Browsing by Author "Dillon, Sheila"

The purpose of this thesis is to visualize the economic system (supply, production, and transportation) and the logistics of the movement of marble in the Roman Empire in an effort to better understand the larger system of material movement in Imperial Rome. This will be accomplished through a digital case study on the largest surviving bath complex in Rome, the Baths of Caracalla, for which we have evidence of the types of materials used in its construction and speculative observations on the quarries from which this material was procured. In order to effectively demonstrate this system and to accurately locate the Baths of Caracalla within the imperial trade network, a detailed visualization of the marble quarries and the web of transportation routes using ArcGIS Pro mapping software was created. Using ArcGIS Pro as a heuristic tool, this map will show the quarry sites and reconstruct the transportation routes by which marble was moved over long distances for the Baths of Caracalla in Rome. While the digital humanities have used the city of Rome as a site for experimental mapping projects on various subjects, this map on the stone quarries in the Roman Empire in relation to the Baths of Caracalla will be the first digital humanities mapping project of its type.

This dissertation models a new approach to the study of ancient portrait statues—one that situates them in their historical, political, and spatial contexts. By bringing into conversation bodies of evidence that have traditionally been studied in discrete categories, I investigate how statue landscapes articulated and reinforced a complex set of political and social identities, how space was utilized and manipulated on a local and a regional level, and how patrons responded to the spatial pressures and visual politics of statue dedication within a constantly changing landscape.

Instead of treating sites independently, I have found it to be more productive—and, indeed, necessary—to examine broader patterns of statue dedication. I demonstrate that a regional perspective, that is, one that takes into account the role of choice and spatial preference in setting up a statue within a regional network of available display locations, can illuminate how space shaped the ancient practice of portrait dedication. This level of analysis is a new approach to the study of portrait statues and it has proved to be a productive way of thinking about how statues and context were used together to articulate identity. Understanding how individual monuments worked within these broader landscapes of portrait dedications, how statue monuments functioned within federal systems, and how monuments set up by individuals and social groups operated along side those set up by political bodies clarifies the important place of honorific statues as an expression of power and identity within the history of the site, the region, and Hellenistic Greece.

“Globalizing the Sculptural Landscape of Isis and Sarapis Cults in Roman Greece,” asks questions of cross-cultural exchange and viewership of sculptural assemblages set up in sanctuaries to the Egyptian gods. Focusing on cognitive dissonance, cultural imagining, and manipulations of time and space, I theorize ancient globalization as a set of loosely related processes that shifted a community's connections with place. My case studies range from the 3rd century BCE to the 2nd century CE, including sanctuaries at Rhodes, Thessaloniki, Dion, Marathon, Gortyna, and Delos. At these sites, devotees combined mainstream Greco-Roman sculptures, Egyptian imports, and locally produced imitations of Egyptian artifacts. In the last case, local sculptors represented Egyptian subjects with Greco-Roman naturalistic styles, creating an exoticized visual ideal that had both local and global resonance. My dissertation argues that the sculptural assemblages set up in Egyptian sanctuaries allowed each community to construct complex narratives about the nature of the Egyptian gods. Further, these images participated in a form of globalization that motivated local communities to adopt foreign gods and reinterpret them to suit local needs.

I begin my dissertation by examining how Isis and Sarapis were represented in Greece. My first chapter focuses on single statues of Egyptian gods, describing their iconographies and stylistic tendencies through examples from Corinth and Gortyna. By comparing Greek examples with images of Sarapis, Isis, and Harpokrates from around the Mediterranean, I demonstrate that Greek communities relied on globally available visual tropes rather than creating site or region-specific interpretations. In the next section, I examine what other sources viewers drew upon to inform their experiences of Egyptian sculpture. In Chapter 3, I survey the textual evidence for Isiac cult practice in Greece as a way to reconstruct devotees’ expectations of sculptures in sanctuary contexts. At the core of this analysis are Apuleius’ Metamorphoses and Plutarch’s De Iside et Osiride, which offer a Greek perspective on the cult’s theology. These literary works rely on a tradition of aretalogical inscriptions—long hymns produced from roughly the late 4th century B.C.E. into the 4th century C.E. that describe the expansive syncretistic powers of Isis, Sarapis, and Harpokrates. This chapter argues that the textual evidence suggests that devotees may have expected their images to be especially miraculous and likely to intervene on their behalf, particularly when involved in ritual activity inside the sanctuary.

In the final two chapters, I consider sculptural programs and ritual activity in concert with sanctuary architecture. My fourth chapter focuses on sanctuaries where large amounts of sculpture were found in underground water crypts: Thessaloniki and Rhodes. These groups of statues can be connected to a particular sanctuary space, but their precise display contexts are not known. By reading these images together, I argue that local communities used these globally available images to construct new interpretations of these gods, ones that explored the complex intersections of Egyptian, Greek, and Roman identities in a globalized Mediterranean. My final chapter explores the Egyptian sanctuary at Marathon, a site where exceptional preservation allows us to study how viewers would have experienced images in architectural space. Using the Isiac visuality established in Chapter 3, I reconstruct the viewer's experience, arguing that the patron, Herodes Atticus, intended his viewer to inform his experience with the complex theology of Middle Platonism and prevailing elite attitudes about Roman imperialism.

