Thesis (doctoral)--Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität zu München, 1978. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 214-219).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Pennsylvania, 1943. / Bibliography: p. ix-xii.

This thesis is an aetiological investigation of the Hellenistic and Roman figural bronze statuettes in the round that form part of the Ashmolean Museum's antiquities collection. The collection serves as a lens through which to study aspects of ancient and modern receptions of Classical sculptural forms. This approach is based on the premise that the collection's composition has been historically determined not only by how the modern parties responsible for its creation and growth responded to the sculptural forms and images recovered from antiquity, but also by how sculptural forms developed in Greece during the Classical and early Hellenistic periods were received by makers and users of bronze statuettes in antiquity. The thesis has three primary objectives: firstly, to produce a useful and informative catalogue of the Ashmolean Museum's collection of Hellenistic and Roman figural anthropomorphic bronze statuettes in the round; secondly, to determine not only how that collection came to have the characteristics that it does, but also how the reception of ancient sculpture has historically affected the formation of collections of bronze statuettes and their compositions; thirdly, to use archaeological evidence of bronze statuettes to reconstruct possible contexts and to determine in greater detail the reception of canonical sculptural figure types in the form of small bronzes during the Hellenistic and Roman periods. Part I of the thesis deals with the modern contexts for the statuettes, investigating the collection history, pulling out its salient characteristics and then comparing these to other major collections to make informed observations about how and why specific types of statuettes have survived from antiquity and the roles that modern reception of antiquity has played in shaping collections. This leads to Part II, which attempts to reconstruct possible ancient contexts for the Ashmolean bronzes by looking at the archaeological evidence for their production, movement use and display. Part III uses some of the figures of dwarfs, Herakles and Hermes in the collection to develop case studies that examine aspects of the visual relationships that existed between small bronzes and classical sculpture from the Classical and early Hellenistic periods.

Roman wallpainting has been the subject of innumerable studies from the eighteenth century to the present day, but the epic-themed friezes of Late Republican and Early Imperial Italy have been comparatively neglected throughout this history of scholarship. This thesis therefore seeks to examine the three painted and stucco Iliad friezes from Pompeii, all found on the Via dell'Abbondanza, and the Odyssey frescoes from a house on the Esquiline in Rome, as four examples of a type which had a long history in the Graeco-Roman world, even if their survival in the archaeological record is scant. The primary aim of the study is to understand each frieze in the knowledge of how they might have been regarded in antiquity, as elucidated in Pausanias' commentaries on Polygnotus' Iliupersis and Nekyia frescoes in Delphi, and to understand their extra-textual insertions and spelling discrepancies not as artistic errors but as reflections of the geographical and chronological contexts in which the friezes were displayed. Through detailed study of their iconography and epigraphy, alongside contemporary writers' discussion of the epic genre and its specific concerns for a Roman audience, this study aims to show that the most fruitful course of enquiry pertaining to the friezes lies not in an argument about whether they are entirely faithful to the Homeric epics or depart from them in puzzling ways, but in the observation that reliance on the text and free play on it go hand in hand as part of the epic reception-culture within which these paintings belong.

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

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

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

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

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.