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This dissertation argues that the increase of upland settlement, noted in the archaeological record for the middle Byzantine period (seventh through thirteenth centuries) on Mount Latros and Mount Mykale, should be associated with the period between 961 and 1081. Settlements in this period were characterized by a mountain resilience rooted in security from external threats, diverse economic opportunity, and monastic mountain leadership. The usual association obscures a complicated and often contradictory relationship between mountains and war. In fact, increased settlement was enabled by a new interconnectivity between mountain and plain defined by imperial control of territory in the Maeander valley and the newly ascendant monastery on each mountain. I deploy a new method for mapping the border descriptions or periorismoi within the Praktikon of Adam, a survey document produced in 1073 for the donation of an imperial property. Landscapes in the mountains and in the wider Maeander valley truly come into focus when these descriptions are mapped and compared with the archaeological survey data. The dissertation is divided between Part 1: The Mountains, comprising the first two chapters, and Part 2: The Maeander Plain, comprising the second two chapters. In Part 1, I show how the two newly founded monasteries of Stylos and Hiera Xerochoraphion transformed the marginal mountain landscape into a new center of authority. The isolation, which aided in the construction of authority vis-à-vis the hagiographical traditions of their founders’ eremitic virtues, also necessitated the investment in a network of roads across each mountain which alleviated the isolation of other mountain settlements. In Part 2, I show how the cities, whose bishops often considered any monastery on the mountain under their authority, were sidelined by the accumulation of imperial territory in the Maeander valley. Imperial estates benefited the most from the economic and demographic recovery in the Maeander valley and the wider Byzantine Empire beginning in the tenth and eleventh centuries.

In his Death and Disaster series, Andy Warhol’s Byzantine Catholic upbringing and beliefs take shape in his portraits of celebrities and unnamed disaster victims alike, converging into an iconography rooted in American daily life. While previous scholarship on Warhol’s Death and Disaster series describes Warhol’s representation of death as consumerist, callous, and contributing to spectacle culture driven by mass media, my work instead focuses on Warhol’s adoption and transformation of the Byzantine iconic tradition in his Death and Disaster series. Using Byzantine visual language, Warhol elevates press photographs of both Marilyn Monroe and Jackie Kennedy-Onassis to the realm of the sacred, emphasizing the symbolic resonance of their tremendous cultural influence. In choosing to appropriate tabloid images of otherwise anonymous fatalities in the Disaster series, Warhol additionally dignifies disaster victims in a way which was perhaps most familiar to him: as the secular martyrs of a rapidly modernizing world, where we are often mere casualties sacrificed in the name of industrial progress. As Warhol glorifies the dead in his Death and Disaster series, he allows these images to pivot from their former lives as tabloid spectacles, instead taking on new meaning in Warhol’s contemporary version of Byzantine Catholic iconography.

Before Constantinople fell in 1453, Byzantine-style iconography had been experiencing massive shifts in not only production, but also in manufacturing quantity and personal use. Two such pieces reminiscent of this shift are displayed in the Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art as part of the Ambassador George Crews and Cecilia DeGoyler McGhee Collection of Icons at the Fred Jones Jr. Museum of art at The University of Oklahoma at Norman. These two works, Virgin and Child, Virgin of Consolation (Madonna della Consolazione) and The Virgin as the Life-Giving Spring are representative of the aforementioned variables, namely the effects of Crusaders and their art on the iconological canon, the emergence and prevalence of icons hailing from the Greek Ionian islands, and the influence of private patronage on thematic matter and function. By creating a historiographical timeline focusing on the influence of these variables of style, I identify the icons in the FJJMC as derivates of the works being manufactured around the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries

The geographic, historic, and economic relationships between the Empire of Nicaea and the Sultanate of Rūm in the early thirteenth century are often portrayed through a polarizing lens. Despite territorial contestation after the Fourth Crusade (1204), the two states individually experienced brief periods of prosperity in the form of large-scale building. The Laskarid dynasty refortified urban centers as the Seljuks constructed caravanserais across Asia Minor. On account of the Mongol Invasion of 1243, an event that limited Seljuk independence, Nicaea sent provisions across the shared Lykos valley to the recovering state, which created a network of fixed points between the Hermos valley and Taurus mountains. This increase in traffic indirectly caused traveling and local groups to utilize fortified spaces in different ways, which drew the Laskarid and Seljuk-sponsored building programs even closer. The incorporation of historical data into geographical and archaeological analyses will help to better understand how structures participated in networks at a specific moment in history and encouraged cross-border trade.

The imperial Roman advance to and entrenchment along the Danube from the times of Augustus to Aurelian, mirrored by the slow development of various Germanic peoples beyond the 1,700-mile river’s northern bank, set the stage for a series of climactic engagements between the late Roman Empire and their various barbarous neighbors along what had quickly become the Empire’s most important and unstable frontier. The immigration and settlement of Goths from the Pontic Steppe, fleeing the Huns as they emerged from Central Asia, within the Roman Balkans undermined the Danube frontier, eviscerated the Eastern Roman field army, and enabled Alaric’s role as a destabilizing free radical between the estranged imperial Roman courts at Rome and Constantinople from 395 to 410. At the same time, the Huns, colliding with the Roman frontiers on the Middle and Lower Danube, began to amass on the Pannonian and Romanian Plains, and exerted a steadily increasing pressure on the Roman frontier. After having buckled several times, particularly in Roman Pannonia on the increasingly isolated Middle Danube, from the 410s to the 430s, Attila led two major invasions of the Eastern Roman Empire in 441-442 and 447. Recognizing the importance of the Danube frontier to safeguarding imperial security, Attila forced the Eastern Romans to completely abandon the Middle and Lower Danube, evacuating all military posts and major populations at least a five-days march south of the river, thereby destroying the Roman Danube frontier as the weakening Empire advanced into late fifth century.

This dissertation revolves around the literary works and activities of a significant but little known figure of the tenth century AD, Anania of Narek. To date, no monograph has been written on him in a Western language, nor have any of his books been translated. The goal of this project is to contextualize his works and recover his impact on several of the primary developments in the Near East and Mediterranean that marked his era and in so doing offer a novel view into the multifaceted and interconnected worlds of the period’s various and competing ethnoreligious communities. Anania was the first abbot of Narek monastery, which was founded during a regional explosion of cenobitic monastic institutions. Through a reading of his Book of Instruction and other sources, I present a picture of the intellectual and ascetic-mystical educational system he initiated there. This system became the crucible that formed several of the leading figures of the next generation, including Uxtanēs of Sebasteia and Grigor of Narek. One of the first of the major medieval monastic academies, Narek became a model for later ones that endured throughout the Armenian oikoumen� as intellectual and artistic centers into the early modern period. Anania also was caught up at the center of the Tʿondrakian controversy, which had its origins in a Christian community existing outside the structure of the official church in the borderlands between the Byzantine Empire and ʿAbbāsid Caliphate. Through a careful reexamination of the sources, I offer a new perspective on the development of “Tʿondrakecʿi” as a heretical epithet and explain how ascetic figures such as Anania could be denounced as such by the official church hierarchy. Anania was also at the forefront of the Armenian Church’s self-defense vis-�-vis the assimilationist agenda of the Byzantine Church and Empire in its eastward expansion. Reading his Root of Faith alongside other contemporaneous texts, I reconstruct the vardapets’ (theological doctors) defense of their church’s right to autonomous existence and their self-presentation as preservers of the faith of early Christianity, in universal consensus and communion with the other Christian communities living outside of the Byzantine Empire in Egypt, Ethiopia, the Middle East, the Caucasus, India, and China.

