This dissertation offers a partial history of ancient Greek international law from roughly 500 to 100 BCE as well as an explanation of the use of and compliance with international law by Greeks of those centuries that is grounded in legal sociology and social psychology. In other words it provides some answers to the questions, “Was there such a thing as Greek international law? If so, what did it consist in? And why did Greeks use it?” In the first chapter I show that Greeks recognized the existence of international law, regularly complied with its demands, and sometimes took concrete actions against those who violated it. I argue that there was a Greek international world occupied by political entities that we can reasonably call states, and that the rules governing behavior in this international world are reasonably called law. Hence it makes sense to speak of “Greek international law.” In Chapter 2 I present the theoretical framework by which I interpret Greek international law. This framework recognizes people as psychologically complex, driven by a wide variety of motives, and often acting on the basis of subconscious or unconscious factors. Our psychologies are heavily “socialized” by our social environments. States, in turn, are socially and politically complex collections of psychologically complex humans. With reference to studies in social psychology and legal sociology, I interpret much legal behavior, and in particular law compliance, as the result of socialization processes rather than simply “rational” reactions to the deterrence aspects of legal punishment. Stressing in particular the role of group identity in encouraging people to create, comply with, and enforce rules, I argue that group identity formation and the legal socialization processes resulting from it take place both at local and at international scales. Because groups are created by and within social networks, I describe ways that international social networks and corresponding group identities were formed across the Greek world. In Chapters 3 and 4 I offer histories and interpretations of two aspects of Greek international law: syla, the customary law of self-help seizure; and symbola agreements, interstate judicial treaties by which poleis reciprocally granted to each other’s citizens certain substantive and procedural legal rights. These legal institutions are known primarily from epigraphic sources, and I examine these sources while narrating the histories of syla and symbola through the Classical and Hellenistic eras, while interpreting syla and symbola in light of the theories of legal socialization and group identity presented in Chapter 2. In the final chapter I broaden the horizon and offer briefer overviews and interpretations of three other aspects of Greek international law (oaths, piracy, and federal leagues), suggesting some of the insights that a sociological approach can offer for understanding Greek international law. I argue that, for Greeks, international law, with its norms, its obligations, and its socially embedded nature, was continuous with and significantly overlapped with domestic law.

This dissertation concerns the sculptural representation of divinity in Hellenistic Central Italy, ca. 200 BCE-100 BCE. In so doing, it tackles the question of the role images played in Roman religion as well as the question of the relationship between Aegean Greek and Central Italian sculpture. Recent publications related to Roman divine images have respectively: a) suggested that the form of images was incidental to their functioning as sacred sculpture; b) proposed that images were not a necessary part of Roman religion; and c) considered the divine images themselves primarily significant as ideological statements on the part of their patrons. Furthermore, most scholarly treatments of sculpted images in Hellenistic Central Italy have to-date siloed architectural from freestanding sculpture, impoverishing the study of both categories of material. Most of these sculptures play little to no role in anglophone histories of ancient art. This project analyses the divine images of Hellenistic Central Italy through the lenses of scale, materiality, and body language. These analytical frames are used to show how the representation of the gods in freestanding and architectural sculpture was meaningfully differentiated from the appearance of sculpted images of mortal people. These differences, as well as the similarities, are highlighted in order to suggest patterns of response, and thereby to propose ways in which the category of ‘the divine’ was constructed in image form. The three lenses of scale, materiality, and body language likewise allow the significant differences, as well as the frequent points of similarity, between ‘Roman’ representations of the gods and the divine images of the Greek world to be elucidated. Chapter 1 presents the evidence from certain key sanctuaries, offering new reconstructions of fragmentary evidence and showing the interrelation between divine images of different kinds in these spaces. Chapter 2 compares divine images with sculpted representations of people through the lens of scale, showing that sculpted images of the gods were crafted at an intentionally ‘inhuman’ scale in Hellenistic Central Italy. Chapter 3 tackles the materiality of divine images, charting the new materials used to embody the gods in the second century BCE and, at the same time, stressing the ways that the use of materials differentiated divine from mortal images. A major theme, across media, is the production of composite, multi-material sculptures of the gods. Chapter 4 assesses the body language of divine images, showing the modifications made to existing sculptural types to make the bodies of the gods more dynamic and interactive to their viewers. The three key elements of divine body language exhibited by the sculpted representations of the gods are grandeur, ease, and engagement with a viewer. The results of this study demonstrate that images of the gods in Italy were constructed so as to differ significantly from the images of mortals. Through these means, images are shown to have embodied a ‘visual theology’, allowing conclusions to be drawn by their viewers about the nature and workings of the divine. In this way, images played an essential role in Roman religion, despite their non-appearance in ritual prescriptions. Further, Roman divine images are revealed to have been significantly different from the images of the gods in the Greek world. This project re-orients the study of the Central Italian images of the gods, focusing on the viewers of sculpture as well as the patrons. The conclusions reached reveal the central role of images in Roman religion in the Hellenistic Period and the value of visual evidence for anthropological approaches to the Roman world. These results regarding divine images provide as yet under-exploited evidence for the relationship between Greek and Roman sculpture.

