Classics Commons^™

& One Night The World Will Have Changed, Hanna Andrews

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

& One Night the World Will Have Changed is a collection of poems largely concerned with thresholds—what does one have to reconcile when standing at a precipice, when grappling with a crisis of faith, and how does one begin again? The collection is marked by three distinct sections: the first section of poems considers the effects of a devastating storm along with the emotional upheaval of abandonment (both the act of having been left, and then later, of leaving behind one life for a different one.) The second section is a series of prose poems that narrate the aftermath in …

Cathartic Concentration: Meditation And Altered States In Apuleius' Metamorphoses, Benjamin L. John

Foreign Languages & Literatures ETDs

In this thesis, I offer my reading of Apuleius’ novel, the Metamorphoses, or the Golden Ass. Modern scholars are divided on whether we should read the novel as a genuine expression of religio-philosophical sentiment or a satire of religious devotion. My goal is to show that these are not mutually exclusive readings, but two positions from which to consider the idea of spiritual transcendence.

The first chapter explores the way that Apuleius uses light imagery to characterize the religious experience of the novel’s protagonist, Lucius, by analyzing similar phenomena in contemporary and modern descriptions of altered states of …

Good Rhetoric From The Classical To The Jesuits; Or On Αγαθός Λόγος, Andrew J. Wells

The Criterion

Labeling rhetoric as ἀγαθός (good) or κακός (bad) might appear subjective. The Jesuit rhetorical tradition suggests otherwise. Once I place the pursuit of eloquentia perfecta within the context of ancient rhetoricians: Socrates, Gorgias, the author of Dissoi Logoi, and Quintillian, I attempt to find a definition for ἀγαθός λόγος (good speech/rhetoric).

Queens Of Failing Nations In Classical Tragedy, Katie L. Toledano

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

This thesis will compare the role that queens in failing nations, motivated by revenge, play as tragic heroes in Classical tragedy. Focusing on the classical tragedies of Euripides’ Medea and Hekabe to Seneca’s Medea and Trojan Women, this thesis compares the roles that these queens play as tragic heroes in both the Greek and Roman renditions. As politically significant characters and tragic heroes, Medea and Hecuba both operate as both poison and cure, representing nations and houses that are failing, on the basis of their identity and their actions. I have focused on how Euripides and Seneca offer queens and …

Lucian's Imagines: A Student Reader, And Pro Imaginibus: A Translation, Jesse Amar

Honors Scholar Theses

This student reader provides a complete Greek text of Lucian's Imagines (Eikones, or Portraits), with linguistic and literary commentary for the intermediate student of Ancient Greek. There follows a new translation of Lucian's Pro Imaginibus, the author's own take on his work.

Affecting Civil War: The Poetics Of Fear In Lucan’S Bellum Civile, Irene R. Morrison-Moncure

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation argues for the importance of fear in the Bellum Civile, Lucan’s Neronian epic narrating the civil war between Caesar and Pompey (49 – 48 BCE). Previous scholars have acknowledged the centrality of fear in Lucan’s poetic program, having related it to the Aristotelian theory of pity and fear (catharsis) and to the use of affective rhetorical devices in historiographic writing. However, there has been no extended analysis on the programmatic role of fear in Lucan’s historical epic. I examine therefore how Lucan represents fear in its multifaceted forms and analyze how the representation of these forms complicates Lucan’s …

Four Facets Of Diminishment In Cicero's Pro Caelio: Dilemma, Irony, Understatement, And Comedy, Donald Matthew Pasko

Graduate Theses and Capstone Projects (excluding DNP)

No abstract provided.

Satyrs, Syphilis, And Sailors: The Influence Of Gaius Petronius’ Satyricon Liber On Samuel Taylor Coleridge’S “The Rime Of The Ancient Mariner”, Spencer Fugate

English Honors Projects

For generations, Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” has befuddled readers. This project argues that many of its apparent puzzles disappear once we recognize its base text as the Satyricon Liber, Gaius Petronius’ first-century vulgar comedy. Attending to Coleridge’s broader literary corpus alongside images of sexual dysfunction in “The Rime” itself to justify this foundational claim, I then explore how a comic source transforms the reader’s experience of “The Rime” and its criticism. “The Rime” refutes cohesive readings as a horror-poem because it was never intended as pure horror: rather, the poem is Coleridge’s attempt to modernize …

