Browsing by Subject "Ancient languages"

This dissertation reexamines the origins, intent, and perceived historical value of the fourth-century series of Latin imperial biographies known as the Historia Augusta. Over the course of the twentieth century, the text was interpreted as a historical “forgery” created by a “rogue scholar” who took pleasure in deceiving most, if not all, of his audience into accepting at face value the text’s false attribution to six fictitious biographers, its spurious imperial dedications, and its reliance on fabricated sources. In the last decade, studies have instead begun to suggest that many of the “fraudulent” elements of the Historia Augusta were not intended to deceive but rather entertain knowledgeable readers by interpolating elements from the ancient novel into a biographical text.

Drawing upon recent reinterpretations of the author, audience, and literary milieu of the Historia Augusta, this study reconsiders the purposes of the invented attributions, dedications, and fabricated sources within the collection. Many recent studies have concluded that the inventions of the Historia Augusta can only obscure or detract from any historical purpose and that the primary intended function of the Historia Augusta was entertainment. In contrast, through reassessment of the work’s composition and the forms and frequency of the inventions across the collection, this study demonstrates that the author uses his inventions to forge thematic and structural links across the thirty biographies and to encourage deeper reflection on his biographical subjects, the limitations of authentic history, and his contemporary political context.

Chapter One reviews recent scholarship that suggests the Historia Augusta’s readers would have been primed by their familiarity with the ancient novel and other fictive works to recognize the collection’s inventions as parodic imitations of novelistic conventions. By examining the role of social networks in the revision and circulation of texts, the chapter builds on recent findings to suggest that the need for friends in the circulation process would have impeded the ability of the Historia Augusta’s author to disseminate his work anonymously and thus suggests that the work was intended for a knowledgeable audience.

Chapter Two reexamines fundamental questions about the composition and aims of the work. Through analysis of the evidence for accretion and false-ends within the Historia Augusta, this study argues that the collection came to fruition only after several stages of revision, a position rejected by others due to the lives repetitiveness and perceived stylistic infelicities. In particular, it demonstrates that the work’s invented attributions and the imperial dedications were not an original design component of the collection at the outset of the composition, but were retroactively added at an intermediate stage of the composition when the author was making broad-scale revisions and alterations to roughly half of the lives.

Through a series of close readings and careful analysis of the text’s political and intellectual context, Chapters Three through Five suggest that the inventions were gradually devised and added to the lives as the author became increasingly engaged with contemporary texts and more self-reflective on the notion of historical evidence and research. Chapter Three demonstrates that the biographer attributions and personae evolved from puns that signaled the virtues of the emperors into central figures in the author’s self-reflective commentary on his own scholarly community. Chapter Four argues the imperial invocations were deliberately added not only to establish a comparison between the legacies of Diocletian and Constantine but also to shore up thematic elements concerning the Antonine dynasty and imperial succession that had subsequently become prominent in the composition. Chapter Five illustrates that the fabricated documents in the lives of the usurpers systematically undermine negative accounts of imperial challengers found in other contemporary sources and encourage more positive interpretations of usurpers’ merits and motivations.

By demonstrating the ways that the author uses the attributions, dedications, and fictitious documents to engage with the cultural and political transformations affecting his scholarly community, this study concludes that more credence should be given to the author’s proposition that he intended his work to serve as a historical source for historians to come (Car. 21.2-3). So too, by challenging the rigid delineations between fact and fiction, truth and fraudulence in the Historia Augusta, this project aims to create new avenues for further research not only on the Historia Augusta but also on the ways that creative impersonation and fabrication could be harnessed for historical purposes in other ancient texts.

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 challenges the notion of pastoral as a rural utopia by exposing the violence and danger innate to the bucolic world. The classical tradition has historically understood the pastoral world as an idyllic paradise standing in opposition to the dangerous city, which it casts as Other. By combining approaches drawn from narratology and intertextuality with a lens of critical classical reception, I demonstrate the inaccuracy of this dichotomy. In doing so, I argue instead for a re-conception of the ancient pastoral landscape as a dark and dangerous setting that exists on a continuum with the urban environment. This dissertation critically reevaluates traditional scholarly conceptions in ancient literature by prioritizing non-canonical texts.After an introduction, the second chapter argues that sexual and intimate partner violence are integral parts of the pastoral world that scholars have willingly overlooked for centuries. I explore physical, sexual, and emotional abuse in pseudo-Theocritus, Calpurnius Siculus, and Nemesianus to show that the relative safety of the locus amoenus in Vergil’s Eclogues is the exception, not the rule. The third chapter confronts one of the signature structural elements of pastoral poetry, the song contest. It dissects the elements that make up an amoebean exchange to argue that these contests that purport to showcase only poetic competition are in fact infused with verbal abuse and physical agonism as well. The chapter includes a close reading of Calpurnius’s sixth eclogue, which fails to launch the expected contest at all due to an exaggerated profusion of insults that literalizes the metaphor of words as weapons—with violent consequences. Thus, violation and violence are woven into the very structure of the pastoral song exchange.

The fourth chapter explores the relationship between danger and didaxis in pastoral. By looking at Calpurnius 5 alongside Georgics 3, I argue that Calpurnius uses descriptions of danger as narratological tools to justify transitions to the didactic mode. Ultimately, however, I conclude that the dangers of the rural landscape are too numerous and ingrained for even the most thorough precautions to fully protect against them. Thus, by the fifth and final chapter, I maintain that danger is an innate and integral part of the pastoral sphere, just as it is presented in the urban sphere. I argue that the common binary constructed between city and country in literature is a false one. Just as characters travel between the two settings, sometimes in the course of a single poem, so do the dangers native to one place migrate back and forth between them. By looking at one of Theocritus’s urban mimes alongside his bucolics and Calpurnius’s seventh eclogue, I reframe the traditional conception of the pastoral sphere as a safe haven. Instead, it is a dystopia with danger, violence, and strife at its very core.