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This thesis builds a picture of culturally-mediated encounters with death in classical Athens. Starting from the premise that death is a mystery, that no one knows what death is and what it is like, I ask two core questions. First, how does visual and verbal culture drawn from the classical period (broadly conceived, to encompass late archaic/early classical and early fourth-century material) generate encounters with death? Second, how does it prompt reflections on the imaginative processes involved in responding to death from the perspective of the living? My approach is by way of case studies, and each chapter covers a distinct medium: literary philosophy, painted pots, tragic drama, temple sculpture, and historiography. My claim is that existential reflection in classical Athens was not confined to a group of elite thinkers and to the texts that they produced, texts that were self- consciously philosophical or that made death the explicit focus of enquiry. Reflections on death were also generated by diffuse and idiosyncratic interactions between individuals and visual or verbal media in a variety of contexts across Athens, and by dialogues between those encounters. Texts and material culture generated and shaped encounters with death, and also generated and shaped epistemological reflections on the imaginative nature of those encounters-upon the immediate and wider cultural frameworks within which such imaginative processes took place. In my conclusion, I expand this claim by considering the wider implications of my thesis when set against a background of intense intellectual and cultural activity in classical Athens.

The Ming dynasty was a special period in China's maritime history. From the beginning, the court implemented strict and consistent restrictions on private navigation, prohibiting its residents from carrying out maritime trade and communicating with overseas people. Almost at the same time, Chosŏn, another important East Asian maritime country, carried out a similar policy. This thesis aims to explain the context of, and the reasons behind, the implementation of the maritime exclusion policy in both Ming China and Chosŏn Korea. It attempts to address a simple but crucial question: why did these two East Asian countries suddenly and simultaneously strengthen their maritime border controls at the turn of the fifteenth century? To answer this question, the thesis surveys primary textual evidence from court discussions on maritime exclusion. By focussing on court debates, this thesis intends to explain maritime exclusion policies from the perspective of central, elite, decision makers and reveal what the Ming and Chosŏn courts understood themselves to have been doing in imposing maritime bans. Scholarship on maritime border control is voluminous. Scholars have made efforts to decipher the rationales for the policy, primarily interpreting it as anti-piracy strategies, part of a Sino-centric or Korea-centric diplomatic framework, which was later known as the 'tributary system', or a Confucian, value-oriented policy that stressed the stability of a natural economy and suppressed commercial activities. Most historians assume that maritime exclusion was an anti-trade policy that could primarily be explained by non-economic factors, such as security, diplomacy, and ideology. The thesis does not deny that non-economic factors were important, but it argues that economic considerations played a key role in the policy-making process. As will be shown, the Ming and Chosŏn courts strengthened coastal border control partly because they intended to maximize their revenue from maritime trade. Although the thesis foregrounds economic considerations, it also considers other factors. Ming and Chosŏn had security concerns, but their maritime policies were more a consequence of the courts' worries about geopolitical uncertainty in the overseas world than about piracy. The thesis also demonstrates the role of the maritime exclusion policy in the establishment of dynastic authority, showing how the courts, by implementing control policies, extended jurisdiction over coastal regions, imposed civilian control over their own militaries, and constructed 'tributary systems' that were designed to strengthen monarchic authority over foreign and domestic audiences. In sum, the thesis shows that the decisions to implement maritime exclusion were motived by multiple practical considerations like trade revenue, national security, and dynastic authority. Moreover, the thesis also shows how the Ming and Chosŏn differed regarding policies and practices. The Ming and Chosŏn courts implemented similar policies simultaneously, because they faced similar security challenges from nearby maritime countries. They were both newly-established regimes founded roughly at the same time, and they had similar interests in improving their fiscal balance as newly centralized authorities. Although their policies look identical, the two administrations attached importance to different aspects of the policy. The Ming court repeatedly highlighted the ban on Chinese border-exit activities, while the Chosŏn court concentrated on its control over border-entry activities or foreign access to Korea. This was partly explained by the fact that the Ming court had a strong military and was able to impose exclusive control over the high seas and protect its marine business. The Koreans, on the contrary, were at a disadvantage when they met the Japanese fleets on the seas, and thus, they had to tolerate the presence of Japanese visitors in their territory. Finally, the thesis will also show how policies evolved differently in the two countries after their initial developments and follow changes into the mid-fifteenth century.

