UC Berkeley

This dissertation examines how people in the past imagined their own past. Specifically, I study the interplay between the physical remains of antiquity and narratives about the past in Late Hellenistic and Roman Lydia: from the notion, celebrated in second-century CE inscriptions, that the Lydian lakes bore the region's primeval inhabitants, to the redeployment of archaic spolia in the Late Roman synagogue at Sardis; from the claim that a mud-brick structure in Late Hellenistic Sardis was the palace of King Croesus, to the second-century BCE association of the vegetation on the slopes of the Lydian tumuli with a favorite courtesan in the Mermnad court. I treat landscapes, monuments, and objects in the city of Sardis and its neighboring territories as the material matrix within which stories about the past were embedded and variously manipulated.

I begin by discussing how certain natural landscapes were associated with ancestral local heroes. I go on to explore local re-interpretations of the most conspicuous man-made monuments in the region: the Lydian tumuli. I then turn from the countryside to the city of Sardis, analyzing interventions in the urban fabric including the recovery, re-interpretation, and re-use of archaic Lydian artifacts. Finally I turn away from Sardis and examine the neighboring towns of Philadelphia and Hypaepa, where alternative memory horizons--specifically Persian and Egyptian--were often conjured when imagining local antiquity. Thus I sketch out a general topography of memory in Late Hellenistic and Roman Lydia, examining the interaction between the places in the region that were charged with ancient meaning and the narratives attached to them.