Papers by Randall Souza
American Journal of Archaeology, 2024
The third-century BCE Sicilian inscribed bronze plaques collectively known as the Entella tablets... more The third-century BCE Sicilian inscribed bronze plaques collectively known as the Entella tablets constitute remarkable evidence of a community's response to near destruction. The decrees inscribed on these bronze tablets attest to the experience of a small western Sicilian polis during the First Punic War (ca. 264-241 BCE). When the inhabitants of Entella were expelled from their city, they were able to survive both individually and as a community thanks to the intervention of benefactors who sheltered them, fed them, and eventually helped them return home. Although previous work on the inscriptions has discussed significant elements of the episode and noted the fact that the decrees strengthened diplomatic relations with their benefactors, this article sets the tablets in their full historical context, clarifies some remaining questions they raise, and reconstructs their overall program, with particular attention to group dynamics and social and political life. Drawing on theories of community and communal trauma, I show how the Entellinoi commemorated their disastrous dislocation and embraced interaction with communities across Sicily so that they would not suffer so much from an existential threat again.
Citizenship in the Classical and Hellenistic western Mediterranean
Citizenship in antiquity: civic communities in the ancient Mediterranean, 2023
This chapter examines the ideologies and practices of citizenship that developed in the communiti... more This chapter examines the ideologies and practices of citizenship that developed in the communities of the classical and Hellenistic Western Mediterranean. Those ideologies and practices constitute a discourse between group and individuals about rights and responsibilities as well as an emotional or affective sense of belonging to a community. In this chapter, therefore, I consider both forms of citizenship, legalistic and affective, with the understanding that they produce and affect each other; neither one explains everything on its own. ‘Classical’ and ‘Hellenistic’
are chronological terms created for the study of the Eastern Mediterranean, and they can lack salience in the areas to be discussed here. For the sake of convenience, the scope of this chapter will extend as far back as the early fifth century BCE, and as far forward as the very beginning of the second, roughly 500–200. The ‘Western Mediterranean’ is also a slippery concept; in this chapter, it will refer to the waters, shores, and inland zones running counter-clockwise from the Gulf of Venice to the Gulf of Tunis. The chapter begins with general observations about Greek citizens and citizenship in the Western Mediterranean, and it then proceeds to examine, in turn, three broad regions: the southern Italian peninsula, the island of Sicily, and the coast along the Gulf of Lion. These
regional summaries are followed by a concluding section that addresses the phenomena affecting the development of citizenship concepts over the course of the classical and Hellenistic periods.
Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik, 2022
Anyone engaged in scholarship about the ancient world, with the patchy, obscure, and ambiguous na... more Anyone engaged in scholarship about the ancient world, with the patchy, obscure, and ambiguous nature of our evidence, has to be ready to admit an error or three. In an article published in this journal in 2016, I offered improved readings of several property contracts inscribed on lead sheets, with particular attention to the presence of women as participants in the transactions. I mostly stand by those readings; however, in one case I made a plausible but incorrect argument against the association of a fragment with one of the contracts, in another case I missed a join between two fragments, and in a third case I neglected to study and provide a new reading of a contract that would have contributed concretely to my article’s thematic focus. The purpose of the present work is to correct those errors with a more careful examination of the three documents and related fragments.
Humans, 2024
Archaeologists deploy a variety of models and theories, often tailored to specific questions or s... more Archaeologists deploy a variety of models and theories, often tailored to specific questions or situations, in making sense of the material record we study. The concept of the community of practice, originally developed in the context of modern work and learning situations, describes among other things how participation in shared activities can create and shape social relationships. It therefore offers a powerful and flexible framework for the many archaeological research agendas in which group dynamics play a role. Some archaeologists have already begun to use the community of practice approach (CoP) as an interpretive framework, and this essay argues that a wider embrace would be a benefit to individual archaeologists and to the field as a whole.
