My study explores the pervasive theme of physical binding in ancient Greece, utilizing visual, literary, and archaeological evidence to uncover its broader cultural and ideological implications. Traditionally, scholarship has scrutinized these sources to reconstruct historical practices such as incarceration, enslavement, and torture. Addressing the performative aspects inherent in the sources under investigation, I complicate this perspective by pairing iconographic analyses and close readings with an interdisciplinary approach informed by theories of affect, embodiment, and neuroaesthetics. This methodology facilitates the interpretation of spaces like the prison, the courtroom, the theater, and the symposium as interconnected cultural landscapes characterized by practices of torture and imprisonment, cursing rituals, bound figures on vases and statues, and theatrical performances featuring actors chained on stage. Within this framework, I argue that the image of the bound body transcends mere representation of societal practices: it actively shapes and crafts social hierarchies and identities. Specifically, male elite control over female and enslaved individuals emerges both as a dominant motif and a symptom of societal anxieties. Ultimately, this dissertation shows that in ancient Greece physical bondage was a real- life issue as much as it was a matter of representation, a cultural assemblage of chains, shackles, and wheels.

“Inscribing Community” examines Greek inscriptions from Rome, between the first and fourth centuries CE, in order to understand the spaces and presentation of multicultural communities within the topography of the city. Literary sources, from Martial to Aelius Aristides, cite Rome’s multiculturalism as a defining feature of the city. These literary sources, however, separate Rome’s diverse population from the city’s built environment. For all the presentation of the city as a culturally diverse capital, did its multicultural population contribute to the topography of the city? Understanding the relationship between the city’s multicultural population and landscape comes as a challenge given the difficulties of tracing identity within material culture and the flawed preservation of Rome’s archaeological record. For this dissertation, I turn to Greek inscriptions – as both social historical texts and archaeological objects – in order to examine the organization and spaces of multicultural communities in Rome. Greek inscriptions, despite the cultural popularity of the language, remained a rarity in the landscape of Rome, accounting for less than 5% of the existing epigraphic record of the city. Within the center of Rome, inscribed Greek represented a cultural practice of the eastern half of the empire, where Greek functioned as the administrative language. When the Greek epigraphic record is mapped onto the topography of Rome, three distinct clusters of inscriptions can be seen in the areas of the Sacra Via, the Baths of Trajan, and the southern Transtiberim region. The contents of the inscriptions within these areas not only demonstrate the existence of communities organized by people from the different parts of eastern Mediterranean but also reveal their physical impression on the city. The three sites mark the only known structures and spaces devoted to multicultural communities in the urban topography of Rome. The Greek inscriptions of these three sites, when examined together, reveal the tension between motivation and perception in imperial Rome. Individuals and communities created inscriptions in Greek as an expression of their identities and native cultures. Yet, the display of inscriptions made the texts perceptible objects within the landscape of Rome, which anyone in the city might interpret in their own way. At each of the sites, imperial power mediated this tension, affecting their presentation and articulation of identity. Whether displayed in the center of the city or its periphery, Greek inscriptions in Rome represent eastern cultural identity that can also serve as a message of imperial dominance.

This dissertation analyzes the relationship between élites and urban spaces with the aim of creating a profile of municipal patronage of art and architecture in Italian cities during the late republican period (2nd and 1st centuries BCE). Starting from a discussion of the methods and the terms previously used by scholars (euergetism, munificence, etc.), the research delves into the civic and urban histories of Italian cities to study the interactions between monuments and society. With the aid of a substantial epigraphic dossier – as well as archaeological and literary sources – I discuss the actors, the processes, and the cultural aspects behind the construction of public buildings and monuments in late Hellenistic Italy. At the center of the work stand three case studies (Aquileia, Praeneste, and Pompeii), each offering a peculiar perspective on the topic. Thanks to the close reading of these cases, I offer new readings and conclusions on various problems connected with the social and economic history of Italian communities, the relationship between Rome and the Italian allies, and the development of Italian urbanism in the context of the Roman hegemonic expansion.