Although widely attested in the historical record, the people known in antiquity as the Thracians (who inhabited a region north of Greece called Thrace) remain poorly understood on the whole and largely stand at the margins of mainstream scholarship. This dissertation seeks to improve our understanding of the Thracians by exploring how they came to be recognized as a distinct ethnic group to both themselves and outsiders as a result of various cross-cultural interactions. Centered around four case studies, my investigation covers a chronological span from the seventh to first centuries B.C.E. and analyzes a wide array of literary, epigraphic, papyrological, and archaeological data. I begin with a consideration of Thracian cultural influences in five Greek colonies in Thrace—Mesambria, Zone, Odessos, Dionysopolis, and Apollonia—the residents of which, I argue, possessed mixed Greco-Thracian identities. The second case study reconstructs the history of the Thracian slave and freed population in Attica and how they eventually developed a sense of ethno-religious solidarity. The third focuses on the Thracians’ encounters with the Achaemenid Persian Empire and the conceptualization of Thracians within ancient Near Eastern ideological paradigms of imperial space. The fourth discusses Thracian military service, resettlement, social mobility, and identity formation under Alexander the Great and the Macedonian “Successor” states of the Hellenistic East. Altogether, I attempt to demonstrate that both Thracians and non-Thracians contributed to the construction of Thracian identity over time, with expressions of “Thracianness”—that is, the experiences, practices, beliefs, and forms of self-identification that marked out Thracians in the eyes of their contemporaries—being most pronounced and noticeable in settings where Thracians constituted a minority.

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Histories of medicine in the ancient Greco-Roman world have traditionally been centered on elite men, despite elite men representing only a small portion of medical practitioners in the ancient world. While recent studies have begin to correct this picture, ideas of folk and elite healing are rarely put into conversation with each other. This thesis aims to balance this view by analyzing the ways in which elite men exchanged knowledge with non-elites, such as women, non-elite men, and peoples of enslaved status from the Hellenistic period to the early Roman Empire on information ranging from pharmacology to gynecology. Ultimately, this thesis demonstrates that these medical histories are in fact entwined, and are not disparate practices as they are often represented.

Panhellenism is a modern concept that has crept into the subconscious of historical narratives of ancient Greece. This term has been used in two general ways—either as a set of “soft” shared cultural characteristics or a “hard” political ideology that promoted a unified crusade against the “barbarian” Persian Empire. The emergence of the term in the early 19th century points to an embedded sense of Greek nationalism that projects such unity onto Greek antiquity. This dissertation measures the applicability of Panhellenism in the northeast Peloponnese region from the Archaic Period (beginning c. 800 BC) to the Roman conquest of Greece in 146 BC.I examine four major extraurban sanctuaries of the northeast Peloponnese region as case studies: Zeus at Nemea, Poseidon at Isthmia, Hera at Argos, and Asclepius at Epidaurus. Each has been described as “Panhellenic” at some point in its history, yet, such a label erases local agency. Using textual, archaeological, and epigraphic evidence, I argue that these sanctuaries were exclusively the product of local production, negotiation, and contestation. This dissertation emphasizes the role of local communities in the creation of mythic, civic, and physical landscapes in the region. Chapter 1 outlines the origins of ancient Panhellenism as a modern concept and its associations with modern nationalism. I propose a new model known as Local Panhellenism to describe the process of juxtaposing local city-state culture with “Panhellenic” ideas to promote local distinctiveness within the Greek community. Chapter 2 scrutinizes the various foundation myths associated with the sanctuaries and their festivals, connecting changes in the myths to changing historical contexts to the end of the 5th century BC. Chapter 3 examines two offices, the agonothetai and hellanodikai, to show how sanctuary administration was inseparable from polis governments and how locals and non-locals relied on the sanctuaries and festivals to enact local agendas. Chapter 4 uses the concept of relational space to reconstruct local narratives of the built environment. Chapter 5 serves as a conclusion and reiterates the thesis that the sanctuaries of the northeast Peloponnese were multivocal sites, but locals were the primary audience and architects of meaning.

Slavery was common throughout the ancient Mediterranean world, but there has been little research accounting for enslaved individuals in historical narratives. The history of medicine has neglected enslaved peoples, despite their presence as physicians, aids, patients, and subjects of medical experimentation. This dissertation has two main aims. First, to rewrite the history of medicine from a bottom-up perspective using enslaved and marginalized perspectives. Secondly, to demonstrate that enslaved experiences varied greatly across the ancient Mediterranean. This research draws on literary evidence, such as medical treatises, and epigraphic evidence, such as grave inscriptions, to center the perspective of enslaved peoples from 300 BCE to 200 CE. First, I rectify past research on professional enslaved healers, which excluded midwives, and demonstrate that professional enslaved healers existed in Greece, not just Rome. In the second chapter, I turn towards non-professional enslaved healers, who performed necessary medical tasks requiring specialized knowledge, such as preparingpharmaceuticals. Third, I investigate enslaved peoples as patients, establishing that healing slaves was a public benefit, but came with limits, as illness could also make slaves returnable to their sellers. The fourth chapter considers slaves and prisoners as subjects of medical experimentation, including dissection, vivisection, and poison testing, all of which expressed state power. Altogether, I demonstrate that slaves and marginalized peoples were integral to health systems within the ancient Mediterranean at every juncture of medicine. Additionally, I elucidate the wide variety of statuses that enslaved peoples could experience through medicine, from the emperor’s physician to subjects of violent experimentation.