FOLD&R Fasti Online Documents & Research , 2019
In its fourth season, the American Excavations at Morgantina: Contrada Agnese Project (CAP) conti... more In its fourth season, the American Excavations at Morgantina: Contrada Agnese Project (CAP) continued archaeological investigations inside a modest house of Hellenistic date located near the western edge of the ancient urban center at Morgantina. Previous CAP excavations, conducted between 2013 and 2015, had verified the presence of an adaptive urban grid in this portion of the ancient city and, moreover, revealed much of the northern part of the building that occupied Lot 1 of insula W13/14S. Following the 2015 excavations, we came to identify this building as a modestly-appointed house that had been occupied for roughly 50 to 75 years, beginning in the second quarter of the third century BCE. The 2016 CAP season represented a significant expansion of the excavation, as four large trenches were set across the entirety of the lot, with the twin goals of resolving stratigraphic questions that remained from previous seasons and exploring the lesser-known southern area of the building. In this report we describe newly excavated evidence for the construction and use of the building as a whole, proceeding phase by phase and trench by trench.
American Journal of Archaeology, 2021
Although literary and epigraphic texts attest to the widespread use of random selection in the an... more Although literary and epigraphic texts attest to the widespread use of random selection in the ancient Mediterranean, archaeological evidence beyond the Athenian-style kleroterion is rare. A recent discovery at Morgantina may improve this situation: a terracotta ball inscribed with a personal name was recovered in 2018 during excavations inside a house dated to the middle of the third century BCE. A nearly identical ball inscribed with a different name had been excavated in the 1960s in a nearby house of similar date. Here we consider them together, offering a first publication of the two objects and their inscriptions, including their onomastic and social significance. We argue that these objects most likely functioned as lots (κλῆροι) for sortition, based on a review of relevant evidence for the theory and practice of sortition from across the Mediterranean. We then discuss the historical context in which the lots were created, used, and discarded: decades of prosperity in eastern Sicily under the hegemony of the Syracusan monarch Hieron II (r. 269-215 BCE). We propose that the inhabitants of Hellenistic Morgantina may have employed random selection for distributing land during a period of demographic and urban growth generated by that prosperity.
FOLD&R Fasti On Line Documents & Research, 487, 2020
In its fifth season, the American Excavations at Morgantina: Contrada Agnese Project (CAP) contin... more In its fifth season, the American Excavations at Morgantina: Contrada Agnese Project (CAP) continued archaeological investigations inside the Southeast Building, a modestly-appointed house of Hellenistic date located near the western edge of the city. The 2016 CAP season had revealed the full extent of the property’s boundary walls and allowed us to propose a cohesive phasing scheme for the building’s construction, occupation, and abandonment. We suggested that the house was occupied for approximately 60-75 years, beginning in the second quarter of the third century BCE. The 2017 CAP excavations resolved a number of remaining questions, particularly those concerning the phasing of the boundary walls, the layout of interior spaces in the southern and eastern parts of the building, and the nature of domestic activities at different stages of the house’s occupation. This report describes the results of these excavations and proposes a new account of the building’s early development. The discovery of two large rotary millstones within the building raises the possibility that the occupants of the house may have specialized in the milling of grains and prompts us to rename the building, “the House of the Two Mills”.
The Fight for Greek Sicily, edited by Melanie Jonasch (Oxford: Oxbow Books), 2020
One characteristic facet of war in Classical Sicily was the mass enslavement of defeated populati... more One characteristic facet of war in Classical Sicily was the mass enslavement of defeated populations. Victorious generals not only seized soldiers on the battlefield but also frequently claimed all the inhabitants of a captured city as captives. Sometimes they were transported to a capital city, say, Carthage or Syracuse, but sometimes they were sold on the spot; the full dynamics of population dispersal through the island’s slave markets can rarely be known with any certainty. However, we can in some cases follow the people enslaved in this way and trace their itineraries, when they reappear as protagonists in the historical record. In this paper I examine the refoundation of cities by their formerly enslaved inhabitants, because such refoundations represent an opportunity to partially reconstruct the experience of enslaved populations.
FOLD&R Fasti On Line Documents & Research, 450, 2019
In its fourth season, the American Excavations at Morgantina: Contrada Agnese Project (CAP) conti... more In its fourth season, the American Excavations at Morgantina: Contrada Agnese Project (CAP) continued archaeological investigations inside a modest house of Hellenistic date located near the western edge of the ancient urban center at Morgantina. Previous CAP excavations, conducted between 2013 and 2015, had verified the presence of an adaptive urban grid in this portion of the ancient city and, moreover, revealed much of the northern part of the building that occupied Lot 1 of insula W13/14S. Following the 2015 excavations, we came to identify this building as a modestly-appointed house that had been occupied for roughly 50 to 75 years, beginning in the second quarter of the third century BCE. The 2016 CAP season represented a significant expansion of the excavation, as four large trenches were set across the entirety of the lot, with the twin goals of resolving stratigraphic questions that remained from previous seasons and exploring the lesser-known southern area of the building. In this report we describe newly excavated evidence for the construction and use of the building as a whole, proceeding phase by phase and trench by trench.
