Master of Arts, The Ohio State University, 1969, Graduate School

Committee: Not Provided (Other) Subjects:

MA, Kent State University, 2019, College of Arts and Sciences / Department of Modern and Classical Language Studies

By examining feminine speech within the corpus of love elegies composed throughout the Augustan period, especially those written by Tibullus, Sulpicia, Propertius, and Ovid, one can determine various stylistic uses of female characters within the entire corpus. In addition to this, while his writings were penned a generation before the others, the works of Catullus will be examined as well, due to the influence his works had on the Augustan Elegists. This examination will begin identifying and detailing every instance of speech within the elegies from a female source, and exploring when, how, and why they are used. The majority of the elegies in which these instances occur are briefer, more veristic in nature, although longer, more polished examples exist as well; both types are examined. Except for Sulpicia, these poets are male and present the majority of their elegies from a masculine point of view; this influence is also examined.

Committee: Jennifer Larson Dr. (Advisor); Brian Harvey Dr. (Committee Member); Sarah Harvey Dr. (Committee Member) Subjects: Classical Studies; Gender Studies; Language

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 1987, Graduate School

Committee: Not Provided (Other) Subjects: Literature

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 1971, Graduate School

Committee: Not Provided (Other) Subjects: Literature

PhD, University of Cincinnati, 2009, Arts and Sciences : Classics

Propertius tells us that the eyes are our guides in love. Both he and Ovid enjoin lovers to keep silent about their love affairs. I explore the ability of poetry to make our ears and our eyes guides, and, more importantly, to connect seeing and saying, videre and narrare. The ability of words to spur a reader or listener to form mental images was long recognized by Roman and Greek rhetoricians. This project takes stock for the first time of how poets, three Roman love poets, in this case, applied vivid description and other rhetorical devices to spur their readers to form mental images of the love they read. All three poets reflect on the role played by a reader's mental imaging in poetry in general and love poetry in particular. In my discussion of Catullus, I examine how the poet uses his control of the reader's perspective to include or exclude him from his love affair, and to show that his love for Lesbia was something unique and worth concealing from the visual scrutiny of the outside world. The chapter on Propertius reevaluates what exactly constitutes the temperament visuel that scholars have so often attributed to the poet. In my discussion of Ovid I examine three different ends to which he employs the language of vision and his reader's mental imaging in the Amores, Ars Amatoria, and Metamorphoses. In the Metamorphoses Ovid makes explicit what Catullus and Propertius had implied about the power of words: their power to create images in the reader's mind allows the reader to become a viewer, to peep into the private world of another through the window of the text. As I show throughout the dissertation, all three poets hold that telling (narrare), the purview of the poet, trumps seeing (videre), the realm of the visual artist.

Committee: Kathryn Gutzwiller PhD (Committee Chair); Holt Parker PhD (Committee Member); Susan Prince PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Classical Studies

PhD, University of Cincinnati, 2007, Arts and Sciences : Classics

This dissertation, Poetic Voices and Hellenistic Antecedents in the Elegies of Propertius, explores some of the techniques with which Propertius crafts a unique poetic voice for his own persona, as well as the poetic voices of other characters in the elegies (chiefly in the Monobiblos and in Book 4). I argue that these techniques are themselves Propertius' own modification and adaptation of techniques he found employed by the Hellenistic poets, on whom he so heavily drew. I demonstrate that, in order to construct arguments which will characterize his own poetic persona, Propertius sometimes draws upon actual epigram sequences in Meleager's Garland, so that the work of the editor's careful arrangement is manipulated and adapted to the needs of the Propertian speaker. I show how he draws upon diverse genres of Hellenistic poetry, such as curse poetry, erotodidactic poetry, catalogue poetry, and the komos, in order to generate and modulate the tone of his poetic voice throughout a given elegy. And I argue that certain Hellenistic poems serve as analogical models (rather than allusive ones) for the poetic technique of appropriating other voices than that of the poet-speaker's persona, thereby blurring the boundaries between different speakers and voices and generating more complex and subtle meaning. After examining each of these techniques individually, I demonstrate how they work together, taking as my example the opening elegy of Propertius' fourth book of elegies. Through a comparison of this elegy with the first and thirteenth Iambi of Callimachus, I argue that a detailed understanding of Propertius' method of adaptation and manipulation of these poetic techniques from his antecedent has great heuristic value for reassessing the difficulties of this most controversial poem, and Book 4 as a whole.

Committee: Dr. Kathryn Gutzwiller (Advisor) Subjects: