The story of the Arian heresy was the work of an embittered bishop named Athanasius of Alexandria (c.298-373 CE) who underwent five exiles under four separate emperors. It was a story that Athanasius and others wrapped around themselves at a time of identity creation and uncertainty. Scholarship on Arianism and Athanasius has up to this point been content to merely deconstruct and discount Athanasius’ grand narratives, classifying them as either misleading or outright fictitious. Yet all seem to take the widespread popularity and preservation of this narrative for granted. This dissertation asks two simple questions: why did this story of “Arians” resonate with contemporary audiences, and just as importantly, who read and replicated Athanasius’ ideas and how did they get access to it?

The following study argues that that Athanasius harnessed a widespread anxiety about the effect that imperial power and coercion had upon the salvation of Christian communities. The source of this insecurity was not related directly to the damage that imperial officials imparted on the bodies of Christians (martyrs had that covered), but rather the fact that when faced with the pressure to conform, Christian communities split into factions of acquiescence and resistance. The result was that these acts of violence threatened the unity of Christian communities and by extension their salvation.

As for how this narrative circled, and with whom, this dissertation takes a two-fold approach. First, it argues that it was Egypt’s positioning relative to the Mediterranean wind patterns and Athanasius’ two exiles (335-37, 339-45), which took him as far afield as Trier in Gaul that contributed success of the narrative. Both during his exile and after his return, the difficulties offered by the Mediterranean winds left only a few highly concentrated corridors of correspondence through which Athanasius maintained an extensive but documentable social network.

To determine how the narrative functioned in a social network context, the study utilizes a social network database rendered through the visualization software GEPHI. The result is a geographically-based image of Athanasius’ social network through which we can watch the story of “Arianism” move across both time and space: information that traveled through the trade networks of antiquity and ultimately between individuals. It becomes clear that the first generation of people who used term “Arianism” were those marginalized by Constantius’ efforts at unification and who possessed an understanding of imperial authority shaped by the memory and after-effects of the persecution. It was the generation that came after however that ultimately propelled the narrative to its lasting success. This generation of wealthy, ascetically-minded individuals had only known an ascendant and wealthy Christianity. They found the Arian narrative attractive in part because of Athanasius’ distaste for imperial authority fit with their own rejection of careers in its bureaucracy and his apocalyptic language and imagery fit their worldview. But Athanasius also managed to weave the Arian narrative into the spiritual authority of the desert monks, a group he courted between 346 and 357, successfully bringing them under the authority of the Alexandrian episcopate.

The Social War (90-88 BCE) was perhaps the most destructive conflict to occur in Italy besides Hannibal’s invasion one hundred years earlier. H. Mouritsen has criticized scholarship about the Social War for reproducing an understanding of the reasons and results of that war constructed from a nineteenth-century nationalist perspective, and for accepting uncritically the narrative of the first-century CE historian Appian, the only intact narrative of the war to survive from antiquity. I attempt to address these critiques by employing twenty-first-century models of nations and nation-state formation as comparative material for the political and social changes that occurred in Italy during and after the Social War, and make an argument that the foundation narratives of the second half of the first century BCE can provide evidence for contemporary ideas about Rome’s Italian allies and their place in Rome’s government and empire.

This dissertation is divided into two parts of two chapters each. The first part discusses the idea of “Italy” and its development over time, both geographically and politically, and introduces Kymlicka’s model of the nation-building state as a comparative model to judge Roman Italy against. I support this comparative model with Smith’s criticisms of “modernist” nationalist thought, i.e. the position that the nation is inherently modern. The second part consists of a reading of three foundation narratives, those of Cicero, Livy, and Ovid. I read these foundation narratives as justifications of their contemporary political circumstances. I also examine the poetry of Propertius, and argue that Propertius does not portray a regional, Umbrian identity as an alternative to a Roman or Italian identity. I conclude that the nation-building institutions of Roman Italy reached their developed forms during the rule of Augustus, that Italian identity formed in this same period, and that the three foundation narratives are evidence for that Italian identity in a developmental phase.

