This dissertation explores the ethics and norms associated with contracting in Ptolemaic and Roman Egypt as a contribution to the institutional study of ancient contract and its relationship to the economic history of the Roman world. Although ancient contracts in the Hellenistic tradition (i.e., non-Roman law contracts) have been studied rigorously from a legal perspective, there has been no systematic study of contract as an economic institution in the eastern half of the ancient Mediterranean. The first three chapters argue that such a study is a historical desideratum and seek to establish the theoretical and methodological basis and scope of such a project. Theoretically, the most decisive factor in determining the nature, extent, and success of contract as an economic institution is actual enforcement, as opposed to mere legal "enforceability." While the modern (Western) state has been justly credited with having had a transformative effect on contract by publishing clear rules (i.e., contract law) and providing effective "third-party" enforcement, even modern contracts depend on the enforcement activities of the individual parties and the power of social norms. Historically, there is no question that the ancient state, Rome included, was less invested and less effective in its support and promotion of private contracting than its modern counterparts. Ethics and norms therefore played a larger and more important role in ancient contracting than they have in the last century and as such need to be studied in their own right. The nature of the project also argues for Egypt being the primary locus of study, since the papyri afford us the most complete access to ancient individuals and organizations using contracts to organize transactions. After the theoretical and methodological discussion, there follow explorations of several important social values and norms with respect to contracting in Graeco-Roman Egypt, including trust (pistis), "respect" (eugnōmosynē), and "breach." The results show how "personal" contracting was and reveal some of the ways in which individuals bridged the inevitable "trust gaps" in their efforts to build credible commitments with those outside the immediate circle of their trusted intimates. It also illuminates the discourse of reputation, a key lever in ancient contract formation and enforcement. Finally, the notion of breach is shown to have become both more common and to have evolved conceptually in written contracts over time. It is argued that these changes in the idea and drafting of breach should be interpreted in light of a larger pattern of historical and legal development spanning the second century BCE to the second century CE, a period which witnessed an increasing "moralization" of contract, itself an adaptation to an enforcement regime heavily dependent on ethics and norms. The last chapter offers a synthesis of the findings and a prospectus of the next phase of the project, which turns to the role of the state, arguing that it was generally more effective and activist than the current opinion allows.

The impact of Roman power on the pre-existing administrative and economic systems of the conquered provinces has been a significant issue of scholarly debate for decades. In the last two decades attention has shifted from the idea of Romanization as a top-down phenomenon to a much more articulated process, in which the element of cultural interaction between the conquering power and the conquered populations was central and led to the creation of locally hybrid cultural forms. This dissertation analyzes the ways in which local cultures and identities interacted with Roman ones in the years between Attalus III’s testament and the end of the Flavian age. I chose to focus my research on these centuries as they include four key moments for the Provincia Asia: 1) the moment of its institution in 129/6 BC with the related issues due to Aristonicus’ rebellion and the necessity of establishing effective provincial administrative and economic structures; 2) the years between the Mithridatic wars and Caesar, when the province spiraled into debt and the Asian monetary system had to adapt to the extra taxation requested by Sulla and then to the change in the role of the societates publicanorum, who were deprived of the farming of the decuma by Caesar; 3) the years of the Civil War between Antony and Octavian and its aftermath, which gave increasing importance to the conventus and to the introduction of Roman currency into the province, both in the circulating monetary pool and as an account unit; 4) the post-Augustan age, which saw an increasing standardization in the ‘local’ monetary systems of the province, with respect to both silver and bronze coinage, and the final ‘victory’ of the conventus over the pre-existing administrative structures, as shown by the fact that even municipal taxation and local cults were by then organized according to the conventus system. The model of ‘middle-ground imperialism’ is useful for understanding the process of progressive standardization of Asian administrative structures and monetary system, not as a top-down process but rather as a bilateral interaction between Roman and local cultures, as I have shown in the case of the progressive standardization of Asian provincial administrative structures (Chapters 1 and 2) and monetary systems (Chapters 3, 4, 5, 6). According to this research the transformative age for the Romanization of the Provincia Asia was not the Augustan Age, but the Second Triumviral Age. The main heuristic tools for drafting the picture of the administrative and economic life of Provincia Asia are a database of Asian civic issues (both silver and bronze) between 133 BC and AD 96 that I have constructed out of the data in BMC, SNG Copenhagen and SNG Deutschlands – van Aulock (for pre-Antonian issues) and in RPC I-II (from Mark Antony up to the Flavians), and three epigraphic databases that include the epigraphic attestations of denarii, assaria and drachmae in the province of Asia between the 2nd century BC and the 2nd century AD, for a total of 372 inscriptions. All these databases are included here as Appendices (I – X).