In this dissertation, I trace the different lives and afterlives of Octavia Minor, Augustus’ sister. I offer a comprehensive study of the ancient literary representations of Octavia; through the course of four chapters and an epilogue, I demonstrate how she occupies a defining space in the public imagination of the early principate. The purpose of this dissertation is to make the literary lives and afterlives of Octavia more visible and to examine how such representations may relate not only to Octavia’s time but also to the times of the sources, from antiquity to the Renaissance. In Chapter 1, I start by pointing out how late Republican customs of marriage and female alliances influence Octavia’s life and its representations and monitor the influence that Octavian had on his sister, and vice versa. Here as throughout the dissertation, I examine how different authors represent Octavia, her widowhood, and her betrothal at the Treaty of Brundisium. In Chapter 2, I trace Octavia’s travels through Greece and the Hellenistic influences in representations of her. This chapter concludes with how she is presented in treatments of the Treaty of Tarentum, where she grows into her role either as mediator or political pawn, according to which sources are followed. Chapter 3 begins with the honours of 35 that both Octavia and Livia receive. Thereafter, I argue for Plutarch’s Octavia as the subject of a mini-parallel life as Cleopatra’s foil. After her divorce with Antony, the literary Octavia seems to negotiate the boundaries between the public and private sphere habitually: we will trace this phenomenon in depictions of Augustus’ victorious return, Octavia’s mourning of Marcellus, and, ultimately, in her own state funeral. In Chapter 4, I examine the different ways in which Octavia’s continuing influence is felt and expressed through the different areas in her life, such as lineage, education, and culture, in what I call “the Octavia Factor.” The epilogue recognizes the historical Octavia as a point of intertextual reference in the pseudo-Senecan Octavia and explores the possibilities of future work on renaissance reception of Octavia. It is in this way that I shed new light on the development of “the Octavia narrative” in the literary sources.

The dissertation re-examines a fragmentary and understudied group of nearly 150 portrait statues representing Hellenistic kings. The surviving portrait statuary comprises a small fraction of those originally produced for kings in marble, bronze, gilded bronze, and other materials during the Hellenistic period. The corpus of extant statuary presents many interpretive challenges, from fragmentary conditions to often uncertain provenance, and from unrecognizable physiognomies of rulers to unstandardized royal iconographies. Most previous scholarship was concerned with identifying kings in their portraits, unfortunately without much success. As a result, the portraits have received relatively little attention over the past few decades, despite robust and relevant scholarly advances related to Greek portraiture and Hellenistic kingship. While most studies have focused on identifying faces and interpreting portraits in thecontext of specific reigns, the present study collates the art historical, archaeological, and textual evidence for royal portraits’ forms, iconographies, and original placements to gain a fuller understanding of the corpus. Analysis of surviving royal statue bases, literary accounts, honorific decrees detailing royal portrait commissions, and royal portraits in other media (e.g., coins, seals, bronze figurines, mosaics, etc.) reveals that royal portrait statues were often more diverse, conspicuous, theatrical, and divinizing than portrait statues representing non-royal individuals. The study demonstrates the resonances between these portrait features and the marvelous bodily adornments, choreographed movements, and calculated performances of kings' real bodies in royal rituals and spectacles, ultimately revealing that like the staged appearances of kings, Hellenistic royal portrait statues were conceived as conspicuous material syntheses of royal actors and royal roles.

