Dedication and Display of Portrait Statues in Hellenistic Greece: Spatial Practices and Identity Politics

This dissertation models a new approach to the study of ancient portrait statues—one that situates them in their historical, political, and spatial contexts. By bringing into conversation bodies of evidence that have traditionally been studied in discrete categories, I investigate how statue landscapes articulated and reinforced a complex set of political and social identities, how space was utilized and manipulated on a local and a regional level, and how patrons responded to the spatial pressures and visual politics of statue dedication within a constantly changing landscape.

Instead of treating sites independently, I have found it to be more productive—and, indeed, necessary—to examine broader patterns of statue dedication. I demonstrate that a regional perspective, that is, one that takes into account the role of choice and spatial preference in setting up a statue within a regional network of available display locations, can illuminate how space shaped the ancient practice of portrait dedication. This level of analysis is a new approach to the study of portrait statues and it has proved to be a productive way of thinking about how statues and context were used together to articulate identity. Understanding how individual monuments worked within these broader landscapes of portrait dedications, how statue monuments functioned within federal systems, and how monuments set up by individuals and social groups operated along side those set up by political bodies clarifies the important place of honorific statues as an expression of power and identity within the history of the site, the region, and Hellenistic Greece.

Two versions of life: emotionally negative and positive life events have different roles in the organization of life story and identity.

Over 2,000 adults in their sixties completed the Centrality of Event Scale (CES) for the traumatic or negative event that now troubled them the most and for their most positive life event, as well as measures of current PTSD symptoms, depression, well-being, and personality. Consistent with the notion of a positivity bias in old age, the positive events were judged to be markedly more central to life story and identity than were the negative events. The centrality of positive events was unrelated to measures of PTSD symptoms and emotional distress, whereas the centrality of the negative event showed clear positive correlations with these measures. The centrality of the positive events increased with increasing time since the events, whereas the centrality of the negative events decreased. The life distribution of the positive events showed a marked peak in young adulthood whereas the life distribution for the negative events peaked at the participants' present age. The positive events were mostly events from the cultural life script-that is, culturally shared representations of the timing of major transitional events. Overall, our findings show that positive and negative autobiographical events relate markedly differently to life story and identity. Positive events become central to life story and identity primarily through their correspondence with cultural norms. Negative events become central through mechanisms associated with emotional distress.

Globalizing the Sculptural Landscapes of the Sarapis and Isis Cults in Hellenistic and Roman Greece

“Globalizing the Sculptural Landscape of Isis and Sarapis Cults in Roman Greece,” asks questions of cross-cultural exchange and viewership of sculptural assemblages set up in sanctuaries to the Egyptian gods. Focusing on cognitive dissonance, cultural imagining, and manipulations of time and space, I theorize ancient globalization as a set of loosely related processes that shifted a community's connections with place. My case studies range from the 3rd century BCE to the 2nd century CE, including sanctuaries at Rhodes, Thessaloniki, Dion, Marathon, Gortyna, and Delos. At these sites, devotees combined mainstream Greco-Roman sculptures, Egyptian imports, and locally produced imitations of Egyptian artifacts. In the last case, local sculptors represented Egyptian subjects with Greco-Roman naturalistic styles, creating an exoticized visual ideal that had both local and global resonance. My dissertation argues that the sculptural assemblages set up in Egyptian sanctuaries allowed each community to construct complex narratives about the nature of the Egyptian gods. Further, these images participated in a form of globalization that motivated local communities to adopt foreign gods and reinterpret them to suit local needs.

I begin my dissertation by examining how Isis and Sarapis were represented in Greece. My first chapter focuses on single statues of Egyptian gods, describing their iconographies and stylistic tendencies through examples from Corinth and Gortyna. By comparing Greek examples with images of Sarapis, Isis, and Harpokrates from around the Mediterranean, I demonstrate that Greek communities relied on globally available visual tropes rather than creating site or region-specific interpretations. In the next section, I examine what other sources viewers drew upon to inform their experiences of Egyptian sculpture. In Chapter 3, I survey the textual evidence for Isiac cult practice in Greece as a way to reconstruct devotees’ expectations of sculptures in sanctuary contexts. At the core of this analysis are Apuleius’ Metamorphoses and Plutarch’s De Iside et Osiride, which offer a Greek perspective on the cult’s theology. These literary works rely on a tradition of aretalogical inscriptions—long hymns produced from roughly the late 4th century B.C.E. into the 4th century C.E. that describe the expansive syncretistic powers of Isis, Sarapis, and Harpokrates. This chapter argues that the textual evidence suggests that devotees may have expected their images to be especially miraculous and likely to intervene on their behalf, particularly when involved in ritual activity inside the sanctuary.

In the final two chapters, I consider sculptural programs and ritual activity in concert with sanctuary architecture. My fourth chapter focuses on sanctuaries where large amounts of sculpture were found in underground water crypts: Thessaloniki and Rhodes. These groups of statues can be connected to a particular sanctuary space, but their precise display contexts are not known. By reading these images together, I argue that local communities used these globally available images to construct new interpretations of these gods, ones that explored the complex intersections of Egyptian, Greek, and Roman identities in a globalized Mediterranean. My final chapter explores the Egyptian sanctuary at Marathon, a site where exceptional preservation allows us to study how viewers would have experienced images in architectural space. Using the Isiac visuality established in Chapter 3, I reconstruct the viewer's experience, arguing that the patron, Herodes Atticus, intended his viewer to inform his experience with the complex theology of Middle Platonism and prevailing elite attitudes about Roman imperialism.

