Abstract

This dissertation offers analyses of several characters, broadly classified as intellectual poets, in the dramas of Euripides and Aristophanes, through a study of contemporary philosophical speculation concerning cultural performance, particularly by the sophist Protagoras. It argues that, in a belief system wherein a circumscribed community possesses the privilege to define truth, intellectuals, insofar as they as individuals desire to usurp the community's truth-defining privilege, must negotiate the "intellectual's paradox." That is, intellectuals must perform identities that will persuade a community to identify them as intellectuals and thus as reliable creators of truth. ;The first part of the study offers a reading of Protagorean speculation concerning humanity as the criterion of truth and the relation of his "human-measure" doctrine to the community's claim to define identities. Protagoras is best understood, I argue, not as a relativist; rather, he propounds a theory of truth that resembles modern coherence theories. With this speculation regarding the "intersubjective" creation of truth he associates a theory of identity that foregrounds the individual's position within intersubjectively defined ethical fields. The latter portion of the dissertation considers Euripides' Medea and Helen and Aristophanes' Acharnians and Thesmophoriazusae. Characters in these plays must negotiate the intellectual's paradox in order to create new truths and fulfill their diverse goals. Euripides in Acharnians and Agathon in Thesmophoriazusae aim to create fictional characters for their tragedies by performing their identities by and for themselves, while Medea performs identities before every other character in the tragedy, only to discover the impossibility of creating the ethically best identity for herself. Both openly display their intellectualism. In contrast, Helen in Helen and Euripides and his Relative in Thesmophoriazusae aim to deceive their internal audiences by concealing their intellectual abilities while they metafictionally perform their intellectualism for the external audience. Helen succeeds and escapes; Euripides and his Relative fail in the face of the truth-defining community of the Thesmophoria women. In their dramas, Euripides and Aristophanes draw on the recognized cultural paradox that confronts itinerant intellectuals, such as Protagoras himself, in order to explore and exploit contemporary debates regarding ethical identity and mimetic creativity