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This work comprises three thematically linked studies in typologically informed Indo-European historical linguistics, each dealing with different aspects of the development of degree morphology within the family. The first study shows that multiple morphological and syntactic strategies for the expression of degree should be reconstructed for Proto-Indo-European, with semantic and morphological factors governing the choice of strategy for a given word. Furthermore, the origin of the “secondary comparative” of Indo-Iranian and Greek is traced to an archaic locatival morpheme *-er. The second study uses Greek and Latin evidence to investigate the origin of the Latvian comparative marker ‑āk- and its close cognates within Balto-Slavic. This leads to the reconstruction for Proto-Nuclear Indo-European of an athematic compound suffix *‑eh2‑k- (deriving evaluative-characterizing substantives from nominal bases) and of its thematic counterpart *‑eh2‑ko- (deriving corresponding adjectives). The third study explains why several branches of Indo-European show variation between degree forms with or without a seemingly unetymological long vowel. It is argued that in each case, adjectival degree forms were influenced by their adverbial counterparts, with the same process operating on different morphological material in different branches. Parallels from other language families (Uralic, Tungusic, Turkic) bolster various aspects of these proposals. As Indo-European is the only language family combining a wide variety of synthetic degree forms with a long history of attestation, it is uniquely capable of providing insight into processes of development, decay, and renewal in this morphosyntactic subcategory. This dissertation is thus a contribution both to the historical morphology of Indo-European in particular and to the typology of degree morphology in general.

DENIS the Carthusian affirms Mary as the summa contemplatrix, interpreting the plenitude of grace of Luke 1:28 to include the theological gift of wisdom. In Dionysian thought, the gift of wisdom equates to mystical theology, unitive wisdom, or contemplation by negation, the highest form of prayer possible in this life to a wayfarer. Denis the Carthusian makes an original contribution to Marian studies by positing the exemplarity of Mary’s prayer, in accord with Denis’s notion of contemplation, suggesting that Mary enjoyed a singular perfection in Her intellectual knowledge of God before the Incarnation; was later instructed in mystical theology by Her Divine Son, the God-Man; and attained to the contemplative vision of God while still on earth as a foreshadowing of the beatific vision Mary now possesses in heaven. This doctoral dissertation, written by a cloistered monk not unlike Denis the Carthusian, seeks to penetrate the silence and solitude of contemplative monastic life lived by one of Christianity's most prolific authors and popularly hailed "the last of the schoolmen" to explore the notion of Marian contemplation and the incomparability of Mary's prayer for twenty-first century imitation and pastoral application.

Animalization classifies women as non-human animals who must be tamed and controlled by marriage and motherhood. Our earliest written sources, like Hesiod’s Theogony and Works and Days (7th c. BCE) and Semonides’ Fragment 7 (7th c. BCE), describe women’s body parts in animal terms to manipulate the actions and behavior of female characters for a male audience.Animalization continues to affect the treatment of women and animals today, particularly regarding voice, agency, and bodily autonomy. Using Julia Kristeva’s (1985), Donna Haraway’s (1985), and Carol J. Adams’ (1990) theories, I propose a woman-as- animal spectrum where female-presenting individuals slide between neutral/domesticated/sacrificial animals and bestial/wild/hybrid monsters. Using this spectrum, I investigate the animalized female body in classical literature through women’s skin, mind, and reproductive system and end with a discussion of how contemporary authors and artists are reclaiming animalization today.Because women develop from monsters in ancient cosmogonies, I argue in chapter 1, “Skin,” that Io, Callisto, Ocyrhoë, and Scylla in Ovid’s Metamorphoses (1st c. CE) experience species dysphoria, anxiety and depression because their interior and exterior experiences do not match. Hindu and First Nations stories, however, show that women do not have to suffer when transforming into animals with whom they share a close kinship.In chapter 2, “Mind,” I explore three animal metaphors (snakes, dogs, and lions) through four women from Greek tragedy (5th c. BCE): Agave in Euripides’ Bacchae, Creusa in Euripides’ Ion, Clytemnestra in Aeschylus’ Oresteia, and Medea in Euripides’ Medea. I then move to Roman tragedy (1st c. CE), where I argue that Seneca’s Medea and Phaedra present the title characters as uniquely Roman manifestations of the woman-as- animal spectrum. I end by suggesting how tragic women can harness hybridity as a tool for promoting their own and their children’s agency.In chapter 3, “Womb,” I discuss the animalized reproductive system. Related to the wandering womb, the animalized womb and its constituents, rabies-causing menstrual blood and the vagina detanta (fanged vagina), turned the uterus into a terrestrial/feral creature. When the uterus worked properly, ancient authors/artisans described it as aquatic, recalling the wet nature of women in ancient medicine; however, we see through Baubo, Scylla, and Medusa the development of a monstrous, deadly female reproductive system that threatened male social control.Finally, chapter 4, “Soul,” revisits skin, mind, and womb through three short stories and accompanying works of art that reclaim animalization for female–animal agency and equality: Audrey Niffenegger’s “Raven Girl” (2013), Karen Russell’s “St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves” (2006), and Angela Carter’s “The Tiger’s Bride” (1979). By exposing the misogynistic impulses behind animalized women in the past and exploring what contemporary authors and artists are doing today, I consider the context and impact of the woman-as-animal spectrum on women’s and animal rights.