Greek literature is infamous for its fondness of narrating in horrific detail the violent plots of man versus man, man versus beast, and even man versus god, encompassing conflicts that range from individual vendettas to large-scale warfare. The extant stories of Greek epic and drama preserve merely a snippet of the ancient audience’s fascination with violence in all its forms. Depicted among these bloody confrontations is a subject that seems taboo even to modern viewers—kin murders. Epic conceals the most brutal violations of kinship ties, preferring a more nuanced approach to such horrors. Tragedy, in contrast, relishes translating these particular crimes onto the public stage. However, in dramatic performance the violent acts themselves are only either described in words or alluded to; they are always completed off-stage, and audience members must rely on their imaginations to recreate the most offensive parts of an episode. There is a similar hesitation in visualizing these gruesome stories of parents slaying children, wives murdering husbands, brothers turning against each other, or sons slaughtering mothers in Greek art. In contrast, there are numerous portrayals of lethal violence in other contexts that are unabashedly explicit and shockingly gory. For example, images of quarrels between political rivals or cultural others enjoyed popularity from the earliest periods of Greek art. But depictions of sanctioned violence in the military sphere occupy a different realm than the rare illustrations of the most sinister of transgressions—the murder of one’s own kin. The tantalizing few examples of this exceptional category of violence prompt further study, yet there has never been a comprehensive investigation on portrayals of intrafamilial murder in in the visual repertoire. In Kindred Killers: Intrafamilial Murders in Archaic and Classical Greek Art, I bring together and examine for the first time the evidence for murder against kin in Greek art from the seventh to the fourth centuries BCE. I assemble a catalog of 202 images related to four types of intrafamilial murder within the nuclear family unit: filicide, spousal homicide, parricide, and fratricide. Geographically, the material spans from mainland Greece, including Attica, Corinth, and the Peloponnese, to East Greece, and to South Italy and Sicily; the objects range from pottery, shield bands, seals, and other representatives of the so-called minor arts, to statue groups, temple architecture, and lost monumental wall paintings. I investigate the iconographic patterns of the four typologies, tracing their changes through time, medium, and area of production, while also considering factors, such as manner, intent, and motivation, in order to establish a visual language for “intrafamilial murder.” I frame the images within broader, shifting cultural notions of violence and explore how the various scenes of kinship murder challenge and solidify social norms, negotiate interpersonal power, and express the tensions brought about by ever-changing family dynamics.

The working assumption in the scholarship on Aristophanes is that fifth-century comic slaves were instantly recognizable in performance through aspects of their body, costume, and/or mask. This project seeks to corroborate the claim that the fifth-century comic male slave was probably not differentiated visually from other types of characters. In so doing, I stake out an additional set of new claims. Since the appearance of a comic actor in the playing space did not seem to instantly announce whether or not he was playing a slave role, slave identities were instead likely inflected through performance. Any delay in the inflection of a character’s identity as a slave would create the opportunity for that character’s identity to be ambiguous. This potential for ambiguity is not exclusive to the comic slave but is rather inherent in the comic male body and costume which, in the fifth century, does not seem to have differentiated social type. Indeed, two early artifacts apparently display a recognition of the potential for the comic body to be ambiguous through depicting comic figures who bear a strong visual similarity to one another in scenes that seem to invite the exploitation of that ambiguity. The bulk of this project explores a range of ways in which that potential for ambiguity is activated and played with in the fifth-century comedies of Aristophanes, in particular in the case of comic slaves. In the first two chapters, I consider how artifacts relating to the performance of comedy and the extant plays of Aristophanes both support the view that the fifth-century comic male slave probably looked like a typical comic character. In the third chapter, I explore the revelation of character identity in the opening scenes of Wasps and Women at the Thesmophoria. Through close readings that seek to reconstruct how these scenes would have unfolded in performance, I argue that where the reader sees slaves clearly in the opening scene of Wasps, the original audience might not have, and, conversely, where the reader tends not to see a slave in the opening of Women at the Thesmophoria, the original audience might have. In both plays, the ambiguities surrounding character identity contribute to a core function of the Aristophanic prologue—capturing audience interest and curiosity. Two chapter length studies on Knights and Frogs follow. In Knights, I argue that the ambiguity of the comic body is politicized through an extensive engagement with oligarchic sentiments and attitudes. By not distinguishing slave from citizen, the ambiguity of the comic body underlies and visually develops the pervasive blurring of legal status categories in this play, while also becoming a sign and symbol of the perversion of social hierarchies that an oligarch might associate with democracy. The ambiguity of the comic body is further exploited in the contest between the Sausage Seller and Paphlagon, contributing to the difficulty in distinguishing whether the Sausage Seller will be similar to Paphlagon or not, as visual differences between the two are collapsed. Ultimately, the engagement with oligarchic sentiments about the perversion of social and moral hierarchies in the democracy are part of an elaborate form of misdirection. The Sausage Seller is not the same as Paphlagon, as he proves through restoring order. In this way, the ambiguity of the comic body is re-politicized as, through the figure of the Sausage Seller, it becomes emblematic of the potential of a citizen in the democracy, a potential that is not constrained by social background. Finally, I argue that it is precisely when legal status boundaries become especially blurred in Athens with the mass enfranchisement of enslaved people who fought at the Battle of Arginusae that we begin to see a visual and verbal contraction of the potential ambiguity of the comic slave in Frogs. This curtailing of the potential for the comic slave to be ambiguous is a key contribution to the later development of the comic slave, as the visual code for the slave becomes much more defined in the fourth century. It is also essential for understanding how this play responds to that contemporary mass enfranchisement of the enslaved people who fought at the Battle of Arginusae.

