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In 362 CE, a group of women, led by a deaconess named Publia, stood in front of her house in Antioch and sang psalms against Emperor Julian as his entourage passed by (Theodoret of Cyr; Rosen; Teitler). This is one of the earliest known instances when Christians used song to make a public statement in the decades following the Edict of Milan.

How could a dance concert spawn a riot? This study investigates the power which Greco-

Roman thinkers believed musical performance could have over the minds and bodies of

spectators by means of the pantomime dancer, and contextualizes this power in relation to

Roman Imperial power. Rising to popularity in the 1st century BCE in Rome and quickly

spreading throughout the Empire, pantomime dance featured a masked performer representing

mythological narratives with only gesture and movement. Recent scholarship has begun to

This paper demonstrates that Apollonius’ Medea uses music as a means of usurping the

power of the poet and of achieving heroic deeds in the masculine sphere, usurping

hegemonic male power. There has been analysis of Apollonius’ Medea from various angles

including her psychology and her emotions (do Céu Fialho 2018, Klooster 2018, Buxton

2017) but nothing has focussed specifically on the connection between Medea’s magic,

music and power in book 4 of the poem. This paper builds on the suggestion of Fantuzzi

This paper compares and contrasts the evidence for enslavement in Egypt before and after the Persian conquest in 525 BC, proposing that the Achaemenid Empire brought with it novel practices of enslavement and its documentation. Evidence for chattel slavery in Egypt before the Achaemenid Period is sparse and often vague. Documentary attestations from the New Kingdom (c. 1550–1069) amount to notations of prisoners of war (Morris; Matić; Menu 2005) and oblique references in judicial documents of adoption (Eyre; Cruz-Uribe 1988) or lawsuits (Gardiner).

This paper compares and contrasts the evidence for enslavement in Egypt before and after the Persian conquest in 525 BC, proposing that the Achaemenid Empire brought with it novel practices of enslavement and its documentation. Evidence for chattel slavery in Egypt before the Achaemenid Period is sparse and often vague. Documentary attestations from the New Kingdom (c. 1550–1069) amount to notations of prisoners of war (Morris; Matić; Menu 2005) and oblique references in judicial documents of adoption (Eyre; Cruz-Uribe 1988) or lawsuits (Gardiner).

The slogan of an ideological Pax Persica has become a common structuring principal in discussions of Achaemenid imperialism and the empire’s interaction with subjects and neighboring populations.

Research on the Achaemenid empire and its administrative system and networks has come a long way from the cliché of a colossus on clay feet. A current baseline is provided by, among others, Briant et al. (eds.), L’archive des Fortifications… (Paris, 2008) and Jacobs et al. (eds.), Die Verwaltung im Achämenidenreich (Wiesbaden 2017). Two concepts, sometimes called “imperial signature” and “imperial paradigm,” play an important role in ongoing debates: the imprint and the design of administrative structures in the centre and notably in the satrapies.

Stretching from Egypt and the Balkans to Central Asia and the Indus, the Achaemenid Persian Empire (559-330 BCE) was an order of magnitude larger than any previous state in the history of the world. Understanding the mechanisms and institutions which kept the bulk of the Achaemenid Empire together for over two centuries is an important research topic for comparative studies of the development of the state and imperialism in world history. Although the Achaemenid Empire has lately taken a more prominent role in the world history of empires (e.g.

The slogan of an ideological Pax Persica has become a common structuring principal in discussions of Achaemenid imperialism and the empire’s interaction with subjects and neighboring populations.