Can we consider Plutarch's Parallel Lives a historical work? Can we read them as a unitary series? These are the initial questions that this thesis poses and that are investigated in the Introduction, five main Chapters, and the Conclusion. In the Introduction, a preliminary status quaestionis about ancient biography is presented before clarifying the methodology adopted for reading the Parallel Lives as a unitary historical work and the reasons for choosing the Lives of Lycurgus, Lysander, and Agesilaus as the case studies to examine in detail. Chapter 1 discusses the historiographical principles that emerge from the De sera numinis vindicta: for Plutarch history is primarily the history of individuals and cities, based on the interpretation of historical events. Chapter 2 tries to verify the hypothesis that the Parallel Lives correspond to the historical project delineated in the De sera numinis vindicta. This Chapter, moreover, reassesses the literary form of the Parallel Lives by employing the concepts of 'open macrotext' and 'cross-complementarity' between the Lives. Chapter 3 analyses the Life of Lycurgus, focusing on the formation of the cultural identity and the political model of Sparta. In the Life of Lycurgus, Plutarch indicates already the intrinsic weaknesses of Sparta and the probable causes of Spartan decline in the fourth century BC. Chapter 4 is devoted to the Life of Lysander, where Plutarch narrates how after the Peloponnesian War Sparta established its hegemony over the Greeks and, simultaneously, began its rapid moral and political decline into decadence. Plutarch also seems to suggest that in this historical period of extraordinary changes not only Sparta and Lysander but all the Greeks were guilty of distorting moral values. Chapter 5 concentrates on Agesilaus, who could have led Sparta and the Greeks to great success against the Persians, but, instead, had to save Sparta from complete destruction after the Battle of Leuctra. The Conclusion recapitulates the main points of the thesis and proposes possible arguments for future research on Plutarch’s Parallel Lives.

This thesis presents a historical study of the relationship between the city of ancient Byzantium and the Thracian Bosporus. Structured around the themes of regional particularity and identity, it shows that local studies can be used to gain fresh insights into more general topics. Viewed through the lens of the relationship between strait and city, the history of the Bosporus sheds light on the nature of economic exploitation and ancient imperialism, and on the nature of ancient communities’ local identities. Chapter 1 explores regionally specific geographical features in the strait, which directed and determined responses to life in the area, around which the regional economy revolved, and in response to which the identities of the local communities were created. Chapters 2 and 3 examine the history of economic exploitation of the region, exploring the attitude of the Athenian Empire toward the Bosporus, and the attempt by the local communities of the Bosporus to create a controlled monetary system in the third century BC. These efforts to exploit local opportunities and commodities, I show, transformed the Bosporus into an attractive economic resource. Chapter 4 examines the local fishing industries of the strait, and demonstrates that the extraordinary availability of fish in the region provoked responses which could not be emulated precisely elsewhere. The thesis also shows that the cultural identity of a Greek city could be intensely local. Byzantium, a Greek colony typically characterized by its relationship to its mother-city, had a series of important local identities, explored in chapter 1. From this perspective, chapter 5 re-examines the difficult relationship between Greeks and Thracians in the region, and chapter 6 questions the validity of the traditional view of the relationship between a colony and its mother-city.

This thesis investigates the morphology and the purpose of palaces in major and minor kingdoms of the Hellenistic World. Elements of architecture, spatial organisation and decoration are analysed in the attempt to clarify issues of chronology and in order to identify function. The analysis places the material into its social and ideological context by taking into consideration the role of kingship ideologies in the formation of space used by royal courts. Comparison with residences of the elite demonstrates the reception of palaces not only as architectural models, but also as mechanisms of power manifestation. Macedonia is the starting point of the discussion as the homeland of the first Hellenistic kings. In the light of evidence recovered in the last twenty years and not comparatively studied before, the chapter brings together various chronological phases of the buildings. Questions of definition and on sources of inspiration are clarified further in the following chapters. The third chapter uses textual evidence and finds from the royal district of Alexandria to understand the meaning of palace architecture for the Ptolemies, while the seat of a local official in Transjordania reveals mechanisms of emulation. In chapter four the case of Pergamene palaces and their relationship with residences in the city demonstrates that formation of these royal seats corresponded to ideals of Attalid kingship. Seats of officials in the Seleukid Empire and palaces in Bactria and Kommagene, the subject of the fifth chapter, provide an insight into the position of palace architecture in processes of hybridisation in material culture. The last chapter is a synthesis of patterns of form and function and unifies the conclusions for each separate region. It emerges that shifts in power relations and the structure of the royal court, especially towards the end of the third century BC, were a crucial factor in shaping palace forms. The concluding chapter also provides a view from the West: examples from the late Roman Republic indicate that the role of Hellenistic palaces as models for power display went beyond the limits of royal courts.