Modern students of Thucydides and Herodotus may find it odd to think of them as rhetoricians. Yet in the ancient world, both historians (and especially Thucydides) played an important role in rhetorical schools. They were among the favorite authors of ancient teachers of rhetoric and served as foundational pillars of the ancient curriculum, providing themes for school exercises and even for such seminal texts as Hermogenes' theoretical treatises on rhetoric. Modern scholars might never read technical rhetorical texts such as Hermogenes. They almost certainly would never turn to Hermogenes and his kind to help them understand Thucydides or Herodotus. But for our ancient intellectual predecessors, such an approach would have been unconscionable, as ancient rhetoric was the theoretical lens with which they understood and appreciated historical writings.In this dissertation, I explore the confluence of rhetoric and historiography in the ancient world through an examination of how Herodotus and Thucydides were used in ancient schools and then by later historians. Chapter 1 and 2 outline how these historians were embedded and encoded within the rhetorical curriculum. In Chapter 1, I examine how Herodotus and Thucydides entered the rhetorical curriculum and how rhetors incorporated them into the rhetorical curriculum through an examination of the surviving progymnasmata, scholia, and pedagogical myths. Chapter 2 then turns to the practice of declamation, that is the writing of practice speeches in which the declaimer impersonated a figure from the past. Through an examination of how rhetors wrote a historical declamation on themes from Herodotus or Thucydides, this chapter illustrates how rhetors were trained to invent a speech for a specific historical occasion. After outlining what assumptions and ideas about historiography these beginning exercises taught students, chapters 3 and 4 demonstrate how they translated these ideas into practice through an examination of imitations of Thucydides by later historians. In chapter 3, I look at imitations of events in Thucydides, such as plague, sieges, strife, and battles. Taught that Thucydides was the canonical example of these kinds of event, later historians treated him as a template for their own historical writing and often sought to improve their model or even surpass him. Or they might use him as a template for the invention of new historical scenes such as an earthquake or famine. This chapter thus challenges us to think of imitators of Thucydides as participants in a dynamic rhetorical tradition of competition and emulation. Chapter 4 then examines how emulators of Thucydides crafted Thucydidean speeches in light of their rhetorical training. It sees historical speeches as a product of declamation, which mediated Thucydides for later generations. It also seeks to reveal how rhetorical practices encoded the historian with webs of meaning, which modern scholars miss because they are generally unaware of ancient rhetorical practices. Throughout antiquity, Thucydides and Herodotus played an important role in training students to write and think about history. This dissertation helps us understand the links between rhetorical practice and historiography and more broadly step into the literary workshop of an ancient historian.

