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  • ItemEmbargo
    Objects for the Dead, Practices of the Living: Chamber tombs, burial assemblages, and social dynamics at Ialysos on Rhodes and in the islands of the south-east Aegean
    Sienkiewicz, Jan
    The late prehistory of the Dodecanese islands is known to us mostly through numerous chamber tomb sites dated between the 15th and 11th century BC (the Late Bronze Age III period). These sites, and, by extension, the people who used them, have long been considered as belonging to the so-called ‘Mycenaean culture’, which is said to have originated in, and spread from, the southern Greek mainland. Because of this cultural label, funerary behaviour attested in the Dodecanese has been viewed almost exclusively through reference to contemporary chamber tomb cemeteries of mainland Greece. As a result, idiosyncrasies and variability in mortuary practices within and between island communities have not received sufficient attention beyond the ‘Mycenaeanisation’ debate – beyond questions about migrations, acculturation, politics and ethnicity, which have defined studies of the chamber tomb phenomenon in the south-east Aegean. In this thesis I go back to the very foundations of ‘Mycenaean’ archaeology by re-examining the material from the first systematic excavations of a Late Bronze Age chamber tomb cemetery in the Aegean, Sir Alfred Biliotti’s exploration of Ialysos on Rhodes (1868-71). Combining this legacy data with evidence from subsequent investigations at Ialysos, on Rhodes, and on other islands, and employing a revised system of tomb dating, I construct the most comprehensive and chronologically refined account of mortuary practices in the Dodecanese offered to date. I do so in a bottom-up fashion, adopting an explicitly local perspective, and bringing more attention to differences and variation within and between sites, according to what I call here an ‘ethnographic’ agenda. My ‘ethnographic’ account allows us to better understand chamber tomb use, both in the Dodecanese and more generally, and serves to question one of the dominant narratives of Aegean prehistory. First, I demonstrate that chamber tombs cannot be linked to any specific burial custom, not least one of a defined point of origin. The representation of different social units through burial, the varied patterns of tomb use, as well as diverse modes of interaction with dead within burial chambers attest to the fact that this grave type did not promote a distinct ‘ideology’ or a specific socio-political organisation, as some scholars have suggested. Secondly, I argue that the deposition of the same objects in tombs may have served divergent ritual and social purposes. My analysis of tomb assemblages indicates that individual items were relationally combined to represent different activities and social roles, and to express often competing identities. As such, funerary deposition is structured not only by ritual concerns, but also by inter- and intra-community dynamics and changing cultural values, rather than constituting a single, normative practice or a passive reflection of the ethnicity of chamber-tomb-using groups. Thirdly, I show how the chamber tomb phenomenon in the Dodecanese can be explained in mostly local terms, as emulation of prominent groups residing in regionally important centres by more peripheral communities. The findings of my analysis are used to revisit the established view that chamber tomb use spread to the Dodecanese from mainland Greece. Similarities in burial practices and tomb construction between Ialysos and Knossos point towards Crete as the original source of influence, which fits with the picture of close links between this island and the Ialysos community documented for the earlier stages of the Late Bronze Age. By showing how networks of socio-cultural interaction, evidenced by similarities in mortuary practices, do not readily map onto networks of trade in ceramics, I argue that the predominance of pottery imported from the Greek mainland in chamber tombs of the Dodecanese may not be an index of cultural affiliation. This undermines the assumption about the primacy of the Greek mainland built into the label ‘Mycenaean’ and questions the validity of seeing archaeological cultures as reflecting any sort of cultural unity. Lastly, I offer a more complex and dynamic picture of culture change in the southern Aegean, one that shows a multi-directional flow of influences between individual communities occupying nodal positions in regional and inter-regional networks of interaction and exchange.
  • ItemEmbargo
    The Material Construction of Identity in Sparta and Lakonia (750–480 BCE)
    Martin, Daphne D
    This dissertation explores the construction of Spartan and Lakonian identity through material culture from 750–480 BCE. To resolve the lingering shadow of the mirage Spartiate, an image of Sparta constructed through a retrojection of later sources onto the Archaic period, I turn my attention in this thesis to the evidence that can be gleaned from the material world, with all its agency and affordances. As the modern city of Sparta is built on the ancient, our archaeological knowledge of political and domestic spaces, as well as burial practices, remains extremely limited. Spartan sanctuaries, by contrast, have been extensively excavated and enable us to explore how the ancient Spartans developed and maintained individual and group identity through objects made, worn, and dedicated at each site. Through an examination of key assemblages from major Spartan sanctuary sites, ranging from the exquisite ivories worn by young girls partaking in choral performance at the sanctuary of Artemis Ortheia, to the thousands of miniature aryballoi dedicated by boys at the sanctuary of Apollo at Amyklai during the Hyakinthia, to the iron spits re-enacting memories of heroic feasting offered at the shrine of Helen and Menelaos at Therapne, the material construction of Spartan identity comes to life in the context of community-wide religious celebrations that performed what it meant to be Spartan during the Archaic period. In addition to examining sanctuaries at Sparta, I move also beyond the bounds of Sparta, into the broader territory under its control: Lakonia. There, my dissertation takes as case-studies three perioikic sanctuary sites (the sanctuary of Apollo Hyperteleatas, the sanctuary at Aigies, and the sanctuary of Artemis Limnatis in Dentheliatis), bringing to light how their respective assemblages highlight the material differences that shape the construction of identity in these subaltern communities. Through a focus on materiality and object affordances, what emerges in the place of the mirage Spartiate is an Archaic Sparta and Lakonia where diverse identities, shaped through factors such as gender, status, and location, are negotiated through objects. Ultimately, the arguments advanced in this dissertation provide a more nuanced, dynamic picture of the myriad coexisting social groups that constituted Lakedaimonia from the eighth to the fifth centuries BCE.