FOLD&R Fasti On Line Documents & Research, 500, 2021
In its sixth season, the American Excavations at Morgantina: Contrada Agnese Project (CAP) contin... more In its sixth season, the American Excavations at Morgantina: Contrada Agnese Project (CAP) continued archaeological investigations inside the House of the Two Mills, a modestly-appointed house of Hellenistic date located near the western edge of the ancient city of Morgantina. This report gives a phase-by-phase summary of the significant discoveries from the 2018 excavation season, highlighting the architectural development of the building as well as evi-dence for the various activities that took place there over the course of its occupation.
From Document to History. Epigraphic Insights into the Greco-Roman World, edited by Carlos Noreña and Nikolaos Papazarkadas (Leiden: Brill), 2019
The relationships between nominally autonomous Greek poleis took many forms, some of which reinfo... more The relationships between nominally autonomous Greek poleis took many forms, some of which reinforced polis community boundaries and others of which cut across them. Among the more intriguing relationships are those of isopoliteia, in which the right to become a citizen in one city was granted to an individual or an entire community in another city. The details and terminology vary from case to case, but it remains clear that the offer of potential citizenship was a useful diplomatic tool. When two cities exchanged such grants and the relationship was reciprocal, power was balanced, at least in theory; when one city possessed the right of potential citizenship in a city that did not have reciprocal rights, different dynamics could emerge.
In this chapter I examine anomalous usages in the formulae of isopoliteia grants, in which certain communities usurped the right to dictate status to partner communities, asserting or attempting to assert control beyond the boundaries of their legitimate authority. I suggest that these assertive acts are best understood in the context of diplomatic discourse not simply as transgressions of a norm but as attempts to ensure the survival of the communities in question.
Fasti On Line Documents & Research, 2019
In its fourth season, the American Excavations at Morgantina: Contrada Agnese Project (CAP) conti... more In its fourth season, the American Excavations at Morgantina: Contrada Agnese Project (CAP) continued archaeological investigations inside a modest house of Hellenistic date located near the western edge of the ancient urban center at Morgantina. Previous CAP excavations, conducted between 2013 and 2015, had verified the presence of an adaptive urban grid in this portion of the ancient city and, moreover, revealed much of the northern part of the building that occupied Lot 1 of insula W13/14S. Following the 2015 excavations, we came to identify this building as a modestly-appointed house that had been occupied for roughly 50 to 75 years, beginning in the second quarter of the third century BCE.
Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik, Mar 2016
The corpus of Sicilian real estate inscriptions is small but significant. The first published con... more The corpus of Sicilian real estate inscriptions is small but significant. The first published contract from Sicily was found in the archaeological museum in Aidone in 1912 and likely comes from the nearby Serra Orlando – Morgantina, though we do not know exactly where or in which levels. Two contracts were discovered in the 1970s in archaeological excavations at Camarina and therefore have secure provenances and archaeological contexts; they come from a residential area and are dated to ca. 300 BCE. The remainder of the extant documents come via private collections from looters so they lack this crucial information. G. Manganaro has published a number of documents including defixiones and contracts from Sicily beginning in 1977; to my knowledge the most recent publication of a new contract was in 1997. Each contract was inscribed using a stylus on a lead sheet, which was then apparently folded or rolled and flattened. They have been dated variously to the late third and second centuries BCE on the basis of letter forms, though this dating can only be approximate given the medium and the potential for idiosyncratic ductus. Nowhere else in the ancient Mediterranean was lead used for contracts involving real estate, which were always carved in stone outside Sicily. The lack of any extant Sicilian contract cut in stone fits the general dearth of stone inscriptions from this period in Sicily, which can be explained in part by the lack of locally occurring marble or even high-quality limestone on the island. In Sicily lead, which was also used for curses and mercantile seals, was the preferred medium for durably recording the sale of land.
Here I present improved texts of several contracts based on epigraphic research conducted in Ragusa, Sicily, and explore some of the implications these texts present for our understanding of Hellenistic Sicily. The contracts under discussion arrived from the Roman collector Ricotti Prina at the museum in Ragusa in 1983, and were published in 1989 by Manganaro, who attributed some to Morgantina and some to Camarina. My research confirms certain of the previous readings and restorations, and challenges others.