This dissertation offers an analytical history of Roman imperial accessions from the first century through the early years of the seventh century AD. It examines three phases of accessions: a `Roman-senatorial’ phase, a `provincial-military’ phase, and an initial `Constantinoplitan’ phase. I distinguish each of these phases with reference to the typical site of accession, the central audience of the accession speech, and the predominate persona assumed by new emperors who successfully projected legitimate imperial authority. I argue that in less than 600 years, the prerogative to make new emperors changed hands three times. After the foundation of monarchical empire (27 BC-AD 14), the Roman populace (and the relatively few communities of citizens living in the provinces) delegated its right to make heads of state to the Roman Senate. They enjoyed this privilege for the first two centuries of the empire’s existence (14-193 AD). In the second phase (212-383 AD), Roman frontier armies stripped the privilege of emperor-making from Rome and its Senate. A century after a major overhaul of the empire’s administrative system, emperors decided to permanently settle in the eastern city of Constantinople. There, the circus-factions and populace in the hippodrome of Constantine’s `New Rome on the Bosporos’ would distinguish themselves as the electoral base of new emperors. While surveying each phase of accession, this history identifies and analyzes the communicative acts and political dynamics that defined successful imperial accession and restored anew the emperorship of the Romans. The dissertation closes with a hypothetical treatise instructing future emperors-elect on the essential tasks that they must perform in an accession speech in order to enact new emperorship.

This research examines the circumstances of the omission of the letter m in word-final position in non-elite Latin texts, and proposes a morphosyntactic pattern to explain omission. Word-final m was not pronounced in non-elite Latin of the imperial period, and the letter is frequently absent in phonetically spelled texts, particularly as a grapheme. However, a number of texts remain in which the letter is both written and included. The authors of such texts demonstrate awareness that the letter should be written in final position (despite the lack of pronunciation), yet under certain circumstances they still choose to omit it. The paper suggests that the circumstances of the letter’s omission and inclusion are pattern-based, and that authors are more likely to omit the letter in two morphosyntactic environments (which are not independent from one another). Firstly, omission takes place more often following the vowels a and e than after u. Inflected words ending in a or e were common to the non-elite Latin morphological system, whereas words ending in u were not. Omitting final -m after u would have thus produced a word which did not end in an acceptable word-final grapheme. Secondly, omission is more likely in prepositional phrases, and nominal phrases in which another grapheme marking the same function is present. Both types of phrase contain another form which marks the syntax, rendering the presence of the grapheme less valuable; the prepositions themselves govern their phrases, while the presence of at least one grapheme appears to sufficiently identify the syntactic role of the entire phrase. The greater willingness to omit after a and e continues to be operative within the phrases. Several types of non-elite texts are examined for their patterns of omission and inclusion of final -m, including business contracts, personal letters, graffiti, and votive offerings. The texts range from the first century BCE to the fourth century CE, with wide geographic distribution from locations such as Britain, Egypt, Italy, and Turkey.

The Argonautica of Apollonius Rhodius is often studied in terms of how the author uses previous literary poets such as Homer. This project asks whether Apollonius Rhodius also uses philosophical authors in his Argonautica and looks particularly at Empedocles, Parmenides, Xenophanes, and Plato. In addition to building on references by earlier scholars such as Malcolm Campbell, I use plagiarism-tracking software (WCopyFind) to identify places of potential connection and then evaluate the passages in question to see whether these connections are significant. I conclude that Apollonius does use the works of Empedocles and Parmenides and perhaps Xenophanes, and he uses Parmenides’ and Empedocles’ works in ways that indicate he is interested in their ideas as well as vivid images and rare words. I conclude that although there are good reasons for considering Plato’s works as a source of interest for Apollonius, Apollonius does not use Plato’s work in the same significant ways that he uses Empedocles’ and Parmenides’ works. Instead, Apollonius’ project as a poet-scholar contradicts many of the views on poetry, inspiration and skill that Plato’s Socrates develops in the Ion. The works of Empedocles and Parmenides provide an alternative model of poetry that involves thoughtful mixing of elements from previous poets.