Classical Studies, as a subject, has not been seriously presented in many schools until fairly recently. Britain initiated the introduction of Classical Studies to the school curriculum in 1974, and interest has continued to grow steadily in other countries like America, New Zealand, Australia and Canada. This thesis was started on the assumption that this entirely new subject could be introduced into the curriculum for standard six and seven pupils at South African schools, for reasons which will be given later. As work continued on the thesis, the 1985 syllabus for Latin lent it further impetus. Some of the implications of the new Latin syllabus will be considered in the conclusion (Introduction, p. 6)

This study explores how in central plays of Euripides – namely, Alcestis, Hippolytus, Helen, and Bacchae – bodies, landscapes, and objects (both seen on stage and described in speeches, dialogues, and choral odes) serve as media for assessing affective states, materializing the characters’ feelings and sensations and hence enabling the audience to vividly perceive them. My focus is grounded in the ancient conceptions of bodies and the senses in material from the Pre-Socratic and the Hippocratic writings, including theories about how the surrounding environment influences bodily types. It is also underpinned by theoretical perspectives that have come to prominence in recent research in ancient literature and culture. First, it draws on insights from phenomenology, aesthetics, and affective theory that in ancient drama highlight embodiment, synaesthesia, and the circulation of affects among characters and spectators. Second, it engages with works inspired by the new materialisms, which have produced a new attention to the mutual and symbiotic relationship between humans and nonhuman entities. Finally, it is based on the “enactive” approach to cognition, which makes a compelling case for visualization (e.g., spectators’ imagination of the things sung, spoken, or narrated) as grounded in the active, embodied structure of experience. Building on such theories, I posit that Euripides’ plays illustrate how the characters’ feelings and emotions combine with sensory indicators (sight, taste, smell, and touch), so that they operate as visible marks of states usually conceived of as inner. These states are, I suggest, exteriorized not only on bodies but also in their surroundings, such that landscapes as mapped onto the dramatic stage and objects with which the characters interact function as supplements to embodied affective manifestations. In addition to onstage action, I focus on how Euripides’ language triggers a strong resonance in the spectators’ imagination. In this regard, my argument takes up the insights of ancient critics such as Longinus, who has praised Euripides’ ability to generate “emotion” (τὸ παθητικόν) and “excitement” (τὸ συγκεκινημένον) in the audience through “visualization” (φαντασία) and “vividness” (ἐνάργεια). Thus, I examine how references to onstage performance and visualizing language interact, giving the spectators a full picture of the dramatic action. In Alcestis, I explore how embodiment, sensorial phenomena, and physical interactions put the characters’ feelings of pain and grief on prominent display, eliciting the audience’s sensory reaction. In Hippolytus, I examine how the characters’ emotions blend into the surroundings, such that forms, colors, and textures of landscape and objects allow the spectators to perceive inner states more forcefully. In Helen, I investigate how material and nonhuman things, such as rivers, plants, costumes, weapons, statues, ships connect to the characters as parts of an affective entanglement that heightens the experiential appeal of the characters’ feelings and sensations. In the Bacchae, I regard Dionysus’ action as an affective force that spreads throughout the world of the play, cracks, and mutates things, including human and animal bodies, natural elements, and objects. This action creates an enmeshment between things, which is embodied by the thyrsus topped with Pentheus’ head (mask) that gives the spectators a keen sense of the multiple, productive, and transformative nature of Dionysus’ power. In conclusion, this study argues that bodies, landscapes, and objects represent the privileged sites for exploring the affective exchange between the characters and the audience, refining our understanding of the intensity, impact, and reception of the Euripidean theater.

