This study explores the Greeks' experience of the Dioskouroi before the arrival of the Romans, stimulated by Cicero's assertion (Cic. Nat.D. 3.15(39)) that by his time they were worshipped widely in Greece, possibly more than the Olympians: from the archaeological evidence, a surprising claim. The task is complicated by the brothers' different incarnations in different places and at different times, and the variability and patchiness of the evidence for the period, from Homeric times to c. 146 BC. To address this (explained in Chapter 1), the study is designed around examining the evidence in selected locations over time, with an underlying theme of comparing the archaeological with the literary evidence, much of which is Roman. An overview of the evidence from literature, images and buildings sets the stage (Chapter 2). The association of Kastor and Polydeukes with 'Lakedaimon' in the literature, from Homer onwards, led the study to focus primarily on Sparta and the Peloponnese (Chapter 3), looking closely also at Sparta's near neighbours, Messene and Argos. It then looks at evidence from Thera, Kyrene and Naukratis (Chapter 4), in order to include some of the earliest material evidence we have of cult of the Dioskouroi in Greek settlements, which also have associations with Sparta and Lakonia; evidence from Thasos is included too. The final chapter considers the findings and assesses the usefulness of the methodology. The paucity of architectural evidence for major monuments and buildings specifically dedicated to the Dioskouroi, except in centres where Greeks gathered from different places for trade or religious reasons, may be explained if the primary location of their cult was the individual household, buildings only being needed for dedications to the brothers by Greeks away from home. It could also explain the seeming mismatch between Cicero's statement and the archaeological record.

Des rois grecs ont régné sur l'Asie centrale et l'ouest de l'Inde antique du IIIème siècle av. J.C. jusqu'au début de l'ère chrétienne. Ils laissent une image belliqueuse, car le fondement de leur pouvoir fut d'abord militaire. Des indices permettent d'envisager qu'à l'instar des autres souverains hellénistiques ils diffusèrent leurs portraits, mirent en place un culte royal, associèrent parfois leur fils au pouvoir, vécurent entourés d'une cour royale itinérante. Leur gestion économique fut suffisamment efficace pour que la région ne souffrît pas des guerres fréquentes ; les voies de communication furent préservées, le commerce et l'irrigation se développèrent, le système fiscal et administratif semble comparable en efficacité à celui des Perses ou des Séleucides. L'originalité de ces souverains réside dans leur adaptation aux milieux linguistiques et religieux : s'ils défendirent la langue et la culture grecque, pour des raisons identitaires et politiques, ils usèrent parfois du bilinguisme dans les monnaies et y firent graver des dieux compatibles avec les croyances ou les habitudes picturales locales. On peut envisager qu'au tournant de l'ère chrétienne les Grecs aient été lentement absorbés dans le monde asiatique. / Greek kings' domination in Central Asia and Western Antique India was effective from the IIIth Century BC till the beginning of Christian Era. The Greek kings of Central Asia image appears warlike, because their power was at the beginning and mainly a military one. We may suppose that, according to the example of the other Hellenistic sovereigns, these kings spread their sculptured portraits, organized a royal cult, and sometimes ruled with their son ; a royal itinerant court escorted them. The economic management of Greek Central Asia was so effective that the area prospered in spite of wars : the roads were protected, trade and irrigation developed, their fiscal and administrative system is similar to the Persian or Seleucid efficiency. These kings were remarkable because they adapted to the linguistic and religious environments : they defended the Greek language and culture, for political reasons and to preserve their identity ; the coins they engraved were sometimes bilingual, and we identify on it the image of Gods who are compatible with local faiths or pictorial habits. We may suppose that, circa Christian era, after defeat or disappearance of their kings, Greeks were slowly absorbed into the Asian world.