  • ItemOpen Access
    Studies in the Linguistic Variation of Classical Attic and the Attic Orators
    Machado, Robert
    This thesis seeks to analyse several previously unexplored cases of morphosyntactic variation (the distribution of the two perfect stems of γίγνομαι; the dual; expressions of possession; the aorists ἤνεγκα/ἤνεγκον; complementiser selection in purpose clauses; complementiser usage with λέγω) in Attic from fifth to the fourth centuries BC and to explore the nature of this variation in oratory. It first analyses the distribution of these features in comedy to determine what the likely causes of variation were in the spoken language. These are then analysed in oratory (and, where possible, other texts) to determine how this genre reacted to these developments and whether the factors involved in variation were the same in this register as the factors in comedy and spoken Attic. It then examines how the register was constructed from the linguistic resources of the language and how orators pitched the register between the spoken language and the literary tradition.
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    Suetonius and the Politics of Private Life
    Koltermann, Jannis
    This thesis examines the role of the emperor’s ‘private life’ in Suetonius’ *Lives of the Caesars* against the backdrop of contemporary political discourse. Suetonius is (in)famous for writing more about an emperor’s love affairs, dining habits or pastimes than about speeches in the senate or military campaigns, a focus that has led many scholars to argue that he is ‘not interested in politics’ (Wallace-Hadrill). I aim to revise this judgement by showing how Suetonius’ interest in the emperor’s ‘private life’ reflects the structure of the principate and engages with the politics of his own time. My thesis consists of three chapters. The first analyses the role of private life in two (quasi )biographical texts that are near contemporaries to Suetonius’ *Caesars*, Tacitus’ *Agricola* and Pliny’s *Panegyricus*. By depicting Agricola’s private life as impeccable yet insignificant, Tacitus follows a historiographical and biographical tradition in which the private life of protagonists is eclipsed in favour of their public life (examples are Cato the Elder, Sallust and Nepos). Pliny’s *Panegyricus*, by contrast, gives ample space to matters such as family life or pastimes, stressing their political impact and importance as indicators of the emperor’s genuine character. Hence, these two texts represent two different models of dealing with private life in political literature, one pointing backwards to the Republic and one pointing forwards to the Empire. Suetonius, I suggest, follows Pliny’s model and applies it to imperial biography. The second chapter deals with Suetonius’ concept of ‘private life’. In a close reading of *Aug.* 61, the key passage in this context, I argue that Suetonius deliberately avoids using the term *privata vita* when introducing the emperor’s sex life, dining habits and so forth. This is in line with a broader terminological shift under the principate: due to the emperor’s eminently public position, *privatus* was increasingly seen as the opposite to *princeps*, and *privata vita* only ever used for the emperor’s life before or after his reign – the reigning emperor never had a ‘private life’. Employing the terms *interior ac familiaris vita* instead, Suetonius stresses that this is simply another sphere of the emperor’s activity, but one that is no less publicly and politically relevant than his life *in imperis ac magistratibus*. If we want to do justice to his concept in English, we would do better to drop the term ‘private life’ and speak of (e.g.) ‘unofficial life’ instead. The third chapter investigates what this concept means in practice and proposes a new reading of Suetonius’ depiction of unofficial life in a series of case studies. I argue that many of Suetonius’ ‘lurid’ anecdotes are designed to demonstrate the direct political impact of, for instance, Tiberius’ drinking bouts, Claudius’ domestic weakness and Caesar’s body care. They are also designed to reveal the emperor’s character, indicating it more reliably than his often deceptive or ambiguous official actions. Since this character shapes the emperor’s reign at large, anyone who sees the emperor in his unofficial life has a privileged understanding of his politics; and since authenticity and dissimulation were hot topics in the discourse of the post-Domitianic period, Suetonius’ literary technique also has political implications. In short, my thesis argues that Suetonius’ focus on the emperor’s ‘private life’ is not a rejection of politics and history, but an adaptation of political history to the circumstances of the principate.
  • ItemOpen Access
    Self-knowledge in Alcibiades I
    Wasmuth, Ellisif
    This dissertation explores the topic of self-knowledge as it is presented in *Alcibiades I*. Although self-knowledge is widely recognised as the unifying topic of the dialogue, it has proved difficult to derive one unified conception of self-knowledge from it. I argue that this is partly because the dialogue treats of three different conceptions of self-knowledge, without, however, making the shifts between them explicit. The first conception of self-knowledge, is the traditional Greek notion of knowing one’s limits and knowing one’s place. Socrates recasts this, through a lengthy exposition of Alcibiades’ ignorance, as knowing the limits of one’s knowledge, stressing that these limits also determine the bounds within which one should act. A second conception of self-knowledge underlies the *Alcibiades*’ discussion of statesmanship and the statesman’s need for self-knowledge. I argue that the self-knowledge required of the statesman is a craft-like knowledge of what a human being is. In so far as it also includes knowing what a *good* human being is, this kind of self-knowledge turns out to be substantial, covering knowledge of justice and virtue as well. However, neither of these conceptions of self-knowledge make sense of self-knowledge as it is presented in the analogy drawn towards the end of the dialogue, between a self-seeing eye and a self-knowing soul. Here self-knowledge emerges both as an ideal to strive towards and as knowledge of the particular knower herself. I argue that we should understand the eye analogy as illustrating the *Alcibiades*’ core conception of self-knowledge, namely self-knowledge as mirroring. I further argue that although dialogue provides the paradigm case of self-mirroring, the soul can in fact mirror itself in the whole sphere of its practical life. Moreover, the two earlier conceptions of self-knowledge serve as necessary conditions for knowing oneself most fully (*malista*), i.e. knowing oneself as someone whose practical life is in full accordance with wisdom.
