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It is widely believed that the Emperor Constantine's conversion to Christianity politicized religious allegiances, dividing the Christian Roman Empire from the Zoroastrian Sasanian Empire and leading to the persecution of Christians in Persia. This account, however, is based on Greek ecclesiastical histories and Syriac martyrdom narratives that date to centuries after the fact. In this groundbreaking study, the author analyzes diverse Greek, Latin, and Syriac sources to show that there was not a single history of fourth-century Mesopotamia. By examining the conflicting hagiographical and historical evidence, the book presents an evocative and evolving portrait of the first Christian emperor, uncovering how Syriac Christians manipulated the image of their western Christian counterparts to fashion their own political and religious identities during this century of radical change.

City of Demons widens our view of the late antique urban environment by insisting upon a simple but far-reaching interpretive innovation: people believed in and continuously ritually interacted with, against, and through demons. Cities were topographical, complex spaces, teeming with invisible, material powers that people interacted with to gain power, to compete, to survive. The city had unpredictable dangers, but also potencies. Ritual protections, defenses, and curses were common practices. This book projects John Chrysostom’s Antioch, Cyril’s Jerusalem, and Ambrose’s Milan against this backdrop. Sacramental rituals transform into powerful weapons in the baptized Christian’s ritual war to Christianize the city. I have adapted the term diabolization from the anthropologist Birgit Meyer, who studied exorcism and demon possession in Pentecostal churches in Ghana. Diabolization describes a ritual and discursive process whereby unseen forces of the city were identified as dangerous, predatory; Meyer places sacramental rituals within the frame of spiritual warfare, describing an anti-demonic, ritual practice from a sociological perspective. I argue that each urban church leader wrapped demons around specific, local, socio-religious or politico-religious conflicts. In analyzing a case study for each leader and location, I demonstrate the potential for diabolizing rhetoric and rituals to escalate quickly into violence. In moving toward new forms of animistic/enchanted history, this book identifies and critiques the modern, Western perspective problematizing our interpretation of late antique ritual. Ultimately, then, I argue for developing a ritual model that recognizes how belief in and experience of a pre-Cartesian, enchanted environment factored into concepts of ritual power and agency.

The figure of the dog is a paradox. As in so many cultures, past and present, the dog in ancient Greece was seen as the animal closest to humans, even as it elicited from them the most negative representations. Still a loaded term today, the word bitch not only signified shamelessness and a lack of self-control, but was also exclusively figured as female. Women and dogs in the Greek imagination were intimately intertwined, and this analysis explores the ancients' complex relationship with both. By analyzing the relationship between humans and dogs as depicted in a vast array of myths, proverbs, spontaneous metaphors, and comic jokes, this book in particular shows how the symbolic overlap between dog and woman provided the conceptual tools to maintain feminine subordination. This book extends the boundaries of classics and anthropology, forming a model of the sensitive work that can be done to illuminate how deeply animals are imbricated in human history.

This book presents a theoretically informed, up-to-date study of interactions between indigenous peoples of Mediterranean France and Etruscan, Greek and Roman colonists during the first millennium B.C. Analyzing archaeological data and ancient texts, the book explores these colonial encounters over six centuries, focusing on material culture, urban landscapes, economic practices, and forms of violence. It shows how selective consumption linked native societies and colonists and created transformative relationships for each. It also examines the role these ancient encounters played in the formation of modern European identity, and colonial ideology and practices, enumerating the problems for archaeologists attempting to re-examine these past societies.

Clothing, jewelry, animal remains, ceramics, coins, and weaponry are among the artifacts that have been discovered in graves in Gaul dating from the fifth to eighth century. Those who have unearthed them, from the middle ages to the present, have speculated widely on their meaning. This book contributes to the study of death and burial in late antique and early medieval society with its long overdue systematic discussion of this mortuary evidence. Tracing the history of Merovingian archaeology within its cultural and intellectual context, the book exposes biases and prejudices that have colored previous interpretations of these burial sites and assesses what contemporary archaeology can tell us about the Frankish kingdoms. Working at the intersection of history and archaeology, and drawing from anthropology and art history, it emphasizes in particular the effects of historical events and intellectual movements on French and German antiquarian and archaeological studies of these grave goods. The discussion traces the evolution of concepts of nationhood, race, and culture and shows how these concepts helped shape an understanding of the past. It then turns to contemporary multidisciplinary methodologies and finds that we are still limited by the types of information that can be readily gleaned from physical and written sources of Merovingian graves. For example, since material evidence found in the graves of elite families and particularly elite men is more plentiful and noteworthy, mortuary goods do not speak as directly to the conditions in which women and the poor lived.