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In contrast with previous methodologies which seek ''key ideas'' or functional ''programs, '' this book argues that the unique complexity of Pindar's choral lyric can be better understood by analysis of each text's logical configuration as a network of interacting polarities and analogies. Against the backdrop of pre-Socratic philosophy and later rhetorical radition, the book systematically examines the primary polar relations which are prominent in Pindar's work, illustrating their development and transformation through the course of individual odes. The author concludes that Pindar expands traditional ethical dichotomies into dynamic tensions which play on the semantic fluidity of Greek poetic language in its formative period. This work attempts to apply ''structuralist'' hermeneutics in an appropriate way to the elucidation of an often difficult and obscure archaic poet. Accordingly, it should be of interest not only to the Pindaric specialist, but also to students of literary theory and the history of ideas in antiquity.

Originally presented as the author's thesis (doctoral)--Montana State University, 1980.

The five books of the Silvae bring together the occasional verses which Statius wrote in addition to his two epics. In these short descriptive poems Statius elaborates features taken from various genres into an original whole, in which description and eulogy play important roles. The main themes of the poems of his second book are consolation after bereavement and the contrast between nature and culture. The present work contains a general introduction, a text of Silvae II, a bibliography, and an index, together with a verse-by-verse commentary on the poems of this second book. This is the first commentary on a book of the Silvae since Vollmer's commentary on the whole of the Silvae of 1898. Emphasis is here placed on interpretation and moreover chiefly on the literary and stylistic aspects of the poems, which, compared with the epic poetry of Statius and his contemporaries, have hitherto received relatively little attention.

Although editions of Nemesianus have been surprisingly numerous, very few have contributed appreciably to our understanding of this author, and most texts have been based on a very limited number of manuscripts. There has been no commentary of any length since that of Burman (1731) and there has never before been one in English covering the whole corpus. This book is an attempt to remedy those deficiencies. The text is the first to have been based on an examination of all the known manuscripts, and a detailed and accurate apparatus criticus is provided. The textual history of both poems is thoroughly discussed. The question of the authenticity of the Eclogues is examined and Nemesianus' authorship is held to be proved. The commentary is mainly concerned with textual and grammatical matters. There is also a bibliography.

This is a word-for-word commentary on the first part (vv. 1-382) of Hesiod's Works and Days. Special attention has been paid to peculiarities of grammar and idiom, but also to figures of style and the poet's train of thought. All interpretations - many of them which are new - are documented as fully, but at the same time as concisely, as possible. This documentation, which will prove useful for the interpretation of many other texts, has been made more easily accesible by detailed indexes. Discussion of other views plays a considerable part in the commentary and will help the reader avoid a great number of minor and major misunderstandings.The commentary has been confined to the first part of the poem because this seemed to be more in need of a thorough explanation than the rest. It is also the most interesting part in so far as it forms a kind of manual of social morality. The basis concepts of this doctrine are carefully defined in the commentary, and their historical implications are briefly indicated.

This book contains an introduction to the text of and a commentary on the fragments of two plays by Euripides, the Kresphontes (ca. 424 B.C.) and the Archelaos (ca. 408/7 B.C.)Fragments of both plays are preserved in quotations by other writers and in recently published papyri. The introduction discusses aspects of the background and of the contents of the plays, such as, for example, their first performances, the relation of the Kresphontes with the plays about Orestes, and Euripides' motives in writing the Archelaos (politics or flattery?). The commentary to each play deals with the interpretation of the fragments and testimonia, with textual problems and with typical elements of Euripides' style. This is the first full-scale treatment of both plays and offers, thanks to modern papyrus finds, some new evidence on their composition and context. The text of the papyrus fragments is based on personal inspection of the papyri concerned, which has resulted in a number of new readings.