This dissertation focuses on images of Christ that date from the first half of Late Antiquity, defined as the three centuries between AD 200 and 500. The cultural dynamics of this period left a distinct impression on Christian art, and this dissertation traces that impact. Unlike other studies that attempt to resolve ambiguity within the corpus of Christ images, the argument here maintains that ambiguity was a key component in the creation and subsequent interpretation of the Late Antique Christian iconography. The dissertation proceeds in three parts, each comprising two chapters. In the first section, the history and historiography of the image of Christ is explored, and a methodology capable of accommodating the diverse meanings assigned to the Christ’s discrepant and ambiguous iconographies is developed. In order to better understand the socio-religious environment in which the first images of Christ were produced and interpreted, the second section of the dissertation moves away from material culture and towards method and theory. The notion that interpretation is a group level phenomenon is critiqued, and a model explaining how individuals in Late Antiquity could have made sense of ambiguous images of Christ is advanced. The final section turns back to the material culture and applies the framework developed in the second section to two artworks: (1) the sarcophagus of Junius Bassus and (2) the floor mosaic from the Hinton St. Mary Roman Villa now in the British Museum. By complementing the standard analyses of Christian art with interpretations grounded in the diverse interactions viewers had with artworks, new perspectives will emerge that provide a fuller picture of Late Antique Christianity and the iconography of its godhead alike.

The Babatha and Salome Komaise archives contain the legal documents of two Jewish women and their families, dating mostly from c. 94 C.E. to 132 C.E. The community that they attest lived in a small village which was first part of the Nabataean Kingdom but was later incorporated into the province of Roman Arabia in 106 C.E. The documents consequently provide invaluable information about a community’s experience before and after the creation of the province. The laws and traditions in evidence in the two archives are remarkable for their diversity, exhibiting elements of Jewish, Nabataean, Roman and Hellenistic law. This thesis examines this complex legal situation and considers the ways in which people coped with the array of legal options available to them. A ‘ground-up’ approach is adopted, focusing on the people involved in the documents’ creation and use in order to detail how different parties affected the working of law in the area. An overview of the individual documents is provided in The Survey of the Documents. The rest of the thesis is then structured according to the various groups that influenced their formulation and use: The Scribes, Legal Advisors, The Parties, The Alternatives to the Assizes and The Roman Officials. These various contributions are then brought together in the Conclusion to model how law operated in this particular community. The primary contributions of this study are therefore to Roman provincial and legal history, as well as the history of the Jewish people in the inter-revolt period.

This thesis uses the evidence for a wide range of phenomena relating to the exile of citizens, by judicial decision or through stasis, to investigate the political cultures of Greek poleis in the period c. 404-146 BC: the fundamental ideas about citizenship which were in circulation in poleis in that period. Political communication in the context of exile phenomena forced citizens to make explicit their fundamental assumptions about the criteria for civic inclusion and exclusion and about the extent and basis of civic obligation. Analysis of surviving evidence for that communication thus offers unique insights into prominent Greek ideas about citizenship. This method is applied, in chapters 1 and 2, to laws and discussions relating to, first, lawful expulsion and exclusion and, second, civic reconciliation and the reintegration of exiles; and, in chapters 3 and 4, to the political rhetoric, organisation and ideas of participants in exclusionary stasis and of exiled citizens. Wherever possible, ancient Greek philosophers’ arguments, rhetoric and assumptions are compared with those of non-philosophers. Study of the four different bodies of evidence suggests that most poleis’ political cultures were distinguished by their extremes, paradoxes, indeterminacies and contradictions. In particular, many poleis’ political cultures included very significant, radical norms of civic voluntarism, encouraging citizens to exercise extensive voluntary initiative in political contexts. Moreover, most poleis political cultures were dominated by two coexisting, radically opposed basic paradigms of the good polis and of good citizenship: these are defined in the introduction and chapter 1 as a ‘unitarian teleological communitarian’ paradigm and a ‘libertarian contractarian’ paradigm. In addition to revealing fundamental ideas of citizenship, some of the exile evidence enables study of the effects of those ideas in practice in this period: citizens’ political choices, claims and behaviour in relevant periods of stress, such as a bout of exclusionary stasis or a spell of political agitation while in exile, represent a well-defined and revealing case-study of the multiple, competing effects of those ideas on political interaction. It is argued that the exile evidence suggests that the same fundamental ideas of citizenship were conducive both to civic stability and flourishing and to destructive civic unrest.