In their content, the texts provide new documentation of women’s activity in the exchange of real estate in Sicily during the Hellenistic period. I explore the possibility that this activity is a sign of greater economic independence for women in Sicily as compared with the rest of the Greek Mediterranean, though I remain cautious about extrapolating too much from what is still a small, fragmentary, and isolated body of evidence.
G. Bruno (ed.), La geoarcheologia come chiave di lettura per uno sviluppo sostenibile del territorio. Atti del congresso nazionale di geoarcheologia: Aidone (EN), 04-05 luglio 2014. SIGEA 2/2015: 19-24., 2015
The Contrada Agnese Project (CAP) of the American Excavations at Morgantina (AEM) is a multi-year... more The Contrada Agnese Project (CAP) of the American Excavations at Morgantina (AEM) is a multi-year research and excavation project focused on an insula at the western end of the Classical and Hellenistic city. This article presents key findings from the project’s 2013 and 2014 seasons and offers preliminary interpretation of the excavation data. We end with a brief account of CAP’s advances in the fields of data management and geospatial recording.
FOLD&R Fasti On Line Documents & Research, 322, 2014
This article provides a preliminary report on the 2013 excavations carried out by the American Ex... more This article provides a preliminary report on the 2013 excavations carried out by the American Excavations at Morgantina (Sicily): Contrada Agnese Project (CAP). The 2013 season marked the start of this multiyear re-search and excavation project aimed at investigating both the urban planning of the city and the lives of its resi-dents, with a specific focus on the periods of occupation and cultural transformation from the third to first century BCE. During the first season, three trenches were excavated in two parts of the ancient city. Their locations were chosen, in part, based on the results of a geophysical survey, conducted on the archaeological site in the spring of 2012. This preliminary report presents the significant stratigraphic units and material finds encountered in each trench, along with a provisional outline of the phases of activity, setting the developments observed in each trench within the broader historical and archaeological context of the urban center at Morgantina.
In this article we re-examine an honorific decree for the Attalid courtier Asklepides, which was ... more In this article we re-examine an honorific decree for the Attalid courtier Asklepides, which was passed after his death by a Lydian city to which he had been posted. We offer a new edition of the text with new readings and restorations, which forms the basis for further discussion of Asklepides' family, the identity of the city, and his relationship with the city. It is proposed that the decree belongs to Apollonia-Tripolis ad Maeandrum, and that Asklepides served as an official there in virtue of his family's close connection to the Attalids. His work on behalf of the inhabitants was rewarded with posthumous honors including celebrations (but not burial) in at least one of the city's gymnasia.
The mobility of Sicilian populations and the nature of Sicilian citizenship, 409-202 BCE
From at least the end of the Bronze Age, Sicily has been a site of interaction among different po... more From at least the end of the Bronze Age, Sicily has been a site of interaction among different population groups, so that by the Classical and Hellenistic periods Greeks, Carthaginians, Italians, Romans, and native Sikels and Elymians were circulating on the island. Mass enslavements, transfers or eliminations of city populations as well as new foundations are common events in the relevant literary and documentary sources, and are crucial to understanding life there. In this dissertation I combine historical and material evidence to argue that there was higher mobility in Sicily over the fourth and third centuries than elsewhere, due initially to the nearly constant tension among the imperial powers—Syracuse, Carthage, and Rome—operating on the island, whose forced destructions, relocations, and foundations weakened the connections of people to their homes. This lack of connection in turn encouraged greater voluntary and individual movement, and as the Sicilian concept of citizenship became more provisional, it raised problems of group cohesion that affected the island’s social, economic, and military history. As a consequence cities could no longer count on a reliable citizen army; land had to be redistributed periodically, generating conflict; and certain population groups dissolved entirely requiring their members to find new identities. This instability of civic and ethnic divisions contributed to the emergence of the island of Sicily itself as the most salient basis for a group membership.
