Browsing by Subject "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

Many psychologists and philosophers hold that anger is a completely normal and often healthy human emotion. This position perhaps traces back to Aristotle, who argued that anger is morally good when it is moderated, such as towards the right people, to the right degree, and for the right reasons. Even though Aristotle’s position has widespread acceptance, this view of anger is challenged by the philosophical traditions of Stoicism and Buddhism. Despite starting from disparate premises, both conclude that anger is impermissible and ought to be eliminated, a position called anger eliminativism. Even so, there has been little critical engagement with their respective arguments as bona fide philosophical positions, worthy of consideration in their own right. This dissertation hopes to help remedy that lack. To do so, it offers a philosophical exploration of Stoic and Buddhist arguments. It contrasts and critically evaluates the views of Stoicism and Buddhism, evaluates the Buddhist metaphysical reasoning about anger, responds to existing interpretations of Stoic anger eliminativism, and presents Stoic objections to arguments from the Confucian tradition that anger is at least sometimes the morally virtuous response to perceived wrongdoing.

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 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.

This dissertation considers the role of the critic in democratic political culture by engaging Socrates. Since Socrates so often stands as an exemplar for many different styles of critical activity, both in political rhetoric and in popular culture, I address the roots of these many figures of Socrates by examining the multiple aspects of Socrates as they appear in Plato's dialogues. Starting from the different metaphors that Socrates uses to describe himself - the stingray, the master of erotics, the midwife, the practitioner of the true political art, and the gadfly - I parse these different strands of Socrates' character and assess their coherence. While each of these descriptions captures a different angle of Socrates' activity vis-à-vis Athenian democracy, I argue that together they also hold one essential aspect in common: Socrates' strange relationship to Athens as both connected and disconnected, immanent in his criticism and yet radically so. As strange both in the context of Athens and in relation to his interpreters, I further advance that the figure of Socrates suggests a kind of political activity committed to disturbance and displacement while also working across, with, and against conventional boundaries and languages. Moreover, I maintain that the Socrates suggests new forms of critical associations that take up his practice of philosophy in democratic culture today.

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.

“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.

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.

In an era of ecological upheaval that has led some scientists to declare that human activity has inaugurated a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene, the apocalyptic theology of the Apostle Paul speaks a timely word of ethical and practical import. In his letter to the Roman Christians, Paul calls for a conversion of behavior that resonates with and lends theological substantiation to the urgent calls of ecologists, climatologists, and others concerned for the wellbeing of the entire ecosphere. With a fundamental belief in the God who creates, sustains, and resurrects life, Paul's message in Romans 8:19-22 urges Christians to align their lives with the liberation that God intends for creation and that Jesus Christ has inaugurated through his life, death, and resurrection.

This dissertation examines Rom 8:19-22 in its literary, theological, imperial, and ecological contexts in order to illuminate the implications of Paul's thought for contemporary Christian living. Laying a biblical and theological foundation, the first chapter delineates the ways in which Old Testament texts assume a "relational pyramid" in which Israel, the nations, and nonhuman creation relate with one another and with God in ways that affect the wellbeing of all. In this vision, the conditions and destinies of human and nonhuman members of creation interdepend. Presupposing such a view of the world, Paul indicates throughout Romans, and especially in Rom 8:19-22, that creation's slavery to destruction results from human sin and that its liberation depends upon God's liberation and glorification of humanity, an argument developed in my second chapter. While this interpretation parallels common understandings of Rom 8:19-22, the frequently muted voice of creation is magnified when we recognize that the nonhuman creation too acts as subject, aligning itself with God's purposes, expectantly awaiting the resurrection of humanity, and collectively groaning and laboring towards that resurrection, the apocalypse of the "sons of God." Chapter three turns to relevant features of ancient Rome's religious, political, and agricultural traditions. Like Paul, the Roman imperial mythos maintained that human activity affected the health of creation. Yet, in contrast to Paul, it declared that Augustus, the divinely favored son of god, had established an age of peace and had brought fertility and abundance to the natural world. This "Golden Age" depended upon military power and the exploitation of conquered people and land, as an investigation of the Roman grain trade reveals. By placing Roman rhetoric and practice in conversation with Paul, chapter four demonstrates how Paul's vision of liberation subverts the Roman imperial mythos. The Epistle to the Romans insists that the empire's practices are among those that enslave creation to destruction and that the fulfillment of God's liberation will be established by Jesus Christ, the true Son of God, who will share his inheritance with his siblings, the children of God from all nations. In accord with their allegiance to Christ, his followers should live in ways that honor their relationships with human neighbors and also alleviate the destruction of creation, promote the flourishing of life and biodiversity, contribute to the wellbeing of creation's vulnerable members, and render thanksgiving to God. Exhibiting Paul's practical theology of creation and its powerful political bite, the fifth chapter examines and criticizes American industrial agriculture, particularly the growing of wheat in the Great Plains. In ways that parallel the Roman imperial myth, modern agriculture presents itself as liberating the world from famine through industrial power even as it masks the ways in which it binds creation to destruction. Inspired by the message of Romans, however, Christians find themselves called to unveil the powers of oppression and nurture sustainable communities of liberty, peace, and flourishing in harmony with creation. They may begin to do this by supporting local, organic, and perennial forms of agriculture with the hope that farmers may rely less on fossil fuels, toxic chemicals, and expensive seeds. In so doing, humans presage the liberty and flourishing of the New Creation as they mitigate the epoch-shifting and life-destroying events of climate change and species extinction.