This dissertation explores how late Roman and Byzantine Christians conceptualized the role of their empire in the consummation of history and the events of the end times, and suggests that their views on this subject have larger ramifications for the study of Byzantine political thought. It examines how the citizens and subjects of history’s first Christian empire reconciled the distinctly anti-imperial apocalyptic literature of the Bible with the needs of imperial ideology. It pursues this question by studying how Latin, Greek, and Syriac writers in late antiquity and the early medieval period interpreted the apocalyptic prophecies in the Old Testament Book of Daniel, which were hostile to the imperial order of the time.The Danielic prophecies divided history into four successive kingdoms, of which the fourth and last was the most wicked, ruled by an evil and persecuting king. It prophesied that in the near future this evil kingdom would be destroyed and replaced by an eternal and holy fifth kingdom. Scholars have long recognized that ancient Jews and early Christians denounced the Roman Empire as the persecutory fourth kingdom of Daniel. Nonetheless, most modern scholarship claims that after the conversion of Constantine, Roman Christians sought to reconcile Christian empire with scripture, either by stripping the fourth kingdom of its negative associations and celebrating it as the polity which would help usher in the God’s eternal kingdom, or by identifying the empire with that eternal kingdom, Daniel’s fifth kingdom. These mistaken conclusions stem from a conflation of Byzantine and Syriac eschatological literature. Some Syriac sources, produced in the imperial borderlands or within the Persian and, later, Arab empires, did glorify the Roman Empire from afar as a virtuous fourth kingdom; however, this literature exercised a major influence within the empire only from the eighth century onwards. In addressing past misconceptions, this dissertation proposes a new narrative of the development of late Roman and Byzantine political eschatology. It argues that while Christianity was still illegal within the Roman Empire, Christians formulated a common political-eschatological scenario; that is, a shared narrative of the political events that they believed would take place in the time leading up to the end of history. According to this scenario the Roman Empire, identified as the fourth kingdom of Daniel, would at some point in the future fall into the hands of the Antichrist, who would reign as the last emperor and use the Roman state to persecute Christianity. Despite the Christianization of the Roman Empire, this scenario remained largely unchallenged through the seventh century. This indicates that late Romans were far more pessimistic for far longer about the future of the empire than most scholarship suggests.Next, the dissertation argues that divergent interpretations of the four kingdoms of Daniel and Rome’s eschatological role did develop within Syriac literature. This was the result of textual differences in the Syriac version of the Book of Daniel, different traditions of Biblical exegesis favored by Syriac Christians, and the unique political circumstances under which Syriac Christians lived. One such tradition, first attested in the Syriac Demonstrations (composed c. 337 AD by the Persian Christian Aphrahat), held that God had tasked the Roman Empire, as a righteous fourth kingdom, with ruling the earth as Christ’s proxy until his second coming. According to this theory, when Christ returned the Romans would peacefully restore the kingship to him. Aphrahat’s understanding of Rome’s eschatological role was somewhat popular among Syriac Christians until the late sixth or early seventh century. After that time, Syriac eschatology became far more ambivalent towards the Roman Empire—likely as a result of the Roman persecution of the Church of the East and the Syriac Orthodox Church. Such ambivalence was exacerbated by the seventh-century Arab conquests, which shattered the grandiose expectations for the Roman Empire. A major exception to this ambivalence was the Syriac Apocalypse of Methodius of Patara ("Pseudo-Methodius"), composed c. 690, which resuscitated and adapted Aphrahat’s eschatological views to the political circumstances after the Arab conquests. The author of the Apocalypse of Methodius of Patara invented a literary figure commonly called the Last Roman Emperor (or “King of the Greeks”) to act out Aphrahat’s interpretation of the Danielic prophecies: this emperor would bring all the world under Roman rule and would later surrender his kingship to God in advance of Christ’s second coming. Finally, the dissertation argues that the Apocalypse of Methodius of Patara, which was translated into Greek c. 700 AD, introduced to Byzantium the idea that its empire was a good fourth kingdom of Daniel, and provided an alternative to the earlier political-eschatological scenario. As the empire teetered on the brink of collapse in the eighth century and the status of the emperor faced new challenges, Syriac political eschatology provided a more hopeful message in the face of Byzantine concerns about the future of the empire. Nonetheless, the earlier, more pessimistic political-eschatological scenario was never fully displaced, and many Byzantines continued to suspect that the Byzantine state would succumb to evil in the final days of history. In setting forth a new narrative of the development of Byzantine eschatology, this dissertation challenges many old assumptions. Contrary to received wisdom, the late Romans and Byzantines did not believe that their empire was the manifestation of God’s kingdom on earth or a forerunner to Christ’s eschatological kingdom. Rather, longstanding traditions of Christian eschatology taught them to be wary of the Roman state and suspicious of the powers of the emperor (even if not all late antique Christians heeded these lessons). This finding problematizes traditional portrayals of Byzantine political thought as a Christianized doctrine of divine kingship stressing unconditional loyalty to the emperor as God’s representative on earth. Moreover, his dissertation demonstrates that a positive appraisal of the empire’s eschatological role was not imposed through imperial court propaganda as modern scholars often suggest, but rather developed from the ground up, emerging from the imperial periphery or from outside the empire. This suggests that emperors and their spokesmen had far less influence in shaping ideology than is often assumed, and exposes weaknesses in the top-down historical narratives that predominate in the field. Further, this dissertation challenges the long-held assumption that Syriac apocalypticism developed out of Byzantine imperial ideology, and shows instead that Syriac eschatology actually shaped Byzantine ideas and indeed exerted a major influence on Mediterranean-wide discourses on empire and kingship. Such insights emphasize the connectedness of the late antique and medieval worlds, and argue for a history of the Byzantium that privileges cross-cultural links over strict disciplinary boundaries.

