Browsing by Subject "Ancient history"

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 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.

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.

Among the numerous commitments late ancient Christians throughout the Roman Empire shared with their non-Christian neighbors was a preoccupation with justice. Not only was the latter one of the celebrated characteristics of God, the New Testament had charged Christians, particularly those who served as bishops or elders, with ensuring and maintaining justice in their communities from the tradition's very origins. In the early fourth century, this aspect of episcopal responsibilities had received an unexpected boost when the Emperor Constantine not only recognized bishops' role in intra-Christian conflict resolution, but expanded their judicial capacity to include even outsiders in the so-called audientia episcopalis, the bishop's court.

Christians had, of course, never resolved the question of what constituted justice in a vacuum. Yet bishops' increasing integration into the sprawling and frequently amorphous apparatus of the Roman legal system introduced new pressures as well as new opportunities into Christian judicial discourse. Roman law could become an ally in a minister's exegetical or homiletical efforts. Yet it also came to intrude into spheres that had previously regarded themselves as set apart from Roman society, including especially monastic and clerical communities. The latter proved to be particularly permeable to different shades of legal discourse, inasmuch as they served as privileged feeders for episcopal sees. Their members were part of the Christian elites, whose judicial formation promised to bear disproportionate fruit among the laity under their actual or eventual care. This dissertation's task is the examination of the ways in which Christians in these environments throughout the Latin West at the turn of the fifth century thought and wrote about justice. I contend that no single influence proved dominant, but that three strands of judicial discourse emerge as significant throughout these sources: that of popular philosophical thought; that of biblical exegesis; and that of reasoning from Roman legal precept and practice. Late ancient Christian rhetoric consciously and selectively deployed these threads to craft visions of justice, both divine and human, that could be treated as distinctively Christian while remaining intelligible in the broader context of the Roman Empire.

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 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.

This dissertation examines the history of the military institutions of the Hellenistic kingdoms. The kingdoms emerged after years of war-fighting, and the capacity to wage war remained central to state formation in the Hellenistic Age (323-31 B.C.). The creation of institutions and recruitment of populations sufficient to field large armies took a great deal more time and continual effort than has generally been imagined. By bringing documentary evidence into contact with the meta-narratives of the Hellenistic period, and by addressing each of the major powers of the Hellenistic world, this project demonstrates the contingencies and complexities within the kingdoms and their armies. In so doing, it offers both a fresh perspective on the peoples and polities that inhabited the Hellenistic world after Alexander and a much-revised narrative of the process by which Alexander's successors built kingdoms and waged war. Inheritors of extensive political and military traditions, they were forced to reshape them in their new and volatile context, eventually establishing large and powerful kingdoms and armies that dominated the eastern Mediterranean and Near East for over one hundred years.

The early model of Hellenistic kingship was based on military successes and martial valor. It found a complement in the burgeoning mercenary market of the early Hellenistic period, which allowed Alexander's generals to field massive armies without relying on complex military institutions for recruitment and mobilization. As years of continual warfare stressed populations and war chests, several new kings, crowned in the era of war, sought to end their reliance on mercenaries by developing core territories, settling soldiers, and constructing powerful military institutions. These institutions did not develop seamlessly or quickly, and often functioned awkwardly in many of the locales that had recently come under Macedonian rule, whether in the cities of Syria or along the Nile valley in Egypt. My project involves several detailed studies of military mobilization during the Hellenistic period, as a way to analyze the structures and evaluate the successes of the kingdoms' respective military institutions.

I employ methodologies from both history and classical studies, moving between technical work with papyrological, epigraphic, and archaeological evidence, close reading of ancient texts, and comparative analysis of narrative and documentary texts, while drawing upon the large historiographies of each of the largest kingdoms. One of this dissertation's contributions is in making comparisons between these spaces and across time, when much of Hellenistic history has trended toward ever-greater partition. The papyrological material, in particular, permits the greatest access into both the social activities of individuals and the particular elements of human, legal, and customary infrastructure within a Hellenistic state, though it has rarely been used outside of particularly Ptolemaic histories. My dissertation argues against Egyptian exceptionalism, and offers a Hellenistic history drawn from the full array of available sources. Part of the narrative of Egyptian exceptionalism developed from the perception that it was in some sense less traditionally Macedonian than the other two kingdoms. A careful reading of the evidence indicates instead that in the violent and multi-polar world of the Hellenistic age, military identity was very flexible, and had been since the time of Alexander. Additionally, the strict adherence of the other kingdoms to the Macedonian way of war ended in defeat at the hands of the Romans, while the Ptolemies in Egypt innovated counterinsurgent activities that preserved their power in the wealthiest region of the Mediterranean.

The question of Matthew’s missiology in modern scholarship frequently centers the relationship between contradictory commissions in 10:5-6 and 28:19-20. Does Matthew believe that the mission to Israel is the primary focus of the nascent church, or that the gentile mission has replaced it? Or does Matthew believe that the mission that began in Israel has now expanded to include all nations? The goal of this dissertation is to complicate this question by expanding our object of study to other passages in the Gospel that discuss missions. We begin with Matt 10. In Matt 10, missionary work is an ethnically and geographically limited project. Missionaries are sent as envoys of Jesus. They depend on their targets for hospitality. They focus on Jews, though gentiles are present as onlookers. The missionary project forces confrontation with Jewish leadership, particularly Pharisees. Neither Jews nor gentiles are singled out as persecutors. The mission is associated with imminent eschatology, and it is underway when Matthew writes. We compare this missiology with five passages that precede the final commission: the parable of the tenants (21:33-46), the wedding banquet (22:1-14), the woes against scribes and Pharisees (chapter 23), the tribulation (chapter 24), and the parable of the sheep and the goats (25:31-46). What becomes clear is that Matthew’s missiology is unified. He entertains a mission that is no longer restricted, but other tropes from Matt 10 reappear. This continuity reemerges again in the final call to international mission (28:16-20). Matthew’s missiology is not discontinuous, but stable. He introduces a missionary task in 10:5-42, places it in Israel, and expects that this work will continue in the rest of the world. Outreach to Jews and gentiles bleeds into each other from the beginning, given Matthew’s awareness of gentiles in Palestine and of Jews in the Diaspora. The question of whether Matthew intends his message to go to Jews, or gentiles, or both, therefore, is significantly more complicated than it first appears.

“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 revolves around a central observation that, although the methodological differences among Greek mathematical writings are striking, these differences do not lie primarily along lines of subject matter or time period. Almost all mathematical works fall clearly into one of two distinct sets of methodological conventions, which are observable from the classical period through late antiquity, in all disciplines. Because these sets of conventions transcend time and subject, and instead seem to be followed consistently by certain authors who interact among themselves in the manner of philosophical traditions, I have interpreted them as schools of mathematical practice.

I have named the schools “systematist” and “heurist” according to the characteristic epistemological orientation of each. The systematist school, of which Euclid is the paradigmatic author, is motivated by the goal of a generalized and systematic treatment of mathematical information. Features of this method include strict conventions of presentation, the idealization of mathematical objects, a preference for universalizing propositions over unique problems, and a general reluctance to work with specific numbers, physical tools, or measurements. The heurist school, in which Archimedes, Heron of Alexandria, and Ptolemy worked, is oriented toward the discovery and development of effective methods of problem-solving. Presentation is less structured and usually more personalized, specific solutions are allowed to stand implicitly for universal principles, and physical phenomena, measurement, tools, and numerical calculations are more commonly included and addressed.

Over the course of this work I will demonstrate the existence of these two schools with a thorough survey of Greek works of theoretical mathematics; I will outline the schools’ characteristic features and histories, and show how the influences of philosophical movements and intellectual social networks affected their practices. Each of the four chapters addresses the ways in which the methods of each school were expressed in the four most common mathematical disciplines: geometry, arithmetic, astronomy, and music. The chapters will show not only the evidence for the divisions between the schools in each field, and how they developed, but also that both schools made only minor adaptations to their methodologies according to subject matter. In fact, it can be shown that even when they departed from more traditional mathematical disciplines into areas of research such as mechanics and catoptrics (i.e. fields of science and technology that use mathematical tools but are not essentially governed by mathematical principles), the epistemological and methodological differences between the systematist and heurist schools were retained.

