Browsing by Author "González, José M"
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Item Open Access Democritus and the Critical Tradition(2013) Miller, Joseph GreshamModern scholars cannot agree how extant fragments of thought attributed to Leucippus and Democritus integrate (or do not) to form a coherent perspective on the ancient Greek world. While a certain degree of uncertainty is unavoidable, given the nature of the evidence available and the fact that Democritus wrote many different works (including at least one in which he deliberately argued against positions that he defended elsewhere), this study demonstrates that we know enough to take a more integrative view of the early atomists (and of Democritus in particular) than is usually taken. In the case of Democritus, this study shows that it makes good sense to read what remains of his works (physical, biological, and ethical) under the presumption that he assumes a single basic outlook on the world, a coherent perspective that informed every position taken by the atomist philosopher.
Chapter 1 provides an in-depth portrait of the historical and philosophical context in which early atomism was born. As part of this portrait, it offers thumbnail sketches of the doctrines attributed to a representative catalogue of pre-Socratic philosophers to whom published work is attributed (Anaximander, Xenophanes, Heraclitus, Parmenides, Empedocles, Anaxagoras, Philolaus). It demonstrates how each philosopher presumes that his theory offers a universal outlook on human reality, a perspective on the universe which purposely encompasses (and builds into a single theoretical framework) physics and biology and practical ethics.
Chapter 2 introduces the early atomists as respondents to the pre-Socratic movement before them (a movement which this study refers to as the Critical Tradition). It presents evidence for an integrated reading of early atomist fragments, a reading that construes the Leucippus and Democritus as men of their time (working with and responding to the positions taken by their predecessors in the Critical Tradition).
Chapter 3 shows how Democritus' ethics arise naturally from his physics via an historical process of development. Like his predecessors in the Critical Tradition and many of his contemporaries, the atomist deliberately imagines nature (physics) providing the raw material from which culture (ethics) naturally and inevitably rises.
Chapter 4 offers an original reading of extant ethical fragments of Democritus, showing how the atomist uses his unique outlook on the world to develop a practical approach to living well.
Item Open Access Narrative Revenge and the Poetics of Justice in the "Odyssey": A Study on "Tisis"(2010) Loney, AlexanderThis dissertation examines the interplay of ethics and poetic craft in the Odyssey through the lens of the theme of tisis, "retribution." In this poem tisis serves two main purposes: it acts as a narrative template for the poem's composition and makes actions and agents morally intelligible to audiences. My work shows that the system of justice that tisis denotes assumes a retaliatory symmetry of precise proportionality. I also examine aspects of the ideology and social effects of this system of justice for archaic Greek culture at large. Justice thus conceived is "open-textured" and readily manipulable to the interests of the agent who controls the language of the narrative. In the end, I show that this system fails to secure communal harmony.
The project has three parts. In part one, I argue that earlier scholars have not sufficiently appreciated the narrative character of tisis. Following an inductive analysis of the poem's paradigmatic example of Orestes' tisis, I draw upon the methods of narratology to propose a new definition of tisis as a "narrative," a certain conventional arrangement of a set of actions and roles that together constitute a narrative whole. This narrative acts as a compositional tool for a singer's re-composition and performance of poetry, becoming a major organizing structure in the tradition of Homeric poetry. From this practice arises the Odyssey's complex texture of several interwoven tisis narratives that dialectically carry out the poem's moral program. Because Homeric ethics is a narrative ethics, a practice of placing one's self and others in the stories that society tells, tisis provides an ethical framework that renders experience morally intelligible and allows actors to evaluate the moral standing of themselves and others. tisis, thus, is morally inflected: those who play the role of avenger receive commendation; those who play the victim, condemnation. And the great moral conflicts in the Odyssey--between Poseidon and Odysseus, between Odysseus and the suitors--are over the assignment and adoption of these narrative roles.
Against the other tisis narratives in the Odyssey, Odysseus' own, central narrative appears strikingly atypical. Unlike Aegisthus, the suitors have neither killed anyone nor corrupted Penelope--nonetheless, they face the same punishment. But through a creative interpretation of ius talionis the singer makes a series of brilliant rhetorical moves to recast the acts of the suitors as accomplished murder and adultery. This allows Odysseus to play the part of just avenger of himself Furthermore, it resolves in the person of Odysseus a latent tension between the narratives of nostos (which implies the happy return of a hero) and tisis (which implies the death of a hero and vengeance on his behalf).