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    Play in the Roman imagination
    Kreutel, Robin
    This thesis traces a discourse of play in the Roman republic from Plautus’ *palliata* comedies via Lucilius’ satires to Cicero’s philosophical dialogue *De oratore*. Methodologically, it combines philological close reading with historical analysis to interpret the function of appeals to play in the context of the political culture of the Roman republic with its distinctly Roman set of values and beliefs. Due to the more complex semantics of lexemes for play in the Latin language than in English (*ludus* also means e.g., ‘school’, ‘public festival’, ‘trick’), the study will move beyond the associations that the English concept ‘play’ suggests. The thesis argues that ‘play’ is a fundamental notion for Plautus’ self-fashioning as a new social type: a writer of comic fiction in Rome’s budding literary culture. His exploitation of the multiple meanings of *ludus* influence Lucilius, another innovator in Roman culture as he transfers Plautus’ socially inferior modes of play into the milieu of aristocratic leisure. Cicero, finally, draws on both earlier writers and uses ‘play’ to construct a tradition of Greek philosophy in the Roman past as well as to style himself as the teacher of a renewed upper class in his own imaginary school. Play is a concept that is at odds with the core tenets of the aristocratic value system in Rome and because of its purported marginality has been an underappreciated aspect of important texts across a variety of genres that we possess from the Roman republic.
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    A Commentary on Plautus' Mostellaria with an Introduction
    Gibbs, Orlando
    A full-scale commentary on the *Mostellaria* in English remains a desideratum (Stürner 2020: 147; he does not mention Mantzilas 2014, in modern Greek). Of 20th-century commentaries, Sonnenschein 19072 predates Fraenkel’s *Plautinisches im Plautus*; the scope of Merrill 20022 is limited by the targeted readership of early readers of Plautus; Terzaghi 1929 and Collart 1970 offer much of interest but predate recent research into metre, metatheatre and slavery. In the 21st century, Mantzilas usefully summarises scholarship but many of his ideas are underdeveloped and the level of detail in his notes varies considerably. Biddau is preparing an edition and commentary in Italian, and his 2021 article of textual emendations is stimulating, but there are numerous places in the text in which a *communis opinio* has not been reached. After an Introduction in which I investigate, albeit not comprehensively, important issues facing a Plautine scholar reading *Mostellaria* (Section I), there are two sections of commentary. My notes strive to mimic the practice of the Cambridge Classical Texts and Commentaries Series (“Orange”), and summarise prevailing opinion, investigate themes hitherto underdeveloped in certain lines, and outline points of dramaturgical, historical, linguistic, or textual interest (including allusions, parallels, and adjudications of textual disputes, or emendations of my own). I have aimed to strike a balance between detailed textual analysis and evaluation of broader themes. Unless otherwise specified, my lemmata use the text of de Melo 2011d as the modern Vulgate. Section II offers notes on the first scene, to give readers an idea of what my commentary would look like. A difficulty of a commentary for a doctoral thesis is the word count: I cannot cover the whole play line-by-line, which leads to salient issues not receiving treatment. In Section III, therefore, I cover material from every scene, with introductory notes on each scene to give readers a sense of my stance on broader features of interest. While I have drafted notes for the whole play with a publishable commentary in mind, Section III offers notes on lines in which I feel I contribute the most value. I comment on the following passages:
    I.2: 84-92, 120-31, 146-54
    I.3: 200-26
    I.4: 313-28
    II.1: 348-58, 384-8, 419-30
    II.2: 431-6, 476-81, 489-504
    III.1: 532-6, 603-14, 639-45, 663-72
    III.2: 690-703, 724-32, 760-70, 775-85, 817-30
    IV.1+2: 870-91
    IV.3: 904-8, 921-6
    IV.4: 983-92
    IV.5: 1033-40
    V.1: 1041-50, 1100-15
    V.2: 1149-55, 1178-81
  • ItemEmbargo
    Beyond the Classical Landscape: Representing Greece and Anatolia in British Illustrated Books, 1832-1882
    Marshall, Sebastian
    Between the establishment of the Kingdom of Greece in 1832 and the expansion of tourist travel in the eastern Mediterranean during the 1880s, illustrated books were one of the foremost means for people in Britain to see and conceive the landscapes of Greece and Anatolia. Working to nuance the idea that British audiences regarded these locations exclusively through the lens of idealised antiquity, this project examines different strategies for mediating place in books illustrated with lithographs and wood and steel engravings, and the sketches and watercolours created to produce them. On the one hand, this means asking what was distinctive about different Greek and Anatolian landscapes for British travellers, paying attention to agroecology, physical geography, archaeology, the built environment, and the lives of the people of Greece and the Ottoman Empire. On the other, it merits considering how images of landscapes were created by artists and draughtsmen and disseminated and viewed in the thriving market for illustrated books that flourished in Victorian Britain. Underpinned by the conviction that any attempt to apprehend the Mediterranean past is mediated by perceptions of the present, I argue that Victorian illustrated books have had a longstanding impact on ways of looking at ‘ancient landscapes’ beyond the nineteenth century.