La thèse est organisée en trois chapitres, dans lesquels on analyse, respectivement, la relation entre la notion d’espace et trois civilisations spécifiques – les Perses, les Egyptiens, les Scythes, les peuples auxquels Hérodote consacre les portions les plus amples et longues de son ouvrage – ; les fonctions des espaces sacrés grecs et « barbares », qui peuvent être un lieu d’émerveillement, un instrument argumentatif du discours historiographique, un repère géographique ou dénotatif ; enfin, le territoire de l’œcoumène, considéré en tant qu’espace de mouvement et en tant qu’argument de débat politique et littéraire. Les logiques qui soutiennent les constructions/représentations répondent à une double nécessité : fournir des informations sur la narration, la civilisation, le groupe humain ou l’individu qui constituent le sujet du récit ; assurer que le public des Histoires participe aux mécanismes narratifs qui règlent l’accès aux savoirs collectés par l’historien et, en particulier, à sa façon de décrire les espaces. / The main purpose of this project is to try to understand the function of spaces in Herodotus’ work and, in particular, to analyze the way in which spaces may play a different role accordingly to a specific context or topic Herodotus is dealing with. A first part of the research is dedicated to the attempt of understanding how spatial descriptions are fundamental to characterize those civilizations to which Herodotus devotes a large part of his narrative (the Persians, the Egyptians and the Scythians). The second part of the research is dedicated to sacred spaces. In this section I focus on two aspects: the multiple role of the temple as thoma, landmark and proof/impulse of the historical narrative; the passages in which Herodotus describes his characters by insisting on their behaviors towards sacred spaces. A third and final part of the thesis deals with space from a more geographical perspective and it is structured in the five following paragraphs: terminology of proximity; 'epeiros'; 'eremos', 'eschatos' and knowledge; hodological and cartographic space; naming lands and seas. / La nozione di spazio è analizzata secondo una prospettiva tripartita. Nel primo capitolo mi occupo del binomio spazio/civiltà: l'obiettivo è quello di capire come la nozione di spazio venga diversamente declinata in ciascun contesto per rendere ragione delle caratteristiche preminenti delle civiltà in oggetto. Il secondo capitolo è ulteriormente suddiviso in due sottosezioni: nella prima indago le funzioni storiografiche degli spazi sacri menzionati nelle Storie; nella seconda esamino il comportamento di tre coppie di individui rispetto a uno spazio di partenza che viene sottoposto a un processo di sacralizzazione o diviene, al contrario, teatro di un’azione sacrilega. Nel terzo capitolo tratto gli spazi dell'esperienza quotidiana, prestando attenzione a tematiche quali la nozione di prossimità, l'orientamento, la divisione politica e geografica dell'ecumene, la percezione dei territori di frontiera e periferici.

Au cours de l’époque classique, la gestion des cultes et des richesses sacrées d’Athènes devient de plus en plus centralisée autour de l’Acropole. La cité en effet met en place un système de gestion plus rationnel et cohérent de ses biens sacrés en même temps qu’elle se dote de structures administratives et institutionnelles lui permettant de gérer un empire maritime en expansion. Ce système, loin d’être figé, repose sur la mobilisation des pratiques et instruments comptables qui conduisent à une connaissance plus précise des fortunes des sanctuaires et à une organisation et exploitation plus efficaces des trésors sacrés. La structure administrative semble bien s’adapter aux statuts variés des sanctuaires attiques ainsi qu’aux spécificités liées à leur positionnement géographique. La polis décline en effet de façon différente ses interventions dans la gestion économique des lieux de culte dispersés sur son territoire : elle procède souvent au maintien des spécificités régionales dans l’administration des sanctuaires mais elle adapte en même temps ces différentes réalités administratives aux nécessités d’une gestion centralisée et unitaire. A la lumière de perspectives évoquées, la recherche en cours se consacre à étudier l’articulation et l’évolution au fils du temps des formes et des méthodes de l’administration économique et financière des richesses sacrées athéniennes ainsi que le rôle et l’action de ses acteurs principaux : la polis et les autres instances civiques, les sanctuaires et le territoire. / At Athens, since de development of the maritime Empire, the management system of sacred finances became increasingly centralized on the Acropolis. The city developed a more rational and coherent method of administration of its sacred properties. This system was based on several practices and instruments of accountability that allowed the Athenian State to better control the wealth of attic sanctuaries and to better exploit it in order to finance religious life. Furthermore, attic sanctuaries bore different statuses and different economic roles inside Attic boundaries. For these reasons, Athens declined in a different way its interventions in the economic management of its sacred treasures. The Polis maintained, anyway, regional diversities in the administration and harmonized it inside a unified and coherent management system. Thus, the current study is devoted to study the articulation and evolution over time of the forms and methods of economic and financial administration of Athenian sacred wealth as well as the role and action of its main actors in this system : central and local civic authorities, sanctuaries and the territory.