The comedic playwright Menander is known for his unique style of characterization. His genre of New Comedy is distinct in its way of using common stock characters, but Menander himself enriched this generic trope through variation of these stock types. Techniques of characterization are naturally found in all genres of literature, but New Comedy places a unique emphasis on character. Similarly, ancient ethical philosophy and rhetoric focuses on human character. The philosophers Aristotle, Theophrastus, and Plato each have notable works that try to answer ethical questions about character and try to depict and explain human behaviors through character elements. This thesis analyzes Menander's method of characterization and compares his style to the techniques of characterization used by Aristotle, Theophrastus, and Plato. The comparison is utilized to answer what aspects of characterization is similar between these two distinct genres and which elements of character these writers saw as important.

This dissertation explores the use of Roman historical memory from the late fifth century through the middle of the sixth century AD. The collapse of Roman government in the western Roman empire in the late fifth century inspired a crisis of identity and political messaging in the eastern Roman empire of the same period. I argue that the Romans of the eastern empire, in particular those who lived in Constantinople and worked in or around the imperial administration, responded to the challenge posed by the loss of Rome by rewriting the history of the Roman empire. The new historical narratives that arose during this period were initially concerned with Roman identity and fixated on urban space (in particular the cities of Rome and Constantinople) and Roman mythistory. By the sixth century, however, the debate over Roman history had begun to infuse all levels of Roman political discourse and became a major component of the emperor Justinian’s imperial messaging and propaganda, especially in his Novels. The imperial history proposed by the Novels was aggressivley challenged by other writers of the period, creating a clear historical and political conflict over the role and import of Roman history as a model or justification for Roman politics in the sixth century. This dissertation examines the parameters of and conflicts between these new histories in order to demonstrate the existence of a coherent intellectual movement whose central concern was influencing the normative narrative of Roman history in the sixth century.

Ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus, known for his theory of "constant flux," may be one of the most misunderstood and misquoted thinkers of Western philosophy. The way that the protagonist of Julio Cortazar’s Rayuela misreads Heraclitus serves as one example of this phenomenon wherein poorly-conceived postmodern inquiries that seek to weaken the idea of a Truth lead to a nihilistic apathy. Horacio Oliveira misunderstands Heraclitus’ doctrine of constant flux and uses this misreading to “logically” justify his sexist and elitist behavior towards others. This phenomenon crops up again in Samuel Beckett’s absurdist play Fin de Partie through Hamm, a patriarch that no longer sees any point in trying because the world as he knows it is disintegrating. We can use Heraclitus as a central theoretical point for parsing through what exactly goes wrong with the ethical decisions of these characters. Carole Maso’s AVA serves as a counterexample to Rayuela and Fin de Partie, for the novel revolves around similar theoretical questions but provides us with a more properly “Heraclitean” approach for how to confront a world without fixed meaning. Studying these failures and successes supply us with examples of how Postmodern thought can be used for harm or for good. A Heraclitean reading of these texts shows us how, properly understood, Postmodernism moves not only towards deconstructing structuralized systems of violence and marginalization, but also towards building something out of the rubble.