Divination And Human Nature [Review], Larry Swain

Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature

Platonic And Confucian Theories On Music-Parallels And Differences, Christian Moreno

Honors Thesis

Music has always been an important part of humanity, and with the advent of the Axial Age, the period between the 8^th and 3^rd centuries BC where new ways of thinking emerged in a wide range of cultures, two of humanity’s greatest thinkers in Plato and Confucius, would apply their thoughts and theories to music. By examining their opinions of music in their written texts, especially Confucius’ Analects and Plato’s Republic, as well as modern scholarship on the subject like the work of philosopher Mark Muesse, one can gain an insight into the general thinking of these …

Learning To Read In The Theaetetus: The Recuperation Of Writing In Plato's Philosophy, Luke Lea

Foreign Languages & Literatures ETDs

In my thesis, I take up the popular question of the status of writing in Plato’s dialogues, but from a fresh perspective. Instead of approaching the question of writing head-on, I attend to the philosophical message about reading presented by two dialogues, the Phaedrus and the Theaetetus. My thesis offers interpretations of two individual dialogues whose emphasis on writing and reading as both literary themes and philosophical problems ensure that the overall meanings of these dialogues cannot be reached without attention to this subject.

Although I examine the dialogues in isolation, believing that the setting and characters unique to …

Drama As Dream: Sophoclean Tragedy And The Cult Of Asclepius, Molly C. Mata

Foreign Languages & Literatures ETDs

This thesis explores tragic drama as a corresponding ritual to the incubation ritual in the cult of Asclepius and theorizes that this ritual is psychologically cathartic and healing. I argue that in Ajax and Philoctetes, Sophocles marks this cathartic ritual through nosological language, setting, and social context. In my first chapter, I explore Sophocles’ use of the language of madness (mania) and illness (nosos) in Ajax to show the exacerbation of the audience’s psychological state. Next, I show that catharsis is achieved through the negotiation and subsequent burial of Ajax. In my second chapter, I argue that Sophocles uses both …

Negotiation And The Construction Of Intimacy In The Letters Between Fronto And Marcus Aurelius, Sarah C. Keith

Foreign Languages & Literatures ETDs

This project analyzes the letters between Marcus Cornelius Fronto and his student Marcus Aurelius as works of literature, rather than merely sites for historical mining. The letters, I argue, contain carefully constructed tropes of rhetoric and feature intentional polish that serve as opportunities for discussion about the virtues of philosophy and rhetoric during the Second Sophistic. Topics of discussions between both parties range between the imagery of sleep, and intimate spaces, like bedrooms, to substantive allusions to Plato’s philosophy and his dialogue Phaedrus. By looking beyond the identification of concrete names and dates to the literary, referential, and personal world …

Emblematic Eating: Reading The Feasts Of The Iliad As Models For Social Order, Erin Welty

Senior Theses

This paper analyzes the Iliad’s feast scenes as sites that amplify the sociopolitical and economic tensions that permeate the wider plot of the epic. Through a literary analysis of the major feasting scenes of the Iliad, I show how the epic’s presentation of the dais collectively displays particular emblematic values of social equity and fair distribution of resources that manifests in the formulaic language that repeats in each feast scene and produces a sense of stable social organization. At the same time, however, I display how the narrative contexts of the feasts and the narrative presentation internal to …

Applying Jung's Archetypes And Theory Of The Collective Unconscious To Ovid's Metamorphoses, Lindsay Covington

Senior Theses

The premise of this thesis is to explore the concepts of Carl Jung’s collective unconscious and archetypes using myths from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. In exploring the archetypes of the Animus, the Mother, the Hero, the Child, the Trickster, and Rebirth through these myths, I aim to demonstrate their relevance to modern psychology by directly connecting them to related psychopathologies as described in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manuel of Behavioral and Mental Disorders V. Through this, the validity of the concept of the collective unconscious will be demonstrated in how the enduring archetypes of stories that are over two …

Mysteries Of Paradise Revealed & Concealed, Brittany Bryant

Seaver College Research And Scholarly Achievement Symposium

No abstract provided.