This thesis discusses the sources of royal power in the kingdoms of Argead Makedonia and early Ptolemaic Egypt. The overarching aim is to assess the degree of change and continuity between the structures and networks that framed Argead and Ptolemaic royal power. Viewing power not as an abstraction but as the outcome of the real and observable interrelations between individuals and groups, this thesis builds upon the historical sociology of Michael Mann in order to identify four main sources of royal power: dynastic, courtly, military and economic. In their capacity to enhance or limit royal power, the social networks that are formed between the king and representatives of these groups in each context, as well as the structures that produce and reproduce their behaviour, form the focal points of this research. As such, this thesis distances itself from that segment of socio-historical tradition, which grants ultimate primacy to human agency. The Introduction presents the main scholarly debates surrounding the nature of Ptolemaic and Argead kingship and highlights the fact that although both have received considerable attention separately, they have not yet been the focus of a systematic, comparative analysis. At the same time, this chapter brings in the theoretical and methodological framework employed in the thesis. Chapter One discusses the structural organisation of the dynasty, focusing on patterns of marriage and succession, and the manipulation of dynastic connections, real or constructed, as instruments of legitimation. It is argued that the colonial circumstances in early Ptolemaic Egypt led to an amplification of the importance of the dynasty as a source of power. Chapter Two examines the interrelations of the ruler with his extended circle of friends and associates, i.e. the courtiers. A discussion of the physical and social structure of the courts in Aigai, Pella and Alexandria in the early Ptolemaic period confirms that administration at the highest level continued to be organised around personal relations. Chapter Three identifies the enabling mechanisms, which sustained the military power of the Makedonian king. It is argued that royal military leadership and the integration of facets of military organisation (e.g. the institution of klerouchia) and values (through education) in society remained integral to the social organisation of early Ptolemaic Egypt. Finally, Chapter Four examines the economic power of the ruler, as revealed by the organisation of property rights. The absence of the Makedones and the prominence of temples as economically significant groups in early Ptolemaic Egypt underline the structural discontinuities that arise from the necessary adaptation to different local conditions. This thesis concludes that the structures that framed Argead royal power were in their majority remembered and instantiated in the organisational practices of the early Ptolemaic rulers. Deviations from the Argead paradigm occurred when pragmatism led to the introduction of corrective practices, such as the co-regency principle aimed at eradicating the dynastic instability that had plagued the Argead monarchy, and when ecological and political considerations, such as the needs of their non-Hellenic, non-Makedonian audience, dictated a greater degree of accommodation to local conditions, especially in the field of economic organisation. Even there, however, one can discern the influence of the flexible, all-inclusive model of Argead administration of its New Lands as an organisational template.

