Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2010, Greek and Latin

Throughout the corpus of texts scholars have decided to call the Greek Magical Papyri (PGM), most simply defined as a “recipe-book” for ancient magicians, there are many spells describing the manufacture and use of sacred images that, by the end of the ritual actions incorporated throughout the spell, become invested with essences and traits that are not necessarily ontologically apparent or natural. For example, there are statues invested with social agency that can perform all manner of fantastical feats. There are engraved rings that are ritually invested with great powers and come to be specifically described in terms of adjectives such as “beneficent,” “ merciful,” “sexually pleasing,” and so forth. This dissertation takes a close look at the specific ritual actions that allow for objects in the profane world – such as clay or stone, for example – being ascribed these kinds of powers and abilities. For this purpose, I use cognitive and semiotic frameworks to draw out deeper meanings, analyses, and typologies of ritual action. I use the PGM as my primary source, although part of the semiotic theory that I incorporate also involves looking at how these images fit into a wider conception of the portrayal of divine interaction in literature and iconography in the ancient world. A second important aspect of this dissertation is a closer look at the practitioner of magic himself as a figure who also has (or comes to have, through the course of the ritual action) an inner essence that bestows upon him special and divine powers. An essential contribution of semiotic domain theory to this topic is the manner in which it allows us to analyze the practitioner of magic as a “specialist” thinker within the domain of religion. In this way the practitioner of magic can be compared to other “specialists” who also create new content within the semiotic domain of religion, such as the figure of the poet. Both of these figures create new content, however one happens to create ve (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Sarah Iles Johnston PhD (Advisor); Fritz Graf PhD (Committee Member); Carolina Lopez-Ruiz PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Classical Studies

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2024, Greek and Latin

This project uses mythology as a heuristic tool to enrich our understanding of the ancient female body and its processes. Alongside the important and necessary implications afforded by Greco-Roman myth, each of my chapters works through the prominent tripartite biological statuses of the ancient woman that appear in the surviving Greco-Roman gynecological documents—post-natal care, pregnancy/birth, and virginity. By approaching the material from three separate angles, my dissertation explores the complex relationship between medicine and mythology. In each life stage of an ancient woman, I reveal how “irrational” myth and “rational” Greco-Roman medicine support one another in the reckoning, mechanisms, and actions of the female body. Each chapter utilizes Soranus' Gynecology to commence an analysis of each life stage because, as a document speculated to be a manual for midwifery, it offers a viable proving ground due to its range of topics from virginity to raising children.

Committee: Fritz Graf (Advisor); Julia Nelson Hawkins (Committee Member); Sarah Iles Johnston (Committee Member) Subjects: Ancient History; Classical Studies; Medicine; Religion; Womens Studies

MA, University of Cincinnati, 2006, Arts and Sciences : Classics

The present thesis is concerned with household religion practiced during the Classical period in ancient Greece. In the past, the study of domestic cult was overlooked, and instead scholars focused on the public religion of the Greeks. These studies used literary evidence in order to describe civic religion. However, ancient texts also provide evidence for rituals practiced and gods revered in the Greek household. Literary sources indicate that domestic rituals did not require specialized equipment, and therefore, such equipment is difficult to identify in the archaeological record. This study attempts to identify such implements and examines material excavated from domestic contexts in three cities: Olynthus, Halieis, and Athens. The integration of literary sources and archaeological evidence demonstrates that common household items were used as the implements of domestic ritual. Thus, it seems that everyday, household objects assumed religious significance in certain contexts.

Committee: Kathleen Lynch (Advisor) Subjects:

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2021, Greek and Latin

In the first portion of this project, I analyze the myths of the Homeric Hymns from a divine vantage point, exploring the ways in which their narrators ask the divine to “delight” in their work. Unsurprisingly, deities enjoy hearing of their own superiority, and I argue that the Hymns' mythic scenes of epiphany efficiently crystallize that superiority into narrative form. Because epiphany forces a direct confrontation between god and human, it provides an opportunity for the poet to juxtapose god with mortal, efficiently revealing their insurmountable differences. In particular, by way of the epiphanic scene, the poet, in order that his divine audience might “delight in him the most,” communicates to his titular divinity the total insufficiency of human beings to interact with the divine. I focus, however, on the context in which these epiphanic scenes are deployed, and I ask how that context might affect the entire mythic narrative's appeal, especially to mortal audiences. In the second piece of this project, I delve into the poems' appeal to mortal audiences, and examine how the Hymns' poets use dramatic irony, framing devices, and humor to “delight” the human beings listening to their compositions. I argue that the poets seek to flatter their mortal audiences by providing them with information deliberately withheld from mortal characters. Even further, the Hymns' narrators reveal to their mortal listeners information withheld from divine characters as well. The singer of one of the myths incorporated into Hymn to Apollo, for example, lets his audience know the trick about to be played on Apollo, thus allowing the usually terrifying god to be humiliated—much to the mortal audience's “delight.” I hone in especially on the Hymn to Hermes and argue that its poet subverts the type-casting deployed in the other Hymns' mythic scenes of epiphany at divine expense. I show how the narrator of the myth relayed in the Homeric Hymn to Hermes, rather than leverage the type- (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Sarah Iles Johnston (Advisor); Carolina López-Ruiz (Committee Member); Thomas Hawkins (Committee Member) Subjects: Classical Studies

