Interpretatio Hiberniana: Classical Influences in Medieval Irish Depictions of Otherworldly Characters Brigid Kathleen Ehrmantraut This thesis examines the reception of Classical mythology in Ireland, primarily between the tenth and thirteenth centuries, and analyzes the influence of Classical literature upon medieval Irish depictions of Otherworldly beings and pre-Christian settings. The core texts I discuss are a corpus of vernacular Irish adaptations and loose translations of Latin epic and Classical mythological narratives produced in Ireland during this period. I situate these Classical adaptation texts within a broader intellectual milieu and argue for points of contact between them and other medieval Irish vernacular narratives. Roman attempts to translate the gods and mythological narratives of other cultures into their own familiar equivalents are known as interpretatio Romana. This thesis questions whether a sort of literary interpretatio Hiberniana took place in medieval Ireland, whereby Classical mythological figures were equated with or inspired Irish Otherworldly beings.

The first half of this thesis investigates instances of interpretatio and intertextuality, while the second half turns to larger questions of world history writing and typology in medieval Ireland. Chapter 1 delineates the Irish and European intellectual milieux in which Classical reception and interpretatio occurred. Chapter 2 examines the names of the Classical gods in early Irish glosses and later glossaries as a learned background for subsequent Classical reception. It then addresses the development of a system of divine epithets for the Olympian gods across the Classical adaptations and particularly within Togail na Tebe. Chapter 3 reviews the extant scholarship on battle spirits, which represents the area of medieval Irish Classical reception which has been best studied to date. I frame my own contributions to the discussion by providing a lexical analysis of the word ammait, a term applied to both the necromancer Erichtho in In Cath Catharda (the Irish version of Lucan’s Bellum Civile) and the Furies in Togail na Tebe (the Irish version of Statius’s Thebaid), as well as a host of Otherworldly female characters in other works of Irish literature. Chapter 4 surveys the appearances of gods and supernatural figures in the Classical adaptation texts. It identifies similarities and differences in portrayals of these characters with reference to source texts, and elucidates attitudes towards paganism within each vernacular adaptation text. Chapter 5 is a case study of a single text: In Cath Catharda. I argue for a nuanced reading of In Cath Catharda grounded in medieval ideas of salvation history and eschatological thought. Chapter 6 explores Classical parallels to and influences on Irish vernacular texts that are not adaptations of Latin epic or Greco-Roman mythological narratives. I focus on the motif of magical thirst inflicted in battle scenes in Statius, Togail na Tebe, and medieval Irish literature. Chapter 7 analyzes Classical influence on medieval Irish depictions of druids. The first section catalogues claims about druids from works of Classical ethnography which were potentially available to the medieval Irish, concluding that there is minimal evidence for direct influence from Classical ethnographic texts on medieval Irish portrayals of druids. The second half of the chapter looks at the single exception to this: the adaptation and amelioration of Lucan’s druids in In Cath Catharda. I conclude that in medieval Ireland, literary interpretatio cannot be separated from translatio studii (the transfer of knowledge from the Classical world to medieval cultures), or from medieval uses of biblical typology to interpret Christian salvation history.