This dissertation offers a reading of Horace's first book of Satires that takes account of the moral content within to offer a more fulfilling reading--one that acknowledges the genius of Horace's aesthetic principles and achievement but that pays attention to the stated function of Horace's satiric text: moral and ethical improvement. My analysis of the pragmatics of Horace's libellus reveals a program of moral (self)-pedagogy, where Horace, his audience and even today's modern reader, can learn from the mistakes and foibles of others by using them as exempla, by careful self-reflection of one's own mistakes and the use of oneself as an exempla, and the moral correction and education that friends can offer one another freely through sodality and conversation. In this way Horace is able to reconcile the ideas of friendship and the nominally invective and critical discourse of satire. Rather than an analysis of old Horatian moral saws like the aurea mediocritas or "nothing in excess", my analysis reveals a moral process at work, one that is ever active, that acknowledges that everyone has imperfections and works to strive for moral improvement.In my first chapter I situate my work into two contexts--first the modern critical apparatus of scholarship on Horace's satires and secondly within the intellectual and historical currents of Horace's own time, particularly with attention to the important contemporary discussion of friendship offered by Cicero's Laelius de Amicitia. Next I start with the most overtly moralizing texts in the libellus, the first three so called "diatribe" satires and show how they set up issues and themes in the rest of the poetic book. In chapter 2 I give a detailed reading of satire 1.4, widely acknowledged as the first open program satire amongst Horace's poems. I show how Horace gives us an ethical program that uses and interacts with several important Roman institutions--the mos maiorum and the paternal education it entails in Roman tradition, satire and friendship. In chapter 3 I turn to the subsequent two satires, 1.5 and 1.6. I use 1.5 to demonstrate the different kinds of friendship Horace imagines in his poetic world--literary friendship, friendship towards oneself and courtier friendship. In 1.6 I show how Horace can maintain a truly equal and free friendship with Maecenas, showing how Horace's criticism of Maecenas own snobbery (in this case against Horace's father), demonstrates that Horace, at least in one important way, portrayed his friendship with Maecenas as one of equals rather than courtier and patron. In chapter 4 I turn to satire 1.7, a short counterblast ending in a pun. While a poem focused on odium would seem strange in a book about amicitia, I show how 1.7 forms a potent counter example to the discussions of friendship and ethics in the previous poems. Finally in my concluding chapter, I show how the last two poems fit into Horace's ethical program.

This dissertation explores the intersection of political and ethnic conflict during the emperor Justinian’s wars of reconquest through the figure and texts of Jordanes, the earliest barbarian voice to survive antiquity. Jordanes was ethnically Gothic - and yet he also claimed a Roman identity. Writing from Constantinople in 551, he penned two Latin histories on the Gothic and Roman pasts respectively. Crucially, Jordanes wrote while Goths and Romans clashed in the imperial war to reclaim the Italian homeland that had been under Gothic rule since 493. That a Roman Goth wrote about Goths while Rome was at war with Goths is significant and has no analogue in the ancient record. I argue that it was precisely this conflict which prompted Jordanes’ historical inquiry. Jordanes, though, has long been considered a mere copyist, and seldom treated as an historian with ideas of his own. And the few scholars who have treated Jordanes as an original author have dampened the significance of his Gothicness by arguing that barbarian ethnicities were evanescent and subsumed by the gravity of a Roman political identity. They hold that Jordanes was simply a Roman who can tell us only about Roman things, and supported the Roman emperor in his war against the Goths. In this study, I argue that Jordanes must be appreciated as both Roman and Gothic. His texts reveal an individual negotiating his own dual identity in reaction to the acute crisis of the Gothic War. It is my contention that through his praise for both Goths and Romans, and his incorporation of contrived Gothic origins into the fold of Roman history, Jordanes sought to establish an inextricably entwined Roman-Gothic destiny in order to reconcile the two warring peoples with whom he personally identified.This project examines how Jordanes’ multivalent identity informs his conception of both historic and contemporary relations between Goths and Romans, and thereby significantly enhances our ability to interpret Roman-Gothic cultural dynamics, while also advancing debates over barbarian ethnicity. Jordanes provides unparalleled insights into the complex processes that accompanied ethnic confluence and assimilation into the Roman order. This study is also the first to examine Jordanes and a chorus of other authors as interlocutors in an empire-wide polemical discourse on the nature of Gothic rule in Italy and the war that forever halted imperial ambition to reconquer the west. Importantly, at the moment when the emperor Justinian was calling for the extermination of the `tyrannical, barbarian’ Goths, Jordanes published a counter-narrative which praised the Goths, challenged the stereotype of Gothic barbarism, and criticized the emperor’s war of aggression. He calls for the establishment of a modus vivendi between Goths and Romans – a desire clearly reflective of his own imbricated sense of self.

