Athens and Hellenistic literature

Thesis

This thesis examines the ways Athens is interpreted and depicted in literature in the context of the geo-political and cultural changes in the Greek world in the Hellenistic period. Scholarship has successfully established the new orthodoxy that the polis did not die after the Macedonian conquests, but it did multiply, converge, and exist side-by-side with several new kingdoms. In Greek culture this manifested itself in a broad spread of cultural centres: Greek drama was performed across a greater area than ever before, rhetoric thrived in Asia Minor, and the Hellenistic monarchs encouraged scholarship and literary production at their courts in Alexandria, Pergamum, and Antioch. How did writers engage with the city of Athens in this cosmopolitan context? The way the city’s space, history, and literary legacy were subsequently constructed in the Hellenistic period, in the light of the city’s importance in the fifth and fourth centuries as a political actor and cultural hub, can contribute to our understanding of Hellenistic Greek relationships with the cultural past and present.

While literary reception of the Athenian past has received scholarly attention for the ‘Second Sophistic’ and the fourth century BC, the Hellenistic period remains largely unexplored. The Hellenistic period was a crucial transitional period for the transmission of ideas about Athens. In many cases the Classical period was itself constructed by Hellenistic authors grappling with the idea of Athens. How and why are the questions addressed by this thesis. The thesis makes three key arguments. First, in the realms of space and myth, classicisation and idealisation dominate, but there are hints at the instability of these constructions and the ‘dumbing down’ of Athenian greatness. Second, texts and art from the period reveal the ways in which Athenian history acted as shared cultural memory and an arena for dealing with contemporary political concerns, though the ‘Athenianness’ of the past fluctuated. Third, the thesis argues that Athenian literature was consumed at multiple levels of society and interacted with conceptions of Athenian historical identity to perpetuate and reshape ideas about the city as a political and legal model and as a magnet for literary history. The thesis therefore examines Hellenistic Greek negotiations of cultural capital and relationships with the ‘canonical’ past.

Authors: Pagoni, A

• DOI: 10.5287/ora-mpkzkgqry
• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English