SCRIBENTIS IMAGINES

I am deeply grateful to my ever patient, critical and constructive supervisor Professor Stephen J. Harrison. Along with my helpful co-supervisor Professor Tomas Hägg, he has steadily guided me in the right direction, from which I would otherwise surely have gone astray. Along the way, many others have kindly helped me and generously shared their immense knowledge with me. My thanks are due to the University of Bergen for granting me a doctoral scholarship from 2003 to 2006, as well as providing a friendly, lively and stimulating intellectual environment. I have benefited greatly from all the seminars and scholarly discussions I have had with my colleagues in Bergen. Also stimulating was the milieu at the Faculty of Classics, University of Cambridge, where I was allowed to spend the spring of 2003 as a visiting PhD-student. Professor Michael D. Reeve kindly took interest in my project and helped me immeasurably both during and after my stay in Cambridge. In England I furthermore had the pleasure of making the acquaintance of Professor Gianpiero Rosati who, in addition to sharing his learned views on my subject, kindly read and comment upon parts of the thesis. Thanks to further funding from the University of Bergen and the assistance of Professor Safinaz A. Naguib and Kirstin Kjelstad at the Centre de la coopération franco-norvégienne en sciences sociales et humaines, I was able to spend the spring of 2005 in Paris. I benefited greatly from the eye-opening tutorials of Professor Jesper Svenbro who made it possible for me to work at the Centre Glotz Gernet at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique. At Paris IV Sorbonne Professor Jacqueline Dangel welcomed me at her lectures and provided me generously with several copies of her recent work on the Epistula Sapphus. The funding of the Italian Ministero degli Affari Esteri through the Research Council of Norway’s international scholarship, as well as the generous assistance o