Virgil's Aeneid departs from his earlier pastoral poetry in featuring herdsmen as agents of violence. His Eclogues characterize herdsmen as musicians who are helpless against the violence of outsiders. In the Aeneid, in contrast, herdsmen both unwittingly catalyze and deliberately take part in acts of war; they never make music. In similes in the epic, the hero Aeneas is compared to a herdsman engaged in activities that are not typically pastoral. Partial studies of pastoral elements in the epic have focused on evaluating Aeneas in moral or political terms or on the aesthetic function of pastoral motifs in "reducing" the subject matter of heroic epic to an Alexandrian scale. I take a different approach, examining pastoral motifs in the Aeneid in relation to Greek models in epic and tragedy. The tragedians regularly use pastoral figures, language, landscapes, and music to set up ironic contrasts between peace and its violation. Identifying this tragic use of pastoral offers insight into Virgil's strategy of intensifying the shocking effect of violence by juxtaposing it with images of pastoral peace. Virgil develops the tragic ambiguity of characters, landscapes, and musical language with pastoral associations to express the underlying tragic tension between Aeneas' constructive aims as a leader and his inevitably destructive methods.

The Bacchic cult became the target of mass persecution in 186 BCE. According to Livy, the cult permeated all societal boundaries, resulting in the Roman government condemning over seven thousand people. Of the seven thousand, more Bacchants suffered capital punishment than were thrown in jail. This thesis shows how this extreme and violent reaction can be sociologically categorized as a moral panic by using sociologist David Garland’s seven criteria of a moral panic. Highly influenced by Stanley Cohen, the creator of the term moral panic, the criteria of Garland are examined in detail to prove that the persecution of 186 was, indeed, a moral panic. In order to strengthen the argument and connection to moral panic studies, the Bacchic cult persecution is compared side-by-side with the witch hunts in Europe during the 14th-17th centuries. The criteria necessary for categorization as a moral panic are present in both violent reactions, even though they are centuries apart. That is, both persecutions involve concern, hostility, consensus, disproportionality, volatility, and a moral dimension that is symptomatic of a larger problem. For a moral panic to be set into motion, the conditions need to allow for the panic to engulf the general public, and 186 provided such an opportunity. The violent reaction toward Bacchants happened due to a hidden political agenda which included many factors: concern regarding foreign influences in Italy, shift of public support to newly victorious generals, changes in aristocracies throughout Italy due to Hannibal’s destruction a few years prior, evolution of the role of women, fracturing within the Senate, and a desire to expand political power to other areas within Italy. False accusations that preyed upon deep-seated fears of the foreign cult were hurled against the Bacchants, a group which provided the perfect scapegoat. By creating a moral panic, the Roman government was able to work the public into a frenzy so that it could justify the violent suppression of the cult, thereby reestablishing its dominance and addressing all political concerns that had arisen in the decades prior to 186.

This thesis looks at over 3,000 inscriptions of unmarried daughters, under the age of 20, during the Roman Empire. It discusses the formulaic ways in which daughters were described on their tombstones based on their age and the Roman virtues valued at the time. It primarily focuses on descriptors, superlatives used, the dedicators who commissioned the work, girls who died before their wedding, and ages of girls which have excesses in the months or days she lived as inscribed on her epitaph.