PhD, University of Cincinnati, 2016, Arts and Sciences: Classics

“The Landscape of the Lion: Economies of Religion and Politics in the Nemean Countryside (800 B.C. to A.D. 700),” synthesizes archaeological evidence and ancient historical sources to construct a history for the Nemea Valley, Greece from the Geometric through Late Roman periods, a span of roughly 1,500 years. In the first part of the dissertation, I examine in detail a wide range of functional types of sites discovered by the Nemea Valley Archaeological Project (NVAP) between 1984 and 1989. I consider their economic relationships to local population and religious centers, such as the city-state of Phlius and the Sanctuary of Zeus at Nemea – the former was a minor polis, while the latter was famous in antiquity for hosting the biennial Nemean Games. With an attention to the constantly evolving political agendas and alignments of neighboring city states (chiefly Argos and Corinth), I demonstrate that, in the absence of a polis center within the contested Nemea Valley, local pagan and Christian institutions were the most significant of those agents that determined patterns of settlement and rural economy. In the background, smaller, more isolated cult places situated on polis borders, together with a network of fortified positions, demarcated territory and asserted the dominion of the major actors within the region. In the second part of my dissertation, I show in outline how a loose network of numerous small Classical farms was, by the Late Roman period (A.D. 400-700), gradually transformed into an array of fewer and larger landholdings and villa estates that were engaged in intensive cultivation. Key to recognizing this subtle and gradual change is a novel approach making use of all artifact data produced by the survey, which show how landscape exploitation over time became more extensive and simultaneously entailed the adoption of new agricultural methods intended to produce greater yields from available land. As a tool for studying the larger regional – and (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Jack Davis Ph.D. (Committee Chair); John Cherry Ph.D. (Committee Member); Steven Ellis Ph.D. (Committee Member); Kathleen Lynch Ph.D. (Committee Member); Alan Sullivan Ph.D. (Committee Member) Subjects: Archaeology

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2015, Greek and Latin

Modern scholarship on the Skira has focused on explicating the origins of the festival, specifically through tracing the etymology of its name while simultaneously privileging the study of only a few sources. Further, these attempts are complicated by a general understanding that the purpose of religious study is to 'decode' the ultimate purpose of symbolic-ritual actions. This focus, along with the underlying belief in the essentially unchanging nature of religious ritual, has created a circular and misleading discourse on the nature of the Skira. These faults are also emblematic of much of the study of ancient religion. This dissertation makes two broad claims. First, rituals are constantly changing entities whose meaning and practice evolve based on the needs of the participants. Second, we should be not only be seeking to understand some singular symbolic meaning behind a festival but we should be trying to reconstruct it through the subjective viewpoints of both participants and onlookers. This means that a festival must be studied both synchronically, trying to recapture the various speculations about the festival at distinct points in time, and diachronically, tracing how those viewpoints evolved and changed. By necessity this means attempting to recover lost perspectives, especially those from groups traditionally ignored by Athenian writers. To that end, this work develops a methodology which allows for the study of religion in the way outlined above, elaborating a model originally proposed by Dorothy Noyes and Roger Abrahams to study the way that a particular Catalonian festival, the Patum, evolved and changed. Using this methodology, I examine the Skira, a Classical Athenian festival of midsummer, employing it as a test case for the claims above. This results in a number of innovations over previous scholarship of the Skira. First, using a careful diachronic accounting of sources, I am able to show that the Skira existed in dist (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Sarah Iles Johnston (Advisor); Fritz Graf (Committee Member); Tom Hawkins (Committee Member) Subjects: Folklore; Literature; Religion

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2015, Near Eastern Languages and Cultures

This dissertation looks at the ways in which the Tannaitic Sages portrayed and discussed non-Jewish ritual. Although this has been traditionally characterized as “idolatry,” this dissertation argues that that is not a category which would have been applied by the Sages of the Mishnah, Tosefta and the Tannaitic Midrashim. In fact, the Sages did not consider worship of avodah zarah, as it is called in this text, as something which was wholly different from their own ritual. The Tannaitic Sages conceived of non-Jewish ritual and Jewish ritual to be part of a single category of ritual. This category ultimately derived from the ritual practices of the Jerusalem Temple, which meant that rituals which were performed outside of that context were sacrilege and an affront to the God of Israel. It was precisely the similarities, rather than the differences, between Jewish and non-Jewish ritual which gave the Tannaitic Sages pause. These similarities, however, also gave the Sages tools for controlling non-Jewish ritual. They did this through a quest for plausible contexts for non-Jewish ritual behavior. Through establishing these contexts, the Tannaitic Sages are able to control what does and does not qualify as the worship of avodah zarah.

