This dissertation analyzes the interplay between imperial messaging or self-representation and legal activity in the Roman Empire under the Severan dynasty. I discuss the unusual historical circumstances of Septimius Severus’ rise to power and the legitimacy crises faced by him and his successors, as well as those same emperors’ control of an increasingly complex legal bureaucracy and legislative apparatus. I describe how each of the four Severan rulers—Septimius Severus, Caracalla, Elagabalus, and Severus Alexander—employed different approaches to imperial legislation and adjudication in accordance with their idiosyncratic self-presentation and messaging styles, as well as how other actors within Roman legal culture responded to Severan political dynamics in their own work. In particular, this dissertation is concerned with a particularly—and increasingly—urgent problem in Roman elite political culture; the tension between theories of imperial power that centered upon rulers’ charismatic gifts or personal fitness to rule, and a more institutional, bureaucratized vision that placed the emperor at the center of broader networks of administrative control. While these two ideas of the Principate had always coexisted, the Severan period posed new challenges as innovations in imperial succession (such as more open military selection of emperors) called earlier legitimation strategies into question. I posit that Roman law, with its stated tendency towards regularized, impersonal processes, was a language in which the Severan state could more easily portray itself as a bureaucratic institution that might merit deference without a given leader being personally fit to rule. This dissertation begins by discussing the representational strategy of Septimius Severus, who deployed traditional imperial messaging tropes in strikingly legalistic forms. I then explore how this model of law as a venue for or language of state communication might explain otherwise idiosyncratic features of the constitutio Antoniniana, an edict promulgated by Septimius Severus’ son Caracalla that granted citizenship to all free inhabitants of the Empire. I next discuss two unusual features of the corpus of rescripts issued by Severus Alexander, the last Severan emperor: specifically, the relabeling of rescripts issued by Elagabalus, Alexander’s cousin and predecessor, as products of Alexander’s reign; and the idiosyncratic frequency with which rescripts issued under Alexander’s authority cite prior imperial (and particularly Severan) precedent. Finally, I discuss how jurists responded to Severan (and particularly late Severan) political and legal culture: late Severan jurists are particularly inclined to justify their legal decisionmaking in terms of the desirable consequences of a given decision’s universal promulgation, and similarly likely to justify their opinions by citing to an impersonal ‘imperial authority’ rather than to named figures. I argue that these changes reflect both state and scholarly attempts to wrestle with increasingly unstable imperial selection processes, and to articulate a vision of Roman governance that might function in the new world of the third century C.E.

This dissertation considers Aeschylus’ Persae and portions of Herodotus’ Histories as attempts to shape memories of the Greco-Persian Wars by invocation of material evidence at very different moments in the fifth century BCE. Given the literary and archaeological nature of our surviving Greek evidence, this consideration is a necessary part of the larger project towards which I work: a history of Persian interactions with Greek sanctuaries during the Greco-Persian Wars. Greek archaeological evidence offers one set of comparative perspectives on these interactions. I attempt to place Aeschylus and Herodotus in dialogue with this evidence in chapters two and three. Herodotus, unlike Aeschylus, depicts respectful Achaemenid behavior at Greek sanctuaries during the Greco-Persian Wars. To contextualize this depiction, I examine earlier sources from the western Achaemenid Empire in chapter four. In so doing, I build on methodology demonstrated in the introductory chapter to consider a second set of comparative perspectives. Close reading of Herodotus in parallel to these sources provides a basis for fully examining types of behavior which have often been explained away in previous scholarship on the historian. Notably, Herodotus’ depiction, unlike our surviving earlier sources from the western Achaemenid Empire, often considers how such behavior relates to more violent aspects of conquest, and as such provides a contrast to these surviving earlier sources. I suggest that this contrast—Herodotus’ depiction of both sacrilege and respectful behavior—can be understood in his historical moment. And yet this suggestion is but a beginning.