My first two chapters document the most significant episodes of population movement and attempt to unravel the various modes of movement and population manipulation. In the first I introduce the record of Sicilian mobility motivated by political, economic, and geographic considerations. Politically, tyrants and empires exercised autocratic control over the disposition of the populations subject to them. Economic considerations motivated some of these manipulations, and disparate economic conditions could also encourage group mobility aside from such forced movements. Sicily’s paradoxical insularity—being a very large island—may have conditioned the economy, agricultural organization and imperial policies, while simultaneously giving mobile Sicilians a stable identity no matter where on the island they moved. In the second chapter I explore more closely the specific logic of particular forms of mobility. The goal of this chapter is to differentiate and analyze modes of movement and instances of non-movement in order to clarify the causes and effects of each mode, and to have a more secure basis on which to pursue comparative evidence in later chapters.
With this foundation in place, the second part of the dissertation examines the nature of citizenship in an environment of high mobility through a series of thematic chapters. In Chapter Three on exiles and diasporas, I argue that the dispersal, wandering, and irregular reunion of populations promoted the communication of defining cultural practices between groups. Diasporas in particular represented a spatial extension of the citizen community beyond political boundaries. In Chapter Four I show how the recruitment, circulation, and semi-retirement of mercenaries both affected settled communities and created alternative, mobile ones. Chapter Five addresses the enslavement of populations, tracing the similarities with the condition of exiles but with emphasis on communities of the enslaved in other polities, and on the itineraries traveled between slave and free. I discuss the effects of economically-driven mobility in Chapter Six, arguing that Sicily’s orientation toward grain production and export led to a low-level structural mobility.
One corollary of mobility is the diverse and variable composition of populations, a potential obstacle to group cohesion. Throughout the dissertation I focus on the historical, archaeological, and documentary data relevant to the development and maintenance of communities. In Chapter Seven I mobilize this data in arguing that the diffusion and hybridity of communities created by high mobility constructed Sicily itself as the most relevant container of its populations. Rather than privileging the static and bounded polis, I examine alternative and distributed groupings through the practices that united them or differentiated one from another. These communities of practice sometimes aligned with and sometimes cut across other group boundaries. My engagement with the material record and with individuals and groups ignored or glossed over by the historical sources is intended to move beyond the political and military focus of previous scholarship. In addition to the evidence of domestic objects and funerary ritual, I utilize official documents as well as the abundance of informal writing to characterize the practices distinctive to certain Sicilian populations. Understanding routine practices might explain how certain communities did or did not cohere as groups when mobility was high; understanding the relative importance of different groupings or communities might explain how regions become meaningful bases for identity. In the case of Sicily, the internal distinctions faded and the island came to define its inhabitants.
Entella's Social Network and the Redefinition of Community
Sometime in the middle of the third century BCE the citizens of Entella, a small city in western ... more Sometime in the middle of the third century BCE the citizens of Entella, a small city in western Sicily, were forced to abandon their homes and, dependent on the goodwill of others, dispersed over the interior of the island. After a number of years of wandering, it became possible for them to return to their city and settle back into their territory. As their civic organs began operating again, they passed a series of decrees honoring the cities that had helped the community survive in exile and the cities and individuals who had helped them in the resettlement. The decrees were inscribed on bronze tablets, seven of which were found in clandestine excavations near the site of Entella, along with one tablet from the city of Nakone.
The tablets are important because they vastly increase our understanding of western Sicily in the middle of the third century, and not least our understanding of Entella itself, which is currently being excavated by an Italian team under the direction of Carmine Ampolo. While the decrees have occasioned valuable studies on, e.g., the city’s institutions, population, and cults, accounts of Entella’s relations with the cities it honored have been rather cursory. In the first place, the relationships attested in the decrees have not been elaborated so as to obtain a meaningful picture of this episode. Secondly, the decrees have been treated as only or primarily reflective of immediate historical realities, while their role in forming and altering relationships is ignored. Finally, the decrees practically demand the application or acquaintance of recent theories of networks, interaction, and community, but to my knowledge no theoretical work has been done with them thus far.
This paper will analyze Entella’s relationships with its benefactors as reflected in and shaped by the decrees in order to present as accurate and dynamic a picture as the evidence allows. Because the decrees are the sum of the evidence for the operation of this socio-political network, such analysis is, I think, a prerequisite of any attempt to illuminate the situation using theoretical models or approaches. I will then turn to ideas of diplomatic discourse, Actor-Network Theory and the “imagined community” and suggest that they are helpful tools for making sense of Entella’s network of friends. The first section is meant to be comprehensive; the second will be more tentative and suggestive.