  • ItemControlled Access
    Nulla umquam obmutescet vetustas: Hyperbaton in Cicero's oratory
    Vendel, Agnes
    This thesis treats the topic of hyperbaton, or discontinuous noun phrases, and its use in Cicero’s oratory. It considers the totality of all instances of this linguistic phenomenon – over 2,200 cases – in twenty-one of the orator’s speeches, and thus constitutes the first full-scale, systematic study on the topic. Through careful mapping of the syntactic and semantic features of these instances, as well as of continuous noun phrases that form a basis for comparison, it aims to define the recurring features of this complex construction, and provide some indications as to when it is used. Chapter 1 provides an introduction to some of the issues surrounding hyperbaton, and questions raised by previous scholarship. This includes the definition of ‘discontinuous noun phrase’, potentially useful theoretical frameworks for understanding this aspect of Latin word order, and some considerations regarding the selection of data and the methods for analysing them. This chapter also introduces my corpus, and a description of how I approached the material. In Chapter 2, I look at instances of hyperbaton where the intervening word is a preposition, of the type *summa cum laude*. While previous scholarship has sometimes argued that this word order is unremarkable, I show that the 316 instances in my data allow to determine rather clear criteria for when it is used and when it is not. The word order only occurs with a handful of monosyllabic prepositions. Furthermore, one subtype is characterised by the combination of a determiner and a generic or anaphoric noun. Other cases occur with other types of modifiers, and these seem to be restricted to certain semantic categories, such as adjectives of quantity and size, and to those that are contrasted with another element. Chapter 3 examines 375 cases where the word that separates the two parts of the noun phrase is a personal or demonstrative pronoun. In nearly all the instances, the pronoun appears in the second position of the clause. Previous scholarship has suggested that this placement depends on prosodic factors, and that the pronouns behave like enclitics. I address this question with regard to the instances in my corpus, and argue that while there are some indications in that direction, in particular similarities with instances treated in Chapter 2, there are also a number of cases where such an analysis is improbable for various reasons. In Chapter 4, I propose to group several morpho-syntactic classes of interveners that all perform an adverbial (in a broad sense) function in the clause. I maintain that there is a kind of sliding scale of connectedness with the noun phrase within which these words appear, where some should be analysed as part of that noun phrase whereas others are clearly external. Even the latter group, however, usually stand in a semantic or pragmatic relationship with part of the discontinuous noun phrase, and their placement can thus be understood according to a gradual, logical construction of meaning in the clause. Chapter 5 groups instances of hyperbaton where the intervening word is a mandatory constituent of the clause: these constitute several different categories, and the data discussed in this chapter are therefore heterogeneous. A first section treats intervening pronouns such as quisque and similar, which show a relationship with part of the split noun phrase that is very similar to the instances discussed in the preceding chapter. Similarly, a semantic or pragmatic relationship can very often be supposed when the intervening word is an adjective that functions as attribute to a mandatory constituent of the clause. Moreover, the chapter includes a short section on predicative adjectives appearing within noun phrases, before turning to the largest portion of the data treated in this chapter, which consists of mandatory nouns that split other mandatory arguments. The last section treats cases where a noun, participle, or adjective splits its own complement. Some of the instances can be analysed in a similar way to the data in the preceding chapter, while others are more akin to cases of ‘verbal hyperbaton’, which is the object of Chapter 6. ‘Verbal hyperbaton’ has been proposed to form a separate category of hyperbaton in previous scholarship. In this chapter, I evaluate some of the claims made, comparing this data to that of the entire corpus. I maintain that instances of verbal hyperbaton, except for some specific patterns, are not particularly different from the categories of hyperbaton discussed in the other chapters. Instead, verbal hyperbaton can largely be explained through consideration of the same factors that are significant for the occurrence of hyperbaton at large. I also discuss the potential influence of prose rhythm and other artistic factors. Chapter 7, lastly, treats cases of hyperbaton where multiple constituents appear within the discontinuous noun phrase: I call these instances ‘long-distance hyperbaton’. These complex constructions display many of the features revealed in the preceding chapters, and it is likely that the longer separations are merely the result of a combinations of such factors. An alternative and potentially complementary view is that long separations can be exploited to manage the audience’s expectations, an idea that I evaluate in relation to my data.
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    Totalising Rhetoric in Late Antique Greek Poetry
    Praticò, Domenico
    The question at the core of my thesis is how to holistically make sense of the colossal corpus defined by classical scholars as ‘Late Antique Greek poetry’. The phrase refers to the work of (primarily Christian) poets from the Greek-speaking Eastern Roman/Byzantine Empire roughly between 4th-7th c. AD, at the critical juncture between the Classical Era and the Middle Ages. This poetic corpus – which has long lived at the edges of the (traditionally more ‘classical’) discipline of Classics – has recently become the subject of great interest in classical scholarship. Yet it is peppered with puzzles and questions, so far partially answered by studies of style, intertextuality, Homeric reception, the ‘Nonnian’ school, anti-Julian ‘literary’ reactions, et alia. What do Late Antique Greek poems (primarily epic) have in common? Through what terminology, patterns, categories can we describe the field as a whole? Why do Christian authors write poetry? Why do they agree to write poetry by paradoxically using the poetic forms and language traditionally used by antiquity’s earlier ‘pagan’ authors? This thesis tries to answer these questions by reading the whole corpus through the lens of ‘totalising rhetoric’. Poems or specific poetic passages ‘totalise’ when they seek (more or less directly) to represent the world (i.e., the Earth, Universe, Nature, or ‘existence’) in its totality, whether on the temporal (e.g., historical), spatial (e.g., geographical, astronomical), or conceptual (e.g., a description of the world as the stage of the fight between Good and Evil) axis. I argue that Late Antique Greek poets frequently write rhetorically totalising poems or poetic passages to subordinate the ‘world’ to dominant ideologies, particularly imperial (i.e., the Eastern Roman/Byzantine Empire’s) and Christian. The key difference from earlier poetic totalising rhetoric (and therefore what defines the Late Antique corpus) is this vertical plane (symbolically leading to God or the Byzantine Emperor) along which everything in the world is supposed to be ‘interconnected’ (a notion rooted in Neoplatonic philosophy). The choice of writing through the ‘pagan’ poetic form par excellence, the (hexametric) epic genre, is motivated by its capacity to express important ideological statements and, crucially, an all- embracing, totalising content.