Throughout my dissertation, I diverge from traditional approaches to culture change that center on the concepts of Romanization and identity. In order to access local experiences of globalization, I examine viewership on a micro-scale. I argue that viewers brought their concerns about culture change into dialogue with elements of cult, social status, art, and text to create new interpretations of Roman sculpture sensitive to the challenges of a highly connected Mediterranean world. In turn, these transcultural perspectives motivated Isiac devotees to create assemblages that combined elements from multiple cultures. These expansive attitudes also inspired Isiac devotees to commission exoticized images that brought together disparate cultures and styles in an eclectic manner that mirrored the haphazard way that travel brought change to the Mediterranean world. My dissertation thus offers a more theoretically rigorous way of modeling culture change in antiquity that recognizes local communities’ agency in producing their cultural landscapes, reconciling some of the problems of scale that have plagued earlier approaches to provincial Roman art.

These case studies demonstrate that cultural anxieties played a key role in how viewers experienced artistic imagery in the Hellenistic and Roman Mediterranean. This dissertation thus offers a new component in our understanding of ancient visuality, and, in turn, a better way to analyze how local communities dealt with the rise of connectivity and globalization.

The Market for Apples: A Theory of Identity and Consumption

This paper presents an economic model of the effects of identity and social norms on consumption patterns. By incorporating qualitative studies in psychology and sociology, I propose a utility function that features two components – economic (functional) and identity elements. This setup is extended to analyze a market comprising a continuum of consumers, whose identity distribution along a spectrum of binary identities is described by a Beta distribution. I also introduce the notion of salience in the context of identity and consumption decisions. The key result of the model suggests that fundamental economic parameters, such as price elasticity and market demand, can be altered by identity elements. In addition, it predicts that firms in perfectly competitive markets may associate their products with certain types of identities, in order to reduce product substitutability and attain price-setting power.

Intergenic and genic sequence lengths have opposite relationships with respect to gene expression.

Eukaryotic genomes are mostly composed of noncoding DNA whose role is still poorly understood. Studies in several organisms have shown correlations between the length of the intergenic and genic sequences of a gene and the expression of its corresponding mRNA transcript. Some studies have found a positive relationship between intergenic sequence length and expression diversity between tissues, and concluded that genes under greater regulatory control require more regulatory information in their intergenic sequences. Other reports found a negative relationship between expression level and gene length and the interpretation was that there is selection pressure for highly expressed genes to remain small. However, a correlation between gene sequence length and expression diversity, opposite to that observed for intergenic sequences, has also been reported, and to date there is no testable explanation for this observation. To shed light on these varied and sometimes conflicting results, we performed a thorough study of the relationships between sequence length and gene expression using cell-type (tissue) specific microarray data in Arabidopsis thaliana. We measured median gene expression across tissues (expression level), expression variability between tissues (expression pattern uniformity), and expression variability between replicates (expression noise). We found that intergenic (upstream and downstream) and genic (coding and noncoding) sequences have generally opposite relationships with respect to expression, whether it is tissue variability, median, or expression noise. To explain these results we propose a model, in which the lengths of the intergenic and genic sequences have opposite effects on the ability of the transcribed region of the gene to be epigenetically regulated for differential expression. These findings could shed light on the role and influence of noncoding sequences on gene expression.

The normative and the personal life: individual differences in life scripts and life story events among USA and Danish undergraduates.

Life scripts are culturally shared expectations about the order and timing of life events in a prototypical life course. American and Danish undergraduates produced life story events and life scripts by listing the seven most important events in their own lives and in the lives of hypothetical people living ordinary lives. They also rated their events on several scales and completed measures of depression, PTSD symptoms, and centrality of a negative event to their lives. The Danish life script replicated earlier work; the American life script showed minor differences from the Danish life script, apparently reflecting genuine differences in shared events as well as less homogeneity in the American sample. Both consisted of mostly positive events that came disproportionately from ages 15 to 30. Valence of life story events correlated with life script valence, depression, PTSD symptoms, and identity. In the Danish undergraduates, measures of life story deviation from the life script correlated with measures of depression and PTSD symptoms.

Flashbulb memories and posttraumatic stress reactions across the life span: age-related effects of the German occupation of Denmark during World War II.

A representative sample of older Danes were interviewed about experiences from the German occupation of Denmark in World War II. The number of participants with flashbulb memories for the German invasion (1940) and capitulation (1945) increased with participants' age at the time of the events up to age 8. Among participants under 8 years at the time of their most traumatic event, age at the time correlated positively with the current level of posttraumatic stress reactions and the vividness of stressful memories and their centrality to life story and identity. These findings were replicated in Study 2 for self-nominated stressful events sampled from the entire life span using a representative sample of Danes born after 1945. The results are discussed in relation to posttraumatic stress disorder and childhood amnesia.