This dissertation explores how antiquity and some of its early modern admirers understand the notion of certainty, especially as it is theorized in Quintilian's Institutio Oratoria, a first-century educational manual for the aspiring orator that defines certainty in terms of consensus. As part of a larger discussion of argumentative strategies, Quintilian turns to the “nature of all arguments,” which he defines as “reasoning which lends credence to what is doubtful by means of what is certain” (ratio per ea quae certa sunt fidem dubiis adferens: quae natura est omnium argumentorum, V.10.8). These certainties, he later specifies, include not matters of scientific demonstration or objective fact, but the agreements of various communities: the laws of cities, local customs, and other forms of consensus. As the foundation of persuasive rhetoric, these consensus-based certainties situate argumentation as the practice of crafting agreements rather than demonstrating necessary conclusions. Taking as its point of departure Quintilian's novel understanding of certainty, this study looks to some of Quintilian's intellectual forebears as well as his later readers to show how his work is both a nexus of earlier intellectual developments as well as an important inspiration for later accounts of certainty, even into the early modern period. After illustrating in the first chapters of this dissertation how Quintilian's manual incorporates elements from Aristotelian notions of dialectic and rhetoric as well as from Ciceronian skeptical approaches to epistemology, I show how Quintilian's curriculum for the orator shapes the thought of Italian humanists, especially that of Lorenzo Valla (1406–1457), a reformer of scholastic logic and dialectic, and Giambattista Vico (1668–1744), an influential Neapolitan jurist. Adopting Quintilian's rendering of certainty as a matter of agreements and conventions, these later authors elaborate their own novel approaches to various fields—including law, language, and logic—through this ancient understanding of certum. Contrary to modern notions of certainty as objective or scientific fact, Quintilian's humanist readers continue to root this concept in consensus, both within the courtroom and without.

This dissertation offers an archaeologically and art historically grounded inquiry into the actuality, form, and meaning of human sacrifice from the Bronze Age through the Hellenistic period. It opens with a critical, up-to-date review of the corpus of proposed archaeological evidence for human sacrifice in the Minoan, Mycenaean, and Greek civilizations, wherein it is argued that rituals of this kind were rare but nevertheless a historical reality, performed in special or extraordinary circumstances at least until the Late Archaic period. The rarity of human sacrifice in the archaeological record is a direct expression of its exceptional nature; the unmatched potency of sacrificing a human being was necessitated only in the most unusual or extreme situations: to quell the unyielding wrath of the gods or to honor a deceased person who was imagined as possessing superhuman stature. The evidence of individual cases of human sacrifice indicates that the ritual could take a variety of forms, some involving heightened degrees of violence. After arguing for the historicity of human sacrifice, the dissertation shifts to a comprehensive analysis of artistic representations of human sacrifice, with a particular interest in their ritual aspect. These images, it is argued, should be interpreted in several, mutually inclusive ways – not only as metaphors or conceptual foils to sacrificial norms, but also as ritually plausible representations of a phenomenon that seems to have existed at least into the later sixth century BCE. Apart from a small group of Bronze Age seals decorated with motifs possibly associated with human sacrifice, the first secure evidence of human sacrificial representations date to the seventh century BCE and continue through to the end of the Hellenistic period. Like the archaeological cases, the visual sources form a comparatively small corpus. The subject matter is exclusively mythical and almost entirely drawn from myths of Polyxena and Iphigeneia; only rarely do artists explicitly represent the bloody violence of sacrifice. Images of the death blow are almost exclusively produced in the Archaic era – a time during which there is contemporary archaeological evidence for human sacrifices in funereal contexts – and involve only Polyxena. Interestingly, the cessation of material evidence is contemporaneous with a shift in the iconography toward the emotionally pregnant moments leading up to the sacrifice. The roughly 100-year overlap between the archaeological and visual evidence presents the possibility that artists drew upon elements of known instances of human sacrifice, or at the very least the two forms of evidence are indirectly related, in that both are inspired by myth. While human sacrifice does not seem to have persisted into the Classical period and beyond, artists continued, as they had in the Archaic period, to construct ritually plausible images with compositional analogues in other, highly codified iconographies, most notably those of animal sacrifice and the wedding. In this way, even as artists began to explore ever more the conceptual and symbolic dimensions of these sacrificial myths, they continued to invest them with a reality and an immediacy that far outlived the ritual’s practical existence.

Undergraduate honors paper--Mount Holyoke College, 2008. Program in Medieval Studies. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 73-79).

This dissertation draws inspiration from one of most iconic exchanges across the Indian Ocean in antiquity: that of Indian spices for Roman gold coins on the Periyar River in Malabar. While previous scholarship has outlined how these goods arrived at various entrepots like that on the Periyar, the larger impacts of Indian Ocean imports within new socio-cultural environments have yet to be explored. "Beyond the Periyar" articulates these impacts from a new perspective, the commodities themselves and the rippling patterns of consumption and industries that contribute to or arise from their importation. Roman coins changed functions as they changed hands, and surviving specimens often show the multiple stages of their long lives as objects through physical adaptations by Indian consumers. Their superficial design further held aesthetic value, provided useful idioms for Indian die-cutters, and inspired an industry of high-quality imitations. Indian spices like black pepper, cinnamon leaf, and ginger contributed to Roman culinary and cosmetic practices, as attested by Roman authors and associated utensils. These products have been discussed in the context of notions of “luxury” in reactionary texts—however, such critiques must be balanced against larger considerations of literary genre and known economic factors like prices vis-à-vis real wages. A hive of human activity throughout the Indian Ocean world underpinned these acts of consumption, which often stands behind the veil of consumer apathy. Human agents range from the investors financing transoceanic ventures and the traders manning oceangoing vessels, to state interests and regional security personnel, to the processors, craftsmen, and vendors who marketed these products to consumers. When we look beyond the Periyar, the consumption of long-distance imports appears not as a marginal force, but as a transformative component of ancient economies and societies with a far wider reach than previously assumed.

