Alcibiades was one of the most dynamic and engaging figures of the Peloponnesian War. Like a chameleon, he managed to change himself to fit almost any occasion and audience; few historical figures can claim to have successfully switched allegiances as many times during a conflict. Starting as a general in Athens, he moved on to side with the Spartans, then the Persians, and then returned to Athens. Some would consider him a young and impulsive egoist, but a closer investigation indicates that he more than likely had a larger, pragmatic goal motivating his actions. This essay will aim first to establish his break from the philosophical status quo of Athens, and then to determine the nature of these larger goals. It will pivot around Alcibiades’ address to the Athenian assembly, using it in a comparative analysis of both Pericles’ Funeral Oration, and briefly supplementing it with Plato’s Alcibiades I.

This study will explore the similarities and differences between Alcibiades and Nicias’ speeches to the Athenian Assembly in 415 BC and Secretary Hillary Clinton and President Donald J. Trump’s first presidential debate in 2016. The ancient speeches were regarding the Sicilian Expedition, while the modern speeches focused on each candidates’ foreign policy plan regarding Syria and the Islamic State (IS). Despite the near 2,500-year difference between these two democracies, there are striking similarities between the ways their governments are structured as well as the values they uphold. I explore the significance of the fact that the Athenians and the modern-day Americans have two ostensibly functioning democracies yet the candidates whom they elected and the subsequent results were disadvantageous for the long-term sustainability of their countries. I will look at the differences between the expectations of the democratic institutions and what the outcomes of the debates were. Additionally, I compare the differences between the Athenian democracy and the American democracy.

This thesis re-evaluates the nature and roles of the Italian classes (fleets) of the Roman empire between 31 BC and AD 193. Studied through the prism of naval history, the classes have been portrayed either as ineffective forces left to decay, or maritime institutions supporting military logistics. By starting from the position that the classes cannot easily be compared to other fleets, I argue that they should be regarded as a flexible manpower pool, placed in the same broad category as other soldiers in the Roman empire, who were drawn upon to perform a range of tasks on land and sea to the benefit of the Emperor, and who were integrated into systems supporting the functioning of the empire, which I term imperial organics. Chapter One discusses primarily epigraphic evidence for the classis servicemen, to argue that they considered themselves and were considered as milites who were trained to row, and who could be given tasks suitable to their abilities and places of deployment. Chapter Two, building on earlier discussion of the origins of the servicemen, examines second century AD papyrological evidence for recruitment from the Egpytian Fayoum. It posits recruitment systems which relied on several elements outside the control of Roman authorities, but which nonetheless ensured that the Italian classes were a well supplied manpower pool, perhaps because they did not rely on the so-called gens de mer. Chapter Three re-examines the main “naval bases” of the classes at Misenum and Ravenna, arguing that rather than purely military ports they should be understood as sites concentrating imperial resources to aid imperial activity in regions where concentrations of imperial property are attested. Drawing on arguments in the previous chapters, Chapter Four considers three case-studies for the functions of the Italian classes: their role in Roman military mobilisation and redeployment systems, their involvement in imperial communications, and their possible place in a coastal system on the western coast of Italy suggestive of imperial authority and benefaction. In all three it seeks to present evidence for imperial organics, low-level systems, possibly engendered by imperial activity, but which could persist of their own accord and which were essential to the workings of empire.

This thesis examines the changes forced upon the Roman elite in the evolving political climate of Ostrogothic Italy. It examines what mechanisms the Roman elite employed to renegotiate their position of influence within the state. The relationship the elite had with the past provides evidence for wider changes in society. I assert that, using the language and landscape of the past, the elite formed discourses which responded to, and which attempted to facilitate a realignment in, a changing environment. The education system still provided the Roman elite with a mechanism through which they could define themselves and prepare for what they considered to be the important aspects of the world outside the classroom. Religious discussions and debate in the post-imperial Italy of Late Antiquity were increasingly directed toward attempts to reunite the fractured Roman Empire through a unified empire of Orthodox faith. Having such a close relationship with the Roman Empire and its political and philosophical culture, education and religion are particularly suitable fields to reflect the changes to the political map of the Roman Empire. Focusing on the elite’s relationship with education and religion, this thesis will uncover examples of continuity and change which are implied by the construction of, and interaction with, discourses designed to facilitate the elite’s renegotiation strategies. Reconstructing the education of prominent members of the elite from their writings provides the evidence for such discourses. The emphasis on this part of the thesis is on discovering how the discourses circulating in relation to education responded to the political and philosophical problems through the language of the past and what these responses tell us about changes in the present. The religious discussion focuses on the attempts of the opinion formers in Italy to create and direct narratives designed to establish the superiority of one religious world-view over another. An examination of the language of tradition in the construction of these narratives provides evidence for the potency of the past in the decision-making process and ideology- forming strategies of the Roman elite. It also provides evidence for the changes in society to which the strategies were responding. A final-chapter case study provides an opportunity to see evidence of the effectiveness of these discourse-forming strategies. In this chapter we see a contemporary historical source interacting with those narratives and discourses we witnessed the elite employing in the education and religion chapters. It also provides an opportunity to see how the past is used to justify the actions of the Roman elite in Ostrogothic Italy to a post-Gothic audience (as the work was composed in the immediate aftermath of the fall of Ostrogothic Italy). This final consideration provides an instructive contrast which brings into sharp focus the extent and nature of continuity and change brought about by the Ostrogothic state.

This thesis will investigate how Roman monumental architecture in Tergeste dating to the first and second centuries AD reflected and reaffirmed the social order of the city, and how it was used in the creation and maintenance of identities. The material used will be two select structures, the basilica and theater, located in the eastern and north-eastern sections of Tergeste, respectively. By using theories of social architecture, agency, identity, and compounding them with the ideology of Roman urbanism, focus will be placed on how movement within a structure and the occupation of its different locales influenced the adoption of particular roles and self-conceptions. A number of statues and dedicatory inscriptions associated with the architectural structures will serve to further corroborate these points, and to add information about whether a specific type of identity was favored above others in the city. The results will provide a first overview of how architecture responded to the social reality in Roman Tergeste, in the hope to encourage further research in this direction.

This thesis considers the use of numismatic imagery in the Byzantine Empire during the period 610-867, with its main focus centred in the period 685-842. Though charting the iconographic trends and changes on the coinage of the period and the possible reasons behind them is the principal raison d’être of the thesis, it also tackles methodological issues such as the use and abuse of dies studies and ways of determining who decided what images appeared on coins. The main body of the text is arranged chronologically with the methodological issues appearing throughout. Exceptions to this format are the first chapter, which considers the economic context of coin circulation in the period and the gold purity of the coins of the period, and the third chapter, which considers the production at the mint of Cherson, which produced anonymous coins not identifiable by date, but still part of the context. Finally, the thesis contains two appendices, the first paper appendix presents a catalogue of the coins held at the Barber Institute of Fine Arts for the period 685-842, and the second CD-ROM appendix presents the data from the All That Glitters ... project, testing the purity of Byzantine gold coins with x-ray fluorescence.

The messages in the imagery on Byzantine coins, although often neglected by scholars, were a key means of projecting imperial power. Emperors could project power via dress, ceremonial, and displays, but these methods would not have reached all subjects. Byzantine coins had the advantage of reaching all subjects, as the Byzantine economy was fundamentally monetized. Military symbols (figures, dress, and weapons), whose study has been rather overlooked, formed an important part of this imagery. Whilst military symbols disappeared from Byzantine coins in the early eighth century, and were absent for some three centuries, they were reintroduced in the mid-eleventh century and appeared until 1394/5. Their importance is indicated by the fact that military types comprised over half the overall total of types for some emperors. This study examines military symbols on Byzantine coins from the eleventh to the fourteenth centuries, and notes also imperial representations in other media. The numismatic sources for this study are the collections in the Barber Institute of Fine Arts, and Dumbarton Oaks. The general conclusions are that military symbols were used most frequently from 1204 to 1261, less frequently from 1261 to 1394/5, and least frequently from 1042 to 1204. The variety of military saints portrayed increased at first, but declined in the fourteenth century, until only St Demetrios remained, but in the highest status: riding with the emperor.

Sociological theories relating to collective forms of memory and forgetting have received little attention in Egyptological studies thus far with the work of Jan Assmann providing the primary source. Understanding these two processes, however, can support important insights into the lives and cultures of ancient communities; they should not, therefore, be viewed as peripheral theories but as central in developing understanding of societies below the elite. Consequently, this study looks at collective forms of memory and forgetting in the Egyptian Eighteenth Dynasty, focusing on commemoration of deceased kings and queens (‘royal ancestors’). The first three chapters use case studies to highlight different memory stores; written, pictorial and active. The final chapter focuses on forgetting. The evidence is analysed using both Egyptological and sociological theory to facilitate discussion on the subjects of community, identity and legitimation, and to develop understanding of material culture as a site of memory. The study argues that collective forms of remembering, particularly cultural memory, played a key role in the construction of individual and group identity and the legitimation of the ruler. Furthermore, it concludes that existing studies of memory provide good frameworks to understanding Egyptian society, although they should not be used without careful consideration of context.

This thesis demonstrates the significance of Food Vessel pottery and burial in Northern England during the Early Bronze Age (c.2200 to 1800 cal BC). It represents the first original and sustained study of this burial tradition for several decades. It is argued that the interwoven relationships between Food Vessels, other ceramic types, and trade and exchange networks are both a reason why the tradition has posed interpretative problems for prehistorians, and a central component of its significance during the Early Bronze Age. The chronological relationships between British Food Vessels and other ceramic and funerary traditions are reviewed using the first comprehensive and critically assessed dataset of radiocarbon determinations. Previous approaches to Food Vessel typology are critically reviewed and a new approach based on the ‘potter’s perspective’ and contextual studies is proposed. A contextual approach is applied to Food Vessels from three regions of Northern England: the Northern Counties; North-East Yorkshire, the central lowlands and North-West England; and South-East Yorkshire. Each study reveals significant inter- and intra-regional similarities and differences in how Food Vessels were used and understood. The significance of Food Vessel pottery and burial is then discussed at a national scale.

The thesis deals with the socio-economic conditions prevailing in the city of Thessalonikê in the 14th and 15th centuries. One of the main aims is to address certain methodological issues linked to the period of transition from the Byzantine to the Ottoman Empire. In this effort, we have employed as an analytical tool the economic theory of New Institutional Economics, which lays significant importance in the study of the institutional framework of societies. The main strands of the thesis are two: firstly, the exploration of the ideological concerns, internal conflicts and response of the Thessalonian society to the changing political environment until the final subjection of the city to the Ottoman Turks in 1430. Secondly, the behaviour of the Thessalonian elite in terms of social and economic practice through an examination of its relationship with the Athonite monasteries and the Late Byzantine state. Our ultimate goal is to shed light on the way provincial elite of Thessalonikê adapted to the political and economic conditions that prevailed in the Late Byzantine period.