This dissertation examines the role of legal culture in shaping the identity of the Greek Christians of southern Italy as a cultural and religious minority in the pluralistic pre-modern Mediterranean world. In the period in question, southern Italy passed from the jurisdiction of the Greek-speaking Byzantine Empire to that of the Latin Kingdom of Sicily and the Roman papacy. Nonetheless, the Italo-Greeks continued to compile and read manuscript collections of Byzantine religious law, known in Greek as ‘nomocanons’, for another three centuries afterwards. This study provides the first ever comprehensive attempt to identify and study the surviving nomocanons of southern Italy.The aims of the dissertation are threefold: to introduce the reader to the Italo-Greek nomocanons and their contents; to explain why they were produced and preserved under Latin rule; and to analyse what they reveal about the place of Greek-rite Christianity in medieval southern Italy. I have combined the theoretical perspective of legal anthropology – especially legal pluralism – with the methodology of material philology to examine the manuscripts as evidence for the legal, cultural, and religious context in which they were produced. My interpretation has been guided in particular by the legal scholar Robert Cover’s theory of law as a social discourse or narrative.The dissertation’s key conclusions are that the formal system of Byzantine religious law in southern Italy survived the Norman conquest for over a century as the local institutions of the Greek church remained largely intact. However, as the Italo-Greeks became more closely integrated into the institutional structures of the Church of Rome in the thirteenth century, the nomocanons began to lose their value as sources of legal authority. They came to serve instead as sources of cultural authority, used to explain and justify the maintenance of a separate Greek identity in the face of increasing assimilation into the Latin majority.Finally, the dissertation provides a series of comprehensive descriptions of the contents and material characteristics of each of the manuscripts in question for scholarly reference.