This thesis investigates the nature of the relationship between cities and king in the late Classical and Hellenistic Macedonian kingdom. It will consider the cities from two main perspectives: the city as a community, and the city as a settlement. Section 1 re-examines the evidence most commonly used to argue for the Macedonian cities gaining substantial autonomy in this period. It will be argued that this evidence has less to tell us about the political autonomy of the Macedonian cities than their 'social relations' with other Greek communities: Macedonian cities engaged in international exchanges which did not represent any challenge to the authority of the monarch, but which could also be used to represent the relationship between king and city as cooperative. Such latitude was balanced, however, by forceful expressions of royal dominance in other arenas. Section 2 considers the position of the cities within the royal economy, and examines how, as a result of the king's monopolisation of Macedonia's resources, and the fact that the Macedonian elite was more interested in advancing their position at court than acting as civic benefactors, the cities were left economically subordinated to the king. Section 3 uses the increasingly abundant archaeological evidence to consider how royal building programmes served to project royal ideology into the localities. Royal palaces, large-scale urban development, and fortifications created an experience of urban space in Macedonia which emphasised the roles of the monarch as guardian, benefactor, and unifying figure. The picture that emerges is of a kingdom of civic communities which were engaged in meaningful exchanges with their peers outside Macedonia, but which were living in large and impressive urban settlements which stood as monuments to the extent and ubiquity of royal authority. Late-Classical and Hellenistic Macedonia was a kingdom of poleis, but that kingdom was first and foremost a royal space.

If as argued the Mediterranean consisted in Antiquity of a unity determined by similar environmental factors and crises which were mitigated through established networks of trade and exchange, the border regions of the Roman Mediterranean, particularly to the South and East, were characterised by a radically different environment. This thesis focuses on the development of three of the arid regions bordering the ancient Mediterranean, namely the Fazzan oases in the Libyan Sahara, the Eastern Desert of Egypt and the region of Palmyra in Syria. These arid regions have received considerable archaeological attention in recent years, and a review of them will highlight the factors which enabled these regions to interact with the Roman Empire through trading dynamics, but also through the development of local resources. Central questions within this thesis concern the extent to which the environment would have tailored the potential of these regions, and if the existence of trade routes and social networks both affected and were affected by settlement and exploitation patterns in the region. Trade was created by geographically much broader social requirements for foreign or exotic goods, yet was restricted by the possibility to pass through these regions. Developments were conditioned by the constant need for balance between the state as a power enforcing and representing peace and security and local entities, and what the local social organisation had to offer in term of rent and stability to the state as an institution. After an introduction (Chapter 1) delineating the aims of the thesis, Chapter 2 defines influential theories and models that will be considered for this thesis, namely environmental factors, social networks and institutional economics. The archaeological evidence is then discussed in each relevant chapter: Chapter 3: The Libyan Sahara; Chapter 4: The Eastern Desert of Egypt; Chapter 5: Palmyra. Chapter 6 discusses major factors that may work as explanations for the development of agriculture, the exploitation mineral resources, and trade in these regions. The choice of regions both inside and outside the Roman Empire also allows a discussion on the rise of economic activities linked to the imperial economy. As such, the thesis moves away from a romano-centric perspective and proposes to look instead for internal factors, such as the development of complex societies with organisational frameworks and social networks which enable them to overcome the challenges of their geo-climatic settings. This study concludes that the developments identified in each chapter were not a factor of environmental changes but human agency. The state, or private individuals or communities successfully organised the resources necessary to integrate the regions into wider networks of intense trade in the imperial period. These concerned both physical infrastructure, and the development of far-reaching social networks.

