Concerns regarding political ‘enslavement’ and imperial constraints on free speech are especially palpable in the literature that follows the emperor Domitian’s assassination in 96 C.E. Under his successors, Nerva and Trajan, authors worked to differentiate the post-Domitianic age from the prior era of metaphorical enslavement and suppressed speech. Scholars have studied some of the ways in which Neronian and Flavian authors employed literary accounts of the Saturnalia, a festival characterized by temporary license and the notional transformation of social roles, to criticize individual rulers and thematize issues of imperial control. Yet they have not fully appreciated the pervasive use of literary Saturnalia in Flavian and post-Flavian political discourse. I examine the Saturnalia as a political metaphor in five texts: Martial’s Domitianic Epigrams 5 and Nervan Epigrams 11, Pliny’s Trajanic Epistles and Panegyricus, and Dio Chrysostom’s Trajanic fourth Oration. In Epigrams 5, Martial thematizes the circumscription of Saturnalian freedom to highlight limits to his poetic expression under Domitian. Later, in his Epigrams 11, Martial’s presentation of the Nervan regime as an age of ‘Saturnalia,’ a festival whose freedoms are inherently temporary, signifies anxiety about whether post-Domitianic freedom from imperial ‘enslavement’ will be short-lived. In the Panegyricus, Pliny praises Trajan for reasserting the social hierarchies that had become troublingly eroded under the dystopic ‘Saturnalia’ of Domitian. Through Pliny’s depiction of domestic Saturnalian celebrations in Epistles 2.17, the senator proves that the perverse ‘Saturnalia’ that plagued imperial life before Trajan are no more. Finally, in Orations 4, Dio Chrysostom uses circumscribed Saturnalian freedom not only as a metaphor for the limited political authority available to Greeks, but also to valorize his own Greek wisdom as essential to Trajan’s correction of shameful ‘Saturnalian’ rule. The authors in this study, although writing from different personal and generic perspectives, depict metaphorical Saturnalia to articulate the distressing limits of freedom under imperial rule or—in the case of Pliny and Dio—to burnish the image of the anti-Saturnalian ruler Trajan. My dissertation demonstrates that literary representations of the Saturnalia occupy a far more important role in imperial Greek and Roman understandings of autocracy than has been previously appreciated.

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A study of the cultural and ideological effects of Roman citizenship on Greeks living in the first three centuries AD. The ramifications of the extension of citizenship to these Greeks illustrates that ideas such as 'culture' and 'identity' are not static terms, but constructions of a particular social milieu at any given point in time. Roman citizenship functioned as a kind of ideological apparatus that, when given to a non-Roman, questioned that individual's native identity. This thesis addresses, via an examination of four sources, all of whom were Greeks with Roman citizenship - Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Paul in the Acts of the Apostles, Ulpian, the minters of eastern civic coins - the extent to which one could remain 'Greek' while participating in one of the most Roman institutions of the Empire. Utilizing these sources with the aid of a number of theoretical bases (notably Louis Althusser and Pierre Bourdieu), this study attempts to come to a conclusion about the nature of 'Romanness' in the ancient world.

A study of the cultural and ideological effects of Roman citizenship on Greeks living in the first three centuries AD. The ramifications of the extension of citizenship to these Greeks illustrates that ideas such as 'culture' and 'identity' are not static terms, but constructions of a particular social milieu at any given point in time. Roman citizenship functioned as a kind of ideological apparatus that, when given to a non-Roman, questioned that individual's native identity. This thesis addresses, via an examination of four sources, all of whom were Greeks with Roman citizenship - Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Paul in the Acts of the Apostles, Ulpian, the minters of eastern civic coins - the extent to which one could remain 'Greek' while participating in one of the most Roman institutions of the Empire. Utilizing these sources with the aid of a number of theoretical bases (notably Louis Althusser and Pierre Bourdieu), this study attempts to come to a conclusion about the nature of 'Romanness' in the ancient world.