In my dissertation Happiness and Superlative Value in the Eudemian Ethics, I analyze dimensions of the Eudemian Ethics (EE) that, as I see it, make the EE a distinctive contribution to ethics. The EE discusses a superlative excellence called kalokagathia, the virtue of being-beautiful-and-good, which does not figure in the Nicomachean Ethics (NE). The agent who possesses kalokagathia is the best agent of Aristotle’s EE. Scholars tend to hold that the practically wise person, the phronimos, or the theoretically wise person, the sophos, are the best agents of the NE. If my reading of the EE is right, then the EE and the NE conceive differently of the best agent. This is salient in both treatises’ construals of the unity of the virtues. In the NE, the unity of the virtues includes the character virtues and phronêsis. In the EE, it additionally includes the virtues of theoretical thinking, or so I argue. The EE starts with what I call the Superlative Thesis (ST): happiness is what is best, most beautiful, and most pleasant of all. I take this beginning to be programmatic. Aristotle aims to show how these three kinds of value combine in the best human life, rather than coming apart. The Pleasure Thesis (PT) is the most contested aspect of ST: happiness is the most pleasant thing of all. On my reading, Aristotle fully embraces PT. In laying out his proposal for the best human life, the Aristotle of the EE develops a distinctive kind of naturalism, which I call Natural Goods Naturalism. I reconstruct this position in two steps: by interpreting the EE’s function argument; and by exploring the notion of natural goods, which is central to the EE, but does not figure in the NE. In sum, my dissertation argues that the EE contains a distinctive and under-appreciated option within ancient ethics, and that it contains ideas that are relevant to today’s virtue ethics and ethical naturalism.

In this thesis I detail how large-scale public entertainment, in the form of gladiatorial games (munera) and dramatic festivals (ludi), could function as a tool for social control in the Roman West. Using late-Republican and imperial Pompeii as a test case, I argue that these spectacular performances provided local notables with a rare and powerful platform for mass messaging. The chief purpose of this communication within the arena and theatres of Pompeii was not to transmit particular words or gestures from wealthy benefactors to their captive audience, but rather to arrive at a public consensus that implicitly acknowledged the legitimacy of local political, religious, and cultural institutions while also underscoring existing social hierarchies and power relations within the unified community. The local laws, traditions, and setting conditioned the behaviour of the entertainers and spectators, who played central rôles in a series of formulaic rituals at these regular events. The processions that preceded games, for example, and the prize-giving ceremonies after munera were staged as dialogues between benefactor and spectators, structured in ways that celebrated the prosperity, civic identity, and political stability of the community. Such a function was particularly important to ensure stability in periods of great uncertainty. I suggest that the construction and renovation of venues for public entertainment should also be understood in terms of crisis communications, as part of a response to political turbulence following the wars of the late Republic and a string of local catastrophes under Nero. In the highly urbanized regions of early imperial Italy, however, the emphasis on civic politics at mass spectacles risked inflaming tensions between neighbouring rivals. This system of social control was not, however, limited to the duration and location of mass spectacles. The Pompeian council limited freedom of association and the production of formal texts and images concerning mass spectacles to the margins of the city. The unofficial forms of expression that clustered here, often in dialogue with one another, suggest that individuals continued to identify with their rôles as consensus-building spectators beyond the games. In spite of its rich and varied dossier of evidence for quotidian life, genuinely original or subversive content that is independent of official messaging appears only rarely in the archaeological record at Pompeii.

This thesis traces Freud's debt to classical Greece and argues that the development of his theory should not be considered apart from its roots in this legacy. The psychoanalytic project sheltered under the umbrella of Altertumswissenschaft and used the "ancient world to illuminate the modern". Winckelmann's Hellenism provided the foundations to German culture in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and dominated the educational and cultural institutions in which Freud lived and worked. Nietzsche later challenged Winckelmann's Apollian vision of Greece, and his "psychology of the Dionysian condition" acknowledged both irrational passion and sexuality. Freud is heir to both Winckelmann's and Nietzsche's Greece, and the dialectical tension between the rational and irrational, the mind and the body, that is evident in the reception of classical Greece in the nineteenth century is often paralleled in Freud's work. Hellenism is an essential element in Freud's theory of dreams and the unconscious. Greek mythology grounds the Oedipus complex, and informs his theorising on human sexuality. It plays an influential role in early sexology, and many of the challenges to psychiatry and neurology have their origin in Greek classicism. Not only does psychoanalysis rely on content drawn from this legacy, but its methodology as well as it structure are deeply influenced by Freud's knowledge of ancient Greece and his involvement in classical scholarship. / Thesis (Ph.D.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, 2008.

