Classics Commons^™

Justice For All: Moira, Tyche And Nemesis In The Marvel Cinematic Universe, Jason Osborne

Journal of Religion & Film

This article explores the ways in which the ancient concepts of moira, tyche, and nemesis permeate the films and series of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

Desire In The Iliad: The Force That Moves The Epic And Its Audience, Rachel H. Lesser

Gettysburg College Faculty Books

This book is the first study to examine desire in the Iliad in a comprehensive way and to explain its relationship to the epic’s narrative structure and audience reception. It offers a new reading of the poem that shows how the characters’ desires, especially those of the mortal hero Achilleus and the divine king Zeus, motivate plot and keep the audience engaged with the epic until and even beyond its end. The author argues that the characters’ desires are primarily organized in narrative triangles that feature two parties in conflict over a third. A variety of desires animate these triangles, …

Lies, Deceits, Manipulations, And Other Forms Of Aesthetic Expression In Horace, Satires 2.5, Andrew Horne

History & Classics Faculty Publications

Finagling an inheritance is one time-tested way of resolving a money shortage: just flatter your way into the good graces of the aged and rich. In Satires 2.5 Horace parodies the Roman version of this vice, known as captatio or ‘legacy- hunting’; with baroque imagination, he presents Odysseus, the mythological hero, consulting the prophet Tiresias in the Underworld and learning how to increase his fortune by amassing inheritances. Odysseus asks: tu protinus, unde | diuitias aerisque ruam, dic, augur, aceruos (‘tell me forthwith, prophet, where I can dig up riches and heaps of money’, 21f.). Tiresias responds: captes astutus ubique …

Born From Myth, Built Anew: Seneca’S Medea As A Stoic Cautionary Tale, Rebekah Dyche

Lewis Honors College Thesis Collection

In Seneca’s Medea, there are two distinct “Medeas” to be examined – Medea the character, who has been built up out of mythical and literary tradition, and Medea as a human individual. By dividing her in this way Seneca opens the door to reimagine an already extant figure through a Stoic lens. He exaggerates the negative portrayal of Medea in her traditional role to draw in the audience and to emphasize the disastrous outcome of the individual Medea’s failure to moderate her human passions – in so doing, he first engages the audience with a familiar character and then challenges …

A Wrath That Remembers: A Feminist Companion To Aeschylus' Agamemnon, Mary Iris Allison

Scripps Senior Theses

This project is a feminist translation and companion to Aeschylus' Agamemnon, which includes detailed footnotes and references to secondary authors that provide a feminist reading of the text.

Ovid's Caeneus As A Queer Hero: Understanding Gender And Gender Variance In The Ancient Mediterranean., Rj Palmer

Theses and Dissertations--Modern and Classical Languages, Literature and Cultures

Caeneus, as written in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, is a notable blend of ancient and Hellenistic versions of the myth. Ovid’s Caeneus can be understood as a transgender man, since he was assigned female at birth, but asks for his gender to be changed by the god Neptune, and goes on to live the rest of his life with the body, appearance, and social roles of a man. Ovid incorporates Caeneus’ trans identity with his use of grammatical gender endings for Caeneus, using masculine gender for Caeneus except when discussing his pre-transition childhood, or when the centaurs address him mockingly while fighting. …

Women's Marital Roles In Classical Athens: Male Understanding And Portrayal In Aeschylus' Agamemnon And Euripides' Medea, Elena Graf, Mary Boyes

Undergraduate Research Posters

Abstract

The Classical Period of Athens (500-336 BCE) was an era of sociocultural growth and stability for the ancient Greeks, renowned for its development of tragic theatre. While Classical Athens nurtured the public sociocultural success of male citizens, women adopted a submissive role, confined to their marital responsibilities. Women were forbidden from directly taking part in politics, philosophy, and above all, the theatrical scene of Athens. Due to these societal perceptions of traditional gender roles, the literature of the Classical Period was heavily influenced by a male bias. This study investigates the connections between women’s role in Classical Athenian society …

Orphan Hermeneutics: Refashioning Archetypes In 19th-Century Epic Prose Fiction, John David Sieker

