The ideas presented in the dissertation are based on the premise that the concept of Eastern Europe is a construction, which received its meaning(s) trough events and shifts, which also shaped the idea of Europe. To analyze these influences several labels and aspects of history, which constructed the concept of Eastern Europe can be recognized. The author argues that there can be five important aspects, forming the concept and providing meanings, discerned and considered: (1) geography associated with the Eastern border of the European continent and its flexibility; (2) cultural trends, mainly provided by the ideas of the Enlightenment, which present the eastern part as wild, barbaric and uncivilized; (3) political formations, which by military and political means conquered or lost the region, alienating it with the West or making it a 'buffer zone'; (4) Economic aspects of backwardness and the constant try to catch-up with the West; and (5) the discourse about the region itself, historiography depicting the formations and ascribing labels to discourse. Powered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org)

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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.

From at least the twelfth century, amid the growth of commerce, towns, and universities, notaries charged with the writing of various administrative documents formed an increasingly important professional group in the Italian communes and, later, across the whole northwestern Mediterranean. A large quantity of sources from the late medieval period were written by notaries, including notarial registers, court records, and other administrative books. Unlike modern administrative records, medieval counterparts surprise us with poems that look like contracts, images that have nominal functions, prayers interspersed with the text of the official record, and musical imagery that allows us to compare notaries to musicians. What do these marginalia betray about the meaning of contractual text and the notaries as their producers?“Minds and Margins: Notarial Culture in Bologna, ca. 1250-1350” is the first interdisciplinary study of notarial registers examining how notarial acts were brought together with poems, prayers, images, and music as they were entered into the registers’ pages by the notaries themselves. It demonstrates that to understand the contents of a quantitatively important source of medieval economic, social, legal, and political history—records written by notaries—we must not only take into account the social and legal-institutional contexts of their production, but also the cultural and religious worlds that shaped the registers and the minds of their makers, the notaries. “Minds and Margins” thus explores how notaries absorbed cultural modes of thought and practice and applied them to their administrative work. Examining poetry, images, music, and prayers in notarial registers—evidence that is not only physically located on the margins, but that has also been marginalized by previous scholars—I argue that notaries were both accountable officials and creators of an ideal urban order, using their culture to define contractual and institutional relationships. Bologna is at the center of this research because of its wealth of surviving notarial records and its university functioning as medieval Europe’s leading institution for the study of law. Moreover, the density and variety of archival records in Bologna provides the opportunity to draw out the connections notaries forged between the marginalia and their profession. Chapter 1, “Medicine and Literature in Salatiele’s Ars notarie,” treats notaries’ formation and shows how Salatiele (d. 1280), a Bolognese notary and jurist who maintained a school for notaries, relied on Galenic medical theory and Ovidian verses to theorize notarial instruments and notaries’ professional roles. I argue that Galen and Ovid allowed Salatiele to conceptualize the intellectual underpinnings of commercialization and monetization as ordering principles of the common good. Chapters 2 through 5 observe notaries at work to demonstrate how they used different cultural media to shape documentary principles and practices. Chapter 2, “Trustworthy Lovers,” examines poems notaries entered into the registers of the Memoriali, a Bolognese office that collected all notarial contracts involving sums of 20 lire. The two textual genres, poems and contracts, contain parallels in their formal and thematic frameworks. I argue that the poems are media by which notaries established for their colleagues and the public their own trustworthiness and ability to write truthfully. Chapter 3, “Signing with Religious Imagery,” examines signs that are analogous to monstrances and other religious objects notaries drew as part of signatures. I argue that in using images of devotional objects as signature signs, notaries were staking a claim to be creators of a quasi-sacred urban order. In Chapter 4, “The Music of Instruments,” I examine how the experience of music shaped notaries’ perceptions of contracts and their professional self-images. Liturgical chant may have inspired notaries’ reading practices, influencing their manner of reading instruments aloud to the contracting parties. From there, I turn to a broader question of the relationship between musical instruments and notarial instruments. The musical portrait of Zachetus de Viola can be seen as relating his musical skill to his reputation not only as a musician but also as a notary. While the teacher of notarial arts, Salatiele, turned to Galen and Ovid, former students drew on music and musical instruments as models for the social harmony they saw themselves constructing with notarial “instruments,” the technical term used for contracts. “Contracts,” “court records,” and “registers” are familiar legal terms. “Minds and Margins” argues that to medieval notaries, they could also mean musical instruments or poems—sometimes both at once. By examining the margins of notarial registers, we discover that the contracts, court records, and texts of other notarial acts at the center of today’s state archives in fact took shape out of a much broader cultural context. In this sense, “Minds and Margins” contributes to our understanding of historical margins as places that shaped the center—urban administrations, contractual and institutional relationships—in unexpected ways. The present research urges us to reconsider contractual and administrative principles—too hastily accepted by previous scholars as predecessors of their modern counterparts—through the lens of the minds of those who shaped them, medieval people.

Title: Occurrence of the risk factors of civilization diseases in clients of the physical aktivity program with components of functional training. Objectives: The aim of the thesis is to evaluate the occurrence of risk factors of civilization diseases in a selected group of clients who have been involved in the physical aktivity program with components of functional training (Fitness Svět pod Palmovkou). Methods: The research was attended by 35 probands (women) attending group lessons with components of functional training at Fitness svět pod Palmovkou in Prague. To all probands were measured the basic anthropometric parameters (body height, body weight, BMI, WHR index). Parameters of body composition were determined by BIA (Bodystat QuadScan 4000). For the analysis of selected risk factors was used the blood pressure monitor (Tensoval duo control) and a capillary blood sample was collected invasively (BeneCheck PLUS analyzer) for cholesterol determination. To determine the occurrence of selected diseases in blood relatives, was used the questionnaire - Family anamnesis. We correlated the relationship with the Pearson correlation coefficient. Results: For the whole observed group (n = 35), there was discovered a significant relationship between family anamnesis of obesity and body weight (r =...

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.

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.

Hair from small mammals of roadside, urban parkland, wilderness, and antique populations was analyzed for lead by atomic absorption spectrophotometry. Hair from roadside populations had a significantly greater amount of lead than hair from the ether groups. Hair from antique populations did not differ in lead content from that of current populations which are removed from immediate exposure to automotive exhausts.