This dissertation is a cultural history of Bithynia, a province of the Roman empire located in northwestern Turkey, in the 1st-3rd centuries CE. In Bithynia, rural settlements dominated the landscape, such that we might speak of cities as “islands” among the countryside. There is substantial evidence for the cultures of these people, in some 1,400 monuments which were carved with text and image primarily for religious and funerary purposes. This dissertation studies these inscriptions in order to write a fuller cultural history of Bithynia. It argues that cultural divides between rural and urban were in fact very permeable, and moreover that geographical boundaries between Bithynia and her neighbor, Phrygia, were also quite fluid. Yet at the same time, cultural differences between the two regions, as well as within Bithynia itself, can also be detected.

This thesis aims to address the Greek attitude to their dream experience in the classical period, as it was conceived in theories and engaged with in dream practices. The emphasis is on the relationship between these elements and the wider cultural frames which surrounded them, in order both to illustrate the manner in which culture influences the conception of dreams, and also to use dreams themselves as a mirror to reflect parts of Greek culture. As a study it has been heavily shaped by the approaches to dreams developed by anthropologists, outlined in Chapter 2, who have emphasised the importance of studying dreams intra-culturally. In Chapter 3 I analyse the language that the Greeks used to express their dreaming experience, drawing from it the important way in which language was both determined by, and determined, the Greeks' understanding of the phenomenon. This forms a base for engaging with dream theories in Chapter 4, both the implicit allusions in literature and explicit explanations proposed by philosophers and medical writers. I then explore the theories at work within Greek culture via dreams as we see them active in the lived religion of the polis: I examine in Chapter 5 the dedications set up by individuals on account of spontaneous dreams, and in Chapter 6 the practice of incubation. I then turn to examine specific relationships: in Chapter 7, the association of dreams with status, i.e. the possibility that powerful people would have equally powerful dreams; in Chapter 8, dreams and gender, assessing the possibility that women considered their dreams to be more important than their male counterparts. In Chapter 9, I position dreams within the context of the other divinatory practices of the period, which allows us to see the unique ways in which dream practices functioned in comparison to the other divinatory forms.

This dissertation presents, for the first time, a freestanding account of notions of time and temporality as seen in the visual arts of the late Archaic and Classical Greece and contextualizes it within the larger cultural history of time. There is a growing consensus among scholars regarding a societal shift in fifth-century Greek attitudes towards time, from the authority of the past to the uncertainties and the immediacy of the present. This dissertation explores such changing notions of time in the visual tradition in four different ways: firstly through the personification of the key notion of kairos, which embodies on many levels the manifestation of this new temporality; secondly by investigating the emergent interest of the "historical present" in the artistic subject matter of the so-called Historienbilder; thirdly through a detailed investigation of new pictorial strategies in Greek vase painting that carry specific temporal attributes, by focusing on the motifs of jumping, lifting and dropping; and lastly, by dissecting the anatomy of the popular motif of "erotic pursuits" in vase painting, which embodies the sensory nature of this new temporality that hinges upon the notion of suspense and delay. These investigations employ a new phenomenological framework that centers on the "embodied viewer", connecting the temporality as understood by the viewer with that which is portrayed in the object, bringing together the visible temporality in art and the experienced temporality of the society, which the viewer inhabits. This framework is first sketched out by offering a phenomenological reading of a full 3-D digital reconstruction of the Lysippan Kairos. Such changes in the notion of time in the visual arts, seen as early as the late sixth century BCE and fully manifest in the Classical period, is also put into relief by a brief examination of analogous literary techniques, with a focus on the case of Aeschylus.

This dissertation argues that Seneca’s philosophical program and literary artistry are jointly coordinated to address and redress the pervasive experience of subverted expectations, i.e. the experience of paradoxicality, attributed to the unwise by Seneca’s Stoic philosophy. With a focus on Seneca’s Epistulae Morales, I suggest that Seneca’s oft-noted paradoxical style reveals and is meant to reflect our fundamentally inconsistent (and thus dissatisfying) experience engendered, in his view, by the incoherency of our worldviews. While, as Seneca explores, our minds’ operations hide this distressing contradiction from our attention, Seneca’s subtle but steady exposure of it and its source attempts to work against this self-deception. The intended result for the reader is the recognition of their own role in their dissatisfaction and the resulting commitment to its remedy through philosophical training.