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

Celebrated authors of the 19th century, Herman Melville and Charles Dickens are frequently critiqued within specifically national parameters, regarded as authors whose literary concerns reflect their respective countries and cultures. From that premise, there seems little if any connective thread to link Bleak House, the quintessential "stay-at-home" novel, and Moby-Dick, the epic, sea-faring adventure spanning nearly the entire globe. However, certain parallels between these novels in both form and content prove quite striking and reveal a transatlantic connection worthy of sustained critical attention. Both Melville and Dickens gesture to biblical and Classical antiquity in order to weave their respective narratives. …

On Forms And Regulations Of Han Poetry, Shang-Ju Chiang

Chinese Language Teaching Methodology and Technology

Traditional poetics is gradually disappearing under the impact of modernization. Aiming to provide Chinese with specific ways to understand the poetics of Chinese characters, this article articulates and analyzes most of the Han Poetry forms and regulations illustrated with the author-created poems, such as the traditional quatrains and regulated poems and many more. It is the author’s hope that more people will appreciate and inherit classic poetry but also be innovative.

How A Book Changed A Nation [2022], Teodora Buzea

Master's Theses

“We don’t believe in vampires.”

I didn’t bother to turn away from the TV to look at my parents. On screen, a crew of young men were interviewing an old woman. She spoke only Romanian, and a too-perfect female voice spoke for her in English. I could see the confident fear in her expression as she exclaimed that vampires were indeed real and that she was always scared of them. She wasn’t alone. All of Transylvania were aware of the existence of vampires. Truly, these young men— ghost hunters and cryptologists—were right to come here to this haunted nation. The …

Non Ennarabile Textum: Allusive Ekphrasis In Francisco Javier Alegre's Alexandrias, Shashank Dimri

The Journal of Purdue Undergraduate Research

Neo-Latin literature in colonial New Spain has a rich history that has only in recent years garnered broader interest from scholars. One of the most unique works produced in New Spain during this time is Jesuit scholar Francisco Javier Alegre’s Alexandrias, an epic that depicts Alexander the Great’s conquest of the Phoenician city of Tyre. As there is scant scholarship analyzing the literary elements of the Alexandrias, this paper focuses only on Alegre’s usage of ekphrasis—a detailed description of an object—in book one of the epic, rather than attempting to explore every allusive aspect in this dense text. …

Concretizing The Fictional Places In Literary Works And Bringing Them To Tourism: Zeyniler Village Calikusu House, Zeynep Yamac Erdogan

University of South Florida (USF) M3 Publishing

In this study, in line with the relationship between tourism and literature, Zeyniler Village which is included in the novel Çalıkuşu by Turkish Literature writer Reşat Nuri Güntekin, has been examined in terms of literary tourism. In the study, it is aimed to determine the tourism potential of Zeyniler Village with the house in which the fictional main characters live concretized and opened to visitors under the name of Çalıkuşu Evi. Zeyniler Village was examined on-site, at the same time as one of the qualitative research methods, interview technique was used, and content analysis was conducted by compiling the data …

Blandin De Cornoalha, A Comic Occitan Romance: A New Critical Edition And Translation, Wendy Pfeffer, Margaret Burrell

TEAMS Varia

This volume presents the first widely available edition in English of the medieval romance Blandin de Cornoalha, accompanied by a translation and introduction to the work. Composed in the second half of the fourteenth century by an anonymous author, the story offers an early recording of the Sleeping Beauty folktale, incorporated into the adventures of two knights. Many elements in this romance from the south of France are comic, suggesting that Blandin is not simply a tale of knights in battle, but also a parody of medieval romance in general.

The Storytelling Cure: Medicine And Narrative From Galen To Shahrazad And Rousseau, Ryan A. Milov-Cordoba

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Are stories healing? This dissertation introduces and explores an idea that I call “the storytelling cure.” With this term I capture a set of related notions about the healing power of stories that span literary studies, intellectual history, philosophy, and medical practice. Through a comparative study I make the case for “the storytelling cure” as a cross-cultural, multiconfessional, and multilingual phenomenon of great age, complexity, and power, worthy of the most sustained attention by the contemporary field of Comparative Literature. Concretely, this dissertation presents three extended case studies of “storytelling cures” from three different kinds of texts (case history, frame …

The Intersection Of Prose And Poetics In Apollonius’ Argonautica, Stephen B. Ogumah

