Browsing by Author "Johnson, William A"

This dissertation investigates ancient language ideologies constructed by Greek and Latin writers of the second and third centuries CE, a loosely-connected movement now generally referred to the Second Sophistic. It focuses on Lucian of Samosata, a Syrian “barbarian” writer of satire and parody in Greek, and especially on his works that engage with language-oriented topics of contemporary relevance to his era. The term “language ideologies”, as it is used in studies of sociolinguistics, refers to beliefs and practices about language as they function within the social context of a particular culture or set of cultures; prescriptive grammar, for example, is a broad and rather common example. The surge in Greek (and some Latin) literary output in the Second Sophistic led many writers, with Lucian an especially noteworthy example, to express a variety of ideologies regarding the form and use of language. A number of authors, including Lucian, practiced Atticism, the belief that the best literature wouldn be made possible by reviving the Attic dialect of Classical Athens, language of Plato and Aristophanes. Others, however, disagree with the narrow and perhaps pretentious version of Greek this ideology produced; intriguingly Lucian was a member of this group as well. This study examines Lucian’s complex and contradictory attitudes towards linguistic practices, focusing the works of his that address Atticism and other linguistic topics—such as the degree to which mastery of a language and its culture will allow one to identify with that culture. Here, too, Lucian portrays the relationship between linguistic practice and cultural identity in several different ways. Investigations into the linguistic views of other authors of the period help answer the question of which contemporary ideologies Lucian may be drawing on for his satire. The dissertation concludes that the detailed, specific humor of Lucian’s linguistic satire is tied into his overall project of creating a distinctive ethnic, cultural, and linguistic position for the self-representation of his disparate personae.

This study analyzes marginalized voices and nontraditional pathways of higher education in the late Roman Empire and diversifies our notion of who was part of “the” educated elite in ancient higher education. I focus on upper-class learners who did not have access to the family’s wealth or faced difficulty with pursuing the discussed traditional paths of schooling designed for young men from wealthy families. The discussed marginalized voices include fatherless students, women, late learners, autodidacts, and disabled students. Since most sources on Roman education were authored by elite men who mention marginalized voices in passing, I piece together the experiences of nontraditional learners and marginalized members of Roman education from an array of literary and epigraphic sources, including letters from teachers to students and families, church historians and Christians commenting on women, orations, tomb stones and legal documents. Most sources discussed are dated to the fourth century C.E., highlighting a period in which girls and women from the upper-class gained a voice in ascetic communities, as educational leaders and philanthropes and in which educational mobility across the Roman Empire flourished. Using Bourdieu’s theory of capital, I analyze how diverse family and educational backgrounds impacted the educational paths of students, discuss the student voices often overlooked in scholarship and bring attention to the challenges that nontraditional and marginalized students have experienced in higher education.

In my dissertation, I trace the depiction of the tyrant-figure in fifth-century Athenian tragedy, and how this figure reflects Athenian changing self-identity over the course of the fifth century. Given the crucial function of tragedy in both Athenian civic display and introspection, the figure of the tyrant was deeply encoded in the matrix of tragedy. The “tyrant” was the most significant referent in the Athenian political imagination, the threatening Other that helped shape Athenian self-identity by inversely defining what values the city should hold.

I consider tragedies by Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, considering the socio- political context for each playwright’s staging of tyranny. I begin with a reading of Aeschylus’ Persians, which stages the Greek victory at Salamis from the Persian point of view. By situating the drama in a foreign court, the tragedy foregrounds the non-democratic aspects of Persian monarchy and society, defining the anti-democratic aspects of the Great King’s court to better articulate Athenain democratic values. The Prometheus Bound, similarly distanced from contemporary Athens, takes place under the tyranny of Zeus; by portraying the god as the worst possible instantiation of a hubristic, violent human ruler, Aeschylus performs a reductio ad absurdum of tyrannical ideology that would seek to portray the human tyrant as divine.

In Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus and Antigone, by contrast, tyrants embody the ideological strain of the exercise of power that Athens experienced at the head of the Delian League. Both tragedies portray tyrants who, with praiseworthy motives (and even, at times, with reasonable, democratic rhetoric), struggle under a burden of governance that they cannot sustain. Unlike the Aeschylean Xerxes or Zeus, who are distant, barely-seen figures that loom over their respective tragedies, Oedipus and Creon are the focal-points of their dramas. The tragedies exploit the tension between the Athenian political conception of tyranny, as a totally negative phenomenon opposed to equality and democratic freedom, and an earlier, Panhellenic (insofar as it did not originate in any one polis) conception that casts tyranny in a more equivocal light, as something worthy both of fear and of jealous awe. Invoking both views together, these tragedies problematize the straightforward depiction of tyranny as something wholly good or bad.

Writing in the last decades of the fifth century, during which time Athenian democ- racy grew increasingly embattled and unpredictable, Euripides’ tragedies collapss the tyranny/democracy dichotomy entirely. In the Suppliant Women, Theseus, a monarch, is cast as the robust defender of Athenian democracy, the overseer of a system in which logically he would have no place. While this contradiction is inherent of a traditional formulation of Theseus, the tragedy highlights the incongruity of the situation by imbuing the king’s dialogue with strikingly modern rhetoric, and making him proficient in contemporary sophistic modes of argumentation. Inversely, Euripides repeatedly employs the motif of the “tyrant mob”; in Hecuba and Iphigenia at Aulis, the tyrannical power of a quasi-democratic body exerts a terrible influence on events, unyielding to both logic and justice. The weaknesses of democracy, the poisonous power of persuasion and the unthinking nature of collective action, are portrayed as the inseparable flip side of its virtues: mass participation and equality of speech.