Philosophy And Politics Perfected: Aristotle’S Greatness Of Soul Embodied In Plutarch’S Alexander The Great, Raquel Grove

Seaver College Research And Scholarly Achievement Symposium

In this paper, I examine the value of Aristotle’s “great-souled man” and the narrative structure of Plutarch’s Life of Alexander as political and philosophical exempla designed to lead men to virtue on a large scale. The confusing, apparently contradictory nature of Aristotle’s virtue “greatness of soul” must be read in the context of the Ethics as a deeply political work. Likewise, Plutarch’s description of Alexander the Great demands examination from a narrative, as well as historical, perspective. Despite their differences in emphasis and method, Aristotle and Plutarch produce writings characterized the same end––each work unites ethics and politics to create …

A Mixed Place: The Pastoral Symposium Of Horace, Kristen Ehrhardt

2018 Faculty Bibliography

When Horace invites Tyndaris to an outdoor drinking party in Odes 1.17, he mixes the locus amoenus of pastoral with the trappings of symposia. I argue that the mixture of the two poetic spaces creates a potentially volatile combination by muddling the expectations of each place’s safety and danger. I read 1.17 in light of other pastoral poems in Odes 1 to establish Horace’s creation of safe places through the negation of natural perils. Although pastoral has its own dangers, the addition of sympotic motifs in 1.17 attracts different beasts—sexual predators—to Tyndaris’ party.

Cynic And Epicurean Parrhesia In Horace's Epodes 5 & 6: Appropriating A Parallel Philosophical Debate For Poetic Purposes, Kent Klymenko

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Within Horace's fifth and sixth Epodes there is a juxtaposition of canine imagery. This imagery parallels two different interpretations of the philosophical concept of parrhesia or frank speech. Horace examines the parrhesia of Cynicism and contrasts it with the parrhesia of Epicureanism. After establishing Horace's philosophical influences, I engage in a close reading of the two poems through the lens of these competing philosophical interpretations of the same concept. I make the argument that Horace is using his knowledge of philosophy to make a larger poetic point. Although Horace's own stance on parrhesia favors Epicureanism, to the extent that one …

Footnotes To Footnotes: Whitehead's Plato, Nathan Oglesby

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines the presence of Plato in the philosophical expressions of Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947). It was Whitehead who issued the well-known remark that “the safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists in a series of footnotes to Plato" -- the purpose of this project is to examine the manner in which Whitehead positioned himself as one such footnote, with respect to his thought itself, and its origins, presentation and reception.

This examination involves: first, an explication of Whitehead’s cosmology and metaphysics and their ostensibly Platonic elements (consisting chiefly in the Timaeus); second, investigation …

Tragedy And Theodicy: The Role Of The Sufferer From Job To Ahab, Nora Carroll

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The character of Job starts in literature, a trope and archetype of the suffering man who potentially gains wisdom through suffering. Job’s characterization informs a comparison to Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, Shakespeare’s King Lear, Milton’s Paradise Lost, and finally Melville’s Moby-Dick. These versions of Job rally, fight, and rebel against a universe that was once loving and fair towards a more chaotic and nihilistic one. Job’s suffering is on the mark of all tragedy because he not only experiences a downfall, he gains wisdom through universalizing his torment. The Job trope not only stresses the role of suffering, it …

“Arrows Fletched From Our Own Wings”: The Early Church Fathers And The “Delphi Of The Mind”, Daniel J. Crosby

Graduate School of Arts and Sciences

Delphi, one of the most important sanctuaries of the classical world, presented the Early Church Fathers with an interesting challenge. Although it continued to be an institution of local importance, by their time, the Oracle had long since been a provincial backwater, requiring Imperial patronage, at times, which revived the sanctuary temporarily, but not to its former glory and importance. It was not the actual institution that presented hindrance to the advancement of Christianity, nevertheless the Early Church Fathers attacked it with arguments ranging from the irreverent to the obscene. The interesting fact is that none of these indictments were …

Chatter And Chant: Religion And Community On The Renaissance English Stage, Rachel Dunleavy Morgan

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation examines moments in five English Renaissance plays when characters employ religious language in bids to consolidate or to fracture communities. The plays are John Bale's King Johan (c. 1538, revised c. 1560), Nathaniel Woodes' Conflict of Conscience (c. 1581); Thomas Heywood's A Woman Killed with Kindness (1603); Shakespeare's Cymbeline (1611); and John Webster's The White Devil (1612). The types of communities examined most closely are those of a small scale - relationships of individuals to God, marriages, families, friendships, households, parishes, courts - but these appear against the backdrop of much larger communities such as the nation …

