This thesis focuses on Paul’s view on freedom for believers in the context ofslavery. Paul’s understanding comes through in his metaphorical usage of slavelanguage in 1 Cor 7:20-24. In this thesis, a comparison between the teaching ofPaul and that of the Stoics Seneca, Musonius, and Epictetus will support myinterpretation of Paul’s opinion regarding slavery and freedom. I first explore howPaul and the three Stoics advocate for their understanding of freedom for slaves,and then I compare Paul’s theological interpretation with the moral values of thethree Stoics. There is no doubt that Paul, Seneca, Musonius and Epictetus wereaware of the cruel physical judgments and hardships, which slaves suffered in thecontext of slavery. Though neither Paul nor the three Stoics expressed an intentionto terminate the existing hierarchical social structure and slavery system, they alsodid not ignore the physical judgments and hardships placed upon slaves. Theteachings of Paul, Seneca, Musonius and Epictetus testify that they had a commonwill to end, or at least reduce, the exploitation and dehumanization of slaves. Theircommon interest is to promote the possibility of freedom, equal fairness and kindlytreatments for slaves. Both groups preferred freedom and dignity for human beingsby ignoring the social standards and social identification of the Roman society.However, they emphasized inner freedom rather than the social freedom of the slaves.Aim of thesis: To compare Paul’s attitude to slavery and his metaphoricallanguage of slavery and freedom with that of the Stoic philosophers, Seneca,Epictetus, and Musonius.

Previous researchers of Jewish history in the Roman Empire have imperfectly employed Greco-Roman sources to describe Roman perceptions of Jews and Judaism by relying on a handful of Greek and Latin written and visual components without attempting to quantify or comprehensively explore this abundant material. Utilizing both quantitative and qualitative methodologies, this dissertation analyzes the vast array of Greco-Roman written and visual sources about Jews and Judaism from the first century BCE to the end of the third century CE. While qualitative reviews of Greek and Latin texts help eliminate potential inconsistencies in the data, computational tools like text-mining analysis quantify the information into calculable results. The addition of visual source material into the framework helps further refine the quantified textual material. Reviews of this data reveal the general traits imperial leaders within the Roman Empire knew about the geography and history of Judaea, Jewish religious beliefs and cultural practices, and Jewish communities in general. Further reviews of the data note regional and, more importantly, temporal variations connecting them to changes both in imperial rule and Judaism. This process presents a more detailed and coherent conception of Roman knowledge of Jews and Judaism than scholars have previously recognized. In addition to highlighting imperial knowledge, this dissertation also demonstrates how Roman authorities drew on this information while ruling over Jewish communities. From this analysis, it is clear Roman imperial authorities formed a complex knowledge of ethnic and religious communities like Jews and applied this information to their rule over these populations.

The purpose of this examination was to evaluate relative age effects among junior elite wrestlers across gender, weight class, and competitive rule sets. Using biographical data, this thesis explores trends representing an oversampling of athletes born earlier in the year, accompanied by potential effects for success in sport and an impact on retention rates. Currently, the use of chronological age is the most common form of classifying sports participants, though this type of classification may have potentially negative long- and short-term implications. Thus, the results may provide an evaluation of weight categorization as a less discriminatory competitive format in junior elite wrestlers.

The dissertation is intended to show whether it is possible for a Roman traveller to make a journey around the Roman world in the year C.E. 210, within 180 days, in a manner similar to that of Phileas Fogg, a character in Jules Verne's novel Around the World in Eighty Days (1874). The Roman's 180-day adventure to complete the journey within the set time incorporates logistics and itinerary on ancient roads, canals and sea voyages, and quotes Horace, Juvenal, Pausanias, Ovid and Strabo. Verne linked the past, an ancient two thousand year old water system in Aden - with his traveller who also visited the site. The Roman traveller will link the past with the present, viewing ancient building and engineering works such as the Lyonnais aqueducts, and the Greek use of curvature in design when building the Parthenon. Parts of such construction remain in situ for the present-day traveller to view. / Old Testament & Ancient Near Eastern Studies / (M.A. (Specialization in Ancient Languages and Cultures))

This thesis adopts a mixed-method approach of quantitative and qualitative analysis to discuss the role of women, especially female speakers and addressees, in Valerius Flaccus’ Argonautica. In addition to the traditional individual mortal and divine speech roles, discourse categories such as the influence of the Muses, the presentation of female personifications, female collectives, frame and inserted speakers, and goddesses in disguise are also taken into consideration. The study shows that, despite the shared subject matter and greatly overlapping ensemble of speakers, Valerius makes significant changes in nearly all categories of female speech representation. Valerius entirely omits some of Apollonius’ female speech acts, reduces speeches from oratio recta to mere speech summaries, replaces Greek goddesses with similar, but not equivalent Roman speakers, assigns new speech roles to previously silent female characters, adds important new episodes with female speakers that do not occur in Apollonius’ epic, changes the speech contexts, the conversational behaviour and the overall characterization of speakers – in isolated individual instances as well as in more complex character portrayals. Valerius even modifies or transfers entire discourse patterns such as conversational deceit in speech and silence, or divine disguise, from one speaker group to another, usually of the opposite sex. Valerius transforms the Apollonian arrangement of a male-dominated, 'epic' first half following the invocation of Apollo and a second female, 'elegiac' half with many female speech acts and epiphanies, after a revision of the narrator’s relationship with the Muses, into a more traditional portrayal of the Muses and a much more balanced occurrence and continued influence of female speakers. The different female voices of the Argonautica, especially Juno, can continuously be heard in the Flavian epic and provide the reader with an alternative perspective on the events. Even the less prominent female speakers are part of a well-balanced and refined structural arrangement and show influences of several pre-texts, which they sometimes self-consciously address and use to their advantage. There can be no doubt that, like Apollonius, Valerius does not merely use female speech acts to characterise the male protagonists, but follows a clear structuring principle. Whereas Apollonius in accordance with his revised invocation of the Muses concentrates the female speech acts in the second half of his epic, especially the final book, Valerius links episodes and individual characterizations through same-sex and opposite-sex speaker doublets and triplets that can be ascribed to and explained by Jupiter’s declaration of the Fata. From Juno’s unofficial opening monologue to Medea’s emotional closing argument, the female voice accompanies and guides the reader through the epic. The female perspective is not the dominant view, but rather one of many perspectives (divine, mortal, female, male, old, young, servant, ruler, et al.) that complement the primary viewpoint of the poet and the male, mortal protagonists and offer an alternative interpretation.