The conclusion will show, first, that the systematist/heurist divide was fundamental and pervasive throughout the history of Greek works on mathematics and related disciplines, but that the divide was largely obscured by the activities of late antique scholars. Second, the conclusion will provide a brief sketch of how the combination of late antique transmission and modern reception of Greek mathematics have affected not only the perception of ancient mathematics (giving undue emphasis to systematist texts, despite evidence that the heurists were the larger school), but also the development of modern mathematical methods.

This dissertation is an epigraphic study of the Roman auxiliary units raised on the Iberian Peninsula based on a corpus of over 750 inscriptions. It presents the literary and epigraphic evidence for late Republican allied and auxiliary forces and for the structure of imperial auxiliary units. It then examines the recruiting practices of the auxilia, the settlement of veterans, and the evidence for the personal relationships of the soldiers enlisted in these units as they are recorded in the epigraphic record, including inscriptions on stone and military diplomas.

The evidence presented here reveals that recruitment from the units' home territories persisted throughout the Julio-Claudian period and coexisted with local, provincial and regional recruitment into the Flavian period. The findspots of inscriptions and diplomas related to veterans of these units indicate that only about half of these veterans remained within military communities after their discharge, while many retired to civilian communities, some of which were also the soldiers' places of birth. Finally, the evidence for personal relationships of men enrolled in these units demonstrates the relative importance of relationships between soldiers in the first century and the decline of recorded inter-soldier relationships in the second and third centuries, while evidence for relationships between soldiers and civilians is more frequent after the first century. These arguments lead to the conclusion that, throughout their service, individual soldiers were influenced by members of their home communities, fellow soldiers, and the native populations among which they served in varying degrees and that these soldiers had corresponding influence upon those communities.

The dissertation surveys marginal annotations (marginalia) in fifty-nine of the earliest manuscripts to contain books in the so-called Septuagint (i.e. ancient Greek translations of books in the Hebrew Bible). The dates of the manuscripts surveyed range from roughly the second century BC to the third century AD. Most of the manuscripts are presently mere scraps of papyrus codices, fewer are scraps of papyrus bookrolls, and still fewer are scraps of parchment codices and bookrolls. Most of the manuscripts were recovered from various rural locations in Egypt and a few come from Palestine. On my count, the manuscripts contain a combined total of 230 marginalia. Some of the marginalia, like the texts they encircle, are written in ancient Greek, while the majority are written in Coptic. As I demonstrate throughout the project, the purpose of the marginalia is only clarified once situated within the scribal contexts of the manuscripts themselves and within the larger context of (late) ancient “grammar” (grammatike).In Chapters 1 and 2, I summarize the manuscript evidence and establish reliable data concerning the manuscripts’ codicology or voluminology, writing, date, and paratextual features as well as discuss patterns in the type, frequency, and distribution of the marginalia. Transcriptions, critical notes, and English translations of the marginalia are provided in a large catalog at the dissertation’s end. Until now, these marginalia have never been studied collectively or systematically and many are here presented for the first time (modern editors of the manuscripts tend to neglect or outright ignore paratextual features in the manuscripts). Chapters 3 and 4 are each devoted to studying the marginalia in a single manuscript. In this case-study approach, I situate the marginalia within their larger social, scribal, and codicological frameworks. Collectively, these frameworks illuminate the marginalia’s function as well as the reading habits and interests of their writers.