Plautus' Amphitruo: Mercury's Metatheatrical Control
Plautus’ Amphitruo is an unusual play, even by Plautus’ standards. Unlike any of his other comedi... more Plautus’ Amphitruo is an unusual play, even by Plautus’ standards. Unlike any of his other comedies, it treats mythological material, although he gives the story of Herakles’ conception a domestic setting with familiar stock roles (the clever slave, the matrona, the doting husband) to be filled. It is a doubles-comedy, like the Bacchides and Menaechmi, but while those plays depend on the coincidence of twins’ presence in the same city, the Amphitruo has deliberate impersonation. The fact that gods are part of the play stands the comic convention of depicting inferior men on its head, and the fact that the gods are deceitful impersonators turns the convention over again. Plautus acknowledges his play’s mixed genre and has Mercury judge it a “tragicomedy” since it contains both gods and slaves. Moreover, from the prologue onward, Mercury is aware of the play in which he acts, and this knowledge is what allows him to change roles and get the better of his targets.
There are no natural twins in the Amphitruo. Instead, Jupiter has taken on the appearance of Amphitruo in order to sleep with his wife Alcumena, and Mercury impersonates Amphitruo’s slave Sosia in order to assist his father. Jupiter and Mercury utterly shake up Amphitruo’s household with their deception, although in a turn that is more tragic than comic, Jupiter appears as himself at the play’s end to make everything better. He makes Hercules’ and Iphicles’ birth painless for Alcumena, and restores Amphitruo’s faith in his wife. While Jupiter is the most powerful character in the story, Mercury is more interesting. He is the subject of this study.
Book Reviews by Randall Souza
The 'mobilities paradigm' that originated in the social sciences several decades ago now has a gr... more The 'mobilities paradigm' that originated in the social sciences several decades ago now has a growing number of devotees in the humanities, and human mobility in its many complexities is rightly receiving abundant attention across historical disciplines. This ambitious volume aims, in effect, to illuminate the phenomenology of mobility from a transhistorical perspective with 20 essays in French and English developed from work presented at conferences held in Los Angeles (in 2018) and Paris (in 2020). They take us from the 6th century BCE to the middle of the 20th century CE (so not quite "à nos jours"), and this broad chronological scope is commendable; this review, however, focuses on the chapters that concern the ancient Mediterranean world.
Uploads
Papers by Randall Souza
are chronological terms created for the study of the Eastern Mediterranean, and they can lack salience in the areas to be discussed here. For the sake of convenience, the scope of this chapter will extend as far back as the early fifth century BCE, and as far forward as the very beginning of the second, roughly 500–200. The ‘Western Mediterranean’ is also a slippery concept; in this chapter, it will refer to the waters, shores, and inland zones running counter-clockwise from the Gulf of Venice to the Gulf of Tunis. The chapter begins with general observations about Greek citizens and citizenship in the Western Mediterranean, and it then proceeds to examine, in turn, three broad regions: the southern Italian peninsula, the island of Sicily, and the coast along the Gulf of Lion. These
regional summaries are followed by a concluding section that addresses the phenomena affecting the development of citizenship concepts over the course of the classical and Hellenistic periods.
In this chapter I examine anomalous usages in the formulae of isopoliteia grants, in which certain communities usurped the right to dictate status to partner communities, asserting or attempting to assert control beyond the boundaries of their legitimate authority. I suggest that these assertive acts are best understood in the context of diplomatic discourse not simply as transgressions of a norm but as attempts to ensure the survival of the communities in question.
Here I present improved texts of several contracts based on epigraphic research conducted in Ragusa, Sicily, and explore some of the implications these texts present for our understanding of Hellenistic Sicily. The contracts under discussion arrived from the Roman collector Ricotti Prina at the museum in Ragusa in 1983, and were published in 1989 by Manganaro, who attributed some to Morgantina and some to Camarina. My research confirms certain of the previous readings and restorations, and challenges others.
In their content, the texts provide new documentation of women’s activity in the exchange of real estate in Sicily during the Hellenistic period. I explore the possibility that this activity is a sign of greater economic independence for women in Sicily as compared with the rest of the Greek Mediterranean, though I remain cautious about extrapolating too much from what is still a small, fragmentary, and isolated body of evidence.