This dissertation takes as its underlying premise that the assumption of the existence of a concretized witch figure in the literature of the ancient world is fundamentally flawed and that the highly generalized term “witch” has been applied retroactively to the categorization of so-called witches in the ancient world and has thus condensed a heterogeneous host of characters into a single category for which the ancient world had no analogue. The introductory chapter is devoted to the exposition of this problem and its proposed solution: the treatment of individual witch characters not as part of a generic group but as specific instantiations of a particular set of actions and attributes primarily contingent upon the precise circumstances of their deployment. The following four chapters examine the six appearances of the character of Canidia in Horace’s (65 - 8 BCE) poetic corpus as a test-case for this hypothesis on the basis that proof of a single character - who is confined to the works of a single author - manifesting multiple, unique aspects that vary from poem to poem, constitutes a significant demonstration of the pluralistic nature of the ancient witch. Such a drastic realignment of these figures’ typology also makes available considerable re-readings of the literature in which these characters appear. The second, third and fourth chapters examine Canidia’s three longest appearances in the Horatian corpus: Satire 1.8, Epode 5, and Epode 17. Each chapter limits itself to the exploration of Canidia’s role in a single poem and analyzes only those attributes demonstrable in that specific literary context before seeking external analogues – again drawn only from their similarity to one particular instantiation of Canidia’s character. Chapter two examines Horace’s use of Canidia in Satire 1.8 as a liminal boundary-walker intruding in the Gardens of Maecenas as a means to discuss the problematic issues of genre inherent in the composition of the Satires. Chapter three considers the Canidia of Horace’s Epode 5 as the incarnation of a child-killing demon along the lines of Lamia or the strix, and reads the poem as a potential response to Vergil’s fourth Eclogue, a poem that anticipates the birth of a child to usher in Rome’s golden age. The fourth chapter finds Canidia in the role of a demonic Empusa where she serves as the embodiment of Horace’s iambic poetry; an inversion of the elegiac puella, Canidia does not invigorate Horace or inspire his poetry, but saps him of his energy and effectively concludes his book of epodes. The final chapter is devoted to the three other poems in which Canidia is mentioned only in passing: Epode 3, Satire 2.1 and Satire 2.8. In these poems, instead of functioning as a powerful magical practitioner, Canidia acts as a generic poisoner whose very lack of detailed magical capabilities sets her apart from the three other poems in which she is primarily featured. This final shift in characterization serves as means to review the multi-faceted nature of Canidia’s character and to reaffirm the central thesis of the dissertation.

This thesis argues that Isocrates was a philosopher and practiced philosophy, a view contrary to the majority of scholars, who view Isocrates solely as an orator or rhetorician. The study of Isocrates’ philosophy has been neglected primarily due to its dissimilarity to the philosophy of Plato, and Isocrates’ work has therefore not been regarded as philosophy, despite Isocrates’ frequent claims to practice philosophy. The goal of Isocrates’ philosophy is to improve decision-making in public affairs by attempting to arrive at the best course of action in any particular situation through a process of conjectures and approximations, which are founded in conventional wisdom.A student of Isocrates’ philosophy learns what conjectures are suitable from exemplary men whom he takes as models for his own thought. For Isocrates, these men were successful Athenian politicians such as Solon, Cleisthenes, Themistocles, and Pericles, whom the community generally esteemed to be excellent. The best way to understand the thought of these men was through reading and imitating the speeches that they wrote. For Isocrates, speaking well and thinking well were inseparable, and therefore the construction of a speech, with thoughts parallel to those of his model, was both producing a philosophical text but also practicing philosophy. Having multiple models to draw upon is preferable in determining which excellent thoughts one should fit to the situation at hand in the speech. As speech-writing is such an important aspect of his philosophy, a portion of his educational program consisted of learning the different figures of speech and methods of composition and how to suit and adapt them to the situation at hand to produce a speech that is persuasive to the audience. Isocrates believes that not everyone can do this complex interweaving of composition and situation effectively, however, his educational program will improve everyone’s abilities, though true ability is reserved for those with natural talent as well as training. Even if a speech is constructed well and contains excellent thoughts, it still may fail to persuade an audience. Isocrates believes that this can happen due to a poor reputation and the confusion or ignorance of the audience, factors which played a large role in his student Timotheus’ failure to obtain an acquittal on charges of treason despite being an excellent general and following Isocrates’ educational program. Any student of Isocrates could achieve so much success that he could become a model for other students to imitate in their speech-writing. Isocrates provides an example of this in the Nicocles, which Isocrates writes in the voice of the tyrant Nicocles, who models his own speech after Evagoras and To Nicocles, two speeches by Isocrates written in his own voice. While many scholars have argued that in the Antidosis Isocrates imitates the philosophy of Socrates in Plato’s Apology, he actually only adopts the situation that Socrates was in and fits his own thoughts to it, exemplifying his philosophy in action. Through studying Isocrates’ philosophy, we can more fully understand the philosophical climate in Athens in the 4th century BCE.