The principles of ancient Greek architecture have persevered through millennia, their impact ebbing and flowing perhaps, but still considered a fundamental layer on which Western architectural traditions have been built. Keeping in mind the pragmatic, aesthetic, and ideological influence Greek architecture has continued to have, my dissertation turns to contemporaneous sources to gauge the Greeks’ reception of their own sacred architecture. Scholars of Greek religion tend to agree that the temple was not a necessary component of ritual – boundary stones delineating sacred space and an altar on which communication with the divine was sought through sacrifice and non-sanguinary offerings were enough for religious rites. Why, then, were considerable effort and funds put towards the construction of temples, often monumental and virtually ubiquitous across the Greek landscape? Paradoxically, why is Greek literature, an art form that valued ekphrastic accounts of artworks (Homer’s description of the shield of Achilles [Iliad 18.478-608] is an oft-cited example) mostly silent on sacred architecture save for few laconic and formulaic appellations and rather dry descriptions (Greek traveler Pausanias, for instance, focused on sanctuary histories and votive offerings but was rather disinterested in architecture)? There appears to be a disparity between etic and emic perceptions of Greek sacred architecture, but, in fact, ancient evidence proves otherwise and demonstrates that artists were mindful of the potency of sacred structures. My dissertation pieces together their visual testimonies, particularly in vase painting which is arguably the most prolific and far-reaching medium of Greek art. Through an exhaustive perusal of museum collections, archives, and pottery-focused publications, the present study assembles a collection of nearly three-hundred vase paintings with depictions of sacred architecture and covering a time period of around three centuries from the Archaic period (seventh-century BCE) to the end of the Late Classical period (late fourth century BCE). The majority of the objects originate in Athens and its environs (Attika) and Magna Graecia. Based on this chronological and geographical scope, the study examines the images in four chapters: Attic black-figure vase paintings, Attic red-figure vase paintings with non-mythological subjects, Attic red-figure vase paintings with depictions of myth, and South Italian vase paintings. Within these chapters, the typology of architectural elements (e.g., freestanding columns, temple facades) and subject matter (e.g., myths, quotidian activities) constitute the primary criteria with which the images have been categorized. This extensive collection of vase paintings provides manifold insights into not only the reception of sacred architecture but also architectural elements as effective pictorial motifs. A great number of the depictions can be connected to “real” prototypes and, in some cases, distinct religious practices. While previous studies have taken a similar approach only to fixate on the discrepancies between prototypes and what architectural depictions can tell us about ancient building practices, the present study argues that vase painters rarely, if at all, intended to reproduce existing structures. Thus, the evidence should be used to study the ways in which artists reflected and refracted how buildings shaped and were shaped by the needs of their users. Creating an autonomous visual language built on abbreviation, elision, and synthesis, artists, in fact, rendered structures fit for the pictorial world. Their aim was not exactitude but rather verisimilitude – temples, shrines, portals, sanctuaries that were guided by but never unequivocally subservient to reality. The semiotic analysis of architecture, meanwhile, considers the aesthetics of vase painting and the objecthood of the vase. Beyond their face value (i.e., signifying sacred structures), elements like columns and simplified temples configure the surface of the vase into distinct zones, thus denoting spatio-temporal transitions, and hierarchize figures within the depicted events. Moreover, there are numerous instances where the pictorial frame is transformed into a built environment itself with the use of architecture – a practice that urges the viewer to contemplate the tension between the flatness of the ‘canvas’ and the habitable spaces defined by the juxtaposition of figures and structures.

This dissertation examines Cicero’s contribution to the rise of astronomy and astrology in the literary and cultural milieu of the late Republic and early Empire. Chapter One, “Rome’s Star Poet,” examines how Cicero conceives of world building through words to connect Rome to the stars with the Latin language. Through a close study of the Aratea, I consider how Cicero’s pioneering of Latin astronomical language influenced other writers, especially his contemporaries Lucretius and Catullus. In Chapter Two, “The Stars and the Statesman,” I examine Cicero’s attitudes towards politics. By analyzing Scipio’s Dream and astronomy in De re publica, I show how Cicero uses cosmic models to yoke Rome to the stars. To understand the astral dimensions of Cicero’s philosophy, in Chapter Three, “Signs and Stars, Words and Worlds,” I provide a close reading of Cicero’s poetic quotations in context in the De natura deorum and De divinatione to show how Cicero puts the Aratean cosmos to the test in Academic fashion. Ultimately, I argue that Cicero profoundly shaped the Roman view of the stars and cemented the link between cosmos and empire.