Classical Literature and Philology Commons^™

No Reply: The Exclusus Amator Through Ancient And Modern Love Poetry, Ayla Wing

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis examines the exclusus amator, or “shut-out lover” trope as it appears in Greek and Roman texts, surveying the many examples of this motif and picking out its main elements: Intense Pain, Strong Emotions, Rejection, Interaction with the Door. It also notes the universality of the trope (anyone of any sexuality from any walk of life can be an exclusus amator) and the many references to the motif in other types of ancient media, including in graffiti, which shows that the exclusus amator was a real-life occurrence. This paper then examines modern songwriting, a genre chosen for its similarities …

Imagined Empires: Roman And Chinese Constructions Of One Another In Antiquity, Elizabeth S. Tsang

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis examines how the Roman and Han Chinese empires conceptualized one another during the first centuries CE, despite never establishing sustained direct contact. It argues that mutual perceptions were shaped less by firsthand experience than by mediated reports, commodities, and the political interests of intermediaries. The study proceeds in four parts. The first explores how Roman authors employed the ethnonym Seres to frame China as a land of wonder, wealth, and alterity. The second analyzes the Chinese designation Da Qin, showing how it projected Han imperial ideals outward by casting Rome as a mirror-image polity. The third turns to …

Dante’S Volgare And The Pastoral Presence: An Analysis Of The Concept Of Language In The Divina Commedia, Paola M. Rodriguez

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Dante’s conception of the Italian vernacular, the “volgare illustre”, is a central concern of his work and one which catalyses and nurtures, both overtly and covertly, his creation of the Commedia. Although Dante positions himself in his writings as the continual defender and most prolific poet of the vernacular, isolating a specific linguistic use and structure, a coherent definition of what vernacular Dante privileges or what appropriate usage he adheres to, is a difficult and often confusing task. The existence of two eclogues, the only works by Dante to have been written after the majority of the Commedia had been …

When Critics Are Artists: Ekphrasis In Erotic Art Criticism, Joanna A. Ligon

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In “Against Interpretation,” Susan Sontag argues for an erotics of art in art criticism in place of hermeneutics. In this thesis, I examine erotics of art, a focus on form and experiencing art instead of exclusively on content, in practice. Drawing on other essays by Sontag, specifically the essay “Godard” in comparison with the filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard’s own filmic criticism in Breathless, criticism according to an erotics of art becomes a new artwork itself. Subsequently, I present a definition of erotic through Anne Carson and Roland Barthes and juxtapose the term with Hans-Georg Gadamer’s hermeneutics. The comparison ultimately undoes …

A Typological And Chemical Analysis Of Roman Oil Lamps From Poggio Del Molino, Brandon Tejo

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Terracotta lamps, known to the Romans as lucernae, are small, handheld, often decorated objects which provided ancient people light. To modern researchers, they serve as tools for dating stratigraphy and iconographic studies. Beyond their immediately apparent aesthetic and symbolic value, the chemical compositions of the clay of these lamps reflect their origin. This study complements archaeological typologies with chemometric analyses to describe 16 Late Republican and Imperial Roman lamps recovered from the villa at Poggio del Molino (PdM), Tuscany. These finds were recovered from the 2021 and 2022 PdM excavations. The combined approach of typology with X-ray Diffraction (XRD) …

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.

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 …

Emotion In Plato's Trial Of Socrates, Thomas W. Moody

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

My dissertation argues that Plato composed the figure of Socrates as a three-dimensional literary character who experiences and confronts emotions in ways that other studies have overlooked. By adopting a dramatic, non-dogmatic mode of reading the dialogues and emphasizing the literary elements of the texts and their dramatic connections, this dissertation offers a new and compelling portrait of Socrates in the dialogues that relate his finals weeks of life: Theaetetus, Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, and Phaedo. This study in turn provides new insights into the genre of Plato’s texts and demonstrates how he exploited the dramatic …

Quod Inane Vocamus: Lucretius’ Void In Seventeenth-Century Italy, Carlo Bottone

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

During the seventeenth century, the revival of atomic theories and the beginning of barometric experiments sparked a philosophical debate on the existence and the nature of void, which in turn generated new attention to the ancient disputes on void and prompted new interpretations of Lucretius’ examination of inane (De Rerum Natura, I.329-397). Commentators began to discuss the passage beyond the ancient philosophical tradition and in relation to modern ideas and recent discoveries, while Vacuists appealed to Lucretian arguments to prove or deny the existence of an absolute void interspersed among corpuscles.