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    Curating the Dead: Bodies and Matter in Early Mycenaean Burials
    Phillips, Rachel
    This thesis examines the relations between bodies and objects in early Mycenaean burials, between 1700 and 1400 BCE on mainland Greece. It adopts an artistic approach to these burials, which treats the burial context as an intentional representation, centred around the creative actions of selection and deposition. It combines these ideas with theories about aesthetics, as the perception and evaluation of material properties on the part of the viewer. It therefore focuses on the visual impressions created in the deposition, and the ways that these impressions structured past experiences and interpretations of the burial. It asks how death was transformed into visual experience: what shaped and directed the viewer’s perception of the tomb context? How can we access the intended impact of these burials based on the selection of specific visual and material properties? In asking these questions, this thesis aims to address the limitations of current approaches to Mycenaean burials. It moves beyond questions about social and cultural hierarchies to think about burials as mediators of ritual, emotion, and narrative. Rather than focus on the socioeconomic functions of these burials or their relations with Minoan Crete, this thesis uses five case studies to show that early Mycenaean burials were intended to transform human bodies into representations, to grant the dead a status more akin to an artwork. In doing so, it reframes these contexts as complex processes of image-making and story-telling, centred around the figure of the deceased. It first examines the manipulation of human bodies within early Mycenaean tombs, with a focus on the Vayenas tomb at Pylos and Tholos 2 at Routsi, two well-preserved and well-documented burial contexts in Messenia. It then looks at the materialisation of the body through the examination of two burial contexts in the Argolid, Shaft Grave IV in Grave Circle A at Mycenae and the Kazarma tholos. Next, it examines the narrativisation of the dead, with the Vapheio tholos in Laconia as its primary case study. The final chapter unites these different themes and contexts, to connect the twin strands of bodies and objects around an artistic approach. Ultimately, this thesis aims to reintroduce art and aesthetics as useful analytical tools for archaeological research. It offers new perspectives on the role of visual culture in burial and thus shows that there is much to be learned from the re-examination of old data with new approaches.
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    Constructing the Coast in Imperial Greek Periplography
    Hanigan, Daniel
    This thesis undertakes the first serious study of the extant corpus of imperial Greek periplographic literature. It focusses, in particular, on the way that these texts construct coastal space, arguing that they are bound together by a shared recognition of the shore as a symbol of the territorial limitation of the Roman Empire. The thesis opens with an introduction surveying the history of scholarship and proposing a novel, *processual* approach to reading periplographic texts that foregrounds their common approach to the textual construction of the seacoast. Chapter One ("Memory") focusses on Dionysius of Byzantium's *Anaplous of the Bosporus*. It argues that Dionysius engages in a form of local resistance to global empire by figuring the symmetrical shores of the Thracian Bosporus as material archives that preserve fragments of the contested pre-Roman history of the region. Chapter Two ("Boundary") turns to the anonymous *Periplous of Hanno King of Carthage*. It shows that this text holds up a quasi-historical mirror to the expansionist imperialism of Rome by offering a fictive vision the shore as both a boundary preventing the city-founding Carthaginians from carrying out their colonial commission and a guideline dictating the progression of the fleet away from the civilised world of the Mediterranean and into what it constructs as the alien alterity of Africa. Chapter Three ("Archive") closes by looking at Arrian of Nicomedia's *Periplous of the Euxine Sea*. It shows that Arrian, in this gubernatorial dispatch to the emperor Hadrian, frames the coastline of the Black Sea as a space of unrealised opportunity upon which to stage the future consolidation and expansion of the intellectual and territorial dominance of Rome. The thesis closes with a conclusion that situates these presentations of the coast within a framework of Greek resistance to the rhetoric of universal domination central to the self-presentation of the Roman Empire. It ends by suggesting a number of conceptual and methodological directions for future research on both the periplographic genre and the ancient coastal imaginary.
  • ItemOpen Access
    Thinking about Acting: The use of causal knowledge for the sake of intentional action in Heraclitus, Hippocratic On Regimen and Democritus
    Audra, Zoë
    In my thesis, I explore the role of knowledge in intentional action within the scope of early Greek philosophy and medicine. I investigate how knowledge influences both the intention behind an action and its successful delivery. Specifically, I look at the works of authors who discuss a particular type of knowledge that I refer to as 'knowledge of causes', a knowledge which offers explanation in terms of causes. I am particularly interested in understanding how a knowledge of causes which is holistic, general, and separable from action, is employed to justify or inform intentional actions. My research draws from various sources, including Heraclitus, who presents an implicit theory of action in his account of '*logos*'. This theory proposes a framework in which the success of decision-making including ethical and political decision-making hinges upon a comprehensive grasp of *logos*. The stronger a grasp of *logos* the more unified larger decision-making bodies become, the firmer a plan may be grounded in an understanding of contextualising information, and the more control an agent will have over the delivery of their plan. Additionally, I examine the Hippocratic treatise *On Regimen*, who presents a holistic knowledge of causes represented by a reductive physical explanation in terms of the powers of fire and water. This framework supports medical decision-making by providing a comprehensive understanding of both bodily and cosmic systems in causal terms. Furthermore, it recognises the significance of dream diagnosis as a reliable source of information about patients, thereby enhancing its explanatory potential. Finally, I delve into the perspectives of Democritus, for whom holistic knowledge of causes serves as fundamental ethical principles expressed through guiding maxims for ethical decision-making. Agents must grasp the underlying fundamental ethical principles within these maxims to effectively apply them to their own circumstances. Failure to do so results in blindness towards the right information required for action, the wrong desires and ultimately, unsuccessful ethical action.
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    Encounters with Londinium: Nineteenth-Century Responses to London’s Roman Past
    Wardle, Sophie
    In the nineteenth century, vast civic construction projects transformed London into a visibly modern capital. But as construction workers dug the foundations for London’s future, they also discovered its Roman past. In their trenches, these accidental archaeologists unearthed fine tessellated pavements and worn-out leather shoes. This thesis explores how these archaeological remains infiltrated the lives of Londoners, playing a part in shaping ideas, identities, and livelihoods in a shifting modern city. Based on new archival research and neglected popular and antiquarian publications, it reveals how Londinium became embedded in contemporary London in four important ways: as a reference point for understanding life during a period of rapid and alienating change; as a productive comparison when responding to emerging social and cultural debates; as a tool in (re)negotiating identity on both a civic and a personal scale; and, as an intellectual and material commodity to be traded in by some of London’s poorest citizens. By investigating a wide range of responses to Londinium—including interpreting, collecting, selling, displaying, reproducing, and even faking its remains—my work reveals how encounters with London’s Roman past helped to make its Victorian present. Contemporary responses to the well-known Bucklersbury Mosaic—discovered in the very heart of the city in 1869—provide the frame for this wider investigation. Along the way we will discover the mosaic’s role in securing a new civic museum for the capital; meet a stonemason turned civic dignitary who built his monumental new home around a replica of this ancient pavement; and uncover in the city’s trenches a brisk trade both in archaeological information and in pieces of fake Londinium.
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    The Enemy Within: Combatants, Commanders, and Comparative Models in Julio-Claudian Recollections of Late Republican Civil War
    Slingsby, Elisabeth
    This thesis analyses parallels between the civil wars of late Republican Rome and episodes about non-Roman historical figures, which were drawn in Latin, and occasionally in Greek, literature composed throughout the Julio-Claudian period. I argue that these parallels provided a key apparatus through which writers active in the century between Augustus' consolidation of power in 27BC and the resumption of civil conflict in 69AD after the death of Nero conceptualised, constructed, and communicated the contentious history of Roman-on-Roman violence. In the last two decades, there has been a renewed scholarly interest in the ways in which armed hostilities between members of the same community have been remembered and retold. From conflicts labelled *bellum civile* and *stasis* in the ancient Mediterranean, to their reception in the modern day, research in this area has repeatedly demonstrated that there was an endeavour to come to terms with lingering memories of brutality, division, and adversity at all societal levels, long after the swords of civil war were sheathed. With respect to the recollection of civil war between Romans, illuminating research has been undertaken on several key periods of Roman history, including the final decades of the Republic, under the Flavians and the Tetrarchs, and in Late Antiquity. However, there is no comparable study of civil war memory under the Julio-Claudians. Rather, scholarship in this area has tended to focus on the representation of late Republican civil war in the literature and visual culture produced under Augustus, and in Lucan's Neronian epic *De Bello Civili*. In this thesis, I use methodology drawn from another burgeoning area of research, ancient exemplarity, to examine the portrayal of late Republican civil war across the Julio-Claudian period. I contend that the frequency with which Julio-Claudian writers drew parallels between civil war Rome and individuals from the non-Roman past, who had previously been depicted in Greek and Roman historiography, is testament to a shared outlook on how memories of the late Republican civil wars should be expressed. Furthermore, the remarkable consistency between these parallels, regardless of whether a writer was looking back on civil war from the perspective of a survivor or after almost a century of peace, attests to a common understanding of which aspects of civil warfare should be remembered. Yet, those writing under the Julio-Claudians did not seek to understand late Republican civil war as a single entity. Through a series of case studies on parallels which treat the Triumviral, the Caesarian and the Sullan civil wars, I demonstrate that each of these three major conflicts had its own distinct legacy. By comparing deeds undertaken in the midst of each conflict with those of non-Romans in other contexts, Julio-Claudian writers grappled with challenging and often confronting memories of civil war, from its all but forgotten victims, to its most famous generals. Overall, I argue that the Julio-Claudian period constituted a critical juncture in the reception of the late Republican civil wars. Although Rome no longer cowered under swords wielded by enemies from within, Roman-on-Roman violence cast a long shadow. In the endeavour to impose order on the chaos of the past, writers with vastly different frames of reference and intended audiences used parallels to paint a remarkably uniform portrait of each major late Republican civil war. Yet, when civil conflict returned to Rome once again in 69AD, many of the comparative models used under the Julio-Claudians were supplemented, even superseded, as a more recent civil war eclipsed the brutality and betrayal of the late Republic. This thesis aims to cast light back onto the writers active during the Julio-Claudian period, their memories of combatants and commanders, and above all their endeavour to come to terms with the horrors of Roman civil war through comparison with events quite literally foreign to it.