This thesis considers the geographical and chronological forms of ‘mirroring’ that offer a way of reading 'Annals' 1-6. It looks at how Tacitus’ depictions of non-Romans reflect back on Rome, and at the echoes of Rome’s past and future that can be discerned within his description of Tiberius’ principate. After an introduction that discusses key thematic and methodological questions, Chapter 1 shows that Tiberius’ accession and the Pannonian and German mutinies described in 'Annals' 1 echo Tacitus’ account in 'Histories' 1 of events of AD 69. Moreover, when the Romans attempt to conquer Germany, the Germans’ resistance to this and to other efforts to rule them shows up Roman responses to civil war and autocracy. Chapter 2 begins by examining potential similarities between Roman and both Parthian and Armenian history, and then focuses on Germanicus’ voyage in the east, recounted in 'Annals' 2. His actions associate him with many late republican and early imperial Roman figures, which suggests that there are continuities between those two eras. Chapter 3 extends this theme by discussing the echoes of Sallust and Caesar in the central books of the Tiberian hexad. Intertexts with Sallust’s 'Bellum Catilinae' especially hint that earlier civil conflicts are about to be replayed in some form, as the appearance of Sejanus, the ‘new Catiline’, confirms. Chapter 4 further considers Tacitus’ inferences about the overlap between republican and imperial history, and then examines anti-Roman revolts in 'Annals' 2, 3 and 4. Foreign rebels’ relative success in attempting to reclaim their freedom correlates with their distance from Rome, and this has clear implications for the status of Roman 'libertas' under Tiberius. Finally, the outbreak of ‘civil war within the principate’, and indeed within the imperial house, is analysed. Chapter 5 traces the continuation of this ‘civil war’, and proposes that the last book of the Tiberian hexad again looks directly to 69, as well as to the excesses of other Julio-Claudians. It also considers Tacitus’ account of Roman intervention in Parthia: this episode confirms imperial Rome’s propensity for autocracy and civil war. There follows a short conclusion in which some speculation is offered about how some of the themes discussed in this thesis with reference to the Tiberian hexad may have been represented in the lost central books of the 'Annals'.

À partir des mises en scène de L’Orestie d’Eschyle, d’Œdipe roi de Sophocle et des Bacchantes d’Euripide diffusées dans les institutions nationales en Allemagne, en France et au Royaume-Uni entre 1973 et 2010, la thèse procède à une archéologie du commun, en explorant, d’une part, le concept de commun, et en particulier ses enjeux politiques, à travers une analyse des mises en scène contemporaines du chœur tragique et en étudiant, d’autre part, ces mises en scène à travers l’expression du commun. Ce travail propose donc de mettre au jour la construction et la circulation du discours sur le commun dans et entre ces trois pays. L’analyse des spectacles, d’abord, expose les éléments qui font ou entendent faire du chœur une incarnation du commun et met en perspective ces choix avec la réception de la tragédie grecque. Le discours sur le commun qui se construit ainsi au théâtre est ensuite confronté aux discours philosophiques et anthropologiques du moment mais aussi aux événements économiques, politiques et sociaux afin de faire apparaître les échos, les analogies, les ruptures et les discontinuités. Ainsi, entre 1973 et 1980, la mise en scène du chœur des Bacchantes a donné du commun une représentation utopiste où la communauté est fondée par le rituel. Dès 1980, à partir des Orestie de Peter Stein et Peter Hall qui tiennent lieu de modèles, le chœur devient un collectif où ce que les individus ont en commun est précisément leur singularité. Dans la continuité, jusqu’en 1999, les mises en scène d’Œdipe roi racontent la naissance de l’individu moderne à laquelle le chœur sert de cadre archaïque. Enfin, et malgré les tentatives dans des mises en scène de L’Orestie, au tournant du millénaire, pour refonder la communauté à partir d’une mémoire commune, les tragédies grecques montées dans les années 2000 présentent un désespoir de communautés – au double sens objectif et subjectif de l’expression. Cette archéologie du commun, qui reflète la globalisation à l’œuvre, est donc en creux une archéologie de l’individu. / Analysing productions of Aeschylus’ The Oresteia, Sophocles’ Oedipus the King and Euripides’ The Bacchai in national theatres in France, Germany and the United-Kingdom between 1973 and 2010, this thesis proposes an archaeology of the common (in the sense of « what we have in common ») both exploring the political implications of the concept – thrown into sharp relief by the various ways ancient choruses were staged – and studying the productions themselves through the type of community that they make manifest. This work intends to highlight the construction and the circulation of contemporary discourses about the common within, and between, these three countries. Performance analyses first focus on the elements that make, or intend to make, the chorus into an incarnation of the common and put these choices into perspective through the reception of Greek tragedy. The discourse about the common thus built in theatres, is then confronted with philosophical and anthropological discourses, as well as with economic, political and sociological events in order to call attention to echoes, analogies, disruptions and discontinuities. Thus, between 1973 and 1980, performances of choruses in The Bacchai were built upon rituals, putting forward a utopian conception of the common. From 1980 onward, as Peter Stein’s and Peter Hall’s Oresteia became established models, the chorus morphed into a collective in which individuals had their singularity in common. Following this, until 1999, the performances of Oedipus the King hailed the birth of the modern individual, for whom the chorus acts as archaic backdrop. Lastly, and despite attempts in performances of The Oresteia at the turn of the millennium to rebuild a community out of common memory, Greek tragedies staged in the 2000s show the despair of, and about, communities. This archaeology of the common, reflecting the globalisation of European societies, is therefore indirectly an archaeology of the individual.