The crisis Rome experienced in the last decades of the Republic was intellectual as well as political, social and military. This crisis was marked by conflicts over values and a growing dichotomy between words and things, as a result of which the key words of the Roman tradition lost their anchor in the inherited, commonly-held percepetion of reality known as the mos maiorum. The crisis was therefore also one of the Latin language itself. The monograph explores this thesis in discussions of the background and character of Roman intellectual history, the nature of the mos maiorum, the relationship of the Late Republic to the Mediterranean world, the roles of Julius Caesar, Catullus, Cicero, and Lucretius in the crisis, and its Augustan and later consequences. The major portion of the discussion is devoted to Lucretius, because the De Rerum Natura is the clearest example of the extent and nature of the crisis, from which it took its origin and gained its form and purpose. A principal goal of the essay is to relate Lucretius to the structure of Roman literary and intellectual history. It finds the explanation for his work in the nature of that history and the characteristic Roman modes and categories of thought rather than in the general history fo Greek philosophy. It also offers a new explanation of the relationshiop of the authors of the Late Republic to each other. In so doing, it indicates the foundation for a new history of Roman literature and a new conception of the reality and importance of the intellectual history of Rome.

Hephaestion's Encheiridion is the most influential text in the history of metrical scholarship. It has been superseded for some genres of Greek verse but remains basic to the description of others. Its terminology continues to be applied to most of the verse written in Western literary traditions. The present volume offers a translation of th eelliptic Greek text and of a parallel account of metre included in Aristides Quintilianus On Music, with a commentary, an introduction analyzing the approach of ancient metricians in term of their own practical aims, an index of all significant words in the Greek texts, and an English index.The book is designed to be equally accessible to Greekless students of metre and to Greek scholars. It should enable them to take clear stand with regard to the ancient heritage in this field, and to define more unequivocally than has been possible any terms they choose to retain, thereby contributing towards greater coherence and consistency in discussion of poetic metre.

This volume contains word-for-word commentaries on Pindar's Olympian Odes 10 and 11, and on Nemean 11 and Isthmian 2. These are preceded by a large number of notes on Olympian 1, intended to form a supplement to D.E. Gerber's edition (1982).The author has tried to explain peculiarities of grammar and nuances of meaning as fully as possible, but due attention is paid to figures of styleand problems of poetic structure. The interpretations proposed by the author - many of which are new - are accompanied by an adequate documentation, including a critical examination of other views. This documentation has been made more easily accessible by detailed indexes, one of subjects and one of Greek words.The book forms a sequel to volume I, which contains commentaries on Olympians 3, 7, 12, 14. A third volume on Pythians 1, 8, 10 is intended to conclude the series.

The work is limited to the question of knowledge in Euripides' Hippolytus and seeks to show that one of the major themes of the Hippolytus, as of the Oedipus, is knowledge.In successive chapters these subjects are treated: (1) the witness theme, seeing and knowing, what the senses reveal; (2) fantasies of other worlds created by the characters and how these fantasies reavel the character's perceptions of the world; (3) how Euripides causes his characters to become aware of the shifting meanings of words and how it happens that one statement and its opposite can be predicated of the same individual or act; (4) the desire for and fear of knowledge and the choice of ignorance; (5) the use of generalization as a kind of ignorance; (6) the relation of the character's knowledge to that of the audience.The work offers a new perception of the drama through a detailed examination of this important question that was so warmly debated among the early Sophists.

This book deals with some (fragmentary) poems of Alcaeus, Archilochus, Hipponax and Stesichorus. The choice of the poems was determined by external factors: all of them are written on papyrus and were first published during the last few decades. After the first edition the fragments were discussed by many scholars, mainly in periodicals. The authors of this volume have assembled the results of this scholarly work and used it as a foundation for a carefully contituted text and an extensive overall commentary. In this way the poems will be more easily accessible than they were hitherto.

This is the first book-length critical study of the three Virgilian works to be published in English for twenty years. It examines in detail the thematic design and intent of the Eclogues, Georgics and Aeneid, and documents the development of their political, moral and poetic pessimism. It presents the interrelationship of the three texts, their intertextuality, as integral to their meaning. The book is in three main parts - 'Pastoral Meditation', 'Didactic Paradox', 'Epic Vision' - corresponding to the three Virgilian works. A brief introductory chapter is concerned with questions of method and the problem of Virgil misread. A chief focus of the book is Virgil's preoccupation with the relationship between poetry, art - art's values, perceptions, visions - and the political/historical world, and the changing nature of Virgil's attitude to the socio-moral responsibilities of Rome. The evolution of Vergil's presentation both of Roman imperium and of man's place in nature and history is carefully delineated.With close scrutiny of the language, imagery, structures and design of the three texts and of their verbal and thematic interrelationship, the book offers a substantial reassessment of the major political, psychological and moral ideas of Virgil's poetic oeuvre. An intricate and persuasive picture emerges of Virgil's intellectual and poetic development and a radically new conception of Virgil's image of himself as poet. The provision of translations makes the book accessible to the Latinless reader.

This detailed literary and rhetorical analysis of the Homeric Hymn to Apollo treats the poem as a unified work of art in which sophisticated poetic craftsmanship is put to the service of serious ethical thought.By means of parallels from Homer, Hesiod, and other Homeric hymns, as well as from later epideictic poetry and prose, the author seeks to show that the poet of the Hymn follows a coherent ''program'' whose intention is to praise Apollo from his birth on humble Delos to his establishment in a position of glory at Delphi. At the same time, the ''Delian'' and ''Pythian'' portions of the hymn are linked by a complex network of ideas bearing on the ethos of Apollo and the nature of his Delphic oracle.The study takes into account previous scholarship on the Hymn and provides appendices on ''The Question of Unity'' and ''The Cosmological Hierarchy and Apollo's Timai''.

In the absence of the stage directions employed by their modern equivalents, ancient playwrights were obliged to ''encode'' information into their texts that can be described as implicit stage directions. It is the presence of such information that permits modern ''production criticism, '' intended to determine how ancient plays were meant to be staged. Since the early nineteenth century, it has been debated whether Seneca's tragedies were or were not written for stage production. Seneca's dramatic texts contain material that looks precisely like the implicit stage directions found in all other ancient drama, and when his plays are subjected to production criticism, it emerges that they make sound dramaturgic sense. Also, Seneca avails himself of the same artificial and sometimes irrational dramatic conventions used by other ancient playwrights, a fact often ignored by those who argue that Seneca was only writing plays for reading or recitation. The internal evidence of the plays offers much to support, and little to contradict, the idea that his plays were written with the stage in mind.

This book deals with the use of archaistic stylistic elements (i.e., those which revive or imitate features of Greek Archaic art) in free standing statuary dating from the second century B.C. to the third century A.C. The main objective of the study is to determine how the archaistic style was used, what prototypes were imitated, what subjects were represented, how the replicas of statue types were distributed, how these statues were displayed, and what prompted such stylistic anachronism.The introductory chapter deals with general problems of archaism in ancient art and the specific questions pertaining to statuary in the round. The body of material, nearly three hundred pieces in all, is organized by type on the basis of pose and garment arrangement.In a concluding chapter, evidence from the body of the study is collected and possible answers are suggested for the questions outlined above.This study contributes to the currently widespread scholarly interest in stylistic revivals (especially classicism and archaism) which occurred not only in Roman times, but in earlier and later periods as well.

This study shows that the "Ecclesiazusae" is an affirmation of the importance of persuasion in the fourth- century democracy.; Praxagora, the attractive and articulate female protagonist, virtually personifies "peitho," the realm of both political persuasion and erotic seduction. The ability of "peitho" to address both public and private motivations makes it the perfect instrument to resolve the tension in the fourth century between selfishness and civic participation. This is, after all, the central issue in the later episodes of the play.

Originally presented as the author's thesis (doctoral--University of St. Andrews, 1979)