This dissertation analyzes the preservation of Byzantine culture, memory, and identity after 1453 by a network of aristocratic Byzantine women. By integrating art history, history, and anthropology to follow the lives, social networks, and patronage patterns of these women, this project examines the cultural contributions of this small, yet remarkable population. The first chapter discusses Anna Palaiologina Notaras, who perpetuated Byzantine culture through texts and images in Venice. By negotiating between the Byzantine émigrés and the Venetian authorities, she secured unprecedented privileges and recognition for the marginalized community. The second chapter centers on Zoe (Sophia) Palaiologina, niece of Emperor Constantine XI, who was raised as an exile at the papal court. In 1472, she married the Grand Duke of Moscow and became a vital translator among the visual languages of Byzantium, Italy, and Russia. Through her entourage, objects, and familial connections, the princess solidified Moscow’s connection to the fallen Byzantium. Chapter three focuses on Cantakuzina (Catherine) and Mara Branković, daughters of Serbian Despot, George Branković. In 1435, Mara married Ottoman Sultan, Murad II and became stepmother to Mehmed II, conqueror of Constantinople. Throughout her life, she participated in a series of diplomatic efforts, which allowed her to become a patron of Byzantine culture within the confines of the Ottoman Empire. Mehmed II relied on Mara to validate symbolically his rule in the eyes of his Byzantine subjects, for whom she was a de-facto spokeswoman. Mara and Cantakuzina negotiated peacefully between Mehmed, the Venetians, Athonite monastics, and prominent post-Byzantine figures. Chapter four discusses Helena Palaiologina, another niece of Constantine XI, and her daughter Charlotte. In 1442, Helena married John II of Cyprus, and became Queen of Cyprus, Armenia, and Jerusalem. Helena applied her power to welcome an important group of post-1453 refugees to Cyprus. Charlotte was forced into exile and ended her life at the papal court, to which she gifted a number of valuable objects. Together, Helena and Charlotte helped preserve the Byzantine imperial traditions of philanthropy and diplomatic gift giving. This dissertation contributes to early modern women’s studies and provides a more nuanced understanding of cultural perpetuation.

Descending from the Throne studies the how medieval and contemporary Byzantine bishops used thrones in monumental art, ritual and text to craft spaces of authority. Constantine the Great and his successors crafted Constantinople innovatively drawing upon the tradition of Rome and Jerusalem to make the imperial city a space of civil and sacred authority.Drawing upon the tradition of the Great Church, Hagia Sophia, in Constantinople, medieval bishops innovated art, text and ritual to stabilize authority in their local circumstances. This dissertation will consider the work of Demetrios Chomatenos, Archbishop of Ohrid and rival of the Despotate of Nicaea for the patriarchal title following the Latin occupation of the Fourth Crusade. Drawing from his years as a canon lawyer in Constantinople, he innovatively crafted a space of legal authority in the upper narthex of Sveti Sophia in Ohrid to preserve Byzantine tradition.Nikephoros Moschopoulos, Archbishop of Crete, served as proedros of Mistra because he was not able to occupy his see due to Venetian control of the island granted by imperial decree. In Mistra, Nikephoros inscribed a space of authority using art and ritual to stabilize his claims to land holdings.Symeon of Thessalonike served as Archbishop of Thessalonike in the last years of Byzantium. The medieval Thessalonians had a deep distrust of nobility and had even ruled the city democratically for a period. Symeon used an ancient liturgical form, called the “Sung Office,” to bring the authority of Constantinople to bear on his unruly flock in Thessalonike.Contemporary Byzantine bishops, with the loss of Byzantium in 1453, nevertheless continue to innovate using tradition to craft a space of shared authority as evidenced by the development of the Hierarchical Divine Liturgy.

