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.
Bad Boys: Circumcellions and Fictive Violence
The circumcellions were roving bands of violent men and women found in late Roman Africa. The problem is that far more of them have been produced by literary fictions, ancient and modern, than once existed.
Sex and empire: a Darwinian perspective
This paper draws on evolutionary psychology to elucidate ultimate causation in imperial state formation and predatory exploitation in antiquity and beyond. Differential access to the means of reproduction is shown to have been a key feature of early imperial systems.
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.
A Crisis in the Multiethnic Society of Ancient Alexandria (66 A.D.)
My intention is to examine an episode from the first period of Roman domination, when the coexistence between the different ethnic groups in Alexandria (the body of Greek cit- izens, the Egyptian population and the Jewish community) was marked by signs of extreme tension and outbreaks of violence.