The present dissertation examines the widespread presence of tropes of tragic recognition in Roman epic poetry from an interdisciplinary perspective. I argue that Roman epic poets draw at once on tragedy and ancient philosophy to address the cognitive instability generated by civil war, an event which recurrently marks the history of Rome since its foundation. When civil conflicts arise, the shifting categories of friend and enemy, kin and stranger, victor and vanquished, generate a constant renegotiation of individual identities and interpersonal relationships. It is in light of these destabilizing changes that I interpret the Roman epic trend of pairing civil war narratives with instances of tragic recognition. Far from working exclusively as a plot device or as a marker of the interaction between the genres of epic and tragedy, tropes of tragic recognition in Roman epic are conducive to exploring the epistemological and ethical dilemmas posed by civil war. While civil strife permeates the fabric of all the epic poems considered in my study, each author magnifies the interplay between recognition and civil war in relation to specific categories: friends and foes in Lucan’s Pharsalia, hosts and guests in Valerius Flaccus’ Argonautica, kinsmen and strangers in Statius’ Thebaid, and the human and the non-human in Ovid’s Metamorphoses.

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Evidence-based management has been proposed as a method to impose rationality on decision-making, and thereby link research more closely with practice. Yet, knowledge, not evidence per se, is the means by which organizations map the uncertainty of their environments and develop strategies accordingly. This essay develops a theoretical argument to support the construct of knowledge variety, and argues that knowledge variety is a preferable operationalization of evidence-based management for organizations facing the epistemic uncertainty of complex environments. The first section sets a foundation drawing upon diversity in socio-behavioral regulation, requisite variety, the social structure of knowledge, epistemic knowledge categories, rhetorical persuasion, sensemaking, and organizational attention. The second section describes a mixed-methods project to examine evidence-based management in terms of knowledge variety across 42 hospitals associated with a common knowledge intermediary. An original proposition intending to establish a relationship between the maintenance of variety and an organization's ability to customize diffusing best practices was unable to confirm or disconfirm a relationship. Nevertheless, a series of qualitative and quantitative findings on evidence-based management and best practices are presented, including a relationship between knowledge variety and the number of years since last academic degree, suggesting the importance of revisiting the Aristotelian notion of practical wisdom (or, phronesis). Reflections, limitations, and suggestions for future research are described throughout.

This dissertation examines letters as a site for the maintenance of long-distance friendship through four case studies of letter-writers spanning both poetry and prose as well as classical Latin through late antiquity: Cicero, Ovid, Fronto, and Paulinus. My first chapter argues that in letters, geographical distance can function as a cipher for other forms of distance and difference, allowing correspondents to both paper over and deemphasize inequalities of age, status, wealth, religion, commitment to the friendship, and more. Ausonius and Paulinus, for example, use the physical space between Paulinus’s family estates in Spain and Ausonius’s home in Bordeaux to talk around power differentials (Ausonius is forty years older and taught Paulinus when he was a young boy) and, perhaps most significantly, the growing chasm between their religious beliefs as Paulinus becomes more devoutly Christian. My second chapter observes that while intimacy in letters is often expressed through anticipation of physical reunion, in many cases the letter is more a site of nostalgia than of anticipation. Long-distance friends may or may not look forward to an upcoming reunion, but they frequently mythologize and look back on an idealized version of their past in-person friendship. The letter, I argue, allows fantasy to substitute for actual co-presence. Finally, my third chapter examines how the asynchronicity of letters shapes the kinds of intimacy they can foster. Ovid laments that it can take a full year for him to receive a letter in Tomis from Rome, so when he learns that Gallio’s wife has died, the asynchronicity of the letter fundamentally changes the kind of friend he can be. Such a belated consolation, he frets, could simply resurface old wounds—or Gallio could have remarried, dooming Ovid to offend the new couple by sending condolences instead of congratulations. Even in cases where the gap between written and lived time is only a matter of weeks or days, this untimeliness can create a sense of freedom that leads to greater candor, but it can also allow correspondents to avoid or ignore one another more effectively than they could in person. Once again, then, the letter becomes a way of talking about and around other forms of distance; temporal distance can exacerbate other gaps that exist between correspondents.

My dissertation examines a series of dialogues that the Roman politician and philosopher, Marcus Tullius Cicero, wrote in the single year between the death of his daughter in February 45 BCE and the assassination of Julius Caesar in March 44 BCE. I argue that as a corpus these texts explore how human experience affects the perception and conceptualization of time. Each chapter addresses a category of experience—solitude, doubt, grief, and failure—with which Cicero grapples in his dialogues. Rather than simply reflecting back the troubled circumstances of its composition, however, Cicero’s philosophy interrogates these experiences to produce distinctive ways of understanding how time creates, shapes, and limits human being. Solitude articulates and punctuates the durative structures of human time. Doubt serves as the drive of inquiry, which must confront the uncertainty of linear progression in time. Grief reveals the rupture between a subjective sense of time and the chronology of nature. Finally, failure demonstrates how the present is tied to heterogenous and indeterminate futures. Through these categories, I identify in Ciceronian philosophy an ethics of the “time of life” (aetas) that is a development of, yet distinct from the Hellenistic philosophical “art of the lifetime” (disciplina vitae). Building on recent work on Cicero’s place in the history of thought and his skeptical methodology, I seek to draw connections not only between Cicero and his Hellenistic predecessors, but also with later thinkers from Ralph Waldo Emerson to Gaston Bachelard and Emmanuel Levinas. Through this approach, I participate in an ongoing reappraisal of the Ciceronian texts of the year 45-44 and seek to locate them within the longue dur�e of critical thought on time and human nature.