Interpreting The Republic As A Protreptic Dialogue, Peter Nielson Moore

Theses and Dissertations--Philosophy

Protreptic is a form of rhetoric, textual and oral in form, which exhorts its recipients to reorient their lives both morally and intellectually. Plato frequently portrays Socrates' use of this rhetoric with interlocutors who are enticed by the moral and political views of figures from Athens' intellectual culture. During these conversations Socrates attempts to persuade his interlocutors to reorient their lives in a way that conforms more closely to his own moral and intellectual practice of philosophy. Plato's depiction of protreptic, however, also exerts a protreptic effect on readers of his dialogues. Plato's writing thus performs a dual function, simultaneously …

Epic Performance Through Invenção De Orfeu And ‘An Iliad:’ Two Instantiations Of Epic As Embodiment In The Americas, Patrice Rankine

Classical Studies Faculty Publications

The body is a problem for epic performance: as a text, epic absents the body, and such absence is a barrier to the modern audience’s full participation. The modern poet might attempt to resolve this issue in one of two ways, either by using the absence as a rhetorical strategy or, alternatively, by reintroducing the body into performed epic. Jorge de Lima’s Invenção de Orfeu (The Invention of Orpheus) (1952) presents one extreme in addressing the absence of the poet’s body, through textual strategies, in his celebration of the literary condensation of past epics as embodiment. By contrast, …

The Puzzle In Babrius's Prologue, Kristin Mann

Classical Studies Faculty publications

The idyllic description of the Golden Age in the prologue is false and unrealistic, whereas his dark and violent fables show the truth, a contradiction designed to instruct readers to figure out for themselves the moral of each fable.

Localizational Evidence For The Restoration Of Rigvedic *Mimihí ‘Measure’.” In Vina Diem Celebrent: Studies In Linguistics And Philology In Honor Of Brent Vine, Dieter Gunkel

Classical Studies Faculty Publications

The purpose of this study is to provide new evidence for the existence of the 2 sg present active imperative *mimihí ‘measure’ in the Rigveda. Controlling to an extent for the effects of morphosyntax, I show that the poets do not localize the forms transmitted as mimihí in the meter similarly to the way that they localize forms of the same metrical/phonological shape, e.g. did¯ıhí ‘shine’, ´si´s¯ıhí ‘sharpen’, gr.n. ¯ıhí ‘sing’. Instead, they localize them like forms of the shape *mimihí , e.g. kr.n. uhí ‘make’, ´sr.n.uhí ‘hear’, tanuhi ‘stretch’. Thus we should restore *mimihí . I then …

Writing Indigenous Identity In Herman Melville And Joseph Conrad's Polynesian And Malay Archipelago Novels, Catherine L. Black

Dissertations and Theses

The thesis of this paper is that cross-cultural writing can be done with the right methods of communication, such as engaging narrator and education—or simply sensitive, imaginative writing. Herman Melville and Joseph Conrad’s five books set in the Polynesian and Malay Archipelagos—Typee and Omoo and the Malay Trilogy (Almayer’s Folly, An Outcast of the Islands, and The Rescue)— are used as master models of how to write indigenous characters with rich characterization in pivotal roles, even circa 1846 and 1896. The unique perspective and technique by which they did this is explored, a technique and perspective not …

Sacred And Profane Loves: The Renaissance Influence In C.S. Lewis' Till We Have Faces, Kevin Corr

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

C.S. Lewis’ last novel, Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold, has often been regarded as his greatest work, but just as often as his most enigmatic work. The purpose of this thesis is to unveil much of the novel’s mystery by considering the impact Renaissance literature had in shaping the novel, most notably Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene. Although it is well-known that Lewis was Professor of Medieval and Renaissance Literature at Cambridge, current scholarship on Lewis has overlooked the Renaissance influence in the author’s work, which particularly plays a vital role in Till We Have Faces. …

Zero To Hero: Elite Burials And Hero Cults In Early Iron Age Greece And Cyprus, Alina M. Karapandzich

Senior Independent Study Theses

Adulation of heroes, including the flawed, militaristic, authoritative men of Homeric epic, was an important feature of ancient Hellenic culture. This phenomenon is reflected in cults and shrines built in the Archaic period. How did these so-called “hero cults” form, and can Early Iron Age (EIA) elite burials form a connection between the tomb cults of the Late Bronze Age (LBA) and the hero cults of the Archaic and later Classical periods? The purpose of this study is to examine EIA burials whose elite goods and archaeologically visible tombs reflect the burial of a “heroic” person. In doing so, I …