Throughout my dissertation, I diverge from traditional approaches to culture change that center on the concepts of Romanization and identity. In order to access local experiences of globalization, I examine viewership on a micro-scale. I argue that viewers brought their concerns about culture change into dialogue with elements of cult, social status, art, and text to create new interpretations of Roman sculpture sensitive to the challenges of a highly connected Mediterranean world. In turn, these transcultural perspectives motivated Isiac devotees to create assemblages that combined elements from multiple cultures. These expansive attitudes also inspired Isiac devotees to commission exoticized images that brought together disparate cultures and styles in an eclectic manner that mirrored the haphazard way that travel brought change to the Mediterranean world. My dissertation thus offers a more theoretically rigorous way of modeling culture change in antiquity that recognizes local communities’ agency in producing their cultural landscapes, reconciling some of the problems of scale that have plagued earlier approaches to provincial Roman art.

These case studies demonstrate that cultural anxieties played a key role in how viewers experienced artistic imagery in the Hellenistic and Roman Mediterranean. This dissertation thus offers a new component in our understanding of ancient visuality, and, in turn, a better way to analyze how local communities dealt with the rise of connectivity and globalization.

My dissertation, “Mapping Immigrant Communities through Their Tombstones in Classical Athens,” seeks to rescue the history of these foreigner residents by studying how they represented themselves on grave markers and how they integrated themselves into the city and its cemeteries. By analyzing the findspots of tombstones of foreign residents, I reconstruct where in the city and alongside whom foreigners were buried.

My dissertation has two main objectives. The first is to show that foreigners were among the few individuals in the mid-5th century whose burials were marked by permanent tombstones. Second, I argue that immigrant communities buried their dead in groups, with immigrants coming from the same place burying together. Moreover, people from different regions of the Aegean tended to bury in different cemeteries in Athens. Though egalitarian on its face, the Athenian democracy was still extremely exclusive, and immigrant communities residing in Athens responded by preserving traditions and promoting their citizenship in other poleis within cemeteries.

This dissertation presents a study of the Aphrodite Anadyomene type in its cultural and physical contexts. Like many other naked Aphrodites, the Anadyomene was not posed to conceal the body, but with arms raised, naked and unashamed, exposing the goddess' body to the gaze. Depictions of the Aphrodite Anadyomene present the female body as an object to be desired. The Anadyomene offers none of the complicated games of peek-a-boo which pudica Venuses play by shielding their bodies from view. Instead, the goddess offers her body to the viewer's gaze and there is no doubt that we, as viewers, are meant to look, and that our looking should produce desire. As a type, the Anadyomene glorifies the process of the feminine toilette and adornment and as the goddess stands, naked and unashamed, she presents an achievable ideal for the female viewer.

The roots of the iconography of the Anaydyomene can be found in archaic Greek texts such as Hesiod's Theogony and Homeric Hymn from the eighth century B.C.E, as well as in paintings of women bathing on red figure vases from the fifth century B.C.E. The Anadyomene type provides a helpful case study to consider the ways that representations of Aphrodite were utilized. Consulting archaeological reports and detailed studies of display contexts make it possible to reconstruct and imagine the original settings for these kinds of works. The known findspots for representations of the Anadyomene can be grouped into four contexts: Graves, Sanctuaries, Baths and Fountains, and Houses. Small objects might have been seen, handled, and used daily that carried connotations and meanings which these ancient viewers would have brought to other more elite or public works.

My dissertation “The Afterlives of Archaic Greek Kouroi: An Archaeology of a Greek Sculptural Type” examines the reuses of several kouros fragments after the discard of their initial setting. The focus is centered on their uses at their find spots. I present the reuses chronologically and by type of reuse and find spot. Also, I discuss the find spot context of four fragments found reused in walls on Despotiko and several others found built into walls or deposited in terraces.My thesis has three main objectives. First, I try to classify the reuses of the fragments. This task currently remains a gap in the scholarship. Second, I intend to enrich and broaden the discussion on kouroi beyond their initial display context and their creation phase. Third, I highlight the importance of archaeological context for such study. I argue that the reuse of the four fragments from Despotiko at doors is a structured, deliberate, and conscious event which attributes meaning to the fragments that extends beyond their practical function. Beyond Despotiko, I show that all reuses have a meaningful setting through analysis of other reused fragments at other sites. However, the type and quality of the human engagement in each case varies.

This dissertation focuses on the artistic, archaeological, and literary representation and commemoration of the Classical Athenian navy. While the project stresses the various and often contradictory ways in which the Athenians perceived and represented their navy, its larger purpose is to argue that the integration of multiple and various media has the potential to change long-standing interpretations of ancient societies and cultures. Relying on the literary evidence of the "Old-Oligarch" and Plato, scholars have traditionally held that the 5th-century Athenian navy and its rowers were viewed by their contemporaries as a "mob" and a locus for citizen "riff-raff." Yet careful consideration of the vases, monuments, and buildings of 5th-century Athens, as well as the literary output of the period, demonstrate that the navy held a far more complex, and at times even positive, position in Athenian society.