Behind all three tragedians, the archaic moral conception of the tyrant stands as a model and foil. The traditional traits of tyranny are either reinforced or subverted, embodied in Zeus or given a new ideological charge by their application to collectives. v The figure of the tyrant (both in its political and moral conceptions) is an ideological reference point whose trajectory mirrors that of Athenian democracy itself, from a system predicated on opposition to sole rule and with mechanisms to prevent the consolidation of power, to the means by which, by the end of the Peloponnesian War, single individuals wielded undue influence over a polis that itself ruled a significant portion of the Greek world.

This dissertation interrogates existing scholarly paradigms regarding aetiology in the Histories of Herodotus in order to open up new avenues to approach a complex and varied topic. Since aetiology has mostly been treated as the study of cause and effect in the Histories, this work expands the purview of aetiology to include Herodotus’ explanations of origins more generally. The overarching goal in examining the methodological principles of Herodotean aetiology is to show the extent to which they resonate across the Histories according to their initial development in the proem, especially in those places that seem to deviate from the work’s driving force (i.e. the Persian Wars). Though the focus is on correlating the principles espoused in the proem with their deployment in Herodotus’ ethnographies and other seemingly divergent portions of his work, the dissertation also demonstrates the influence of these principles on some of the more “historical” aspects of the Histories where the struggle between Greeks and barbarians is concerned. The upshot is to make a novel case not only for the programmatic significance of the proem, but also for the cohesion of Herodotean methodology from cover to cover, a perennial concern for scholars of Greek history and historiography.

Chapter One illustrates how the proem to the Histories (1.1.0-1.5.3) prefigures Herodotus’ engagement with aetiological discussions throughout the Histories. Chapter Two indicates how the reading of the proem laid out in Chapter One allows for Herodotus’ deployment of aetiology in the Egyptian logos (especially where the pharaoh Psammetichus’ investigation of the origins of Egyptian language, nature, and custom are concerned) to be viewed within the methodological continuum of the Histories at large. Chapter Three connects Herodotus’ programmatic interest in the origins of erga (i.e. “works” or “achievements” manifested as monuments and deeds of abstract and concrete sorts) with the patterns addressed in Chapters One and Two. Chapter Four examines aetiological narratives in the Scythian logos and argues through them that this logos is as integral to the Histories as the analogous Egyptian logos studied in Chapter Two. Chapter Five demonstrates how the aetiologies associated with the Greeks’ collaboration with the Persians (i.e. medism) in the lead-up to the battle of Thermopylae recapitulate programmatic patterns isolated in previous chapters and thereby extend the methodological continuum of the Histories beyond the “ethnographic” logoi to some of the most representative “historical” logoi of Herodotus’ work. Chapter Six concludes the dissertation and makes one final case for methodological cohesion by showing the inextricability of the end of the Histories from its beginning.

The dissertation surveys marginal annotations (marginalia) in fifty-nine of the earliest manuscripts to contain books in the so-called Septuagint (i.e. ancient Greek translations of books in the Hebrew Bible). The dates of the manuscripts surveyed range from roughly the second century BC to the third century AD. Most of the manuscripts are presently mere scraps of papyrus codices, fewer are scraps of papyrus bookrolls, and still fewer are scraps of parchment codices and bookrolls. Most of the manuscripts were recovered from various rural locations in Egypt and a few come from Palestine. On my count, the manuscripts contain a combined total of 230 marginalia. Some of the marginalia, like the texts they encircle, are written in ancient Greek, while the majority are written in Coptic. As I demonstrate throughout the project, the purpose of the marginalia is only clarified once situated within the scribal contexts of the manuscripts themselves and within the larger context of (late) ancient “grammar” (grammatike).In Chapters 1 and 2, I summarize the manuscript evidence and establish reliable data concerning the manuscripts’ codicology or voluminology, writing, date, and paratextual features as well as discuss patterns in the type, frequency, and distribution of the marginalia. Transcriptions, critical notes, and English translations of the marginalia are provided in a large catalog at the dissertation’s end. Until now, these marginalia have never been studied collectively or systematically and many are here presented for the first time (modern editors of the manuscripts tend to neglect or outright ignore paratextual features in the manuscripts). Chapters 3 and 4 are each devoted to studying the marginalia in a single manuscript. In this case-study approach, I situate the marginalia within their larger social, scribal, and codicological frameworks. Collectively, these frameworks illuminate the marginalia’s function as well as the reading habits and interests of their writers.

This dissertation answers the question, “How were scribes in the ancient world trained?” The following social history elevates the marginalized voices of ancient scribes, emphasizing their personhood and their agency as human individuals. Chapter 1 establishes the scope of the thesis along with the evidence used and the methodologies employed to approach this evidence. Chapter 2 examines the social backgrounds of ancient Mediterranean scribes, using documentary archives, apprenticeship contracts, and funerary inscriptions to glimpse into their lives and their training. Chapter 3 draws from papyrological evidence to reconstruct the “curriculum” scribes used to develop professional scripts for copying books and writing documents. Chapter 4 details how scribes mastered scribal tools and techniques, balancing ancient archaeological evidence alongside the specialized artisan knowledge preserved by well-attested scribal traditions. This synthesis of evidence focuses on the lived experiences of the creators of our physical texts, thereby uncovering previously unexplored realities about how these texts were written and read.