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 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.

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.

Sarcophagi belonging to Jewish patrons are an important source of evidence for reconstructing the variety of ways that ancient Jews interacted with visual culture in Late Antiquity. During this period, from the 2nd to 5th centuries C.E., the sarcophagus was the height of burial fashion across the Roman Mediterranean. Wealthy individuals across the late ancient world adopted sarcophagus burial not only to protect their bodily remains, but to visibly display and reinforce their social status, to demonstrate their cultural sophistication, and to memorialize and narrate their senses of self. In this regard, elite members of Jewish communities in Late Antiquity were no different (Chapter 2).

The following considers nearly 200 sarcophagi from the late ancient necropoleis of Jewish communities at Beth She'arim and Rome. This corpus captures the wide range of the possibilities open to Jewish patrons as they went about acquiring or commissioning a sarcophagus and sculptural program. The variety reflects not only the different geographic and cultural realities of diaspora and home, but also the immense diversity characteristic of the myriad visual and cultural resources of the Roman world. In order to make sense of this diversity, I contextualize the styles and motifs favored by Jewish patrons according to the cultural resources they engage, moving from local traditions of stone sculpture in Palestine (Chapter 3) to the influence of Roman portrait sculpture on Jewish patrons (Chapter 7).

I begin with local traditions of stone sculpture in Palestine in order to counter the dominant scholarly narrative that these sarcophagi primarily or even exclusively copy Roman models. I argue instead that many make extensive use of visual resources with a long history of use in Jewish contexts (Chapter 4). Moreover, the corpus of sarcophagi from Beth She'arim suggests that the preferences of sarcophagus patrons there were shaped by the provincial context of Roman Syria (Chapter 5). On the other hand, certain sarcophagi from both Beth She'arim and Rome reflect sarcophagus styles with pan-Mediterranean appeal (Chapter 6), and a small group of Jewish patrons in Rome even participated in the ‘portrait boom’ that began in the 3rd century by acquiring sarcophagi with portrait sculpture (Chapter 7).

The corpus of sarcophagi belonging to late ancient Jewish patrons demonstrates a significant degree of mastery of and willingness to engage the visual koine of the Roman world, as well as significant agency with respect to the adoption and appropriation of cultural resources. I argue that the majority of Jewish patrons at both Beth She'arim and Rome were familiar with ‘Roman’ visual culture first and foremost as it existed in their local environments and were comfortable with its usage. At the same time, I consider how different settings—diaspora and Roman provincial—could influence the choices made by sarcophagus patrons. I conclude that the use of sarcophagus burial by Jewish patrons was a highly variable mode of cultural interaction, representing an ongoing negotiation of Jewishness by different individuals from different communities in the context of enduring cultural (ex)change.

This dissertation addresses the problem of the concluding passage of Lucretius’ didactic poem De Rerum Natura, which famously consists of a vivid and evocative account of the Plague of Athens of 430 BCE that ends abruptly and without explanation, with no indication what lessons in Epicurean philosophy the reader is meant to learn from it. While many scholars have suggested a variety of explanations for this ending, this dissertation approaches the text from a narratological angle to examine Lucretius on the basis of first and second readings. This perspective, I conclude, offers two important insights. Foremost, it reveals that the poem’s abrupt ending recontextualizes the rest of the poem, where the content of its narrative reframes the reader’s understanding of earlier passages upon a second reading, confronting them with evidence of their past misconceptions. Further, a second reading of the poem with the context of the Plague offers the reader new insight into the nature of Epicurean communities and addresses the problems of proper attachment and detachment regarding the suffering of others in a hedonist system of philosophy. In short, while the first reader may conclude that Epicureanism is predicated on isolation and ignoring the suffering of others, the Plague reveals to the second reader that the opposite is true, and that Epicureanism is instead founded upon concern and care for the other members of one’s community. Over the course of this dissertation, I apply a close reading of the Plague to earlier sections of the poem, revealing how its content and context reshapes the lessons offered by Lucretius’ poem into something new. I ultimately conclude that the final lesson contained within the poem is in essence an evangelical call to action, where the newly converted reader concludes that he has an obligation to spread the gospel of Epicurus to his friends and family, becoming a teacher to others just as Lucretius has been a teacher to him.