The double-pipe reed woodwind known as the aulos was the most pervasive instrument in ancient Greek life. Despite recent attention to affect and the senses and advancements in ancient musicology, there remains no comprehensive study of this cultural phenomenon. Bringing the burgeoning field of sound studies to bear on the diverse range of evidence, this dissertation offers the first cultural history of aulos performance, focusing on a crucial period of its activity spanning the sixth through fourth centuries BCE. I propose an interpretive model that works across textual and material sources to account for the ineffable, affective ways in which the instrument acts upon the embodied listener. When we consider the aulos as a sonic medium that works beyond the structural and semantic boundaries of music and language, we can identify how the instrument communicates across contexts through certain structures of feeling its sound. By exploring the world-building capacities of the instrument’s sound effects and harmonics, I chart the history of these embodied ways of knowing its sound. I argue that the aulos operates through a culturally conditioned interface with the body, exerting an agency that impacts social and civic identity, drives musical innovation, and poses a cultural threat to discursive ways of knowing and rational persuasion. The five chapters identify the interplay of tradition and innovation across the contexts of aulos performance, between musical and theatrical genres as well as civic practices involving corporate movement. Meanwhile, with the rise of prose, the emerging critical discourse on the aulos analyzes its effect on the body specifically and aims to expose how the listener is tricked into the “enchanting” soundworlds it constructs. This interdisciplinary media-based approach to ancient Greek performance thus presents a new register of meaning-making that articulates unexplored aspects of the artistic, literary, and philosophical works that preserve this culture.

Despite a renewed interest in scholarship about archaic warfare, hoplites, Homeric society, and several other related areas, archery in Archaic Greece has managed to escape comprehensive study for half a century. Scholarship on the subject stands in urgent need of update and revision. Certain erroneous beliefs about archery have become canonical and are dangerous impediments to academic progress in those areas of study that require an accurate and nuanced understanding of archers or archery. I conclude that, contrary to popular opinion, there was no point in Greek history when the bow was not used. Rather, it was used in a variety of ways to support, supplement, and complement heavily armed infantrymen. Although archery could be effective, especially against horses and light-armed men, the bow was not as effective against heavily armed infantrymen for the simple reason that arrows would not often have been able to penetrate Greek armor. This factor did not, however, mean that the bow was impotent or "the feeble weapon of a worthless man." My study of wounds, their treatment, infection, and the potential use of arrow toxins adds a fruitful and previously unexplored perspective on the risks involved with facing an archer and some of the psychological considerations of doing so. In a form of warfare wherein armies were so heavily dependent upon morale and so easily compromised by fear, an arrow was a weapon of terror. Moreover, dying six days after a battle of tetanus did not accord with the hoplites' ideal of a `beautiful death' - one of the prospects that fortified a warrior as he girded himself for what was surely a horrifying ordeal. I also argue that the identity of archers changed over time. Early on, warriors might use a variety of weapons and the bow might have been used by just about anyone. Later, with the advent of the hoplite phalanx, archers became light-armed specialists. While convention holds that these archers were Scythian or Cretan mercenaries, I prove that there is no compelling reason to believe that this was so. The archers were Greek and likely derived from the lower classes of citizens. Moreover, despite its ideological demotion among the elite, the bow did not carry an actively negative association until the Persian Wars in the early 5th century B.C.E. In sum, the treatment of archery in the Archaic period is considerably more nuanced than many scholars have allowed.

This dissertation explores what images of ghosts in Roman art can reveal about the very limits of representation and the act of seeing itself. My approach differs from that of many previous studies on the supernatural, therefore, in that it ultimately has little to do with the question of whether or not the ancients were truly convinced that ghosts exist. While not discounting the importance of belief, I am interested rather in how modalities of belief (or unbelief) developed within a prescribed framework of possibilities--particularly with regard to the historical transformation of ideas about the nature of vision and representation--in which images played a crucial role. While much work has been done on aspects of death that touch upon the supernatural in discrete areas of research on folklore, magic, religion, or theater, for example, the ghost itself has never been the focus of a synthetic study in Roman art. This project is therefore intended to cut across these discussions to arrive at a more rounded picture of how the Romans went on living with the dead.

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.

The goal of the present study is the description and analysis of the material found on the E. H. II site (Area A) situated near Lake Vouliagméni on the Perakhora peninsula. The study includes a description of the stratigraphy and architecture of the site and of the material (ceramics, lithics) found in the building. For the analysis of the material, statistics were widely used to give more precision to the descriptions. The objects were also compared to contemporaneous material. The conclusion consist of a functional analysis of each of the rooms of the building. / La présente étude a pour but de décrire et d’analyser le matériel retrouvé sur le site H. A. II (secteur A) situé près du lac Vouliagméni, dans la péninsule de Perakhora. L’ étude comprend une description de la stratigraphie et de l’architecture du site, ainsi que du matériel (céramique, lithique) contenu dans l’édifice. Au cours de l’analyse du matériel, on a fait un abondant usage des statistiques afin de donner plus de précision aux descriptions. Les objets ont aussi été mis en parallèle avec leurs contemporains. La conclusion consiste en une analyse fonctionnelle de chacune des pièces de l’édifice découvert.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 1996. / Typescript. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 160-168). Also available on the Internet.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 1996. / Typescript. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 160-168). Also available on the Internet.