The Nabataeans, best known today for the spectacular remains of their capital at Petra in southern Jordan, continue to defy easy characterization. Since they lack a surviving narrative history of their own, in approaching the Nabataeans one necessarily relies heavily upon the commentaries of outside observers, such as the Greeks, Romans, and Jews, as well as upon comparisons of Nabataean material culture with Classical and Near Eastern models. These approaches have elucidated much about this enigmatic civilization but have not always fully succeeded in locating specifically Nabataean motivations and perspectives within and behind the sources. To address this lacuna, my dissertation provides a critical re-reading and analysis of the ancient evidence, including literary, documentary, numismatic, epigraphic, art historical, and archaeological material, in order to explore the Nabataeans' reaction to, effect upon, and engagement with, historical events and cultural movements during the period from 312 BCE, when the Nabataeans first appear in the historical record in the wake of the conquests of Alexander the Great, to the annexation of their territory by the Romans in 106 CE. I seek to properly acknowledge the ways in which the Nabataeans self-consciously shaped their own political and cultural destinies while interacting with the broader Mediterranean and Near Eastern worlds. While identification, analysis, and articulation of the Nabataean viewpoint guides the dissertation, the project also broadly challenges or qualifies several important assumptions about the Nabataean civilization. In treating the period from 312 BCE to the eastern settlement of Pompey in 63 BCE, I argue that the Nabataeans played a more important role in the Hellenistic world than has generally been acknowledged--especially for the 3rd and 2nd centuries BCE--and I articulate the nature and significance of their position vis-à-vis their neighbors and rivals, both regional and further a-field, specifically from the Nabataean point of view. This analysis makes an important contribution to current discussions of the development of Nabataean identity and culture, and it can serve as a model for viewing other under-explored Hellenistic civilizations in the Near East. Events in the ensuing period, after 63 BCE, take place under the broad shadow of the extension of Roman power in the eastern Mediterranean, but by analyzing internationally important events of this period, such as the Roman expedition to Arabia ordered by Augustus, from a specifically Nabataean vantage point, I am able to show that the Nabataeans' self-interest often did not align with Roman objectives, and that their foreign policy flourished on its own merits. These conclusions appropriately acknowledge Nabataean individuality and autonomy, challenging the widely asserted notion that Nabataea fits a prescribed model of a client--or dependent--state of Rome. In examining the last generations of Nabataean independence, I argue against the traditional characterization that sees during these years a gradual political, economic, and cultural decline for the Nabataeans, culminating in their annexation by the Romans in 106 CE. I demonstrate that the period instead represents a time of increasing sophistication and self-confidence on the part of the Nabataeans, not one of resignation or submission to the inevitability of Roman domination.

This dissertation uses a combination of literary and archeological evidence to ask how Romans understood and defined public space in Rome during the Republic. The definition of concepts of `public' and `private' in Roman culture differed from that current in modern Western discourse, but just like modern definitions, it was ambiguous and manipulable. Taking public space as a starting-point offers new insights into the Roman concepts, and a behavioural approach, aided by insights from space syntax theory, allows for a partial reconstruction of the diversity of spatial experience in the city. Traditionally, lack of behavioural control has been associated with private space, but for the majority of the population, who were not householders, it was public spaces which were characterised by greater freedom of access and behaviour. Public space was not a monolith, but offered a variety of spatial experiences and was experienced differently by different groups. Moreover, just as the space of the Roman elite house was more `public' than we might naively suspect, public space in the city of Rome was determined by and thoroughly saturated by the private. The Republican Forum Romanum incorporated domestic and commercial space as well as political space, which itself was never neutrally `public' but always contested. The grand victory porticoes of the Campus Martius mark out sacred space but also space associated with an individual general, and their architecture and decoration increasingly mark them as semi-private, until eventually Pompey's theatre-portico complex incorporates not only a curia but also his own house. We see attempts to exploit the ambiguities of existing discourses of public and private, creating spaces like victory complexes and basilicas. Although Latin uses publicus and privatus as a natural and exclusive pair, the terms were in fact contested even in ancient times, and very little space in Rome was entirely public or entirely private.

How did the Roman state affect areas under its control? This dissertation addresses that question by examining one area, northern Italy, which was administered by the state at its most and least intensive. In the Republican and Late Antique periods the state frequently and directly intervened in the area. During the Republic changing Roman conceptions of northern Italy led the state to intervene dramatically in ways that remade the physical and demographic landscape of the region, while in the late Roman period similarly changing attitudes led to reformulation of the region's purpose and position within the empire. In contrast, the Roman state's presence in northern Italy in the early Imperial period was minimal, and this study explores the reasons for and effects of that minimalist approach on northern Italy in the first and second centuries AD.

Explanations for this early Imperial policy towards northern Italy are to be found not just in the region's late Republican history but also in the creation and evolution of Italian identities. Case studies of the Aemilia and the central Transpadana illustrate the intersection of these identities with state policy and ideology. These studies also examine the consequences of that intersection on everyday life in towns and in the countryside, on matters ranging from tombstones to taxes and from poetry to politics. Further case studies of Aquileia and Liguria look at how the state, even in its minimalist form, shaped the development of local economies and societies through the movement of people and goods around the empire. Together these studies examine the effects of the state on interregional networks as well as on individual communities.

Abstract

When Kings Become Philosophers:

The Late Republican Origins of Cicero’s Political Philosophy

by

Gregory Douglas Smay

Doctor of Philosophy in Ancient History and Mediterranean Archaeology

University of California, Berkeley

Professor Erich S. Gruen, Chair

This dissertation argues that Cicero’s de Republica is both a reflection of, and a commentary on, the era in which it was written to a degree not previously recognized in Ciceronian scholarship. Contra readings which treat the work primarily as a theoretical tract in the tradition of late Hellenistic philosophy, this study situates the work within its historical context in Late Republican Rome, and in particular within the personal experience of its author during this tumultuous period. This approach yields new insights into both the meaning and significance of the work and the outlook of the individual who is our single most important witness to the history of the last decades of the Roman Republic.

Specifically, the dissertation argues that Cicero provides clues preserved in the extant portions of the de Republica, overlooked by modern students in the past bur clearly recognizable to readers in his own day, indicating that it was meant to be read as a work with important contemporary political resonances. Among those which are still traceable in the mangled palimpsest which is our only source for the majority of the treatise are comments on the proper apportionment of authority and governmental responsibility among senate, magistrates and populus that grew out of Cicero’s handling of the Catilinarian conspiracy and its aftermath, and reflections on the importance of political engagement, even under the adverse circumstances of the First Triumvirate, which were heavily influenced by Cicero’s own political travails in the late 60s and 50s B.C.

As such, the de Republica represents a novel kind of literature within the Roman tradition. Living in an elite culture that privileged political action, yet unable to act politically in traditional ways under the constraints imposed by his enforced alliance with the triumvirs, Cicero attempted to forge a new kind of statesmanship, one carried out through the medium of the written word. The de Republica is thus written as a political act, a thoughtful response to contemporary conditions written by an intelligent commentator who, unable any longer to steer the ship of state by conventional means, was seeking a new way of exerting an influence on the course of events.

Abstract

Reconstructing Jewish Identity on the Foundations of Hellenistic History:

Azariah de' Rossi's Me'or `Enayim in Late 16th Century Northern Italy

by

David Michael Rosenberg-Wohl

Doctor of Philosophy in Jewish Studies

and

the Graduate Theological Union

Professor Erich S. Gruen, Chair

Me'or `Enayim is conventionally considered to be early modern Jewish history. Recent scholarship tends to consider the work Renaissance historiography, Counter-Reformation apology or some combination of the two. The approach to date has focused primarily upon the third and most sizeable part of Me'or `Enayim, the sixty-chapter "Words of Understanding".

In this dissertation, I seek to state a claim to the purpose for the work, a chimerical task. I argue that Azariah de' Rossi wrote Me'or `Enayim neither as history nor as apology but rather to articulate his vision of a new Jewish identity for the Jews of his time and place - late 16th century northern Italy. Recognizing the dominant Christian cultural embrace of the Roman empire and the concomitant Jewish opposition to Rome, de' Rossi felt that the pressure of the Counter-Reformation left Jews with no viable way to be relevant to contemporary Italian culture while remaining Jewish. He proposed abandoning the account of the Jewish interaction with Rome, an account long contested by Christianity, and replacing it with the honor accorded Judaism by Greece, specifically the Hellenistic empire. Key to that enterprise was emphasizing the role in Jewish history of Alexander the Great, Ptolemy Philadelphus and even Gaius Caligula (a Hellenistic monarch by virtue of the fact that he reigned before the destruction of the Second Temple and the advent of the Roman empire).

This purpose accounts for much that is puzzling about Me'or `Enayim. It explains why the book focuses upon Hellenistic history in general and upon the sources Aristeas, Philo and Josephus in particular. It explains why Roman history is either dismissed, in the case of Livy, or discounted, in the case of the Rabbinic midrashim accounting for the death of Titus by a divinely dispatched gnat. It explains why the work is comprised of three parts, for political identity is composed of a past, a present and a future.

Most of all, I believe, my approach explains how both strains of current scholarship - the historians and the apologists - are right, but only in part. It is true that de' Rossi is interested in what actually happened: he takes the time to establish the Hellenistic respect for Jews, their priests and their Temple. And it is true that de' Rossi is eager to discard Rabbinic midrashim dressed up as history that can be debunked: for de' Rossi, Rabbinic midrashim are vital as ethical lessons, lessons of hope. But de' Rossi's interest in history is selective, and not simply because as a religious Jew he is incapable of removing God as a causal agent. De' Rossi privileges Hellenistic history over Roman history because while the latter is useless to Jews of his age, the former is revitalizing.

De' Rossi's Me'or `Enayim is about the usefulness of history - namely, history in support of identity. In that, it is fruitful to think of Me'or `Enayim not simply as a Renaissance work of humanism or of a Counter-Reformation work of apology. It is also, and perhaps primarily, a Jewish work in the spirit of the Protestant Reformation's rearticulation of the religious past.