This thesis presents a historical study of the relationship between the city of ancient Byzantium and the Thracian Bosporus. Structured around the themes of regional particularity and identity, it shows that local studies can be used to gain fresh insights into more general topics. Viewed through the lens of the relationship between strait and city, the history of the Bosporus sheds light on the nature of economic exploitation and ancient imperialism, and on the nature of ancient communities’ local identities. Chapter 1 explores regionally specific geographical features in the strait, which directed and determined responses to life in the area, around which the regional economy revolved, and in response to which the identities of the local communities were created. Chapters 2 and 3 examine the history of economic exploitation of the region, exploring the attitude of the Athenian Empire toward the Bosporus, and the attempt by the local communities of the Bosporus to create a controlled monetary system in the third century BC. These efforts to exploit local opportunities and commodities, I show, transformed the Bosporus into an attractive economic resource. Chapter 4 examines the local fishing industries of the strait, and demonstrates that the extraordinary availability of fish in the region provoked responses which could not be emulated precisely elsewhere. The thesis also shows that the cultural identity of a Greek city could be intensely local. Byzantium, a Greek colony typically characterized by its relationship to its mother-city, had a series of important local identities, explored in chapter 1. From this perspective, chapter 5 re-examines the difficult relationship between Greeks and Thracians in the region, and chapter 6 questions the validity of the traditional view of the relationship between a colony and its mother-city.

This thesis explores the development of naturalistic rendering of emotion in the art of Greece through facial expression and body posture from 525 to 400. Why does emotional naturalism arise in the art of Greece, and in which particular regions? Why at this period? In which contexts and media? What restrictions on situation and type of figure can be interpolated or reconstructed? The upper chronological limit is based on simple observation. It is about this time, in many media, that naturalistic emotional expression is employed, although there are exceptions that blur this line slightly. The lower limit marks a major historical turning point, a culmination in Beazley's chronology of Attic vase painting and a common dating threshold for small finds. Emotional expression accelerates from the fourth century, and requires a different set of questions. 400 is for this reason held as a strict end-point. Many categories of physical object were considered; gems and coins did not offer substantial results, but are used for comparison. The rest have formed the armature of the thesis. Only original objects are included, as emotionality undergoes marked changes in Hellenistic and Roman copies. The first section treats publically-commissioned sculpture – sculpture integrated into architecture. The second section treats privately-commissioned sculpture, stone and terracotta; the third pottery: black-figure, red-figure and whiteground. Within these sections, material is arranged broadly chronologically. Human figures are the focus, and semi-humans such as Centaurs and satyrs are included; figures with essentially non-human faces such as the Gorgon are not. Human anatomy is constant, so the method of analysis is physiological. Rather than putting facial expressions in folk terms – a frown, a smile – they are described anatomically for precision: by muscular contractions and extensions and their correspondent manifestations on the surface of the body. Moving beyond description to explanation, neurochemistry and psychology are the preferred tools, although neither discipline has a consensus on the nature of emotion or its expression. History, religion, location, maker, commissioner, viewer, medium and technique are brought to bear in order put expressivity in context. An important methodological tool has been the separation of emotional 'input' and ‘output’. Output is the evocation or intended evocation of an emotional state in the viewer, and the thesis is constantly aware of the disconnect between the 'intended audience' and a modern one. It focuses instead on input – the methods used to render the inner state of the figures shown. This has twofold benefit: it avoids insurmountable subjectivity – one might laugh at the expression of fear on a maenad being raped by a satyr, while another might not – and allows for comparison across genre and medium.