This dissertation offers a comparative cross-cultural investigation into the imagination of space in three sibling centers of civilization driving the formative expansion of Europe in the early Middle Ages: the Frankish court, the papacy and Byzantium. At its center stands the Slavic world of eastern Europe, which in the eighth and ninth centuries attracted the expansive energies of a young Carolingian empire, a newly aggressive papacy and a resurgent Byzantine Empire. A close reading of Latin, Greek and Church Slavonic records reveals three models of imagining space, and three ways of conceptualizing power. Frankish authors at the courts of Charlemagne and Louis the Pious represented areas of the world under Frankish power as territories, and areas beyond Frankish reach as ethnicities. Their "imagined territoriality" of power included the Slavic world at those times and in those places when and where Frankish imperial reach was possible. At the same time, and especially in moments of crisis, court authors represented Frankish space as a heterogeneous network of nodes of landed wealth. This complex Frankish imagination of space was ultimately shaped by an exercise of power that was fundamentally economic in nature. Meanwhile, Roman authors at the ninth-century papal court imagined the spaces of eastern Europe very differently as homogeneous areas clearly delimited by strong borders. They reveal a geopolitical brand of territoriality as defined by geographers and historians of the modern nation-state. This papal vision of space was influenced by a power that was jurisdictional in nature. Finally, and in stark contrast, Byzantine authors imagined a non-territorial space of peoples in Eastern Europe: instead of drawing border lines to distinguish territories, they drew lines of faith to distinguish peoples. In the Church Slavonic sources, the most important principle ordering this ethnographic space was jezykb, a term meaning both "language" and "people," emphasizing both a Byzantine imperial ideology that was fundamentally ethnographic in nature as well as an exercise of power grounded in written cultures and even alphabets. This dissertation both exposes the critical role played by eastern European Slavlands in the origins of European conceptions of territoriality and demonstrates the power of cross-cultural investigations to deepen our understanding of the medieval past.

Between 602 and 628, the Byzantine Empire was at war with the Sasanian Empire. Following the defeat of Chosroes II, Emperor Herakleios commissioned George Pisides to write an account of his triumph. A court poet, Pisides wrote numerous works chronicling Herakleios' victory over the Persian enemy. In this paper, I focus primarily on the Herakleias, Pisides' last major poem on the Persian campaigns, to examine the depiction of Chosroes II, Persia, and Zoroastrianism. I begin by providing a brief context for the poem, then follow with a background on the author, and finally conclude by providing the original text with English translation of the passages that concern Chosroes II, with my accompanying analysis. As I argue, Pisides' poetry by focusing on the figure of Chosroes and a certain representation of the Persian Empire refracted through the Sasanian king engages at a deeper level with Zoroastrianism. His literary style is informed by several Zoroastrian themes and tropes, as I show in my thesis, and presents a refreshed approach towards the `foreign' which, in its turn, enriches the linguistic threads of Pisides' poetic style.

This thesis examines the foreign policy of Constans II as the first Byzantine Emperor to rule after the initial Arab conquests in Syria-Palestine. His reign, 641-668, was the first reign of a Byzantine Emperor where the entire reign was subject to Arab raids and invasions. Constans II also had to contend with the Slavs in Thessalonica and Greece and the Lombards in Italy. To complicate matters more, Constans II was forced to cope with the religious division between the eastern and western churches due to Monothelitism in the East. Beset on every frontier and inheriting a much reduced empire after decades of intermittent warfare and several disastrous defeats, scholars have reasoned that Constans II's reign was defensive and turbulent in nature. This thesis uses literary and archeological sources to argue that Constans II had a foreign policy focused on actively retaking lost Byzantine territory. While stabilizing the frontiers in his early reign, he suffered devastating defeats and serious threats, primarily from the sea, where the Arab navy had gained superiority. His attempt in securing the western provinces of Italy and North Africa demonstrate not an emperor who was abandoning Constantinople, but one that was attempting to regain the initiative from the Arabs and deprive them of Egypt, which was providing the Arabs with a navy, wealth, and an agricultural surplus. Despite the Byzantine losses Constans II did not accept the transformation in Byzantine territory and influence. The thesis concludes with a historical analysis of his successors and how their foreign policies differed from Constans II's.