This thesis investigates the economic culture that fostered the constitutional history and political cosmology of late medieval and early modern Genoa. Genoese economic actors are here studied through their diversified trades and businesses, as they moved from the shores of the Black Sea into the Atlantic. Genoa’s late medieval economic expansion is described through several case studies and briefly compared to the state-run military expansion of Venice’s empire. Genoese colonial history is found to be both peculiar and relevant, as entrepreneurial techniques, institutions and attitudes later transferred to the Atlantic first originated in the private networks built by Ligurian businessmen in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The adaptability and entrepreneurial skills that allowed Genoese merchants and bankers, captains and businessmen, tax collectors and clergymen to enter the Spanish Atlantic in the sixteenth century are linked to the medieval history of the Genoese commune, to the specific idea of libertà progressively defined and protected by its fluid elite, and to the development of Hispanic-Genoese diplomatic and financial relations. Through the study of diverse documents in Italian, Genoese dialect, Venetian dialect, Spanish, Latin, and English, Genoa’s civic ideology and institutions are revealed to be intertwined with Genoese entrepreneurs’ simultaneity of careers, cosmopolitan self-perception, and mimetic imperialism. The thesis closes with a survey of the Genoese economic activities in Spain’s American kingdoms, whose most significant result is the illustration of Genoa’s multifaceted roles in the building of the Hapsburg Atlantic. This work thus constitutes the first chronologically and thematically broad attempt to explain the prolonged Genoese presence on the stage of intercontinental commerce as well as the existence of a modern Ligurian Atlantic.

The thesis analyses the development of social movements in Italy in the period from 1968 to the end of the following decade, with particular reference to the Milanese experience and a focus on the 1968-9 years. It argues that the late ‘60's represent a transitional moment; whilst industrial class conflicts dominated oppositional politics in 1968-9, the student movement anticipated the radical redefinitions of politics brought about by the social movements of the 1970's. The changing relationship between social movements and the conceptualisation of social conflicts is the central theme. The thesis is divided into five parts. Part 1 outlines approaches to the analysis of social protest which are considered especially useful because of their concern with agency and the specific dynamics of social movements; Part 2 gives a historical introduction to the origins of the crisis of 1968-9; Part 3 is a case study of the student movement, and Part 4 of the workers' movement, both concentrating on the 1968-9 developments in Milan. Part 5 outlines their consequences for the formation of oppositional politics in the 1970's. It returns to the theme of 'old' and 'new' political forms, taking the cases of red terrorism, feminism and youth protest. It is argued that the emergence of new social movements has provoked a fundamental questioning of categories of social analysis with important consequences for both political theory and practice.

Representations of the Holy Trinity have increasingly come under scrutiny, exposing two competing paradigms at opposite ends of the theological spectrum: the legitimacy and the illegitimacy of imaging the Triune God with focus on the invisible Father who was imaged as an individual from Late Antiquity and beyond. An overview of these two conflicting views has unveiled a number of inconsistencies in how the Early Christian iconography of God the Father and the Trinity has been interpreted. This thesis provides a unique re-evaluation of the surviving Trinitarian visual material between c.300 to c.730. Primarily, this study collates pictorial evidence preserved in the mediums of sarcophagi, catacomb frescoes, mosaics, illuminated manuscripts and an icon that depicts Divinity. It proceeds to critique modern misconceptions of the identity, form, meaning, function and reception of the depictions. The thesis traces the visual shift amid overt and covert images of Divinity by decoding important artworks such as the Ashburnham Pentateuch and the Codex Amiatinus; Christians visualised explicitly the ' invisibility' of God but created an unprecedented invention, the depiction of the Father through Christ's image. The innovative depiction heralded future visual formulas of Divinity echoing the complexities of Trinitarian material culture of the Mediterranean world.

The thesis investigates the role of the Greek junta in the Cyprus Crisis of 1974 and analyses the invisible and complex components, including the foreign factors, which determined its outcome. Initially it examines the backstage of the intra-Greek collision between Brigadier-General Ioannides in Athens and Archbishop Makarios in Nicosia, as well as the subversive planning, including the possibility of US implication, and the military operations of the Greek coup that dethroned the Cypriot president on 15 July. It analyses the critical preinvasion days (15-19 July), which offered a clear operational forewarning over Turkish strategic intentions, and the Athenian strategic miscalculations, for the timely mobilization of the Greek-Cypriot forces, against the imminent invasion on 20 July. Then it focuses on the analysis of the offensive and defensive operations during the two phases of the Turkish invasion, and examines the difficulties encountered by the Turkish forces as well as the causes that pre-determined the Greek-Cypriot defensive failure. The thesis concludes with the implicating responsibility of foreign powers, which silently acquiesced to the deterioration of a crisis that ended with the military partition of the island Republic: the surprising Soviet silence, the fluctuating behaviour of Whitehall, and the ambiguous role of Washington which, under the dominance of Kissinger, played a critical role in encouraging, rather than deterring, Turkish strategic objectives.

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