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<p> Retailing in ancient Rome remains a neglected area of study on account of the traditional view among economic historians that the retail trades of pre-industrial societies were primitive and unsophisticated. In addition to addressing a lacuna in the scholarship of the ancient economy and challenging traditional models of retail history, this study offers a novel diachronic analysis of the development of the fixed-point retailing trade in the city of Rome between the late 3rd c BCE and the 2nd/3rd c CE. An interdisciplinary approach to the research is employed, combining the textual sources, epigraphic texts, archaeological data, art historical evidence, and comparative historical materials in order to arrive at a more holistic understanding of ancient Roman retailing. This study also introduces new approaches to the ancient evidence, adapting models from marketing and retailing such as retail change theory and retail atmospherics, as well as from social network analysis to advance our understanding of the Roman economy and urban culture. </p><p> Economic growth in the mid-Republic triggered a major shift in the structure of distribution at Rome as permanent shops surpassed temporary markets as the dominant form of urban retailing. The establishment of a shop economy at Rome improved the social and economic status of shopkeepers, who emerged in the late Republic as a socially defined, politically active group capable of affecting grassroots change in the political system. By linking shops to Augustan ideology, Augustan urban reforms improved the social position of shopkeepers and increased the visibility of their shops in the commercial landscape. Shopkeepers capitalized on this by focusing their marketing strategies on the shop design, which became the primary method of advertising. For the everyday Roman, the fashions and information advertised in the design of Roman shops would have been highly visible and extremely pervasive, as shops formed the backdrop to the lived experience of urban inhabitants. On account of the development of the fixed-point retailing trade, the Roman shop became not only an essential unit in the urban distributive system and an important locus for sociability, but also a physical reflection of a local urban identity, emblematic of the power and prosperity of the Roman empire more generally. Consequently, Roman shopkeepers were as active in shaping the urban character of Rome from below through shop architecture as the emperors and elite with their more monumental building projects.</p>

<p> The Early Helladic II&ndash;III (EH II&ndash;III) transition was a period of dramatic cultural change in the Argolid, and one of the most prominent shifts which occurred at this time was in the pottery, which changed from forms with few handles, simple decoration, and homogeneous appearances to ones with an abundance of handles, prominent decoration, and wide variation in appearances. While this shift has been explained to some extent by writers such as Rutter (1993) and Spencer (2007), the nature of this change has not yet been fully explored. This thesis explores this problem by examining the organization of pottery production in Early Helladic Lerna, a type site for the region. This is done by examining indirect evidence from Lerna in EH II and EH III, largely through the use of standardization analysis, which is then used to evaluate the organization of pottery production in each phase by using Costin&rsquo;s parameters of craft production, namely intensity, concentration, scale, and context (1991). These are then compared, ultimately concluding that production was at the level of very low-intensity household production for domestic use and limited non-economic trade in both periods. The single change observed is in the context of production, which is found to move from a midpoint between independent and attached production in EH II to embedded production in EH III, a form of attached production. This occurred as the result of a change from a seemingly uncontested political sphere in EH II to one characterized by competition between individuals or groups in EH III, which caused the political powers to draw nearer to their otherwise unchanged pottery production groups in order to compete for power. </p><p> This thesis contributes to current scholarship in several ways. It first of all provides new evidence for the organization of pottery production in the Argolid during EH II and III, which has received little scholarly attention. It also contributes to research into the nature of the political changes which occurred across the EH II&ndash;III transition, such as Weiberg and Lindblom&rsquo;s suggestion of differential adoption of foreign elements in the Argolid in EH III (2014), which I propose is due to varied approaches to competition for political authority. Finally, it provides a useful instance of shifting political power and an associated change in production context that problematizes typical narratives regarding the development of attached craft production (Costin 1991: 12).</p><p>

Pothos, "longing" or "absence", is identified as the singular topos accounting for both the origin of tragedy and the origin of ontology from the epic and pre-Socratic narratives of the tragic crisis in Mythos. In Homer's Iliad it is the pothos of Achilles' curse upon the Achaeans which distinguishes the genius of Homer's Iliad from the Iliadic tradition whence it arises in supplanting the tradition theme of menis, or "wrath". As substance of the curse, Achilles' pothos, or "absence" from battle, ultimately redounds back upon him in his pothos, or "longing" for his surrogate Patroclus. Although pothos per se recedes into the background among the pre-Socratics, its repercussions are evident in the disarticulation of the integrity of Mythos in the unfolding developments associated with the limit (peras), from Anaximander through Parmenides and Empedocles. It is in this context that the origins of ontology are discovered as arising in Hesiod. The putatively metaphysical dicta of Anaximander, and even Parmenides' positive apodeixis of Being are interpreted against the tragic backdrop of the end of epic and as anticipating in a singular historical development the origin of tragedy proper. The retrospective orientation of Parmenides to the archaic Dike, "Justice", of Epic is overextended. The apparent positivity of his apodeixis of Being, is over-determined and belies the now advanced and ineluctable crisis of the tragic. Aeschylus' apotheosis of tragedy in the Oresteia emerges from the penumbra of the transit of Being (einai) before Mythos, and will thus be written in the shadow of what was objectively 'revealed' in Parmenides' noetic transcendence to the open sphere of Dike. This is evident first in the disaesthesis of the archaic symbolon in the active Empedoclean optics of the gorgonic epiphany of the graphe in the sacrifice of Iphigeneia, in which the enigmas of the parodos of the Agamemnon are cledonographically revealed. This disaesthesis is, however, but the obverse of the opsis, or "image", of Helen's phasma which appears, hypostatized, independently of human experience hovering above Aeschylus's inversion of Empedocles's cosmogonic whirlpool of Love and hate, hovering over the cosmophthoric abyss of pothos.

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