Thesis (Ph.D.) - University of St Andrews, April 2008.

This dissertation examines the history of elite male youth in the Roman Empire from 218 BCE to 68 CE by demonstrating how a young elite man could “act his age” in his specific historical context. The Prologue introduces the theoretical and methodological underpinnings of my approach, which depart from traditional social history models. Drawing on gender and age studies, theories of discourse and interpellation, my argument re-inscribes age as a performance, whereby the age-roles that existed in Roman society were constituted by historically determined performances of “age scripts”. The performances of youth examined are demonstrably intersectional in nature, frequently overlapping with gendered performances of masculinity. By concentrating attention on the behaviors prescribed for young elite men at Rome in these scripts, as recovered from the discourses about youth preserved in both textual and visual evidence, my inquiry tracks how changes in these scripts were historically contingent, rather than universal. As a result, this study foregrounds the interconnection between age and male power relations in ancient Rome and explains the diachronic changes in this relationship. Changes in the social, demographic, legal and, above all, political context(s) from the Middle Republican period down to the death of Nero, in turn occasioned edits—sometimes even full rewrites—in the age scripts available to young elite men. Structured as a historical play in three parts, each part corresponds diachronically to a moment of change in these scripts. Part 1 examines the Middle Republic and introduces the “comic script” primarily through the plays of Plautus and Terence, as well as the “normative script” preserved in exempla and the works of Cato the elder to which the comic script responded and sometimes offered challenges. These scripts are examined in dialogue with the radical demographic, legal and political changes occasioned by Rome’s near defeat in the Second Punic War. Part 2 then moves down to the Late Republic, acknowledging how both the normative and comic scripts endured in this period, but instead trains its focus on the emergence of new scripts for youth—oratorical, philosophical, sexual and poetic. These scripts are set against the background of a shift away from military pursuits among the youth and toward the civic sphere, stemming from political, legal and cultural developments that arose out of Rome’s increasing imperial hegemony in the Mediterranean during the second century BCE. In particular, the efforts of politicians to interpellate the youth, understood as the next political generation, according to specific ideological scripts, and in contrast to other scripts (for example, the martial, sexual, or philosophical scripts), reveals how young men in this period were presented with more behavioral options than ever before. That these young men were consequently torn by these conflicting options is borne out in Catullus’ parodic rejection of certain scripts, but also the discourses about other young men, such as C. Trebatius Testa and M. Caelius Rufus. Cicero’s attempt to script the behavior of one youth, the young Octavian (later known as Augustus) and the dramatic shift in power relations that Octavian’s rise occasioned for the age scripts at Rome forms the first half of Part 3. From here my analysis extends out from Octavian’s personal aetas to the Augustan “age” more generally and how this period saw a conscious promotion of a normative script for the iuventus. Conjoined to this script, and driving its promotion, was the biological ageing of Augustus himself, whereby his own aetas and its youthfulness became contiguous with that of his youthful successors and more generally the community, as represented by the iuventus, and even more abstractly, the urbs itself. With the advent of the youngest princeps yet, the problem of the emperor Nero’s young age and the script he would enact forms the core concern of Part 4, the epilogue to this dissertation. The De Clementia of Seneca is examined for its role in scripting the imperial youth and his behavior. The case study of Nero’s first bearded portrait as a visual commemoration of his depositio barbae, coinciding with his celebration of age-based spectacles during the Iuvenalia of 59 CE, demonstrates how Nero was both the heir to earlier scripts and in his reception of them, the author of a new one centered around an attempt to construct his imperial maturity. The response to Nero’s script is then traced both at an elite and non-elite level, from elite literary texts, such as Petronius’ Satyrica, to graffiti and non-elite bearded portraits. As a historical study in visual discourses as much as textual ones, this dissertation encompasses a wide range of visual material from numismatic iconography to portrait sculpture in the round, and represents the first attempt to bring such material into dialogue with the textual evidence. A catalogue of imperial male portraits, from Octavian to Nero, which feature facial hair—a key piece of evidence assessed in Parts 3 and 4—is presented in the Appendices.

