaries, as providing symbolic control of access to the polis, and bestowing authority on decisions taken by assemblies. Finally it suggests that Herodotos's inclusion of religious matters in his histories increases his importance as a source and an historian.
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Polten, Orla. "Spectres of metre : English poetry in classical measures, 1860-1930." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2018. https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/278573.
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Why did so many poets attempt English verse in Ancient Greek and Latin metres during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries? And what was at stake in these attempts? The most immediate importance of these questions to literary criticism is the fact that they mark one of the most striking and consistent points of contiguity between the verse-forms — and poetic theories — of poets commonly categorised as ‘Modernists’ and ‘Victorians’. This study uncovers a lineage of experimentation with classical metres connecting Algernon Charles Swinburne to Ezra Pound and H. D., in the process challenging received periodizations of English verse-history. The assumption that vers libre and metrical verse constitute alternate and incompatible paradigms prevents us from being able to perceive, in either of them, the endless performative possibilities that rhythm offers us — possibilities which, as I intend to demonstrate, underpin some of the period’s most influential experiments in verse-form. My close studies of these poetic forms raise another question: what is the ontological status of these poetic forms that pass through multiple languages and millennia? I frame my readings of English poetry in classical measures through the metaphor of the ghost because English poetry can only encounter classical metres as a kind of spectral or incomplete presence. I refer to this encounter, borrowing a term from Jacques Derrida, as ‘hauntology’: a situation of temporal, historical, and ontological disjunction that occurs when a being or entity, apparently present, is revealed to be an absent or continually-deferred (non-)origin. The hauntological character of English poems in classical measures is due not only to fundamental differences between the syntaxes and phonologies of Ancient Greek, Latin, and English, but also to the loss of knowledge concerning the traditions and conventions of metrical performance in Ancient Greek and Latin. This is why writing English poetry in classical metres generally poses a far greater challenge — both technically and conceptually — than writing English poetry in the metres of a living language: recreating classical metres in English requires reimagining the very nature of the encounter between poems and bodies, while also facing up to the quasi-magical charge that ‘the classical’ holds in the English literary imagination.