In part two, I argue that the ideology of justice that tisis denotes--returning equivalent harm for harm--runs through the heart of archaic Greek culture, but it is always vulnerable to manipulation. Speakers--and poets especially--exploit the possibilities of ambiguity in the language of justice in order to fabricate a likeness between crimes and their punishments, thus justifying avengers. Similarly, speakers use poetic techniques to cement this ideology into more than a merely talionic retribution of "like for like" and instead construct a justice that equates a crime and its punishment. Under this strengthened regime of equivalence, crimes merge with and become their own punishment. This ideology has political consequences: I take as a banner example Alcman's Partheneion, in which the order of both the political community and the universe rests on tisis. I examine as well many other examples of a tight linkage between crime and punishment.
In part three, I return to the Odyssey, asking why the singer uses this rhetoric of synonymy of crime and punishment and why he has arranged the moral positions of the characters as he has. I conclude that this arrangement serves the narrator's seemingly monologic, overt program of justifying Odysseus and his divine patrons. But at the same time the narrator has taken the symbolic reasoning of ius talionis to a rhetorical extreme, effectively making the suitors into cannibals. Likewise, the retributive claims of the suitors' kin at the close of the poem disappear all too easily: hostilities are not so much resolved as obliterated in mass amnesia. Through such holes in the fabric of the justice of tisis, the audience perceives the workings of another program, a subversive program that calls into question the narrator's overt program and the entire, corruptible system of retributive justice.
My project thus contributes to our understanding of the Odyssey's subversive narrative integrity, the operation of justice in archaic Greece, and the nature of narratorial authority in poetic discourse. My conclusions should interest not only philologists and literary critics, but also scholars of ethics and political theory.
Item Open Access The Theognidea in Reperformance: A Rhetorical Rereading(2023) Karsten, AlexanderThe Theognidea is the most significant work of archaic Greek elegy, but questions of its origins have long dominated its study. This dissertation reads the Theognidea as the product of widespread, rhetorically motivated sympotic performance and gives equal interpretive weight to each performance, whether it be the putative “original” or a reperformance. I find that many features that had been regarded as cruxes would have instead been assets for symposiasts hoping to repurpose the poetry. In the first chapter, I take up the problem of poem divisions. There is no authoritative scheme of poem divisions. Indeed, there are almost as many different schemes of poem division as there are versions of the texts, as I show in the results of a survey of the poem divisions made by 16 manuscripts, 21 editions, and two schemas proposed in a monograph. I argue that this variation is not a problem, but instead a reflection of the malleability of the text, a feature that would have been useful in sympotic reperformance. In the second chapter, I argue that the doublets are demonstrations of the adaptability of the poetry to new contexts, whether or not they are actual transcriptions of reperformance. I argue that the change in medium from dynamic, sympotic performance to fixed, page poetry has created interpretive problems which can be solved with the introduction of a born-digital edition of the collection. In the third chapter, I discuss the use of five value terms (agathos, esthlos, kalos, kakos, and deilos) which occur with notable frequency in the collection. I find that the status of “good” or “bad” described by these terms is a matter of discernment rather than the result of objectively identifiable indicators like birth or wealth; moreover, the status is regarded as impermanent. The frequent use and inconsistent application of these terms is a reflection of the fact that these terms were both valuable and contestable. In the fourth chapter I build upon the unsettled social picture of the third chapter with an examination of the use of friendship language in the Theognidea. I find that friendship is predominantly described on a one-on-one level and characterized by a lack of trust. If organized friend groups (hetaireiai) did exist, they do not seem to have held much sway over the interpersonal relationships of the symposiasts who performed this poetry. The final two chapters are concerned with how this new reading ought to affect our understanding of author and audience in the poetry. In the fifth chapter, I examine passages in which the speaker of the poetry makes claims to authorship. I find that these claims are consistent with the immediate rhetorical needs of the symposion and do not preclude reuse. I argue that Theognis, as identified in previous readings, is best understood as an implied author. I close with an examination of how the implied authors of the collection has been understood. In the sixth chapter, I describe the differences between the ancient and modern audiences of the poetry. I survey the extensive use of address in the collection to show that the audience is quite literally an element of the poetry, and I discuss how these vocatives could be used in reperformance. I conclude with a rumination on the role that modern readers play as audience members. I find that it is ultimately impossible for readers now to fully inhabit the role of audience envisioned when it was performed in the symposion.