This thesis demonstrates key imperial virtues communicated on Roman Imperial triumphal monuments. A closer examination of monuments located in Rome reveals the presentation of personality traits such as military valor, piety, and mercy through symbolism, nature scenes, and personifications of abstract qualities. Each monument is dedicated to an emperor and exemplifies his virtues. The representation of imperial virtues conveys an emperor's worth to the public by communicating his better qualities. Architecture and coin evidence served as media to convey an emperor's qualities to the public and fostered general acceptance of his rule among the public. Valor (virtus), piety (pietas), and mercy (clementia) are each examined to demonstrate their importance, their multiple types of representations in architecture, and their presentation and reach on coins. Chapters 2 through 4 look at the symbolism and representation of military courage and honor. As a military virtue, valor is easiest to represent and point out through battle scenes, military symbols, and gods who assisted the emperor in war. Honor (honos), as a close association to valor is also a promotable trait. Chapters 5 through 7 look at the multiple representations of an emperor's piety. Piety, being the Roman empire's oldest virtue, can be seen through sacrificial scenes, mythological scenes, and symbols associated with these same gods and sacrifices. Chapter 8 looks at personifications of abstract qualities and natural phenomena and their role in Roman cosmology. Chapter 9 looks at the last virtue, mercy, which is demonstrated as the most valuable but also rare because it demands special skills and balance within a ruler. Mercy's rarity makes its symbolism and representational scenery smaller in comparison to the first two but still evident in architecture and coins. Possession of each trait awarded the possessor honor and divinity heaped on him, as discussed in Chapter 10. The Romans saw divinity as an honor which the senate awarded upon display of these superior virtues. Several arguments are considered and add different viewpoints to how divinity was acquired whether for the possession of these qualities or the actions that resulted from them. This analysis of symbolism and relevant divine scenes associated with imperial virtues demonstrate the emperor's superiority through possession of these virtues and show their subtle inclusion in imperial architecture.

Ce mémoire explore le lien entre les relations politiques entretenues par l’empire romain et le royaume sassanide et la représentation que faisaient des Perses les auteurs de l’antiquité tardive. Une tradition littéraire défavorable aux orientaux est en effet perceptible tout au long de l’antiquité : les Perses, notamment, sont ainsi cruels, lâches, efféminés, paresseux et perfides. Ces topoi, dont les racines se retrouvent dès le 5e siècle avant J.-C., évoluent-ils à la fin de l’antiquité, lorsque la puissance des Sassanides rivalise avec celle des empereurs? S’appuyant sur les travaux des dernières années sur l’altérité et sur l’ethnographie antique, ce mémoire s’efforce d’autre part de mieux comprendre les Romains en eux-mêmes en faisant l’analyse de leur rapport à leurs voisins. / This dissertation is interested in the connection between romano-persian political relations and the way written sources presented the Sassanids during late antiquity. Antique tradition had indeed been quite biased towards the Orientals: Persians in particular are usually described as cruels, cowardly, effeminates, lazy, toady and treacherous. Are these topoi, noticeable from the 5th century B.C., evolving during the 4th-6th centuries A.D., when the Sassanid kingdom is causing so many problems on the eastern frontier? Using anthropological tools and up-to-date publications on alterity and ancient ethnography, this essay strives to attain a better understanding of the Romans through the study of the way they presented their neighbors.

