Browsing Faculty of Arts and Sciences by FAS Department "Classics"
Now showing items 1-20 of 29
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Ancient Upcycling: Social Memory and the Reuse of Marble in Athens
(2016-05-10)In this dissertation I examine the various ways Athenians of several periods of antiquity purposefully reused stone artifacts, objects, and buildings in order to shape their own and their descendants’ collective ideas about ... -
Arma virumque: The Significance of Spoils in Roman Culture
(2016-05-17)This dissertation explores the significance of spoils and the practice of spoils-taking in Roman culture. Working from the premise that spoils in the classical sense (Latin spolia, exuviae) are items singled out for their ... -
Between Federation and Empire: The koina of the imperial Greek mainland, 1st to 3rd century CE
(2019-09-10)This dissertation uncovers the dynamism and durability of koina in the Greek mainland within the Roman empire. The term koinon translates from ancient Greek as ‘what is common, shared, or public.’ However, scholars often ... -
Contesting the Greek Past in Ninth-Century Baghdad
(2016-05-16)From the eighth century through the tenth, the ‘Abbāsid capital of Baghdad witnessed the translation, in unprecedented numbers, of Greek philosophical, medical, and other scientific texts into Arabic, often via a Syriac ... -
Deliberative Fictions: Isocrates' Assembly Speeches
(2018-05-11)This dissertation is a study of four works by the Athenian teacher and writer Isocrates: Plataicus, Archidamus, Areopagiticus, and On the Peace. In each of these works, a fictitious orator addresses an internal audience ... -
Despotic Nostalgias: Classical Athens and the Autocratic Return
(2020-05-15)This dissertation explores the construction of nostalgia in fifth-century BCE Athenian conceptions of autocracy. I develop a model of “autocratic return” to demonstrate how the autocrat’s desire for homeward travel (nostos) ... -
From mēnis to ira: Ancient Translators of Homer
(2020-05-14)This dissertation expands scholarly conceptions of translation through a comprehensive study of translations of the Homeric epics in Greco-Roman antiquity. By broadening conventional notions of ancient translation formally, ... -
The Great Mystery: Death, Memory and the Archiving of Monastic Culture in Late Antique Religious Tales
(2015-05-15)The present study investigates attitudes towards and teachings about the end of life and the soul’s passage to the next world, as expressed in late antique religious tales in Greek, particularly from Egypt and the Sinai. ... -
Horace and the Ancient Grotesque
(2018-01-19)This dissertation examines the grotesque as both a concept and a phenomenon in the work of the poet Horace. Horace is a key figure in the development of theories of the grotesque, but this aspect of his work has not been ... -
Invention and Discovery in Greek and Roman Thought
(2018-04-27)Straddling the disciplinary boundaries between ancient philosophy, history of science, literary criticism, and intellectual history, this dissertation focuses on the idea of invention and discovery in Classical antiquity. ... -
Latin Literature and Frankish Culture in the Crusader States (1098–1187)
(2015-05-15)The so-called Crusader States established by European settlers in the Levant at the end of the eleventh century gave rise to a variety of Latin literary works, including historiography, sermons, pilgrim guides, monastic ... -
The Measure of All Things: Natural Hierarchy in Roman Republican Thought
(2015-04-30)This work explores how writers of the late Roman Republic use the concept of nature rhetorically, in order to talk about and either reinforce or challenge social inequality. Comparisons between humans and animals receive ... -
Medical Decision Making in Greco-Roman Antiquity
(2018-05-10)This project investigates medical decision making in Greco-Roman antiquity, using modern studies of cognitive bias, heuristics, and the development of expert intuition as a lens through which to view the theoretical ... -
Medicine and Cosmology in Classical Greece: First Principles in Early Greek Medicine
(2016-09-06)In the fifth and fourth centuries BCE, a number of “doctor-cosmologists” attempted to base the art of healing on the elements, laws, and fundamental forces that govern the universe as a whole. This study examines the major ... -
Pindaric Aspects of Ovid's Metamorphoses
(2016-05-10)This dissertation analyzes Ovid’s Metamorphoses through the lens of praise and blame poetry and focuses on Pindar and possible allusions to epinician poetry. In particular, I look at the Apollo and Daphne episode (Met. ... -
Plumbing the Depths: Geological Processes, Deep Time, and the Shaping of Landscapes in Classical Literature
(2020-05-12)The traditional narrative of deep time’s discovery would have it that the geologist James Hutton’s study of unconformities in 1787 and 1788 first established that the Earth’s age exceeded the limits of traditional history, ... -
Public Discourse and Imperial Ideology in the Annals of Tacitus
(2019-05-10)This study examines the relationship between discourse and ideology in the Annals of the Roman historian Tacitus, with a particular focus on the account of the reign of Tiberius in books 1-6. I argue that Tacitus depicts ... -
Reciting the Nation: Nikolaos Loukanes and the Poetics of a Renaissance Epos
(2019-01-20)My dissertation focuses on Nikolaos Loukanes’ s 1526 Iliad, the first printed rendition of Homer’s masterpiece in a modern language, and fully explores the untapped hermeneutic potentials of this intriguing yet only partially ... -
Redeeming Epic: Furor, Classical Tradition, and Christian Cosmos in Late Antiquity
(2016-11-29)This dissertation investigates the renewal and redefinition of the Vergilian epic tradition, as represented by the furor-theme, in the biblical epics of late antiquity. The Christian project of redeeming the most prestigious ... -
The Roman Odysseus
(2015-05-08)This dissertation investigates how Roman authors, especially of the Augustan period, comment on their literary relationship with their Greek literary predecessors through the complex character of Odysseus. It argues that ...