Classical Studies

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This is the collection for the University of Waterloo's Department of Classical Studies.

Research outputs are organized by type (eg. Master Thesis, Article, Conference Paper).

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Browsing Classical Studies by Author "Faulkner, Andrew"

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    Gender Interplay in Nonnos' Dionysiaka: The Cases of Deriades and Aura
    (University of Waterloo, 2018-08-22) Apokatanidis, Katerina; Faulkner, Andrew; Vester, Christina; Faber, Riemer
    This thesis presents the relation between the gendered language of Nonnos and the ironic undertones he employs to describe two main plot points in the Dionysiaka. I focus on Dionysos’ battle with Deriades, the Indian king, and Aura, the titan goddess of the breeze. In my first section, I argue that the irony employed to describe the death of Deriades is based on misperceptions of gender identity as he understands the world. Due to his fixity on the masculine extreme of the gender spectrum, Deriades has created a skewed view of the world which led to his demise by the gender-fluid Dionysos. His false perception is reflected in the text when Athena disguises herself as Morrheus, Deriades’ son-in-law, and comes to taunt him for fleeing the battle with Dionysos. Athena is herself a gender-fluid goddess as the masculine virgin goddess of Truth/Wisdom. Her disguise symbolises the loss of true understanding. For my second section, I examine the implications of the total loss of gender identity as experienced by Aura. Her identification as a masculine female skews her perception of the world and results in committing a crime of hubris against Artemis. Her masculinised persona leads her to become the voyeur of Artemis. Artemis herself is a gender-fluid goddess due to her masculine attributes as huntress. But she is mainly the goddess of female sexuality and its potential to produce life. Aura’s crime against Artemis is symbolically a crime against femininity itself. Her punishment for her voyeurism is to be raped by Dionysos and become a mother. Motherhood symbolises the realisation of femininity which Aura despises. Yet her rape is not the only punishment she receives. Indeed, I argue that her punishment also includes becoming the voyeur of herself and then becoming the object of voyeurism for eternity when she is turned into a spring.
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    The Intertextual Dynamics of Colluthus' Abduction of Helen
    (University of Waterloo, 2018-08-22) Harmsworth, Geoffrey; Faulkner, Andrew
    This thesis is devoted to an intertextual study of Colluthus’ late antique epyllion, the Abduction of Helen. Colluthus is a poet whose reputation has long suffered, but is currently under rehabilitation, and the aim of this study is to build on recent scholarship in order to develop a fuller appreciation of Colluthus’ multi-faceted engagement with literary traditions and his allusive technique. Chapters are devoted to linguistic allusion, the intertextuality of genre, and the thematic intertextuality of the abduction narrative. In each chapter, a different approach to allusion and intertextuality reveals a pervasive pattern in Colluthus’ allusive poetics. Colluthus, it will be shown, was a poet who delighted in irony, but it is an irony which is almost always dependent on its relationships to model texts, generic traditions, and thematic motifs. Through the various allusive devices studied here, we find that the poet frequently creates expectations in the learned reader for the directions his narrative will take, only to deny them: he builds a pastoral world through generic parallels, only to leave it behind; he frequently alludes to the motifs and stories of abduction in classical literature, only to frame the “abduction” of Helen as a mutual romantic encounter. Through a systematic, yet necessarily selective study of Colluthus’ allusive poetics, we gain a new understanding of the Abduction of Helen as a poem defined by its ambivalence and undecidability, just like the figure of Helen herself.
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    Xenophon's Hiero
    (University of Waterloo, 2016-04-29) St Thomas, Andrew; Faulkner, Andrew
    This study will be a close textual analysis of Xenophon’s Hiero, contextualized and informed by the author’s other writings and the relevant secondary philological and historical scholarship. In addition to critiquing the dominant understanding of the Hiero in modern secondary scholarship, it will explore the structure and dramatic context of the dialogue, considering how these support or attenuate its major themes. It will consider and compare these major themes with those of Xenophon’s other works, ultimately showing that the Hiero makes a unique intellectual contribution to Xenophon’s theory of human leadership and his understanding of the impact leadership quality has on the happiness of the leader.