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Detecting allusions in the Argonautica of Apollonius of Rhodes is not quite new except for the fact that it has been carried out for long mostly within the poetic tradition. Looking at the proem of the epic, where there is mixing of genres, this mixture suggests that scholars may need to look beyond the Homeric epics and the poetic tradition for better appreciation of the Alexandrian epic. This dissertation explores the relationship between certain features and episodes of Apollonius’ Argonautica and the prose tradition, and seeks to show that the prose tradition, particularly Herodotus’ Histories, is germane to the …

Eating People Is Might: Power And The Representation Of Anthropophagy In Antiquity, Christopher Weimer

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

For several decades, scholars have read cannibalism in ancient texts as an ethnographic and rhetorical strategy to marginalize, minimize, demonize, or otherwise denigrate ‘the Other.’ It is seen as a characteristic of the wild, the savage, the uncivilized, and the bestial, something one attributes only to other people. This project challenges that assertion. In situating the many varied references to eating people in ancient Greek, Near Eastern, and Roman literature within their historical and generic contexts, I provide an alternative reading of the purpose of these accusations and stories. I argue that consumption of another is a statement of power, …

May The Word 'Shout' Be No More! Silence And The Hellenistic Voice, Noah Davies-Mason

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

No abstract provided.

In Search Of The Pelasgians: Discursive Strategies And Greek Identities From The Archaic Period To The Roman Imperial Era, Tristn Lambright

Theses

In ancient literature, the Pelasgians appear as an ambiguously defined and geographically ubiquitous primeval ethnic group or tribe. Various classical writers describe the Pelasgians as simultaneously pre-Hellenic and non-Hellenic –– ancestral and barbarian, chronologically earlier and essentially different. The ongoing ideological and rhetorical negotiations of Pelasgian identity in ancient literature played a critical role in discussions of Greekness –– discussions rooted in the distant past, informed by fluid and contradictory myths, and shaped by intellectual, social, and political transformations of the period. By contextualizing these discussions, this study attempts not simply a reconstruction of the mythological Pelasgians, but a reconstruction …

Cultivating Creative Storytelling, Emma Kuli

Canterbury Scholars

This essay investigates how the structural expectations and narrative conventions restrict contemporary creative writing. This work seeks to imagine how, in order to work towards the creation of an anti-racist creative space, a classroom may work without and against the limits set by writing and language conventions. Blending academic research, sample student work, and narrative anecdotes, this essay examines the ways in which storytelling can be used to uplift young writing voices.

Clas 150 Oer Sylalbus, Raymond L. Capra

Open Educational Resources

CLAS 150 OER syllabus

Nunc Pauperis Agri: Rural Fantasy And Economic Reality In The Elegies Of Tibullus, Victoria Elizabeth Jansson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation argues that attention to economic anxieties in Tibullus’ elegies is crucial to understanding his corpus. Concerns about agricultural production, globalized trade, and institutional power recur throughout the elegies. An appreciation of economic desire may not only produce a fruitful reading of Tibullus’ poetry, but also help to answer some of the questions suggested by elegy’s socio-historical framework. This project relies methodologically on both economic analysis and a Lacanian psychoanalytic framework. Additionally, each chapter explores a different facet of religious experience in the elegies: the myth of the Golden Age, prayers to the goddess Ceres, and references to the …

Isocrates's Place In Postmodern Advertising, Christopher Barkley

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This study in communication and rhetoric seeks to ascertain constructive applications for distinct advertising practices by examining Isocrates’s work and place in postmodern advertising. The focus uses 5 principles known to Isocrates which are: 1) commonwealths of households, 2) integration of reputation, elegance, substance and style, 3) education and public discourse, 4) phronesis and praxis, and 5) truth and verisimilitude. These 5 principles can form a constructive and practical advertising approach. This study is important. It examines Isocrates through the lens of advertising and extends the research done about him by leading Isocrates scholars who have looked primarily at his …

Heroines And Murderers The World Of Sophoclean Women, Nathan Debar

Honors Theses

This thesis will examine the female characters of the extant and fragmentary plays of the 5th-century BC Athenian poet Sophocles. These plays’ composition date ranges from the second half of the 5th century BC. Not every play will be considered for this study, as some do not contain female characters or female characters cannot be ascribed to a fragmentary play. Only plays that feature female characters or plays in which female characters and their actions can be reasonably estimated will be used in this study. For the fragments and their information, I shall default to Hugh Lloyd-Jones’ 1996 Sophocles: Fragments. …

Mercy Otis Warren’S Marcia(S) And Cornelia(S): A Case Study In Women’S Internalization Of Classicism In Early America, Brittany Ellis

Honors Theses

The connection between people in early America and classicism is a field of study that has been heavily documented, although it has remained a very male-focused field with little research done about how women in early America formed a relationship with antiquity. This thesis reveals that elite white women had a deep emotional and intellectual attachment with mothers and matrons from ancient Greece and Rome as a basis for expressing political thoughts and identity; classicism formed a common language that many women could relate to each other before, during, and after the American Revolution. This assessment is achieved through a …

Woven Words In The Iliad: Gender, Narrative, And Textile Production In The Scholia Of The Venetus A Manuscript, Anne-Catherine Schaaf

College Honors Program

The work of previous scholars has established powerful connections between the process of creating textiles and process of epic oral composition. I build on disparte sources from the fields of archaeology and philology and analyze how the scholia in one epic manuscript of the Iliad, the Venetus A, treat this issue and with a focus on how it interplays with gender, specifically the female characters in the Iliad who produce textiles. I focus on a few major sections of scholia and important scenes of weaving in the Iliad. The key female characters in the novel, both divine and human nearly …

Bee Pluribus Unum: Vergil As An Imperial Advisor, Oleander Reagan-Artemis

Honors Theses

All three of Vergil’s major works received patronage, although somewhat indirectly, by Augustus, the first Roman emperor, and they have been an integral aspect of education since they were given to the public. Research going back hundreds of years, from John Wesley of the late 1700s to the contemporary Peter White, has sought to address the finer details of the relationship between Augustus and Vergil, focusing heavily on Vergil’s attitude towards Augustus and the new imperial rule. In this paper, I will add to this controversy-steeped conversation from the perspective of an educator, highlighting the possibility that Vergil was a …

Searching For Hades In Archaic Greek Literature, Daniel Stoll

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

No single volume of mythological or philological research exists for Hades. In the one moment Hades appears in archaic Greek literature, speaking for only ten lines, Hermes stands nearby. Thus, to understand and journey to Hades is to reckon with Hermes’ close presence. As I synthesize research by writers from several different disciplines, may some light be brought into the depths. May we analyze Hades’ brief appearance in archaic Greek literature, examining how what I define as the “Hermetic” emits from his breath in the one moment he physically appears and speaks.

A Point In Time Filled With Significance: The Application Of Kairos In Contemporary Rhetoric And Civic Pedagogy, Bryant Smilie

Graduate Theses and Dissertations (2019 - present)

This study examines how kairos continues to operate in contemporary discourses and disciplines despite its inadequate treatment as a normative principle in modern studies. Notwithstanding James Kinneavy’s revival of kairos encouraging many scholars to revisit the term in search of a complete definition, there is still an absence of conclusive application of the concept in contemporary pedagogy. I argue that, over time, the two versions of kairos have become entangled, contradictory, and thought of as too flexible to be taught in a modern setting because they have resisted concrete methodology. While the idea that kairos possesses two dimensions has already …

Transforming Trees, Transcending Binaries: Gender In Augustan Poetry, Kendall Swanson

College Honors Program

Humans have been inextricably linked to nature since before the rule of Emperor Augustus in Ancient Rome. Nature feeds humans, it gives people the tools to build a society. Because of this relationship, it is no surprise that authors, both ancient and modern, incorporate various themes of the natural world into their works. Additionally, nature appears linked to human conceptions of gender, as seen in literature and real-world experience. According to the United Nations, one goal to accomplish in order to achieve sustainable development is gender equality in all countries. Gender and nature work together: when inequality exists, environmental degradation …

Shakespeare’S The Merchant Of Venice, Qanon And Blood Libel, Georga Hackworth

Departmental Honors & Graduate Capstone Projects

Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, QAnon, and Blood Libel explores the contemporary relevance of the work of Shakespeare. The Jewish blood libel was first mentioned by Socrates. Whether Socrates was literal or using an allegory is unknown. What is known, is the story was repeated and used as the basis for a conspiracy theory targeting Jews stating they kill Christian Children to make unleavened Passover bread. This idea has resulted in stereotypes and Jews being the scapegoats for all the ills of the world. William Shakespeare played on this idea in The Merchant of Venice, using a blood libel to …