This dissertation represents an investigation into the changing nature of political power during the final 133 years of the Neo-Assyrian Empire, seeking to understand how power functioned within the Assyrian system through studying the careers of its imperial administrators. How was power distributed between the king and his officials? What sort of relationships existed between officials and the king, and with each other? How did Assyrian officials’ careers progress? Finally, to what extent did the above shape the political history of the Neo-Assyrian Empire? To answer these questions, this dissertation utilizes a combination of old and new approaches. Close readings of primary source documents are combined with aggregate analysis and insights from the fields of social network analysis and organizational communication. Rejecting most previous efforts at studying Assyrian imperial organization as too reliant on hierarchical models of organization, this study utilizes tools such as a Communicative Constitution of Organizations framework and Leader-Member Exchange Theory, which emphasize the importance of informal structure and interpersonal relationships in studying human organizations. Through a social network analysis of 3,864 letters which survive from the years 745-612 BC, it identifies especially influential officials during the reign of each king as well as long term changes over time in communications patterns and the types of officials who achieved prominence. This dissertation argues that Sargon II initiated a wide-ranging reform of the imperial administration, seeking to centralize power in the person of the king and the royal family through greatly expanding the number of provincial governors and other officials who reported directly to the king. These reforms increased the importance of informal hierarchy, as a few officials who managed to build close working relationships with the king could wield significant power. Sargon’s reforms structured the empire in such a way as to promote intense competition between officials for status, both between individuals and between the rival sectors of provincial government, palace administration, and the major temples. However, this competition had unintended consequences: the large number of persons writing to the king made it more difficult for the king to acquire accurate information about conditions in the empire. Essentially a prisoner of the information being provided to them, Assyrian monarchs of the seventh century tried a variety of methods to solve this problem, including employing special agents to provide an independent source of information, consulting experts in divination to check the loyalties of their subjects, and implementing public oaths which enjoined the entire population to inform the king of potentially disloyal elements. None of these attempts were successful, and the problem of information likely contributed to a weakening of imperial control over the course of the seventh century, culminating the dramatic collapse of the empire in 612 BC.

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 explores the nexus of joy and power in the lived experience of the ancient rabbis of Roman Palestine (first to fourth centuries CE). The study brings together affect theory and history of emotion to reimagine a phenomenological approach to classical rabbinic texts, a phenomenology that is historically and philologically grounded and attuned to embodied aspects of emotional experiences. By applying this method, this work situates the rabbis of Palestine within the “imperial economy of emotions,” in which provincial subjects utilized a surplus or shortage of collective emotions to assert or resist their place within the dominant political system of the Roman empire. It argues that, within this economy, the rabbis’ engagement with public joy—construed as a somatic and relational experience —was key to their negotiation of Roman imperialism. The dissertation thus makes three chief contributions to the study of ancient Judaism, cognate areas of research, and the field of Religious Studies more broadly. First, it demonstrates how joy, an emotion that is habitually thought of as politically inert, was a potent force in the world of the rabbis and other provincial subjects of the Roman empire. Second, through the case study of the ancient rabbis, the dissertation shows that the minority-majority interface in asymmetric power systems must be understood not only in terms of discourse and ideology but also as a product of the affective forces of daily life. Third, by performing a historically grounded phenomenology of joy, “Affect in Power” pushes back on the wholesale rejection of “experience” as an analytical category in contemporary scholarship.

Jesus was a healer, but what may not be as obvious is that he started a legacy of healing. He passed on his skills and abilities to his followers at least three times. Though not as frequently, they continued to heal through the Book of Acts. The legacy continued in the Apocryphal Acts and other apocryphal materials spanning the early centuries of the common era. Secondary literature looks at modern scholarship and leans heavily into Rabbinic literature. Up to this point, other English-language works in healing have sorely lacked luster in providing. The exploration of the healing legacy of Jesus shifted to meet the skills and needs of the healers, patients, and communities involved. Further, the healings had a substantive resultant impact on various levels of socioeconomics for the parties, which is explored by reexamining each group type of healings, from lameness and paralytics to possession and resurrection, and more. The hope is that taking a holistic approach to these healings as possible will allow readers a new way of experiencing the early common era and these events that permeated everyone's lives at one time or another.

Ancient gynecology is a field with a large number of contradictions. Women were expected to have full awareness of their bodily functions but were not trusted as authoritative experts on the subject. In Rome, the majority of midwives were uneducated slave women, yet the expectations held for a proper midwife required formal education. The ability to give birth made women powerful in the eyes of the Greeks but was also used by Greek men (chiefly Athenians) as an excuse to oppress women. Studying ancient gynecology is a necessity for truly understanding the day-to-day lives of ancient women. In works such as the Odyssey or The Iliad, the women featured are typically upper-class nobles who are in unrealistic settings and have similar abilities, expectations, and lives. By reading through medical texts written by respected physicians such as Soranus and Hippocrates, scholars are provided an in-depth look at how ancient doctors truly saw the female body.

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