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Oaths, Phantoms, Contagion, Truth: The Crisis Of Logos In Fifth-Century Athenian Culture, Kaitlin Elizabeth Karmen

Senior Projects Spring 2020

The political and military collapse of Athens during Peloponnesian War (431 – 404 BCE) was paralleled by a collapse in the norms—social, familial, religious, and moral—that informed traditional civilized behavior. This disintegration was reflected in a number of contemporary texts that wrestled with the implications of this cultural collapse—particularly with respect to its implications for logos (language, reason, narrative), which intellectuals at the time understood to be a cultural construct belonging to the realm of nomoi (laws, customs). In this thesis, I look at a range of texts from Thucydides’ History, to tragedies by Euripides and Sophocles, to a …