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    Lucretius and the Problem of Attention
    Lentricchia, Maeve
    Book 4 of Lucretius’ de rerum natura (DRN) contains the most complete Epicurean account of perception and thought to survive from antiquity. In the course of the book’s detailed discussion of psychology, Lucretius responds to a variety of philosophical challenges to his physiological account: the nature of the relation between external objects and perception, the cause of mental visions, the difference between wakefulness and sleep, and the selectivity of attention. For this last topic he outlines a complex physiological process whereby either the mind or a sense organ (1) voluntarily, or actively, selects an image, or (2) involuntarily, or passively, is absorbed in a particular train of images. Lucretius’ account of attention (marked by expressions such as ‘se parare et contendere’), its varieties and their effects, is the subject of this dissertation. My primary aim is to extract from the DRN a framework for understanding how and under what circumstances attention structures various types of intellectual and perceptual experience. The ‘how’ pertains to the physiological mechanism of attention. I show that Lucretius has at his disposal sufficient resources to account for the selectivity of attention entirely in terms of physical contact. The ‘under what circumstances’ turns on the distinction between voluntary and involuntary attention, a distinction which, I argue, Lucretius applies to both intellectual and perceptual attention. Not only does this distinction, hitherto unnoticed in the literature, unify Lucretius’ treatment of attention in Book 4 (4.794-817), it also illuminates a major philosophical problem for materialist psychology by explaining the manner in which intentional states (e.g., desire) that originate in the mind, motivate and guide the activities of the sense organs. Accounting for such a process puts a strain on the already limited resources of ancient atomism. To make matters even more difficult, any solution offered by an interpreter must be consistent with the demands of Epicurean epistemology. On this point, the question concerns the epistemic status of attention. Can the mind, by way of its desires, have a role in shaping the content of perceptual experience without impugning the claim that perceptions are veridical? I argue that Lucretius has sufficient resources in his physics to respond positively to this challenge: the use of perceptual attention, even when it is voluntary, does not introduce manipulation or interpretation into the perceptual process. It is, therefore, truth-preserving. On Lucretius’ account, voluntary perceptual attention is best understood as a genuine cognitive capacity (its mechanism involves the mind transmitting an atomic motion to the relevant sense organ), but the mind’s involvement in the attentive process does not prompt the perceiver to form an opinion about incoming images from the environment. Thus, Lucretius’ understanding of attention, once properly qualified, offers a corrective to a long-standing assumption that mind can have no meaningful role in the Epicurean account of perception, if perceptions are to be a reliable foundation for knowledge. On the contrary, I defend an alternative thesis that a perceiver’s desires and interests—past and present—affect the content of perceptual experience by determining what that perceiver notices. In Part One, I extract from the *DRN* a taxonomy of forms of intellectual attention. I begin with the mind because Lucretius initially presents the mechanism of attention as a solution to why, given the abundance of images (*simulacra*, *imagines*) in the surrounding environment, we can think of one thing without also thinking of all things. In Part Two, at Lucretius’ invitation, I apply this taxonomy to Lucretius’ account of perceptual attention. In conclusion, I address the connection between Lucretius’ understanding of attention and Epicurus’ notion of *epibolē*, a much-vexed term, the meaning and significance of which is hotly debated in the literature.
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    Studies in the Ancient Reception of Seneca the Younger
    Pliotis, George
    The present thesis re-examines the reception of Seneca the Younger within the first hundred years after his death (60s–c. 160s AD), focusing particularly on the late first and early second centuries AD. It is the first concerted study on Seneca’s ancient reception in over fifty years, the first such study in English, and the first, too, to adopt a fully intertextual approach. Not content, that is, to stick with the explicit references to Seneca in the historical record that have already dominated so much scholarly discussion, this thesis unpacks the wealth of allusions – many of which have gone unnoticed – to Seneca’s works and takes these as a crucial part of the story of Seneca’s reception in antiquity. The principal consequence of this is that the period of Latin literature so often simplistically characterised as one of stylistic aversion to Seneca can now be appreciated as one that engaged frequently and closely with the philosopher’s work and thought. A second consequence is broader still: in focusing primarily on the reception of Senecan prose in later prose texts, this thesis functions as an object lesson in the allusive artistry and density of Roman prose. The Introduction sets out the limitations of the scholarship so far conducted on Seneca’s ancient reception before delineating the intertextual methodology that will remedy these limitations. The subsequent three chapters then put this methodology into practice, analysing the rich Senecan intertextuality on show in some of the most important Latin prose texts of this period – chiefly Quintilian’s *Institutio oratoria* (Ch.1), Pliny’s *Epistles* (Ch.2), and Tacitus’ (Neronian) *Annals* (Ch.3), but also Pliny’s *Panegyricus* (Ch.3.4a), Suetonius’ *Nero* (Ch.3.4b), and Fronto’s letters (Ch.2.*fin*.). All of these authors exhibit a hitherto underestimated familiarity with Seneca’s works and often allude to them in a pointed, significant manner, thus using Seneca as a voice to think with, an interlocutor in their own meditations on various ethical and political issues. These interpretive findings are summarised in the Conclusion, which also broaches some further horizons opened up by the thesis: the reception of Seneca’s more technical philosophical writings, and, ultimately, the his reception among more strictly philosophical authors in both Greek and Latin (Epictetus, Plutarch, Dio Chrysostom, and Marcus Aurelius).
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    A commentary on selected passages of Statius, Thebaid 6
    Puente Gamero, Pablo
    Book 6 of Statius’ *Thebaid* narrates the climax of the Argive army’s stay at Nemea: the funeral of the royal prince Opheltes, who had been killed by the serpent of Jupiter in Book 5, and the athletic games held in his honour. This thesis contains a line-by-line commentary on the opening section, which gives an aetiology of the Panhellenic Games (1-24), the funerary pyre of Opheltes (54-83), the felling of the Nemean grove (84-117), the lament of Eurydice (135-92), the cremation of Opheltes (193-237), the footrace (550- 645), the discus contest (646-730), and the wrestling match (826-910). Throughout, the commentary elucidates the book’s role as a microcosm of the *Thebaid* as a whole: the funeral rites for Opheltes encapsulate the suffering wrought by the Theban war while the athletic contests foreshadow the deaths of the Seven princes which occupy the second half of the poem. The commentary also brings out the characteristic features of Statian language, such as the compression of syntax, extension of conventional semantics and an in interest in the paradoxical affecting every aspect of his poetry. Although the text used for this thesis is based on the edition of Hall and his collaborators (2007-2008), the notes frequently espouse diverging editorial decisions, which are reflected in the corresponding lemmata. The commentary takes a more conservative view of the poem’s transmission, rejecting many of Hall’s interventions, and argues against Statian authorship for most of the book’s suspected interpolations.
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    The Dialect of Hellenistic Inscribed Epigrams from Doric-Speaking Areas
    Pratali Maffei, Dalia
    My thesis explores the dialect of Hellenistic Inscribed Epigrams from Doric-speaking areas, a corpus not yet analysed in its entirety. The aim of the research is twofold: to fill a gap in the scholarship, through a systematic and comprehensive description of the dialectal features from the collected inscriptions; to understand the diachronic change of the dialect of inscribed epigrams from the Archaic/Classical age to the Hellenistic age, and the role played by the local dialects and the newly spread Koine, as well as the new-born genre of literary epigrams. Thus, I argue that it is possible to disentangle local and supra-local factors that shape dialectal choices in epigrams, and I reconsider the importance of inscribed Hellenistic epigrams and their local context in the making of the genre. In the introduction, I give an overview of the debate surrounding the dialectal mixture attested in inscribed and literary epigrams, outlining the selected corpus and methodological framework. In the first chapter, I provide a description of dialectal features and their frequency by linguistic level and morphemes, to be used as a reference tool throughout the thesis. I then reject the idea of previous scholarship that epigrams have a ‘dialectal base’, as well as the formal classification of features by dialectal categories. Rather, I propose a new method that accounts for the dialectal features based on their distribution and usage in epigrams, and I argue that these factors can be assessed only through the linguistic and cultural context of inscriptions. The following three chapters unfold this research hypothesis by providing a contextual analysis of epigrams from the Peloponnese, North-West Greece, and the Aegean Islands. In each chapter, the dialect of epigrams is compared with features attested in contemporary prose inscriptions and in pre-Hellenistic epigrams from each area: I thus reconsider the importance of the spoken varieties and the local context, so far believed having little or no impact on the epigrammatic dialect of the Hellenistic age. In the chapter dedicated to North-West Greece, I further offer a new understanding of the diachrony of the epigrammatic genre by comparing the results with the literary epigrams composed by Damagetus and Posidippus, and therefore by considering the interaction between the inscribed and literary production. I conclude with a brief discussion of the methodology of the study and its potential implementation across sources exhibiting dialectal mixture.
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    The Rhetoric of Athenian Public Finance in Demosthenes
    Sing, Robert John
    Athenian public finance underwent significant reform in the wake of the financial crisis that accompanied the Social War (357–5). Scholarly analysis of these changes, and of Athenian financial decisions in general, tends to pay little attention to the process of mass deliberation which produced them. Existing work on financial debate concentrates on the availability and communication of technical information, emphasising the control either of professional elites or the collective citizenry. The evidence of Demosthenes, by far our most important source of actual Athenian financial rhetoric, shows that these models distort the nature of financial deliberation. Moreover, they overlook the key dilemma of financial decision-making in Athens: how to reconcile the conflicting ideological claims of rich and poor, and how to reconcile an ideology of amateurism with an increasing need to concentrate administrative power in financial experts. Far from a sideshow or a hindrance, rhetorical debate was central to successful financial decision-making because it enabled the ideological negotiation of these fundamental conflicts, and so allowed the democracy to adapt to the difficult fiscal conditions of the fourth century. Part 1 examines Demosthenes’ rhetoric of tax reform in the 350s. Demosthenes defends the traditional notion of taxes on the rich, as a reciprocal exchange of benefactions for charis, against aggressive new initiatives that stressed the fiscal entitlement of the majority in times of need. He does so by associating tax-as-benefaction with other, more popularly compelling examples of reciprocal exchange: between family members, citizens, and elite philoi who are philotimos (‘honour-loving’). In his effort to democratise the elite virtue of philotimia, Demosthenes illustrates the first stage in the eventual re-establishment of honorific language and the ideology of benefaction around this concept. Part 2 examines Demosthenes’ construction of his authority as a financial advisor in the wake of the unprecedented centralisation of financial responsibility in the theoric treasurer. This presentation is analysed in terms of Demosthenes’ construction (and deconstruction) of moral character (êthos), and his articulation of detailed arguments - both with numbers and without. Whereas rhetorical debate led to changes in the ideology of taxation, the strength of the ideology of amateur government meant that the notion of a single, supreme financial official as a permanent fixture of government was never fully accepted. Popular ambivalence towards expertise, and anxiety over the danger of rhetorical deception, gave Demosthenes scope to problematise the power of Eubulus, his allies, and by extension Eubulus’ cautious foreign policy. It is within this overarching claim to authority based on superlative moral integrity that Demosthenes also demonstrates his grasp of technical information, and his capacity to combine relevant popular beliefs with specialist knowledge. Demosthenes ultimately failed to explain how Athens could afford to return to an interventionist foreign policy, but the critical positions he adopts reveal the scope that existed for ideological contest. As such, Demosthenes’ rhetoric not only clarifies the significant changes that took place in the honours system and in financial administration during the 350s, but provides us with a better understanding of the nature of Athenian financial deliberation. Athenians were sensitive to the long-term political consequences of strategic fiscal decisions and were prepared to prioritise these over short-term profit. Athenians also required financial arguments to be intelligible and credible, and so limited the extent to which the superior technical knowledge of orators translated into control over the deliberative process.