This dissertation answers the question, “How were scribes in the ancient world trained?” The following social history elevates the marginalized voices of ancient scribes, emphasizing their personhood and their agency as human individuals. Chapter 1 establishes the scope of the thesis along with the evidence used and the methodologies employed to approach this evidence. Chapter 2 examines the social backgrounds of ancient Mediterranean scribes, using documentary archives, apprenticeship contracts, and funerary inscriptions to glimpse into their lives and their training. Chapter 3 draws from papyrological evidence to reconstruct the “curriculum” scribes used to develop professional scripts for copying books and writing documents. Chapter 4 details how scribes mastered scribal tools and techniques, balancing ancient archaeological evidence alongside the specialized artisan knowledge preserved by well-attested scribal traditions. This synthesis of evidence focuses on the lived experiences of the creators of our physical texts, thereby uncovering previously unexplored realities about how these texts were written and read.

According to the Syriac Acts of the Persian Martyrs, the Sasanian king Shapur II began persecuting Christians in Persia soon after Constantine's death in 337 CE. Previous studies of the Acts (and related material) set Shapur's persecution within the context of Constantine's support for Christianity in the Roman Empire. Religious allegiances are said to have been further amplified during the Roman-Persian war over Rome's Mesopotamian provinces that followed Constantine's death. According to most interpretations, by the mid-fourth century Christianitas had become coextensive with Romanitas: Persian Christians were persecuted because they worshipped Caesar's god and, thereby, allied themselves with Rome.

By contrast, this dissertation reconsiders Christian historical narratives, the rhetorical and identity-shaping nature of the martyrological genre, and assumptions about the clear divisions of religious groups in late antiquity. Although the notion of Christianity as a "Roman" religion can be found in some of the historiography of persecution in Persia, our knowledge about Christians in fourth-century Persia is a harmonized event history woven from a tapestry of vague and conflicting sources that often exhibit later religious, political, and hagiographical agendas.

To demonstrate how Shapur's persecution came to be interpreted as the result of religious changes within the Roman Empire, the dissertation first reconsiders how Constantine is imagined as a patron of the Christians of Persia in Syriac and Greek sources. The second part looks at the ways by which constructed imperial ideals territorialized "religion" in the post-Constantinian era. Finally, the third part presents the first English translations of the Martyrdom and History of Simeon bar Sabba'e, a fourth-century Persian bishop whose martyr acts are central to the historiography of the period.

The Etruscan-Roman city of Vulci is one of many Etruscan cities which lacks a detailed and holistic understanding of its urban development. Vulci represents a rare site that was not covered by modern structures and thus presents a unique opportunity for a city-scale examination of the transformation of urban space over a millennium of occupation. In order to address this query while most of the site is still unexcavated, an innovative method was created for this project. This ‘n’-dimensional approach layers a series of geospatial and historical data, largely relying on new, non-invasive remote sensing surveys. The main sensors and data sets include a series of older aerial photographs (1954, 1975, 1986), a geological and landscape survey from 2014, multi-spectral aerial images from surveys between 2015 and 2017 ranging from normal-colored to red edge to near infrared bands, and two ground penetrating radar (GPR) surveys from 2015 and 2018. The analyses and interpretations from this multi-modal method builds a more holistic and nuanced understanding of the urbanization and transformation of Vulci. Conclusions from spatial analysis suggest a relative order for the development of the Etruscan-Roman street-grid, offering a new framework for the contextualization of other urban features. Further, evidence points to the northeast area with its unique structure orientation and connection to Northeastern Acropolis as the first settled space on the plateau during the 8th century BCE after shifting away from the Villanovan era settlement on La Pozzatella. Analysis also indicates numerous new features, including multiple public buildings in the Western Forum with major phases of transformation first in the 6th-5th century BCE while under Etruscan control and then again during the early Imperial period while under Roman control. Other features include a ‘basilica’-like/Augusteum structure, at least one additional temple, several administrative buildings, and multiple residential structures with atriums and impluviums. The urban development of Vulci implies a revitalization of the city and re-emergence of power during the Roman Imperial period, contradicting the previous notion that Vulci slowly but steadily declined post-conquest. These conclusions situate Vulci in a new place in not only in Etruscan urbanization but also in period the cultural transformation during Rome’s expansion into Etruria. Furthermore, the success of the multi-perspective, layered approach allows for its use in other studies as well as further refinement and advancement of the methodology.