Browsing by Department "Classical Studies"

This thesis seeks to analyze the longest story in Ovid's Metamorphoses, tale of Alcyone and Ceyx. Despite its length, its placement within the entire work, and the presence of the work's eponymous hero, Morpheus, the Alcyone's and Ceyx' story has no major commentary in English and has earned little attention from most scholars. What has been written on it often scants the darker details of the episode, persuaded that Ovid has here sketched a portrait of an ideal, happy marriage, albeit one crossed by circumstances. In order to counterbalance this overly optimistic reading, this commentary carefully analyzes the language, motifs, and intertextual references that thread through Ovid's version of the Ceyx and Alcyone story. Particular attention has been paid to: the ambiguities in Ovid's narrative of Alcyone's attitude towards parting from her husband; the story's portrait of the gods, including Alcyone's own father, Aeolus; allusions to the earlier epic tradition (Iliad, Odyssey, and Aeneid) in the Tempest scene; and the ecphrasis of the House of Sleep, including the character of Morpheus. This analysis will show that the tale of Alcyone and Ceyx is not a simple encomium to marital fidelity, but a picture of conjugal love darker than most Ovidian scholars have suspected.

This dissertation examines the adaptability of civic cults during the Hellenistic period. Faced with shifting populations, increasing social tensions, economic changes, and political pressures, Hellenistic communities devised a number of strategies aimed at negotiating the tension between maintenance of traditional religious practices and adaptive, context-specific change. Through the lens of inscribed Greek sacred laws we see communities balancing the twin requirements of innovation and tradition. The epigraphic record shows significant changes to the choreography of religious experience in response to demographic change; experimentation in funding mechanisms, in what appear to be responses to economic and cultural changes; ambitious attempts to redefine the configuration of sacred space both inside the city and out; savvy rhetorical and ritual framing of innovation in the face of cults that had had failed or else were on the brink of doing so.

Through a series of case studies I elucidate the legislative strategies with which communities dealt with these challenges. In chapter 1, I investigate legal strategies aimed at maintaining traditional oracular procedures as more visitors were coming to iatromantic shrines. I focus on the shrine of Apollo Coropeius in Thessaly where the civic authority at Demetrias passed a law reevaluating the administrative and ritual procedures for consultation. In chapter 2, I analyze the changing obligations of sacred personnel to perform rites in the city at large, i.e. before festivals, in the face of shifting socioeconomic norms. Communities frequently experimented with alternative mechanisms to fund religious activities. A sacred law from Halicarnassus forms the backbone of this analysis. I argue that cultural pressures may have helped shape these mechanisms. Chapter 3 concerns legislative strategies for the reconfiguration of sacred space, particularly the moving or refactoring of sanctuaries. Here I analyze a third-century decree from Tanagra that regulates the transfer of a sanctuary of Demeter and Kore. Other laws, particularly from Anaphe and Peparethus, provide crucial details for the rearrangement of important cult structures. In these cases, we see the concerted efforts to provide for private and public and sacred and secular interests in order to ensure the perpetuation of traditional religious practices. The fourth chapter investigates the reinvention of cult caused by political and ideological interests. Communities employed rhetorical strategies to justify or mask the reinvention or renewal of traditional rites that had lapsed or were on the brink of doing so. I focus on two case studies that illustrate the complexities of legislating ritual reinvention. A second-century Athenian law details the rites for the revived Thargelia whereas a decree from Magnesia-on-the-Maeander details the expansion of the cult of Artemis Leukophryene with a new festival commemorating the goddess' new temple. In both cases, we can see rhetorical strategies of augmentation and renewal reflected in the writings of Anaximines of Lampsacus. The concluding chapter provides a view of the other side of the coin: what happens when communities fail to adapt to the challenges that threatened their cults? Polybius, Pausanias, and Plutarch shed much light on our most pressing questions. For instance, what did failed cults look like? How did Greeks envisage dilapidated sanctuaries and defunct cults? Overall, the case studies based on sacred laws present a Greek view of religious change that finds strength in change, continuity in adaptation, commonality in variation, stability in the shifting sands of historical change. The portrait of Greek religion that emerges from this study is one in which tradition and innovation form two sides of the same coin, rather than opposing forces

Thousands of public records survive from democratic Athens. Nearly all of them are inscribed on stone (or more rarely metal). A century and more of study has revealed that these inscriptions were the tip of the iceberg. Beyond them was an apparatus of public records, kept on perishable media, that were central to the administration of the city. Call it the paperwork of democracy. What remains to be reconstructed are the processes by which this paperwork was created and the significance of those processes for our understanding of democracy. This dissertation examines the paperwork of making decrees, the basic legislative document in Athens, using literature, court speeches, and inscribed decrees to reconstruct the process by which decrees were written and reused in city politics. It argues that paperwork was done in the central institution of democracy, the assembly; that the orators better known in their capacity as masters of speech were also masters of the rules and discourses of decree-making; that in foreign policy these orators and their audience, the masses, brought the same rigor to documentary texts that they brought to giving and hearing speeches. In sum, where earlier researchers have assumed that paperwork had nothing to do with democracy, this dissertation shows that Athenians were as clever with paperwork as they were with oratory.