My research contributes to the scholarship on …

Introducing Odysseus: Force, Resistance And Nostos In The Formation Of Odysseus’ Character, Haley Ryan

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis explores the ways in which Odysseus’ self-introductions to other characters in the Odyssey reveal the complexities of his character with regard to homecoming and his apparent resistance to it. In examining these introductions, the thesis argues that Odysseus that the language Odysseus uses when he introduces himself is often filled with allusions to force and resistance, indicating that he is perhaps more ambivalent about completing his journey home than would be expected of him. The manifestations of this ambivalence in his behavior upon arriving at Ithaka is also explored in the final chapters.

Non Ego Laudari Curo: Honor, Shame, And Aristocratic Competition In Tibullus’ Elegy, Federico Di Pasqua

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

My dissertation explores the ethics of shame and honor at the end of the Republic to offer new perspectives on Tibullus’ work and Roman elegy. By situating Tibullus’ corpus within his contemporaries’ aristocratic discourse on honor, my research argues that the elegiac narrator is not alien from the heroic self-assertion and pursuit of vengeance, typical of the honor-seeking elites of Roman antiquity. In my reading, Tibullus, while clad in elegiac non-conformity, is deeply committed to his contemporaries’ honor-driven ethos and, therefore, wary of the policing gaze of his fellow Romans. Albius Tibullus was an elegist and a citizen of equestrian …

Bloodied Hearts And Bawdy Planets: Greco-Roman Astrology And The Regenerative Force Of The Feminine In Shakespeare’S The Winter’S Tale, Christina E. Farella

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis offers a new reading of William Shakespeare’s late play The Winter’s Tale (1623), positing that in order to understand this complex and eccentric work, we must read it with a complex and eccentric eye. In The Winter’s Tale, planets strike without warning, pulling at hearts, wombs, and blood, impacting the health and emotional experience of characters in the play. This work is renowned for its inconsistent formal structure; the first half is a tragedy set in winter, but abruptly shifts to a comedy set in spring/summer in its latter half. What’s more, is that planets, luminaries, and …

Furious: Myth, Gender, And The Origins Of Lady Macbeth, Emma King

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis attempts to understand the fabulously complex and poisonously unsettling Lady Macbeth as a product of classical reception and intertextuality in early modern England. Whence comes her “undaunted mettle” (1.7.73)? Why is she, like the regicide she helps commit, such a “bloody piece of work” (2.3.108)? How does her ability to be “bloody, bold, and resolute” (4.1.81), as Macbeth is commanded to be, reflect canonical literary ideas, early modern or otherwise, regarding women, gender, and violence? Approaching texts in the literary canon as the result of transformation and reception, this research analyzes the ways in which Lady Macbeth’s gender, …

Chimeras, Centaurs, And Satyrs: Creating Mixed Genre Texts In Antiquity And The Renaissance, Claire Sommers

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Mirroring its many definitions, the concept of hybridity has historically been a highly fraught one, with creatures such as the centaur or the satyr alternately treated as wild and wise. Defined as a “mixed entity,” the English word “hybrid” derives from the ancient Greek hybris, a term with several connotations, including wanton violence, lust, or outrage. The word is also synonymous with “hubris,” or excessive pride. Hybris also developed additional meanings, referring to a deed of excess, an attempt to rise above one’s station, or the desire to surpass the gods. More positively, hybris may also be translated as …

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 …

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 …

Vim Parat: Patterns Of Sexualized Violence, Victim-Blaming, And Sororophobia In Ovid, Melissa Marturano

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

My dissertation argues for the importance of understanding the depiction of sexualized violence and rape in the Roman poet Ovid’s extensive corpus through the modern feminist concepts of victim-blaming (blaming victims of sexual abuse for their own abuse) and sororophobia (female figures participating in misogyny). It explores sexualized violence and rape in Ovid long-form, examines the discernible patterns that emerge and the deviations from them as he depicts that violence throughout his texts, and more importantly, introduces victim-blaming and sororophobia into an analysis of these patterns. Despite the fact that previous scholars have done substantial analyses of the patterns of …

