Totalising Rhetoric in Late Antique Greek Poetry

The question at the core of my thesis is how to holistically make sense of the colossal corpus defined by classical scholars as ‘Late Antique Greek poetry’. The phrase refers to the work of (primarily Christian) poets from the Greek-speaking Eastern Roman/Byzantine Empire roughly between 4th-7th c. AD, at the critical juncture between the Classical Era and the Middle Ages. This poetic corpus – which has long lived at the edges of the (traditionally more ‘classical’) discipline of Classics – has recently become the subject of great interest in classical scholarship. Yet it is peppered with puzzles and questions, so far partially answered by studies of style, intertextuality, Homeric reception, the ‘Nonnian’ school, anti-Julian ‘literary’ reactions, et alia. What do Late Antique Greek poems (primarily epic) have in common? Through what terminology, patterns, categories can we describe the field as a whole? Why do Christian authors write poetry? Why do they agree to write poetry by paradoxically using the poetic forms and language traditionally used by antiquity’s earlier ‘pagan’ authors? This thesis tries to answer these questions by reading the whole corpus through the lens of ‘totalising rhetoric’. Poems or specific poetic passages ‘totalise’ when they seek (more or less directly) to represent the world (i.e., the Earth, Universe, Nature, or ‘existence’) in its totality, whether on the temporal (e.g., historical), spatial (e.g., geographical, astronomical), or conceptual (e.g., a description of the world as the stage of the fight between Good and Evil) axis. I argue that Late Antique Greek poets frequently write rhetorically totalising poems or poetic passages to subordinate the ‘world’ to dominant ideologies, particularly imperial (i.e., the Eastern Roman/Byzantine Empire’s) and Christian. The key difference from earlier poetic totalising rhetoric (and therefore what defines the Late Antique corpus) is this vertical plane (symbolically leading to God or the Byzantine Emperor) along which everything in the world is supposed to be ‘interconnected’ (a notion rooted in Neoplatonic philosophy). The choice of writing through the ‘pagan’ poetic form par excellence, the (hexametric) epic genre, is motivated by its capacity to express important ideological statements and, crucially, an all- embracing, totalising content.

Name dc:type.qualificationname

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Level dc:type.qualificationlevel

Doctoral

Grantor dc:publisher.institution

University of Cambridge

Year dc:date.issued

2023

Author dc:creator

• Praticò, Domenico

Advisors dc:contributor.advisor

• Whitmarsh, Timothy
• Hunter, Richard

• Imperial Greek Poetry
• Late Antique Literature
• Totalisation

Licence

• https://apollo8-f-pro.lib.cam.ac.uk/bitstreams/021e18b0-c923-4aea-8540-7a2beb9dcc96/download
• https://www.rioxx.net/licenses/all-rights-reserved/

Language dc:language

eng

DOI dc:identifier.doi

https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.108644

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.repository.cam.ac.uk:1810/368452