This thesis investigates the morphology and the purpose of palaces in major and minor kingdoms of the Hellenistic World. Elements of architecture, spatial organisation and decoration are analysed in the attempt to clarify issues of chronology and in order to identify function. The analysis places the material into its social and ideological context by taking into consideration the role of kingship ideologies in the formation of space used by royal courts. Comparison with residences of the elite demonstrates the reception of palaces not only as architectural models, but also as mechanisms of power manifestation. Macedonia is the starting point of the discussion as the homeland of the first Hellenistic kings. In the light of evidence recovered in the last twenty years and not comparatively studied before, the chapter brings together various chronological phases of the buildings. Questions of definition and on sources of inspiration are clarified further in the following chapters. The third chapter uses textual evidence and finds from the royal district of Alexandria to understand the meaning of palace architecture for the Ptolemies, while the seat of a local official in Transjordania reveals mechanisms of emulation. In chapter four the case of Pergamene palaces and their relationship with residences in the city demonstrates that formation of these royal seats corresponded to ideals of Attalid kingship. Seats of officials in the Seleukid Empire and palaces in Bactria and Kommagene, the subject of the fifth chapter, provide an insight into the position of palace architecture in processes of hybridisation in material culture. The last chapter is a synthesis of patterns of form and function and unifies the conclusions for each separate region. It emerges that shifts in power relations and the structure of the royal court, especially towards the end of the third century BC, were a crucial factor in shaping palace forms. The concluding chapter also provides a view from the West: examples from the late Roman Republic indicate that the role of Hellenistic palaces as models for power display went beyond the limits of royal courts.

This thesis investigates the nature of the relationship between cities and king in the late Classical and Hellenistic Macedonian kingdom. It will consider the cities from two main perspectives: the city as a community, and the city as a settlement. Section 1 re-examines the evidence most commonly used to argue for the Macedonian cities gaining substantial autonomy in this period. It will be argued that this evidence has less to tell us about the political autonomy of the Macedonian cities than their 'social relations' with other Greek communities: Macedonian cities engaged in international exchanges which did not represent any challenge to the authority of the monarch, but which could also be used to represent the relationship between king and city as cooperative. Such latitude was balanced, however, by forceful expressions of royal dominance in other arenas. Section 2 considers the position of the cities within the royal economy, and examines how, as a result of the king's monopolisation of Macedonia's resources, and the fact that the Macedonian elite was more interested in advancing their position at court than acting as civic benefactors, the cities were left economically subordinated to the king. Section 3 uses the increasingly abundant archaeological evidence to consider how royal building programmes served to project royal ideology into the localities. Royal palaces, large-scale urban development, and fortifications created an experience of urban space in Macedonia which emphasised the roles of the monarch as guardian, benefactor, and unifying figure. The picture that emerges is of a kingdom of civic communities which were engaged in meaningful exchanges with their peers outside Macedonia, but which were living in large and impressive urban settlements which stood as monuments to the extent and ubiquity of royal authority. Late-Classical and Hellenistic Macedonia was a kingdom of poleis, but that kingdom was first and foremost a royal space.

Clement of Alexandria, active in the second half of the second century AD, is one of the first Christian authors to explain and defend the nascent religion in the terms of Greek philosophy and in relation to Greek paideia. His major work, the Stromateis, is a lengthy commentary on the true gnosis of the Christian faith, with no apparent overarching structure or organisational principle, replete with quotations from biblical, Jewish, Greek 'gnostic' and Christian works of all genres. This thesis seeks to read this complex and erudite text in conversation with what has been termed the ‘Second Sophistic’, the efflorescence of elite Greek literature under the Roman empire. We will examine the the text as a performance of authorial persona, competing in the agonistic marketplace of Greek paideia. Clement presents himself as a philosophical teacher in a diadoche from the apostles, arrogating to himself a kind of apostolic authority which appeals to both philosophical notions of intellectual credibility and Christian notions of the authentic handing down of tradition. We will also examine how the work engages key thematic concerns of the period, particularly discourses of intellectual eclecticism and ethnicity, challenging both Greek and Roman forms of hegemony to create a space for Christian identity. Lastly, this thesis will critically examine the Stromateis' intertextual relationship with the Homeric epics; the Iliad and the Odyssey are used as a testing ground for Christian self-positioning in relation to Greek culture as a whole. As we trace this variable relationship, we will also see the cross-fertilisation of reading strategies between Homer and the bible; these developing complex allegorical methods not only presage the rise of Neoplatonism, but also lay the foundations for changes in cultural authority which accompany the Christianisaton of the Roman empire in the centuries after Clement.