This dissertation considers the figural bronze statuettes crowning Etruscan candelabra (c. 520- c. 350 BCE) to discuss the value and role of body images in Etruscan art and domestic as well as funerary contexts. Candelabra rose over a meter in height to present these radiant bodies in isolation, framed by flames. The finial figures were bodies on conspicuous display, as flickering and gleaming light attracted the viewer’s gaze and focused attention on the body’s exposure, dress, and gestures. The emitted light defined social spaces such as the banquet and enhanced the interactions between participants, while candelabra themselves were objects of communal pleasure and viewing. In more personal contexts, candelabra also facilitated interaction with one’s own body by lighting activities such as grooming and self-adornment. Ultimately, this dissertation considers the unique contributions of finial bodies in making candelabra personally and socially meaningful in domestic life, and therefore important memorial objects during a funerary transition at the end of life.By foregrounding the finials and their cultural contexts, I aim to make contributions not only to ancient or Etruscan domestic and funerary culture generally, but particularly to the role that images of the body played as they were incorporated within personal and social objects in these contexts. To this end, I apply theories of phenomenology, embodiment, and perception while considering the value of finials as body images rather than simple subject matter. Because of the relationships that candelabra developed with their users specifically through the body, as well as their conspicuous display of body images, Etruscan candelabra earn a place in these greater theoretical discussions and have value for scholars outside the Etruscan or Ancient world.

Portable objects made of terracotta, stone, and bronze, among other materials, stylistically linked to cultural spheres around the eastern Mediterranean basin and further inland in the Near East, Cyprus, and Egypt, were dedicated with fervor at Greek sanctuaries during the Archaic period. Previously, such votive offerings were superficially interpreted as “foreign imports” and enumerated in oversimplified tallies and exoticizing lists of “orientalia” and/or “aegyptiaca.” They have been embedded as the stimuli of the so-called “Orientalizing” phenomenon—a 19th-century paradigm and enduring trend in scholarship that interprets aspects of culture as originating in the east and moving westward during the early first millennium. Focus was limited to identifying their geographical places of manufacture and attempting to reveal the identities of the dedicators. This paradigm limits attention to the origins of such objects and restricts interpretations of them to one-directional understandings of artistic “influence.” Informed by theories of materiality, modes of acquisition, the exchange of skilled crafting knowledge, and the movement of raw materials, finished products, craftspeople as well as their patrons in the eastern Mediterranean cosmos during the 7th and 6th centuries, this dissertation approaches the corpus through object biographies. It foregrounds three case studies—Cypriot style terracotta figurines from the Heraion of Samos, Egyptian sculptures from East Greek sanctuaries, and the composite North Syrian and Cretan sphyrelata korai from Olympia—to temper the broader theoretical discussions of intercultural artistic exchange during this time. The study explores a diverse array of artistic processes of material transformation ranging from the destruction, reuse, adaptation, and modification of objects to the local production of objects that can be stylistically linked to places far afield. By examining the materials from which and the manufacturing techniques by which such objects were made, it reevaluates where, when, and by whom they were crafted. The analysis identifies the tangible processes of artistic transmission to illuminate the exchanges of and interactions among the eastern Mediterranean craftspeople tasked with the fabrication of the dedications and the patrons who commissioned them. Ultimately, as singular artistic products, it is argued that the objects in the case studies represent intercultural attempts at unique votive object manufacture and communicate meaning by inhabiting more than one geographical space and temporally remote moments in time.

