Inaug.--diss.--Bonn. / Vita.

Inaug.--diss.--Bonn. / Vita.

Thesis (Ph.D.) -- McMaster University, 1999. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves [397]-418]. Also available via World Wide Web.

vii, 65 p. A print copy of this thesis is available through the UO Libraries. Search the library catalog for the location and call number. / Roman gladiatorial games had significance far beyond that of mere spectacle and were more than savage and brutal entertainment for depraved emperors and bloodthirsty crowds. Classifying the games as a form of ritual, and by extension a means of communication, this study approaches Roman gladiatorial games as a type of text and employs literary theories regarding allusion to bring to light the more profound implications of the games. I focus on the ways in which gladiatorial games alluded to funerary and sacrificial ritual as well as to the idealized representations of masculine virtue in Roman literature and the native myths and legends that Romans used to define themselves. The gladiator was both the community's ideal agent and its sacrificial offering, and gladiatorial combat was the embodiment of Roman social values, religious practice, and national identity. / Committee in Charge: Dr. Mary Jaeger, Chair; Dr. Lowell Bowditch; Dr. Cristina Calhoon

Les combats de gladiateurs sont les spectacles les mieux documentés du monde romain. Depuis l'ouvrage de Louis Robert (Les gladiateurs dans l'Orient Grec, Paris, 1940), qui rassemble un corpus épigraphique et iconographique très intéressant, aucune nouvelle synthèse n'a été proposée sur les gladiateurs en Orient, alors que les découvertes ont été très nombreuses, notamment en ce qui concerne les stèles funéraires. Le but de cette thèse sera de mettre en avent cette nouvelle pratique sociale apparue en Orient avec la conquête romaine à travers un catalogue de sources exhaustifs partant des travaux déjà effectués par Louis Robert, étoffés des découvertes postérieures afin d’établir une étude complète du phénomène. / This paper will aim to put forward new social practices emerged in the Oriental province especially in Greece and Asia Minor with the Roman conquest through a phenomenon common to all of the Empire: The gladiatorial combat. After a quick introduction about the gladiator fight’s origin and its importance in the Roman West, this reasoning will highlight the presence of gladiators through epigraphic corpus and varied iconographic and study the importance of gladiatorial evidence in this geographical area, and finally analyse the consequences of gladiator fights’ introduction for the people of these regions of the empire. Those modifications are the result of a deliberate regional policy introduced by the Roman authorities in connection with the imperial cult.

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.