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In this project, I use textual analysis in combination with theoretical frameworks drawn from anthropology, animal studies, and food studies to analyze the poetic significance of meat and cannibalism in Homer, Hesiod, and the Homeric Hymns. Each chapter examines a different combination of consumer and food in order to challenge the neat opposition between divine self-sufficiency and human hunger proposed by Vernant. In the first two chapters, I investigate the gods’ relationship to animal meat. The first is a reading of the sacrifice at Mecone in Hesiod’s Theogony. On the basis of verbal echoes of Hesiod’s account of the castration of Ouranos, I argue that Prometheus’ deception of Zeus functions as a quasi-castration, and that impotence, rather than self-sufficiency, is the implied result of the contest. It leaves the gods unable to consume meat, but does not preclude their craving it. Then, in the second chapter, I explore divine hunger for meat in a post-Mecone world in the Homeric Hymns to Apollo and Hermes. In their quests to gain full acceptance as Olympian gods, both gods commit bewildering acts of violence, always seeming disappointed with the results; these actions make more sense, however, when we read them as frustrated attempts to satisfy their longings for both meat and rebellion against a paternal authority figure—longings that are impossible to satisfy under Zeus’ rule. In the third and fourth chapters, I explore the Odyssey’s Cattle of Helios episode as a case study of human hunger for meat, applying two different heuristics. The third chapter reads the episode from an animal studies perspective: when Odysseus’ crew eat the cattle of Helios, it is because their understanding of the hierarchy of animals, humans, and gods has undergone a gradual dissolution. Their unsettling experiences in the otherworld lead to a disastrous abandonment of alimentary codes with cosmic consequences. Then, in the fourth chapter, I reread the episode in terms of power relationships between humans, applying Maurice Bloch’s theory of consumed vitality and rebounding violence and Pierre Bourdieu’s ideas about the economics of eating. By analyzing Odysseus’ and Eurylochus’ persuasive speeches to the crew about why they should or should not land on Thrinacia or eat the cattle, and by comparing them with other Homeric passages that touch on the class politics of meat, I propose that the crew’s decision to eat the cattle may not be a mistake at all, but an attempted rebellion against aristocratic privilege. In my fifth and sixth chapters, I consider the moments in hexameter when men and gods become meat for each other and for other beings. The Iliad and the Odyssey contain many instances of almost-cannibalism—wishes, threats, and similes about cannibalism, or humans being eaten by animals or monsters—but no literal instances of humans eating each other, even in starvation situations. In the fifth chapter, employing anthropological theories of cannibalism from Arens, Harris, and Nyamnjoh, I attempt to explain the absent presence of cannibalism in Homer, finding that warriors and heroes long for the dominant position of the cannibal because their own lives are metaphorically cannibalized by the wars in which they fight and their precarious position in the world. In the sixth chapter, I investigate stories of gods consuming each other or being consumed, mapping patterns of violence in Hesiod’s Theogony to show how the order of Zeus is founded on his invention of cannibalism, a markedly exploitative form of violence, through the synthesis of more primitive kinds of violence.

This dissertation is a study of pragmatic speech acts and narrative authority in Greek poetry focused on prayer, prophecy, and myth. The project treats the poems of Sappho and Pindar, the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, and a selection of Euripides' tragedies using a theoretical model that combines elements of speech act theory, pragmatics, and narratology. The central question of the dissertation is how a speaker generates authority for a speech act in order to bring about a desired effect upon the audience. I argue that poetic speakers generate authority for their speech acts by demonstrating their knowledge of mythic narratives, their facility in interpreting those narratives, and their ability to communicate efficaciously with gods. This demonstration of religious and cultural knowledge allows speakers to present themselves as competent and efficacious speakers as they attempt to exert influence over the behavior and emotions of their audience. I argue further that this is a complex rhetorical strategy in line with pragmatic speech in other contexts, including inscribed prayers, magical texts, and religious ritual.

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.

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.

The Anglo-Saxons were a people who took great pride in their heritage and culture. However, they faced various challenges in preserving the pagan traditions of their Nordic ancestors while being heavily influenced by Christianity. Many Anglo-Saxon texts demonstrate these cultural challenges, but the Book of Judith, found in the Nowell-Codex, attempts to unify the two conflicting cultures by uniting Anglo-Saxon and Christians traditions in a distinctly Old English format. The Old English adaptation of the Latin Vulgate Judith text portrays the actions of the heroine in light of Christianity while incorporating deeply-rooted Anglo-Saxon traditions. Judith is the unifying figure within the story, because she exemplifies both Anglo-Saxon and Christian ideals. Judith’s dual characteristics create a picture of a unified Christian/Anglo-Saxon woman, whose morals, virtues, and heroic actions are reflected in the minor characteristics of the story. From the Old English writing style, to the opening feast, to the beasts of battle, to the collection of the spoils of war, the Nowell-Codex Judith is filled with traditional Anglo-Saxon imagery that creates a cohesive Anglo-Christian world for readers and listeners of the time to emulate.

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 project is an attempt to grapple with one of the most perplexing of Old English heroic poems, known today simply as Exodus. This 590 line work is an adaptation of the Biblical account of the Israelite escape from captivity in Egypt and their subsequent flight through the wilderness, climaxing with that most iconic of Old Testament images, the parting of the Red Sea. My reading differs from conventional scholarly attempts at interpreting the work not in the details, but on a more fundamental level. There is little doubt among scholars today that the poem’s perplexing and riddlesome passages are typological allusions, but there has been little attempt to unify all of these poetic nuances into a coherent narrative. My approach aims to unify all of the riddlesome aspects of the work by reading the poem as a riddle itself. This riddle exists as a vehicle to challenge readers in their thinking, their knowledge of theology, and how they will respond to such knowledge in their own personal behavior.

In this paper, I offer eight lesson plans and one final assessment on Ovid’s Metamorphoses for upper level high school Latin students. The purpose of this curriculum paper is to explore how Latin high school curriculum can be meaningful, contextualized, and standards based. The lesson plans focus on four myths from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, those of Actaeon and Diana, Baucis and Philemon, Niobe, and Ceyx and Alcyone. Each lesson plan includes objectives, standards addressed, procedures, an anticipatory set, materials list, and an explanation of assessment and evaluation. After creating this curriculum and attending two professional conferences, I conclude that lesson plans should grow and change with the teacher and that a purpose driven curriculum, where Latin is contextualized and meaningful, is essential for successful Latin classrooms.