The aim of this thesis is to explore the characteristics of the socio-ecosystem of south-western Asia Minor in the Roman period. I propose a new narrative anchored in complex systems approach reconstructing the co-evolution of the human populations and their environment with the main focus on the ancient regions of Pisidia and Pamphylia. This experimental work combines recent developments in a number of scholarly fields. The previous historical narratives on the regions, both ancient and modern, have been deconstructed. The numismatic material serves firstly as a starting point for the synthesis of the history of the region, and then as a material for performing Social Network Analysis of Anatolian 'poleis' and the creation of multiple graphs. The climatic framework of the Roman period has been discussed with the special focus on the proxies relevant to south-western Asia Minor. The past landscapes and their changes have been reconstructed with the use of palynology. My main hypothesis is that in the Roman Imperial period Anatolia operated not only on the basis of independent micro-ecologies, but also on the level of meso-scale entities. These were formed along river systems from their springs in the high mountains through upland and coastal plains to their outlets to the Mediterranean, Aegean and Black Seas. Such regional socio-ecological systems were more connected internally than externally, characterised by hierarchical structures and developed thanks to both cultural and natural drivers. The cultural drivers included the interplay between imperial and local politics and economy, changes in land ownership patterns and land use practices. The main natural drivers were the shape and cycles of the local hydrosphere and climatic variability. The potential and connectivity of the regional and supra-regional socio-ecological systems of Anatolia had been accumulating over a longer period of time, but it was particularly encouraged and accelerated by the conditions created effectively by the Pax Romana, and this proved later to be the basis of the resilience of the Roman Empire in Anatolia. My reconstruction tries to grasp the dynamics of these processes in Pisidia and Pamphylia and add nuance to earlier syntheses on the region.

This thesis is a historical geography of the Judean and Samarian Hill Country between the 6th century BCE and 1st century CE. The Hill Country is a small region of Palestine bordered by the Jordan Valley in the east, the Shephelah and the Coastal Plains in the west, the Negev in the south, the Jezreel Valley in the north, and the Carmel Range in the northwest. Across six chapters, I explore the ways the environment shaped (and was shaped by) the society, economy and culture of the local population, drawing on a selection of literary, epigraphic and material evidence, and arguing for the coherence and value of this fascinating historical unit.

This thesis offers a new assessment of the relationships of fifth- and fourth-century Attic women, of citizen and metic status. Chapter 1 demonstrates women's capacity to build and use relationships through and against the vicissitudes of their lives, particularly their transitions between marriages and households. Chapter 2 argues for women's ability to shape formal and informal kinship structures in response to their own affective relationships. Chapter 3 suggests that women could use their relationships with enslaved people, particularly enslaved women, either to confirm or challenge their other roles and relationships within the household. Chapter 4 shows how income-generating work expanded women's social networks, gave them opportunities publicly to present themselves in terms and contexts independent of their family relationships, and enabled them to redefine their roles within their families. Chapter 5 shows how women formed, used, and defined their friendships, considering in particular the role of the neighbourhood and of religion as contexts within which women could shape their social landscapes. The thesis weighs up different approaches to writing women's history. Chapter 1 argues for the value of reconstructive biography. Later chapters focus on re-reading narratives about men to draw out the experiences of women, without attempting complete biographies, and on understanding epigraphic testimonies that women were involved in authoring as instances of women's self-writing-not autobiographies but women's brief portraits of themselves and others. The thesis argues that women's formal and circumstantial relationships did not necessarily commit them to fixed roles or social behaviours but provided a framework within which they could develop and shape their affective relationships and negotiate their own roles. It demonstrates the potential breadth of women's networks, affiliations, and relationships; how they were formed and changed across the course of women's lives, and how they cross-cut other groupings and divisions in Attic society. It argues that women were more able to shape their lives and relationships than has previously been thought, and therefore played a more dynamic role in the social history of classical Attika.