Recognizing Freedom: Manumission In The Roman Republic, Tristan Husby

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Roman manumission was at the center of three different groups: the Roman state, Roman slave-owners, and freeborn Romans who did not own slaves. I draw upon G.F.W. Hegel, Orlando Patterson, Judith Butler, and Pierre Bourdieu to describe Roman manumission as a ritualized practice that transforms a slave’s life from unlivable to livable. The term “unlivable” comes from the philosopher Judith Butler, who developed it in conversation with Hegel’s master/slave dialectic and the term “social death,” which sociologist Orlando Patterson used to describe slavery. Hegel and Patterson’s thoughts on the movement and experience of freedom are useful for theorizing Roman slavery …

Aeschylean Drama And The History Of Rhetoric, Allannah K. Karas

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation demonstrates how the playwright Aeschylus contributes to the development of ancient Greek rhetoric through his use and display of πειθώ (often translated “persuasion”) throughout the Oresteia, first performed in 458 BCE. In this drama, Aeschylus specifically displays and develops πειθώ as a theme, a goddess, a central principle of action, and an important concept for his audience to consider. By tracing connections between Aeschylus’ innovations with πειθώ and later fifth and early fourth century conceptions of Greek rhetoric, I argue that Aeschylus plays a more important role in the development of practical principles and concepts of the …

Publication In Martial's Time And The Publication Of His Works, Jack Kaufmann

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

I have attempted in this thesis to broadly discuss the nature of literary publication in classical times, characterized by (a) the lack of printing presses or any other means to make multiple copies of a work except by writing out each copy by hand, and (b) the lack of any copyright or other protection of a writer’s work. These factors led to a very different concept of publishing than our modern one. I have then focused on the epigrams of Martial (ca. 40 A.D. – 103 A.D.) in particular, because (a) his epigrams contain a wealth of information relating to …

A Passage From Brooklyn To Ithaca: The Sea, The City And The Body In The Poetics Of Walt Whitman And C. P. Cavafy, Michael P. Skafidas

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This treatise is the first extensive comparative study of Walt Whitman and C. P. Cavafy. Despite the abundant scholarship dealing with the work and life of each, until now no critic has put the two poets together. Whitman’s poetry celebrates birth, youth, the self and the world as seen for the first time, while Cavafy’s diverts from the active present to resurrect a world whose key, in Eliot’s terms, is memory. Yet, I see the two poets conversing in the crossroads of the fin de siècle; the American Whitman and the Greek Cavafy embody the antithesis of hope and dislocation …

Senecan Tragedy And Virgil's Aeneid: Repetition And Reversal, Timothy Hanford

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation explores the relationship between Senecan tragedy and Virgil's Aeneid, both on close linguistic as well as larger thematic levels. Senecan tragic characters and choruses often echo the language of Virgil's epic in provocative ways; these constitute a contrastive reworking of the original Virgilian contents and context, one that has not to date been fully considered by scholars. This study is organized according to three main themes that are argued to have strong intertextual aspects: repetition of the past, victor and vanquished, and maius nefas, or greater crime. In each case Seneca tragicus is seen to take a theme …

Ovid's Pentheus: An In-Depth Guide For Students And Teachers To A King's Anger And Fiery Oration, Benjamin Joffe

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Born out of my years of using traditional commentaries for Latin and Greek texts, both for myself as a student learning the language anew and then as a teacher sharing my experience with others &mdash and still learning the language years later &mdash this in&ndashdepth guide to Ovid's version of the story of Pentheus I have conceived as a reimagining of the genre, at once a vehicle designed to allow students to navigate their own ways through the literature and also a tool for building their analytical skills to apply liberally, earnestly, and enthusiastically to other Latin and Greek texts, …

The Interchange Of Plain Velar And Aspirate In Kronos/Chronos: A Case For Etymological Equivalence, Roberto Peter Bongiovanni

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Despite the current state of uncertainty regarding the etymology of Kronos, the equivalence long familiar to the ancients between Kronos and Chronos is still a moot point. Arguments denying their etymological equivalence can no longer firmly rely on linguistic arguments. It is therefore necessary to examine the validity of the time-honored interpretation of Kronos as the personification of Time. The solution to this problem is of considerable importance to Classical studies, since it will not so much as contribute to a better understanding of the myth of Kronos, as the interpretation of Kronos as Time is already familiar from ancient …