The purpose of this study is to examine the practices of rewriting Aeschylus’ tragedies for American audiences and the manner in which these rewrites are “read” by stage directors who adapt them in their academic and non-academic theatre productions in the United States. In order to analyze the translation and performance practices of Aeschylus’ plays, this study will examine all English language translations, adaptations, and distant relatives of Aeschylus’ works for the twenty and twenty-first centuries and analyze key moments that connect and illuminate those works. The two central questions that drive this investigation are: (1) what kind of choices have the English-speaking translators made regarding the tragedies of Aeschylus, and (2) how have Aeschylus’ tragedies been rewritten by the practitioners of the American stage? Because of the proliferation and variance of Aeschylean translations into English, and research published to-date, an examination of these practices and texts provides a rich source for analyzing the larger issues of practice and critical evaluation of translation and performance. The seven tragedies of Aeschylus (Agamemnon, Libation Bearers, Eumenides, Prometheus Bound, Persians, Suppliants, and Seven Against Thebes) and the manner in which they plays have been interpreted by translators and producers from 1900 to 2009 will provide the data for this study.

Athens was the most important cultural center of Greek antiquity and there have been numerous histories written about the city of Athens and Athenian authors. My work differs from these in that it is an intellectual history in which Athens is not the generator of this culture, but an object of it. That is, the literary culture to which Athens gave birth in turn made Athens into an icon for that culture. Specifically, my work examines how during the second to fifth centuries AD Athens came to denote not just a specific community but a larger idea that was defined differently in the “culture wars” of late antiquity, whether as a symbol for Greek culture as a whole, the glorious (and now-lost) classical past of Greece, or a specific philosophy. “Athens” meant something different to everyone who invoked it as a symbol in late antiquity. I have chosen three case-studies which exemplify different “axes of tension” that underlie the debates over the meaning of “Athens.” The first looks at the views of Athens held by the Roman emperor Hadrian and the Greek travel-writer Pausanias. Hadrian attempted to establish Athens as a “cultural capital” of the eastern Mediterranean, but one which served to proclaim Roman power. Pausanias used “Athens” to remember Greece’s pre-Roman past and so maintain a sense of Greek identity with no reference to the Roman empire. This chapter looks at two positive evaluations of Athens as a cultural symbol, but a symbol caught between Roman power and Greek self-definition. The second case-study involves the third-century writer Philostratos, who displays a tension between a localized vision of Greek culture based on Athens and a universalized vision of that culture with no specific center. This chapter highlights debates over whether Greek culture should be based on the locale of Athens. The final case-study looks at criticisms of Athens by the orator Libanios and the philosopher Synesios, who postulated alternatives to “Athens:” the ideals associated with Alexandria and Antioch. This chapter explores the objections to the utility of the ideal Athens. Because I see the symbolism of Athens as being re-negotiated in different periods and intellectual settings, I situate each author’s works in their larger cultural context to understand the part he played in the construction of the “symbolic Athens.” The creation of an ideal Athens is connected to issues of Hellenism. I argue that imperial-era Hellenism was not necessarily an abstract phenomenon based solely on Greek language and literature, an idea favored by numerous scholars over the last two decades. Instead, I believe that intellectuals grounded their Hellenism in the geographical locale of Athens, the home of the texts they read so ardently. Furthermore, I argue that the debates over Athens’ cultural importance demonstrate that Hellenism was never a unified cultural paradigm. Hellenism was internally divided and its adherents debated among themselves as to its definition. These tensions inherent in Hellenism were inherited by post-classical periods, up to and including our own, continually informing how we view the ancient world.