This thesis is the first extended study of one of the major ethnic groups in Greek antiquity, the Aiolians. In the Archaic and Classical periods, Aiolian identity is associated with the regions of Boiotia, Lesbos, Aiolis and the other north-western parts of Asia Minor and the nearby islands. Thessaly is sometimes also considered Aiolian. The equivalence of the Aiolians with other intra-Hellenic ethnic groups in ancient sources has prompted a wide-spread assumption that the Aiolians constructed, thought about and expressed their identity in the same way as the better-understood Dorian and Ionian groups. This thesis tests that assumption, following recent studies which have re-examined the evidence for specific aspects of the Aiolians' cultural and political cohesion. This thesis seeks to provide a holistic reconsideration of the weak political cooperation between Aiolians in the wider context of Greek ethnicity and Aiolian culture. The thesis thus also makes a methodological contribution by exploring ways to reincorporate material and cultural evidence into the wider study of ethnicity in the ancient world. The thesis comprises studies of individual aspects of Aiolian ethnic identity. A preliminary chapter reviews the recent historiography of ethnicity in the modern and ancient worlds, with a particular focus on the characteristics employed to study it. Advancing on the well-established discursive model which focuses on 'intentional' histories, I suggest that the model of 'performativity' which has been useful in gender studies can help scholars to incorporate cultural indicia into the study of Greek ethnicity by investigating how cultural forms may have been imbued with ethnic relevance. After establishing the scope of the ethnonym 'Aiolians' (Αἰολεῖς) and thus this thesis' range (chapter 2), the second part of the thesis explores ancient constructions and modern analysis of the early history of Boiotia, Lesbos, Aiolis and Thessaly. Chapter 3 considers the literary evidence for Aiolian migrations into these territories. Considering the highly variable tradition, I reconsider the migratory traditions as artefacts of Thessalian-Boiotian and Boiotian-Aiolian kinship. The Aiolians, unusually, did not focus on their heroic leaders or their own ancestry per se; the traditions instead codified the historical relationship of the Aiolians with their territory. Chapter 4 turns to a separate examination of the archaeological evidence for the historical migration, which is not decisive. Chapter 5 considers the myths of common descent which have become fundamental to modern scholarship on Greek ethnicity, but in the case of the Aiolians show little ethnic significance. I then turn in the final part to three fields of action which belonged to the Aiolians' present rather than distant history. I argue throughout that objective modern analysis of cultural features has unjustly dismissed the social discourse surrounding dialect and other cultural practices. Chapter 6 is on musical culture, for which Greeks used ethnic terminology to categorize and label certain aspects. I discuss the poetic discourse surrounding the development of an Aiolian 'mode', one of several signs of the importance of musical culture for Aiolian identity. Chapter 7 discusses the existence of an Aiolian dialect group, considering both the rejection of linguistic criteria for ethnicity and the ongoing controversy over the scientific reality of the Aiolic dialectal group. Finally, chapter 8 addresses the evidence for a sense of solidarity between Aiolians, as evinced not by intentional histories or cultural labels, but by shared communal action. Case studies from the Persian Wars, Peloponnesian War, and Hellenistic religion are considered to demonstrate the intermittence of community action based on ethnic identity. A conclusion summarizes the main arguments and considers the historical obstacles to a fuller expression of Aiolian identity.

This is a study of the impact of Roman imperialism on the public honorific culture of the Greek cities of western Asia Minor, 188 BCE to 98 CE. It is concerned with the way that local civic languages of power, framed in the terms of reciprocal benefaction and gift- exchange, adapted to changing political structures, as Rome succeeded the earlier Seleukid and Attalid regimes. This entails relating a mass of archaeological realia for public civic discourse, as embodied in several hundred inscribed honorific decrees, statue-base inscriptions, and public dedicatory inscriptions, to known historical and political contexts, thereby composing a diachronic history of discursive and ideological change and continuity tied to specific chronological and regional boundaries. Of the five chapters, Chapters 1, 2, and 4 chart the influence of high political change. The post-Seleukid era, 188-29 BCE, witnesses an overarching Roman dominance conceived in terms of universal euergetism that affects both late Attalid euergetic self-presentation and the honorific status of local citizens, who become plenipotentiary intermediaries with Roman power. Under the principate the autocratic power of the emperor channels the ambitions of local citizens into the imperial cult, which becomes an arena for elite giving at the provincial and local levels, and encourages honorific hierarchisation and titularisation. Chapters 3 and 5 examine developments in internal political culture across these two periods. Euergetic activity in relation to gymnasia and local cults in the decades after 188 is traceable to anxieties over local identity and growing socio-economic imbalance between citizens and non-citizens; this is exacerbated in the 1st century by the presence of resident Romans, and deepening wealth inequalities, thereby giving prominence to wealth and familial descent as arguments for civic honourability. The result is a subtle change in ethos, as honorific monuments by the early empire emphasise the honorand's memorability rather than exemplarity.

In this DPhil thesis the language, style, structure, epistolary function and content of 314 Kassite period letters from Nippur, which were available to the author, are analysed. Nippur yielded the largest number of Kassite period letters in comparison with other Kassite period findspots. The Kassite letters not only prove that the governor of Nippur had an elevated status, but also supraregional influence. He was involved in the collection of levies for the king, and in the supraregional distribution of resources, which are tasks ascribed to the royal administration. Provincial officials, such as ḫazannus, from other provinces reported to the šandabakku, because the šandabakku, as the highest official under the king, was involved in the collection of levies for the royal administration. Further, the Kassite letters show that the town of Nippur was surrounded by sub-units called pīḫatus, and that the province of Nippur stretched northeast up until Dūr-Enlilē. The šandabakku had the command over temples in Nippur. Levies of temple grants were collected by provincial officials, and temples were referred to as the šandabakku's own household. Nippur's network reached south through Isin and the Sealand to Dilmun, and in the north to Bīt-Pere-Amurru. In the northeast regular communication with Upī, Dēr and Akkade is attested. The involvement of Nippurean officials in distant provinces can be explained through the involvement of the šandabakku of Nippur in the management of temple lands in different provinces.

My thesis is an analysis of Basil’s appeals to tradition in his theological works, with a focus on Against Eunomius and, most importantly, On the Holy Spirit. The work begins with an analysis of Against Eunomius, focusing primarily on the context of the work, the influences on Basil’s thought and arguments in the treatise, and Basil’s attempt to refute Eunomius’ appeal to tradition. I have then traced ideas of tradition from Against Eunomius to On the Holy Spirit, and established the context of and purpose for the publication of the latter in 375 against Eustathius of Sebaste. Establishing the necessity of tradition for Basil’s argument in On the Holy Spirit, I have broken down the jargon and reconstructed the exact nature of the “non-scriptural tradition” to which he appeals. Following this, I have analysed the context to consider whether this idea of non-scriptural tradition is an innovation, or a development of both Christian and Hellenistic influence (though of course the two are indelibly linked in the fourth-century Christian tradition). The latter appears to be the case. The final task has been establishing how this idea of tradition fits into Basil’s theological epistemology. I argue, based on the tradition’s apparent equality in establishing knowledge of divine things with Scripture, that Basil takes a holistic view of the Christian experience, in that all aspects of it have hidden within the (in Basil’s eyes) undeniable truth of God as Trinity. To me, this holistic view is a natural product of his ascetic beliefs. The scholarship on Basil’s idea of tradition has, since the works of Hanson and De Mendieta in the mid-60s, been scant and cursory, with most generally agreeing with the pronouncements of De Mendieta on the matter. However, though De Mendieta’s work is of significant value, it is very much a product of its time in the discipline of Patrology – the last fifty years have transformed the study of the early church, especially the fourth century. Both this, and the previous focus on On the Holy Spirit alone – often in far too small a space to explore the particularities of Basil’s language, context and influences, and the theological implications of non-scriptural tradition – mean that, in my view, a new and more focussed study is very much required.

This thesis contributes to the study of Roman imperialism, providing an investigation of the development of Roman provincial administration in western Asia Minor in the period between 133 BCE and c. 20 CE. It investigates the evolving institutional and ideological frameworks put in place by the Roman state and its representatives and local reactions to them. Chapter 1 focuses on the institutions which the Roman state established in the province of Asia. Employing models of institutional dynamics from the social sciences, it argues that Roman approaches to provincial administration were initially ad hoc and situational and that ‘governance’ developed in an unplanned fashion. The critical role played by individuals such as L. Cornelius Sulla and C. Iulius Caesar, whose influence and power allowed them more flexibility in dealing with institutional constraints, is emphasised. Chapter 2 examines the role of Roman official communication in creating an imperial ideology. It stresses that the establishment of Roman hegemony interrupted long-standing modes of interaction between poleis and Hellenistic rulers and argues that structural factors hindered the establishment of a new framework for negotiating power. Chapter 3 shifts the perspective to the responses of Asian communities to these institutional and ideological realities of Roman rule. It argues that in the absence of a secure discursive framework and faced with an evolving institutional landscape, poleis experimented to maximise their own agency. Addressing the specific strategies of issuing honorific decrees, engaging in diplomacy and monumentalising Roman normative documents, it suggests that communities played a critical role in integrating themselves within a Roman administrative framework. Overall, this thesis makes the case that the Roman state had minimal administrative ambitions vis-à-vis provincia Asia. Consequently, institutional and ideological developments establishing governance were driven by combination of individual Roman actors and, in the longer term, local responses to empire.

This work looks at the textual exegesis of the passages in which Polybius writes about truth as seen in a historiographical milieu and in relation to what Polybius claims to be the proper way of writing history. The main scholarly contribution and originality of this dissertation are to provide a comprehensive analysis of this concept, since the notion of truth in Polybius' work has not been yet extensively examined, and at the same time to 'test' Polybius' assessments and check whether he actually stuck to his claims. The linguistic analysis of the Polybian terminology and the close look at his style and narrative technique illustrate how he employs diverse narrative and oratorical devices, how he mixes references to history, philosophy, tragedy, and rhetoric to invent new words and concepts (which have been defined as Polybian neologisms), and how he plays on different levels with his readers (a special kind of readers, the 'lovers of learning'). Also, this work shows Polybius' anxiety to give an overall view of the events, which is feasible only by applying the rules and techniques required by universal history. The thematic approach to truth has gone hand in hand with the focus on Polybius' attitude towards historiographical methodology in relation with his predecessors, and the dissertation also delineates different types of non-truths or anti-truths in Polybius' view, thus 'how not to write a (false) account of events'. Indeed, in most cases Polybius' methodology lies in the shadow of the critiques to his predecessors. My work not only reconstructs the image Polybius has of truth, but also advocates a new understanding of the figure of the historian, who is characterized by the newly-created Polybian concept of assuming the proper ethos when one undertakes the crucial task of writing history.