My first two chapters document the most significant episodes of population movement and attempt to unravel the various modes of movement and population manipulation. In the first I introduce the record of Sicilian mobility motivated by political, economic, and geographic considerations. Politically, tyrants and empires exercised autocratic control over the disposition of the populations subject to them. Economic considerations motivated some of these manipulations, and disparate economic conditions could also encourage group mobility aside from such forced movements. Sicily’s paradoxical insularity—being a very large island—may have conditioned the economy, agricultural organization and imperial policies, while simultaneously giving mobile Sicilians a stable identity no matter where on the island they moved. In the second chapter I explore more closely the specific logic of particular forms of mobility. The goal of this chapter is to differentiate and analyze modes of movement and instances of non-movement in order to clarify the causes and effects of each mode, and to have a more secure basis on which to pursue comparative evidence in later chapters.
With this foundation in place, the second part of the dissertation examines the nature of citizenship in an environment of high mobility through a series of thematic chapters. In Chapter Three on exiles and diasporas, I argue that the dispersal, wandering, and irregular reunion of populations promoted the communication of defining cultural practices between groups. Diasporas in particular represented a spatial extension of the citizen community beyond political boundaries. In Chapter Four I show how the recruitment, circulation, and semi-retirement of mercenaries both affected settled communities and created alternative, mobile ones. Chapter Five addresses the enslavement of populations, tracing the similarities with the condition of exiles but with emphasis on communities of the enslaved in other polities, and on the itineraries traveled between slave and free. I discuss the effects of economically-driven mobility in Chapter Six, arguing that Sicily’s orientation toward grain production and export led to a low-level structural mobility.
One corollary of mobility is the diverse and variable composition of populations, a potential obstacle to group cohesion. Throughout the dissertation I focus on the historical, archaeological, and documentary data relevant to the development and maintenance of communities. In Chapter Seven I mobilize this data in arguing that the diffusion and hybridity of communities created by high mobility constructed Sicily itself as the most relevant container of its populations. Rather than privileging the static and bounded polis, I examine alternative and distributed groupings through the practices that united them or differentiated one from another. These communities of practice sometimes aligned with and sometimes cut across other group boundaries. My engagement with the material record and with individuals and groups ignored or glossed over by the historical sources is intended to move beyond the political and military focus of previous scholarship. In addition to the evidence of domestic objects and funerary ritual, I utilize official documents as well as the abundance of informal writing to characterize the practices distinctive to certain Sicilian populations. Understanding routine practices might explain how certain communities did or did not cohere as groups when mobility was high; understanding the relative importance of different groupings or communities might explain how regions become meaningful bases for identity. In the case of Sicily, the internal distinctions faded and the island came to define its inhabitants.
The tablets are important because they vastly increase our understanding of western Sicily in the middle of the third century, and not least our understanding of Entella itself, which is currently being excavated by an Italian team under the direction of Carmine Ampolo. While the decrees have occasioned valuable studies on, e.g., the city’s institutions, population, and cults, accounts of Entella’s relations with the cities it honored have been rather cursory. In the first place, the relationships attested in the decrees have not been elaborated so as to obtain a meaningful picture of this episode. Secondly, the decrees have been treated as only or primarily reflective of immediate historical realities, while their role in forming and altering relationships is ignored. Finally, the decrees practically demand the application or acquaintance of recent theories of networks, interaction, and community, but to my knowledge no theoretical work has been done with them thus far.
This paper will analyze Entella’s relationships with its benefactors as reflected in and shaped by the decrees in order to present as accurate and dynamic a picture as the evidence allows. Because the decrees are the sum of the evidence for the operation of this socio-political network, such analysis is, I think, a prerequisite of any attempt to illuminate the situation using theoretical models or approaches. I will then turn to ideas of diplomatic discourse, Actor-Network Theory and the “imagined community” and suggest that they are helpful tools for making sense of Entella’s network of friends. The first section is meant to be comprehensive; the second will be more tentative and suggestive.
There are no natural twins in the Amphitruo. Instead, Jupiter has taken on the appearance of Amphitruo in order to sleep with his wife Alcumena, and Mercury impersonates Amphitruo’s slave Sosia in order to assist his father. Jupiter and Mercury utterly shake up Amphitruo’s household with their deception, although in a turn that is more tragic than comic, Jupiter appears as himself at the play’s end to make everything better. He makes Hercules’ and Iphicles’ birth painless for Alcumena, and restores Amphitruo’s faith in his wife. While Jupiter is the most powerful character in the story, Mercury is more interesting. He is the subject of this study.
Book Reviews by Randall Souza