How does gaining an empire change the conqueror? Why is the assimilation of new populations, goods, and ideas sometimes seen as a marker of a people's greatness, and at other times as a dangerous threat from within? This project analyzes immigration to three capital cities: Athens (5th-4th centuries BCE), Rome (1st-4th centuries CE), and Chang'an, capital of Tang dynasty China (7th-10th centuries CE). It analyzes ancient textual and archaeological evidence through the lens of borderland theory to argue that the boundaries surrounding immigrant neighborhoods transformed each of these iconic cities into urban borderlands where ideas of social otherness had physical analogues. It was in these urban borderlands that the problem of how to accommodate new populations into existing structures of imperial domination was worked out.

In their respective heydays, Athens, Rome, and Chang'an functioned as centers of government, economic powerhouses, global schools, sites of religious pilgrimage, and tourist attractions. Many of the diverse immigrants they attracted settled in the neighborhoods at the center of this analysis: Athens' port of Piraeus, Rome's Trans Tiberim district, and Northwest Chang'an. These communities stood out as "small worlds" within their cities at large, where ethnic, linguistic, and cultural differences overlapped with physical boundaries such as rivers, roads, and walls. Residents carved out places for themselves in their new homes by learning how to skillfully navigate these boundaries. Whether by traversing the urban landscape during their daily commute, participating in civic or religious ceremonies, or attending festivals and entertainments, newcomers came into contact with locals on a daily basis. These interactions blurred lines between "us" and "them" in ways that called into question the limits of national identity and, depending on the circumstances, could either fan the flames of xenophobia or nurture new cultural syntheses. In this sense, life at the center of the Athenian, Roman, and Tang empires resembled that on their outer frontiers, where "civilized" insiders and "barbarian" outsiders lived poised between intimate coexistence and violent rejection. Assessing these imperial capitals as urban borderlands allows us see that this tension was not an aberration or strictly a regional phenomenon. It was quite literally built into the heart of all three empires.

This dissertation analyzes the last four books of an influential, fourth-century CE, Christian text, the Historia Ecclesiastica (History) written by church historian and bishop, Eusebius of Caesarea Maritima. Rather than approaching this Patristic text through a literary lens, my dissertation seeks to understand and re-visualize how the History produced and was a product of the geography of the ancient Mediterranean. By annotating books seven through ten of the History and visualizing the data through digital tools, I show that the universalizing rhetoric of the text was, in fact, geographically localized and masked the contingent nature of the text’s production. In order to achieve these goals, I first contextualize the city of Caesarea Maritima by locating it within Eastern Roman networks. Through this process I emphasize the non-Roman historical influences on the city and argue that Caesarea’s strategic use as an administrative city and military base must inform our understanding of the city in the fourth-century CE. As a city with logistic importance to the Roman Empire, Caesarea was not (as is often assumed) a backwater city on the Roman periphery. After developing context for Caesarea, I then analyze the geographical components in books seven through ten of the History. With the use of data sets (presented through tables and maps) I argue that Eusebius’ idea of where the Roman and Christian worlds came together was a winnowing, localized region: the Roman East. By doing so, I frame the History as a work embedded in its Eastern Mediterranean context and join the ranks of scholars who argue not only for a more nuanced understanding of Eusebius and his work in context, but also those who work to show how canonical texts have long been used to reinforce power dynamics in the modern world.

In late antiquity, several hagiographies of assigned female saints who presented themselves as men centuries were popular among Christian audiences. Within these hagiographies, the subjects changed their gender presentation and lived as men, often in monasteries intended for those assigned male. However, current historiography explains away these acts of gender variance from the historical record. Historians often view their presentation as a means to negotiate patriarchy, such as safety while traveling or to attain authority reserved for men. There seems to be a compulsion among scholars to impose cisnormativity onto these figures through viewing their gender presentation as solely a pragmatic choice. This dissertation analyzes these examples of gender variance in late antique Christianity through a transgender studies lens. This approach views these saints’ genders as performative constructions within their cultural context. By using a transgender studies approach, this dissertation disrupts the cisnormative view that causes the erasure of gender variance from the historical record.