This dissertation is about how dominant identity is constructed through the centering and incorporation of marginal and subaltern subjectivities in Ancient Greek thought, with some preliminary consideration of the Classical Age but chiefly devoted to a study of Hellenistic poetic aesthetics at Ptolemaic Alexandria. The thesis argues ultimately for a specifically Queer and Afrocentric reading of the ArgonautikaI use postcolonial methods, tactics, and strategies to theorize the genealogical intersection(s) of gender and race, and explore the ancient roots of racism. I am indebted in my work to Critical Race Theory, Gender and Queer Theory, Intersectionality Theory and Decolonial Studies. Guided by the millennial discourses of the Coloniality of power and the contributions of Aníbal Quijano and his intellectual heirs to critical thought and theory—positing the fundamental and central functions of epistemological thought, knowledge-production and the control and regulation of knowledge within oppressive social orders as specifically and particularly interrelated practices in the European colonialism of Modernity, and enabling us to deconstruct out of our contemporary knowledge and social practices the oppressive consequences in Modernity as a result of the aftermath of Old World regimes in the New World—the argument throughout this dissertation subjects monuments of Classical Greek literature to an analysis that traces loosely a genealogy of how ideology and identity were constructed and fabricated in imperial contexts in the aftermath of the Greco-Persian Wars, during which time Hellenic peoples were first exposed to Empire, and some great portions of the Greek-speaking world came under the dominion of the Achaemenid imperial regime. In a manner of speaking, this dissertation deconstructs the intersections of identity, including gender (and ethnicity) and “race”, at pivotal moments in the history of Greek Antiquity. Principal test-cases for this study analyze monumental texts produced in societies under the hegemony of “democratic” imperial authority at Athens in the 5th Century BCE and Ptolemaic Egypt in the 3rd Century, in the aftermath of Alexander’s conquests. This dissertation explores how the control and regulation of racialized and ethnic marginalities and subalternities is critical to civic and political structures in the Classical Age, as well as how the interrelated concept of the gendered other, in artistic expressions of knowledge and authority—high literary monuments—functioned critically to reify and justify imperial and colonial practices in the Ancient Greek World. Chapter 1 consists primarily of readings of the Wesir-Heru (“Osiris-Horus”) dynastic succession myth from Egypt in representations of kingship and dynastic succession particularly in Africa and African spaces in the texts of Pindar, Herodotos, and Aiskhylos, including an exploration of the what at the instigation of Jackie Murry I call the Imagistic Poetics of Pindar and Aiskhylos in comparative consideration of Egyptian symbolic literary culture, including even the mdw-ntjr (“hieroglyphs”), and an especially instructive close reading of the center of the Agamemnon. To support my readings of Aiskhylos’ interactions with Egypt and Egyptian thought, I also consider how Aiskhylos interacted with the legacy of the Danaid myth. Situated in their proper historical contexts these readings demonstrate that during the height of the Achaemenid Empire in the Mediterranean World, which coincides incidentally with what we call the Greek Classical Age, Hellenism and Africanism were not mutually exclusive. In fact, as we see early in Chapter 1 with Pindar, Africanism is coextensive with Panhellenism. Furthermore, and critically, as part of my readings of gender as racialized—i.e., constructed under the Ancient Greek linguistic paradigms that govern “racial” otherness (genos)—I show that Blackness, beyond representing masculinity and the male body in the Greek artistic and visual imagination, is separable notionally in the Ancient Greek imagination, and in critical contrast to the modern and contemporary situation, from Africanism. In order to perform this work, I call upon archaeology and material evidence to render a more coherent picture of the networks of culture accessible in the micro- and macro-regions of an interconnected and transnational Ancient Mediterranean. In Appendixes to Chapter 1, I also provide brief readings of intertextuality in the Hellenistic reception at Alexandria of Classical Greek interactions with Egypt, Libya, and the African cultural past and show the embeddedness of that interaction in literary encounters especially, a fact evident from the Classical Greek texts. Chapter 2 explores the Hellenistic origins of Afro-Greek subjectivity in the literary record with Theokritos at Alexandria. I explore “race” in the West and the formation of Greek ethnicity in the East as a “kairological” artistic and poetic projection that exposes of the roots of 3rd-century universalist and globalist Ptolemaic imperial ideology. I also explore Space and identity, the social imaginary, and consequent(ial)ly the gendering of space in the poetry of Poseidippos. In my readings, we see texts engaged intimately with discourses about Sovereignty, and implicitly with the history of Rome and Qrt-ḥdšt (“Carthage”). Chapters 3 and 4 function as a pair or couple. After a full historical and social contextualization of Ptolemaic Alexandria in the Hellenistic Age of the 3rd Century BCE, as well as an exploration of an inclusive range of Queer (including “LGBTQ+”) subjectivities in Alexandrian poetry in Chapter 3, in Chapter 4 I argue that in the Argonautika of Apollonios Rhodios Medeia represents a Queer woman who endures systematic heteronormative and patriarchal oppression, or heterosexism. This opens up Book 4 of the Argonautika for fertile close readings of the inclusive and all-encompassing aesthetics that constitute Hellenistic poetry, including authentically Kemetic (“Egyptian”) voices. The Epilogue provides a roadmap for applying these analytic tools to the Latin Literature of Rome.