This dissertation examines how the Roman historian Tacitus’ political thought in his minor works (the Dialogus, the Germania, and the Agricola) departs from the political thought of his Republic-era predecessors. Tacitus wrote during the Principate, when Rome was organized under the power of a single man. Nevertheless, the dominant approach to thinking about political life was still Republicanism, a constellation of concepts formed when Rome was a Republic. In his minor works, Tacitus argues that Republicanism lacks the complexity to understand different iterations of single-man rule as well as its relationship with surrounding institutions and culture. Each of the minor works explores a different shortcoming of Republicanism. The Dialogus investigates how oratory was weakened in the Principate. The Germania observes how, contrary to a tenet of Republicanism, monarchy does not ipso facto preclude libertas. And the Agricola examines how certain political regimes can alter the individual. Rather than adhering to the traditional approach of viewing these writings as independent works, this dissertation argues that they form a coherent project in which Tacitus moves beyond Republicanism and argues that a new framework is needed to understand a political system as dynamic as the Principate.

Modern scholars cannot agree how extant fragments of thought attributed to Leucippus and Democritus integrate (or do not) to form a coherent perspective on the ancient Greek world. While a certain degree of uncertainty is unavoidable, given the nature of the evidence available and the fact that Democritus wrote many different works (including at least one in which he deliberately argued against positions that he defended elsewhere), this study demonstrates that we know enough to take a more integrative view of the early atomists (and of Democritus in particular) than is usually taken. In the case of Democritus, this study shows that it makes good sense to read what remains of his works (physical, biological, and ethical) under the presumption that he assumes a single basic outlook on the world, a coherent perspective that informed every position taken by the atomist philosopher.

Chapter 1 provides an in-depth portrait of the historical and philosophical context in which early atomism was born. As part of this portrait, it offers thumbnail sketches of the doctrines attributed to a representative catalogue of pre-Socratic philosophers to whom published work is attributed (Anaximander, Xenophanes, Heraclitus, Parmenides, Empedocles, Anaxagoras, Philolaus). It demonstrates how each philosopher presumes that his theory offers a universal outlook on human reality, a perspective on the universe which purposely encompasses (and builds into a single theoretical framework) physics and biology and practical ethics.

Chapter 2 introduces the early atomists as respondents to the pre-Socratic movement before them (a movement which this study refers to as the Critical Tradition). It presents evidence for an integrated reading of early atomist fragments, a reading that construes the Leucippus and Democritus as men of their time (working with and responding to the positions taken by their predecessors in the Critical Tradition).

Chapter 3 shows how Democritus' ethics arise naturally from his physics via an historical process of development. Like his predecessors in the Critical Tradition and many of his contemporaries, the atomist deliberately imagines nature (physics) providing the raw material from which culture (ethics) naturally and inevitably rises.

Chapter 4 offers an original reading of extant ethical fragments of Democritus, showing how the atomist uses his unique outlook on the world to develop a practical approach to living well.

This dissertation explores the lives of persons enslaved or formerly enslaved to soldiers and veterans of the Roman imperial armies (27 BCE–284 CE). Previous scholarship on the subject has been sparse and one-sided, mostly mirroring the perspective of the elite literary sources on which they are based. They are mainly concerned with the role of slaves in the overall operation and organization of Rome’s armies. Such approaches fall short of informing us about the social location and lived reality of individual slaves and ex-slaves. We set out to close this knowledge gap here by leveraging epigraphic, papyrological, legal, and archaeological sources.After exposing the elite bias of the literary sources, we turn to the extant stone inscriptions featuring slaves and ex-slaves of soldiers and veterans, a corpus of over 900 texts at present. First, a large-scale quantitative survey of the material uncovers general patterns relevant to this much-neglected population. Then follows an archaeologically and historically contextualized consideration of a smaller selection of data from Britain and Pannonia, including inscriptions and wooden writing-tablets, in an effort to retrieve and recount in as much detail as possible a few of the experiences and circumstances of these individuals. Finally, we discuss testamentary manumission as a characteristic feature of slave life in military communities. The evidence presented here corroborates our argument that the lives and narratives of individual enslaved persons can and should be retrieved. Quantitative analysis underscores the pervasiveness of slaveholding in the Roman military across many dimensions, including space, time, service branch, rank, and service status. In fact, my calculations show that in regions where reliable overall quantifications of the epigraphic material are available roughly 10% of the inscriptions involving active or retired soldiers mention slaves or ex-slaves. Such findings clearly elevate slaves in military contexts above the marginal status that is implied by the limited amount of scholarly attention they have received. Close scrutiny and careful contextualization of several altars, epitaphs, and writing tablets from Britain and Pannonia underscore my conclusion that we are subscribing to a partial and impoverished view of the Roman military by keeping slaves and ex-slaves out of view. They were essential to life in the military and their presence was viewed as normal.

The anthology of the elder Seneca (c. 55 BC - c. 39 AD) contains quotations from approximately 120 speakers who flourished during the early Empire. The predominant tendency in modern scholarship has been to marginalize these speakers and the practice they represent (declamation): they are regarded as a linguistic and literary monolith, and their literary productions while recognized as influential are treated as discrete from those of other, "serious" authors. The present dissertation challenges this viewpoint by focusing on the following questions: To what extent can a speaker quoted in Seneca's anthology be said to have a distinct and unique literary identity? What is the relationship of a speaker, as represented by his quotations, relative to canonical texts?

Since most of the quoted speakers are found exclusively in the anthology, the study first examines the nature of Seneca's work and, more specifically, how the quotations of the anthology are organized. It is discovered that the sequence in which excerpts appear in a quotation do not follow a consistent, meaningful pattern, such as the order in which they might have occurred in a speech. Instead, excerpts exhibit a strong lateral organization: excerpts from one speaker show a close engagement with excerpts in spatially distant quotations from other speakers. A fundamental organizing principle consists in the convergence of excerpts around a limited number of specific points for each declamatory theme.

The remainder, and bulk, of the dissertation is a close analysis of the quotations of two speakers: Arellius Fuscus and Papirius Fabianus. The distinct identities of these speakers emerge from comparisons of excerpts in their quotations with the often studiedly similar excerpts from other speakers and from passages in other texts. Fabianus' literary identity takes shape in a language designed to construct the persona of a philosopher-preacher. The identity of Fuscus resides in idiosyncratic sentence architecture, in a preference for Presentational sentences, and in methodically innovative diction. Further substantiating Fuscus' identity is evidence that he assimilated the language of authors, such as Cicero and Vergil, and established compositional patterns that became authoritative for later authors, such as Ovid, the younger Seneca, and Lucan.

This dissertation reexamines the origins, intent, and perceived historical value of the fourth-century series of Latin imperial biographies known as the Historia Augusta. Over the course of the twentieth century, the text was interpreted as a historical “forgery” created by a “rogue scholar” who took pleasure in deceiving most, if not all, of his audience into accepting at face value the text’s false attribution to six fictitious biographers, its spurious imperial dedications, and its reliance on fabricated sources. In the last decade, studies have instead begun to suggest that many of the “fraudulent” elements of the Historia Augusta were not intended to deceive but rather entertain knowledgeable readers by interpolating elements from the ancient novel into a biographical text.

Drawing upon recent reinterpretations of the author, audience, and literary milieu of the Historia Augusta, this study reconsiders the purposes of the invented attributions, dedications, and fabricated sources within the collection. Many recent studies have concluded that the inventions of the Historia Augusta can only obscure or detract from any historical purpose and that the primary intended function of the Historia Augusta was entertainment. In contrast, through reassessment of the work’s composition and the forms and frequency of the inventions across the collection, this study demonstrates that the author uses his inventions to forge thematic and structural links across the thirty biographies and to encourage deeper reflection on his biographical subjects, the limitations of authentic history, and his contemporary political context.

Chapter One reviews recent scholarship that suggests the Historia Augusta’s readers would have been primed by their familiarity with the ancient novel and other fictive works to recognize the collection’s inventions as parodic imitations of novelistic conventions. By examining the role of social networks in the revision and circulation of texts, the chapter builds on recent findings to suggest that the need for friends in the circulation process would have impeded the ability of the Historia Augusta’s author to disseminate his work anonymously and thus suggests that the work was intended for a knowledgeable audience.

Chapter Two reexamines fundamental questions about the composition and aims of the work. Through analysis of the evidence for accretion and false-ends within the Historia Augusta, this study argues that the collection came to fruition only after several stages of revision, a position rejected by others due to the lives repetitiveness and perceived stylistic infelicities. In particular, it demonstrates that the work’s invented attributions and the imperial dedications were not an original design component of the collection at the outset of the composition, but were retroactively added at an intermediate stage of the composition when the author was making broad-scale revisions and alterations to roughly half of the lives.

Through a series of close readings and careful analysis of the text’s political and intellectual context, Chapters Three through Five suggest that the inventions were gradually devised and added to the lives as the author became increasingly engaged with contemporary texts and more self-reflective on the notion of historical evidence and research. Chapter Three demonstrates that the biographer attributions and personae evolved from puns that signaled the virtues of the emperors into central figures in the author’s self-reflective commentary on his own scholarly community. Chapter Four argues the imperial invocations were deliberately added not only to establish a comparison between the legacies of Diocletian and Constantine but also to shore up thematic elements concerning the Antonine dynasty and imperial succession that had subsequently become prominent in the composition. Chapter Five illustrates that the fabricated documents in the lives of the usurpers systematically undermine negative accounts of imperial challengers found in other contemporary sources and encourage more positive interpretations of usurpers’ merits and motivations.

By demonstrating the ways that the author uses the attributions, dedications, and fictitious documents to engage with the cultural and political transformations affecting his scholarly community, this study concludes that more credence should be given to the author’s proposition that he intended his work to serve as a historical source for historians to come (Car. 21.2-3). So too, by challenging the rigid delineations between fact and fiction, truth and fraudulence in the Historia Augusta, this project aims to create new avenues for further research not only on the Historia Augusta but also on the ways that creative impersonation and fabrication could be harnessed for historical purposes in other ancient texts.

This dissertation investigates the prominent role of the Mouseion-Library of Alexandria in the construction of a new community of archivist-poets during the third century BCE in the wake of Alexander the Great's conquests. I contend that the Mouseion was a new kind of institution--an imperial archive--that facilitated a kind of political domination that worked through the production, perpetuation, and control of particular knowledges about the world rather than through fear and brute force.

Specifically, I argue that those working in the Mouseion, or Library, were shaping a new vision of the past through their meticulous editorial and compilatory work on the diverse remnants of the pre-conquest Greeks. Mastery of this tradition, in turn, came to form the backbone of what it meant to be educated (pepaideumenoi), yet even more importantly what it meant to be a Greek in this new political landscape. In contrast to many studies of politics and culture in the Hellenistic period which focus on the exercise of power from the top down, I explore how seemingly harmless or even esoteric actions, actions that seem far distant from the political realm, such as the writing of poetry and editing of texts, came to be essential in maintaining the political authority and structures of the Hellenistic monarchs.

In developing this vision of the cultural politics of the Hellenistic Age, my first chapter examines the central role of the Mouseion of Alexandria in making erudition one of the key sources of socio-cultural capital in this ethnically diverse and regionally dispersed polity. Through the work of its scholars, the Mouseion and its archive of the Greek past became the center around which a broader panhellenic community and identity coalesced. In chapter two, I explore the implications of this new institution and social type through a close reading of Lykophron's enigmatic work, the Alexandra, presenting it as a poetic archive that used philological practices to make the past relevant to a new group of elite consumers scattered throughout the Hellenistic world by re-imagining the conflict between Europe and Asia. In the final chapter, I argue that this new institution gave rise to a new type of man, the archivist-poet. I examine how this new figure of subjectivity became one of the primary means of participating in Hellenistic empires of knowledge through the genre of literary epigram.

This dissertation demonstrates that the development of monumental public architecture occurred contemporaneously in urban centers of both Latium and Etruria in the late 6th century BC and argues that its catalyst was a profound shift in socio-political organization that took place throughout Central Italy. It analyses these developments through a lens of spatial theory, especially that of environment behavior studies, to understand how they impacted urban societies of Central Italy. The link between the construction of novel public structures in the Roman Forum and the political upheaval of the late 6th century BC has been well established in previous scholarship. New architectural forms lent shape to the Forum, providing the built environment of Rome with an explicitly public space reflective of its new Republican organization. Yet it was not an isolated phenomenon. It can be detected in the urban form of several contemporaneous Latin and Etruscan cities. While the historical record of these cities is far less robust than that of Rome, their archaeological record supports the conclusion that a similar political shift transpired across the larger region of Central Italy during the late 6th and early 5th centuries. In addition to Rome, cities such as Satricum, Caere, and Vulci constructed monumental tripartite temples, public squares, and assembly halls for the first time. These structures appear as a linked assembly and are innovative in their architectural form, but more importantly in their conceptual configuration as explicitly public structures. They not only facilitated the habitual behaviors of the offices of state and citizen bodies that were gradually introduced during this period but also symbolically represented the authority of the state itself. Previously, the regiae and domestic courtyard complexes of local rulers had served as loci for both private and public activity in early archaic cities. The newfound spatial delineation between public and private is reflective of the elaboration of state level organization that saw individual identity and political authority formally separated through the institution of official offices.

This dissertation investigates ancient language ideologies constructed by Greek and Latin writers of the second and third centuries CE, a loosely-connected movement now generally referred to the Second Sophistic. It focuses on Lucian of Samosata, a Syrian “barbarian” writer of satire and parody in Greek, and especially on his works that engage with language-oriented topics of contemporary relevance to his era. The term “language ideologies”, as it is used in studies of sociolinguistics, refers to beliefs and practices about language as they function within the social context of a particular culture or set of cultures; prescriptive grammar, for example, is a broad and rather common example. The surge in Greek (and some Latin) literary output in the Second Sophistic led many writers, with Lucian an especially noteworthy example, to express a variety of ideologies regarding the form and use of language. A number of authors, including Lucian, practiced Atticism, the belief that the best literature wouldn be made possible by reviving the Attic dialect of Classical Athens, language of Plato and Aristophanes. Others, however, disagree with the narrow and perhaps pretentious version of Greek this ideology produced; intriguingly Lucian was a member of this group as well. This study examines Lucian’s complex and contradictory attitudes towards linguistic practices, focusing the works of his that address Atticism and other linguistic topics—such as the degree to which mastery of a language and its culture will allow one to identify with that culture. Here, too, Lucian portrays the relationship between linguistic practice and cultural identity in several different ways. Investigations into the linguistic views of other authors of the period help answer the question of which contemporary ideologies Lucian may be drawing on for his satire. The dissertation concludes that the detailed, specific humor of Lucian’s linguistic satire is tied into his overall project of creating a distinctive ethnic, cultural, and linguistic position for the self-representation of his disparate personae.

This study analyzes marginalized voices and nontraditional pathways of higher education in the late Roman Empire and diversifies our notion of who was part of “the” educated elite in ancient higher education. I focus on upper-class learners who did not have access to the family’s wealth or faced difficulty with pursuing the discussed traditional paths of schooling designed for young men from wealthy families. The discussed marginalized voices include fatherless students, women, late learners, autodidacts, and disabled students. Since most sources on Roman education were authored by elite men who mention marginalized voices in passing, I piece together the experiences of nontraditional learners and marginalized members of Roman education from an array of literary and epigraphic sources, including letters from teachers to students and families, church historians and Christians commenting on women, orations, tomb stones and legal documents. Most sources discussed are dated to the fourth century C.E., highlighting a period in which girls and women from the upper-class gained a voice in ascetic communities, as educational leaders and philanthropes and in which educational mobility across the Roman Empire flourished. Using Bourdieu’s theory of capital, I analyze how diverse family and educational backgrounds impacted the educational paths of students, discuss the student voices often overlooked in scholarship and bring attention to the challenges that nontraditional and marginalized students have experienced in higher education.

This dissertation examines evidence for the public visibility of elite women in Roman cities in the province of Hispania Tarraconenesis from the first through the third centuries C. E. By focusing on the epigraphic evidence for women's contributions to public life in three cities, I analyze how women used the Roman conventions of euergetism, participation in religious institutions, and other methods of physically changing the visual landscape of a city to promote themselves as individuals and as participants in Roman civic life. I argue that Hispania Tarraconensis shows great diversity in the options available to women to present their own identities in public spaces, but that throughout the province women did actively construct a public civic identity that transcends the traditional image of women as absent from or invisible within Roman civic spaces.

I begin my analysis in Chapter One (Why Tarraconensis?) by examining the unique characteristics of the province Hispania Tarraconensis that makes it a particularly valuable case study for the visibility of Roman women. I conclude that the combination of the wealth of available evidence in the province as well as the lack of studies of individual provinces that center women make this an especially useful arena for exploration. I also argue that the variations in regions' experiences with Roman imperialism affect how women's participation manifested itself in particular cities.

In Chapter Two (Tarraco), I examine the evidence for my first case study, the Roman city, Tarraco (modern Tarragona), which served as the capital of Hispania Tarraconensis. I discuss the history of the city and the cultural and historical context that would have affected the topography of the Roman city. I examine the full epigraphic corpus for Tarraco and, wherever possible, contextualize these inscriptions within the archaeological, art historical, and literary context of the city. I conclude that participation in the imperial cult at Tarraco through election to prestigious priesthoods provided women with the highest level of visibility in this city, and that other methods of visibility (e.g.: as public benefactress) were not as frequently used in Tarraco because of the city's close connection to Rome and association with the imperial family. I also argue that these priesthoods were held by women in their own right and did not rely on or primarily serve male members of their families.

Chapter Three (Emporiae) examines the evidence for Emporiae (modern Ampurias), a coastal city with a history of Greek colonization. The evidence here is less focused on the imperial cult and include women who emphasized their contributions to the cities more through votive inscriptions and public donations. Moreover, the history of the city as a place where Iberian, Greek, and Roman cultures coexisted changes the way that women's identity was represented. In Chapter Four (Caesaraugusta), I turn to the city of Caesaraugusta (modern Zaragoza), which has produced significantly less evidence than either of the two previous case studies. I, therefore, argue that the city is useful to study both for its position as a conventual capital in the interior of the Iberian Peninsula, and as an experiment in methodologies that can present a model for studying other cities with similar problems with the survival of evidence.

Finally, I open this study up to an examination of what public visibility in provincial cities can tell us about women's experience with Roman imperialism and a construction of a female civic identity. Since women were not allowed to officially participate in politics or hold offices in Roman cities, their contributions to civic life have been overlooked and Roman citizenship has become synonymous with male citizenship. I argue that there was a sense of female civic identity and that women in Hispania Tarraconensis cultivated this self-image through the careful construction of inscriptions, statues, public works, and participation in important religious institutions. Women both identified with and presented themselves as representatives of cities, regions, and provinces and did not solely (or even primarily) do this to honor their male relatives or families as a whole. Studies like this can open up and nuance our understanding of the Roman world beyond traditional Rome-centric and military-political historical narratives, which is essential in a time when the Classical world is frequently misappropriated by cultural and political groups in order to promote traditional female values and the supremacy of European identity.

“Monumentalizing Infrastructure: Claudius and the City and People of Rome” is a comprehensive study of public infrastructure in Rome under the emperor Claudius (41-54 CE). Recent scholarship has targeted Claudius’ reign as an important moment in the development of the Roman Principate. Overshadowed in the scholarship by Augustus’ transformation of Rome from a city of brick to marble, Claudius’ projects centered on providing protection from floods, fires, and diseases, and assuring the availability of enough clean water, food, and means of transportation. Building a large marble temple certainly made a symbolic and aesthetic impact, but nearly doubling Rome’s water supply must have meant more to the common person living day-to-day in the city. By focusing on Claudian infrastructure initiatives and using GIS to map and contextualize this work, this dissertation interrogates traditional scholarly approaches to Roman imperial building and ancient urban planning.

Following a survey of the ancient sources for Claudian building in Rome in Chapter 1, Chapter 2 examines the practical measures put in place to secure and advertise the steady supply of affordable grain to the city. Many have explored the convoluted history of the grain supply in Rome. I do not replicate such studies, whose findings have not been changed by any significant new discoveries, but instead I focus on how the labors put in to improve and advertise such improvements to the food supply of Rome under Claudius changed and shaped the urban landscape.

Chapter 3 centers on water and its distribution in the city. I use archaeological, epigraphic, and literary evidence to assess Claudius’ effects on Rome’s water supply. Visualizing these changes lets us consider building as a process, and see what disruption, repair, and construction of aqueduct lines did to water distribution to particular regions of the city. The maps suggest that Claudius improved the potable water supply in areas where the poorer population of Rome lived.

Chapter 4 addresses boundary marking and road building—the visual and practical changes made to the organization of and movement in the city. Organizing the boundaries into and out of the city facilitated the urban development of areas along the banks of the Tiber river. The visualization in this and other chapters allow us to see much more clearly than before, and emperor’s impact upon the general populace and obtain a clearer picture of the city’s urban history.

My compilation and analysis of the evidence reveals a thorough revision of Rome’s infrastructure under Claudius, despite his common denigration as an ineffectual buffoon or a puppet of his wives and freedmen. This dissertation provides a new framework for examining imperial building in Rome. The infrastructure projects that made all other construction possible are at the forefront. The negative aspects of Claudius’ character portrayed in the literary sources are counterbalanced or at least nuanced when a focus on infrastructure and care for the people provides a different viewpoint. An emperor’s popularity and legacy among the people would not be measured by jealous quarrels among the aristocracy. The imperial government was not merely reacting to crises, rather it was proactively seeking long-term solutions.

This dissertation examines the interplay of ethics and poetic craft in the Odyssey through the lens of the theme of tisis, "retribution." In this poem tisis serves two main purposes: it acts as a narrative template for the poem's composition and makes actions and agents morally intelligible to audiences. My work shows that the system of justice that tisis denotes assumes a retaliatory symmetry of precise proportionality. I also examine aspects of the ideology and social effects of this system of justice for archaic Greek culture at large. Justice thus conceived is "open-textured" and readily manipulable to the interests of the agent who controls the language of the narrative. In the end, I show that this system fails to secure communal harmony.

The project has three parts. In part one, I argue that earlier scholars have not sufficiently appreciated the narrative character of tisis. Following an inductive analysis of the poem's paradigmatic example of Orestes' tisis, I draw upon the methods of narratology to propose a new definition of tisis as a "narrative," a certain conventional arrangement of a set of actions and roles that together constitute a narrative whole. This narrative acts as a compositional tool for a singer's re-composition and performance of poetry, becoming a major organizing structure in the tradition of Homeric poetry. From this practice arises the Odyssey's complex texture of several interwoven tisis narratives that dialectically carry out the poem's moral program. Because Homeric ethics is a narrative ethics, a practice of placing one's self and others in the stories that society tells, tisis provides an ethical framework that renders experience morally intelligible and allows actors to evaluate the moral standing of themselves and others. tisis, thus, is morally inflected: those who play the role of avenger receive commendation; those who play the victim, condemnation. And the great moral conflicts in the Odyssey--between Poseidon and Odysseus, between Odysseus and the suitors--are over the assignment and adoption of these narrative roles.

Against the other tisis narratives in the Odyssey, Odysseus' own, central narrative appears strikingly atypical. Unlike Aegisthus, the suitors have neither killed anyone nor corrupted Penelope--nonetheless, they face the same punishment. But through a creative interpretation of ius talionis the singer makes a series of brilliant rhetorical moves to recast the acts of the suitors as accomplished murder and adultery. This allows Odysseus to play the part of just avenger of himself Furthermore, it resolves in the person of Odysseus a latent tension between the narratives of nostos (which implies the happy return of a hero) and tisis (which implies the death of a hero and vengeance on his behalf).

In part two, I argue that the ideology of justice that tisis denotes--returning equivalent harm for harm--runs through the heart of archaic Greek culture, but it is always vulnerable to manipulation. Speakers--and poets especially--exploit the possibilities of ambiguity in the language of justice in order to fabricate a likeness between crimes and their punishments, thus justifying avengers. Similarly, speakers use poetic techniques to cement this ideology into more than a merely talionic retribution of "like for like" and instead construct a justice that equates a crime and its punishment. Under this strengthened regime of equivalence, crimes merge with and become their own punishment. This ideology has political consequences: I take as a banner example Alcman's Partheneion, in which the order of both the political community and the universe rests on tisis. I examine as well many other examples of a tight linkage between crime and punishment.

In part three, I return to the Odyssey, asking why the singer uses this rhetoric of synonymy of crime and punishment and why he has arranged the moral positions of the characters as he has. I conclude that this arrangement serves the narrator's seemingly monologic, overt program of justifying Odysseus and his divine patrons. But at the same time the narrator has taken the symbolic reasoning of ius talionis to a rhetorical extreme, effectively making the suitors into cannibals. Likewise, the retributive claims of the suitors' kin at the close of the poem disappear all too easily: hostilities are not so much resolved as obliterated in mass amnesia. Through such holes in the fabric of the justice of tisis, the audience perceives the workings of another program, a subversive program that calls into question the narrator's overt program and the entire, corruptible system of retributive justice.

My project thus contributes to our understanding of the Odyssey's subversive narrative integrity, the operation of justice in archaic Greece, and the nature of narratorial authority in poetic discourse. My conclusions should interest not only philologists and literary critics, but also scholars of ethics and political theory.

“Negotiating Subjectivity: Gender, Communication, and Narrative telos in the Odyssey” investigates the relationship between gender and narrative structure in Homeric language. Textual and narrative inconsistencies provide a point of departure for examining how gender relations (i.e. patterns of communication between women and men) contribute to the narrative’s complication and resolution. By treating gender in the text as an impetus toward narrative change, this study reveals two alternating currents in Homeric language: first, how heroic male authorities establish boundaries between women and men to achieve a narrative outcome; and second, how male authority is problematized by the inconsistencies which leave such a teleological outcome in question. Illuminating these two trends as evidence for the relationship between gender and narrative, this dissertation advances the interpretation that the language of the Odyssey operates as a continuous re-negotiation of appropriate boundaries of propriety in communication between women and men.

Drawing on the writings of Lacan and Freud, I account for repetitive acts of female duplicity and heroic violence as complications to the aims of the narrative and the desires of its characters. With this approach, I observe an authoritative function in Homeric language that negotiates subjectivity by categorizing roles of women and men to establish a gender binary in the act of storytelling. By investigating this relationship between authoritative language and gender roles, I conclude that the anti-teleological elements which trouble the narrative outcome similarly vex the gender ideology established in the text: as the narrative resists completion, the repetitive re-negotiation of gender relations leaves the Homeric model for appropriate roles of women and men in doubt. Building on a series of readings in Homeric scholarship that argue for an overall transfer of female authority to male authority in the Odyssey narrative, my dissertation further demonstrates how the resistance of a teleological outcome exposes the epic’s ultimate failure to achieve an ideal of heroic male authority.

This dissertation investigates how recognition of Plato's Republic as a pedagogical text and of the milieu of competing disciplines in which it composed suggests new readings of its philosophical content. I contend that close attention to the cultural context in which the Republic was written reveals the degree to which its arguments were constructed not only with an eye towards the philosophical demands put upon it, but also in response to the claims of epistemological authority made by other fields. Furthermore, I show that close attention to the pedagogical function of the text reveals the degree to which Plato relies upon the dialogue's characters and figurative language to entice students away from alternative pursuits and world-views and towards Platonic philosophy.

The Republic was constructed in a revolutionary period for both texts and teachers, in which texts were beginning to function as a kind of tutor. In my first chapter, "Educating Athens", I survey the changing Athenian attitudes towards education from the sixth to the fourth centuries BCE, with a special focus on the rise of the concept of paideia. I also consider some of the ways in which earlier scholars have regarded the Republic as a prescriptive text on education in order to distinguish their approaches from my own: unlike these earlier readings, my approach to the text is to regard it as itself educating the reader, rather than as describing a system of education. The development of systems of paideia is intimately connected to the phenomena discussed in my second chapter: the rise of disciplines and the explosion of the written word. I conduct a historical survey of the evidence for literacy and texts in the seventh to fourth centuries BCE and show that the gradual increase in texts and literacy did not replace oral culture in Athens, but rather supplemented it. I point out striking similarities among medical texts, oratorical works, and the Socratic dialogues written by Plato's contemporaries as a basis for comparison with Plato's Republic.

In the final three chapters of my dissertation I examine three aspects of Plato's Republic which have presented problems for envisioning the Republic as a unified work. My third chapter examines the Socratic interlocutors of book one as negative models for the reader, and shows that by the end of the book Plato has demonstrated the importance of passion, creativity, and deference in the successful philosophical student. As well, I suggest that Plato deliberately shows the weaknesses of the elenchus in the first book in order to argue against the methodologies of his fellow authors of Socratic dialogues, and in order to showcase the new philosophical methods which he displays in the remainder of the Republic. In the fourth chapter I continue to emphasize the relationship between the philosophy of the Republic and the work's pedagogical mission by examining the "two starts" to the Republic at the beginning of book 2 and book 5. I show that important work is done in books 2-4 to prepare the reader for the radical reevaluation of knowledge that will come in books 5-7 In the fifth chapter I consider the use of stories within the Republic, and what such stories can tell us both about Plato's theories of how education occurs as well as about how the Republic is meant to function.

Ultimately my dissertation demonstrates that by locating the Republic within the intersection of competing pedagogies, new disciplines, and the recent rise of texts, the text can be understood as functioning on a number of different levels. It dismisses the merits of other disciplines and privileges Plato over other philosophers, all within the structure of a work which is gradually molding and guiding its reader towards Plato's particular ethical and epistemological system. Although the Republic has been read as a work on ethics, on political philosophy, and on psychology, its disparate components and topics coalesce only by reading it first as a work which educates.

The Laws is generally regarded as Plato’s attempt to engage with the practical realities of political life, as opposed to the more idealistic, or utopian, vision of the Republic. Yet modern scholars have often felt disquieted at the central role of religion in the Laws’ second-best city and regime. There are essentially the two dominant interpretations on offer today: either religion supports a repressive theocracy, which controls every aspect of the citizens’ lives to such an extent that even philosophy itself is discouraged, or religion is an example of the kind of noble lie, which the philosopher must deceive the citizens into believing—viz., that a god, not a man, is the author of the regime’s laws. I argue that neither of these interpretations do justice to the dialogue’s intricately dramatic structure, and therefore to Plato’s treatment of civil religion. What I propose is a third position in which Plato both takes seriously the social and political utility of religion, and views theology as a legitimate, and even necessary, subject of philosophical inquiry without going so far as to advocate theocracy as the second best form of regime.

I conclude that a proper focus on the dialogue form, combined with a careful historical analysis of Plato’s use of social and political institutions, reveals an innovative yet traditional form of civil religion, purified of the harmful influence of the poets, based on the authority of the oracle at Delphi, and grounded on a philosophical conception of god as the eternal source of order, wisdom, and all that is good. Through a union of traditional Delphic theology and Platonic natural theology, Plato gives the city of the Laws a common cult acceptable to philosopher and non-philosopher alike, and thus, not only bridges the gap between religion and philosophy, but also creates a sense of community, political identity, and social harmony—the prerequisites for political order and stability. The political theology of the Laws, therefore, provides a rational defense of the rule of law (νόμος) re-conceived as the application of divine Reason (νοῦς) to human affairs.