Committee: Michael Swartz (Advisor); Sarah Johnston (Committee Member); Sam Meier (Committee Member); Daniel Frank (Committee Member); Lynn Kaye (Committee Member) Subjects: Ancient Languages; Judaic Studies; Religion

PhD, University of Cincinnati, 2007, Arts and Sciences : Classics

This dissertation provides the first comprehensive account of private worship associated with childbirth throughout the ancient Greek world. It documents the rituals performed by individuals during various stages of the reproductive cycle and the different types of votives that were dedicated to the gods of fertility and birth. My work on this subject builds upon previous studies, which have collected much of the available evidence, by asking new questions of the material. In particular, I have sought to define the patterns of childbirth rituals that occurred in the lives of Greek women and to examine how the dedication of childbirth votives fits within this larger pattern of worship. The first chapter examines the cultural background within which the rituals and the votives must be understood. In addition to providing information about the divinities who oversaw childbirth and the sanctuaries for which childbirth worship is attested, this chapter explores the wider social and religious attitudes towards procreation and birth that played a defining role in the formation and practice of childbirth rituals. The second chapter provides a detailed discussion of the rituals surrounding childbirth. By examining the private rituals performed both within sanctuaries and within the home, this chapter establishes the patterns of ritual that punctuated the entire process of birth from the period immediately preceding conception through the time when the mother and child were (re)admitted into society after the birth. The third chapter examines the votives that represent the best-preserved evidence for childbirth rituals. By providing a critical assessment of the votives by type, I first define what objects were dedicated as childbirth votives, and then I examine these votives in order to gather further information about childbirth rituals and Greek attitudes towards childbirth in general. A catalogue of the votives is provided in Appendix 1. In my conclusions I summarize the p (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Dr. Brian Rose (Advisor) Subjects:

MA, University of Cincinnati, 1999, Arts and Sciences : Classics

At some point in the fourth century B.C., anatomical votive terracottas began to be dedicated in sanctuaries in central Italy. Thousands of replicas of body parts have been found in votive deposits in these sanctuaries, left to deities as requests or thank offerings for healing. The spread of the anatomical votive terracotta phenomenon has been attributed to the colonisation of central Italy by the Romans. In addition, parallels have been drawn to the similar short-lived phenomenon at the Asklepieion at Corinth where models of body parts were also dedicated in the context of a healing cult. After a general introduction to the historical and physical context of the anatomical votive terracotta phenomenon, this thesis examines the link to Corinth and suggests how the practice was first transmitted to Italy. Votive evidence of early date and peculiar typology found in situ from the sanctuary at Gravisca on the south coast of Etruria suggests contact with Greeks who would have been familiar with the practice of dedicating anatomical votive terracottas at Corinth. From its point of introduction to central Italy in southern Etruria, the practice of dedicating anatomical votive terracottas spread to Rome along the communication arteries of the developing Roman road system. This thesis also examines why Asklepios, introduced to Rome in 293 B.C., had limited influence on healing cults in central Italy.

Committee: Dr. Charles Rose (Advisor) Subjects:

PhD, University of Cincinnati, 2005, Arts and Sciences : Classics

“A Diachronic Examination of the Erechtheion and Its Reception” examines the social life of the Ionic temple on the Athenian Akropolis, which was built in the late 5th century B.C. to house Athens' most sacred cults and relics. Using a contextualized diachronic approach, this study examines both the changes to the Erechtheion between its construction and the middle of the 19th century A.D., as well as the impact the temple had on the architecture and art of these successive periods. This approach allows the evidence to shed light on new areas of interest such as the Post-Antique phases of the building, in addition to affording a better understanding of problems that have plagued the study of the Erechtheion during the past two centuries. This study begins with a re-examination of all the pertinent archaeological, epigraphical, and literary evidence, and proposes a wholly new reconstruction of how the Erechtheion worked physically and ritually in ancient times. After accounting for the immediate influence of the Erechtheion on subsequent buildings of the Ionic order, an argument for a Hellenistic rather than Augustan date for the major repairs to the temple is presented. Copies of both the Erechtheion's special Ionic order and the maidens of the South Porch were incorporated into many Roman monuments. This study examines the significance of these quotations in the light of Vitruvius' opening statements in De Architectura, where the Roman architect calls female architectural supports “caryatids.” The surviving architectural evidence, in conjunction with the accounts and depictions of the Erechtheion by the early travelers to Athens, provide the bases for reconstructing the different phases of the afterlife of the Erechtheion. After it served as a pagan temple, the Erechtheion was transformed into a pillared hall in Late Antiquity, a basilica church in the Byzantine period, an elaborate residence in the Frankish period, and finally into a house for an Ottoman official. (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Dr. Charles Rose (Advisor) Subjects: