Coming of age in Rome: the history and social significance of assuming the toga virilis
It is the purpose of this thesis, therefore, to collect and analyze evidence for the assumption of the toga virilis in an effort to determine its importance in Greco-Roman society both within the context of Roman family life and from the broader perspective of the cornmunity as a whole.
Social Norms in the Courts of Ancient Athens
The Athenian court system plays little role in conventional explanations for Athens’ success as a well-ordered society. Instead, scholars tend to em- phasize the importance of informal social control and internalized norms in maintaining order.
Socrates and democratic Athens: The story of the trial in its historical and legal contexts
Socrates was both a loyal citizen (by his own lights) and a critic of the democratic community’s way of doing things.
The instrumental value of others and institutional change: An Athenian case study
A primary motive for certain Athenian rule changes in the direction of increased legal access and impartiality in the fourth century B.C. was Athenian awareness of the increased instrumental value of foreigners.
Growing up fatherless in antiquity: the demographic background
Growing up fatherless in antiquity: the demographic background Walter Scheidel (Stanford University) Princeton/Stanford Working Papers in Classics, June (2006) Abstract The severe mortality regime…
The Roman slave supply
This survey of the scale and sources of the Roman slave supply will be published in Keith Bradley and Paul Cartledge (eds.), The Cambridge world history of slavery, 1: The ancient Mediterranean world.
Making Space for Bicultural Identity: Herodes Atticus Commemorates Regilla
Herodes and Regilla built a number of installations during their marriage, some of which represented their union in spatial terms. After Regilla died, Herodes reconfigured two of these structures, altering their meanings with inscriptions to represent the marriage retrospectively. This paper considers the implications of these commemorative installations for Herodes’ sense of cultural identity.
Land tenure, rural space, and the political economy of Ptolemaic Egypt (332 BC-30 BC)
In this paper I argue that statist (or “despotic”) assumptions of royal power does not adequately describe the nature of political power in the Ptolemaic development of Egypt. I examine the process of Ptolemaic state formation from the point of view of the expansion and the settlement of the Fayyum, the foundation of Ptolemais in the Thebaid, and from the point of view of new fiscal institutions.
The Ethics and Economics of Ptolemaic Religious Associations
The first part investigates the economic status of the members…In the second part, the rules are examined in more detail in search of economic incentives that might explain why people joined associations..In the third part, a different approach is presented that tries to understand how the rules correspond to actual social relations.
Legal Pluralism in Archaic Greece
The theory of legal pluralism argues that law’s function in modern society must be understood as a negotiation between different sets of legal orders operating simultaneously. This paper argues that archaic Greece, too, was a legally plural society and explores two negotiations as evidence: 1)the relationship between Drakon’s murder law and the procedure of blood-money negotiation; 2)the Gortyn Law Code and oath-trials.