The Talking Dead: Characterization through Deceased Speakers in Hellenistic Funerary Epigrams

This thesis focuses on select Hellenistic funerary epigrams from Book 7 of The Greek Anthology that feature the deceased as a first-person speaker. Focusing on voice and characterization, I approach these text through both intellectual and embodied models of reader-response, and argue that deceased’s voices employ diverse strategies to evoke multifaceted responses from the readers and present particularly individualized and affective self-characterization.