This dissertation investigates the growth and decline of a major Mediterranean commercial economy at the crossroads of Christian Europe and the Muslim Middle East from 1100 to 1400. New and old evidence uncovers the transformation of the commercial economy of the Byzantine Empire in its relations with the Middle East, western Europe, and Crusader principalities established in Byzantium's ruins. Ultimately, this work helps identify and understand the economic roots for enduring divisions between East and West, and it is unique in observing from Byzantium's perspective the transformation of the Middle East--the economic dynamo of the ancient and medieval Mediterranean.

With the growth of the Internet, there has been a push toward designing reliable algorithms that scale effectively in terms of latency, bandwidth and other computational resources. Scalability has been a serious problem especially with peer-to-peer (p2p) networks which may have sizes of more than a million nodes. An important problem in designing reliable algorithms is Byzantine agreement. For reasons of scalability, message complexity is a critical resource for this problem. Unfortunately, previous solutions to Byzantine agreement require each processor to send $O(n)$ messages, where $n$ is the total number of processors in the network. In this dissertation, we show that the Byzantine agreement problem can be solved with significantly less that a linear number of messages both in theory and in practice. We implement and test algorithms that solve the classical problem with each processor sending only $\ ilde{O}(\sqrt{n})$ messages. Further, we consider the problem in the case where we assume the existence of a random beacon: a global source of random bits. We show that with this assumption, the required number of messages drops to $O(\log n)$, with small hidden constants. Our algorithms are Monte Carlo and succeed with high probability, that is probability $1-o(n^k)$ for some positive constant $k$. Our empirical results suggest that our algorithms may outperform classical solutions to Byzantine agreement for network of size larger than 30,000 nodes.

Abstract: Historically, scurvy has seen only minor investigation in children. This is also true among archaeological populations. The development of criteria for assessing juvenile scurvy among archaeological populations has provided a novel means of paleopathological analysis for discussing this disorder among past populations. In an attempt to further investigate the current criteria for identifying archaeological cases of juvenile scurvy, as proposed by Ortner et al. (2001, 1999; Ortner and Ericksen 1997; Ortner 1984), a combined macroscopic and radiographic study was conducted on the sub-adult individuals from late Roman–Byzantine Stymphalos and Frankish Zaraka, Greece. This study sought to investigate the level of correlation between the proposed macroscopic and clinically employed radiographic indicators of juvenile scurvy. From the research conducted there is clear evidence to suggest a significant level of correlation between the proposed macroscopic and radiographic indicators of juvenile scurvy. Such a correlation supports the current osteoarchaeological criteria for assessing juvenile scurvy.

Web applications are widely used for email, online sales, auctions, collaboration, etc. Most of today’s highly-available web applications implement fault tolerant protocols in order to tolerate crash faults. However, recent system-wide failures have been caused by arbitrary or Byzantine faults which these applications are not capable of handling. Despite the abundance of research on adding Byzantine fault tolerance (BFT) to a system, BFT systems have found little use outside the research community. Reasons typically cited for this are the difficulty in implementing such systems and the performance overhead associated with them. While most research focuses on improving the performance or lowering the replication cost of BFT protocols, little has been done on making them easy to implement. The goal of this thesis is to evaluate the viability of BFT web applications and show that, given the right abstraction, it is viable to build a Byzantine fault tolerant web application without extensive reimplementation of the web application. In order to achieve this goal, it demonstrates a BFT implementation of the Apache Tomcat servlet container and the VQWiki web application by using the UpRight BFT library. The UpRight library provides abstractions that make it easy to develop BFT applications and we leverage this abstraction to reduce the implementation cost of our system. Our results are encouraging — less than 2% of the original system needs to be modified while still retaining all the functionality of the original system. Given the design trade-offs that we make in implementing the system, we also get comparable performance, indicating that implementing BFT is a viable option to explore for highly-available web applications.

Web applications are widely used for email, online sales, auctions, collaboration, etc. Most of today’s highly-available web applications implement fault tolerant protocols in order to tolerate crash faults. However, recent system-wide failures have been caused by arbitrary or Byzantine faults which these applications are not capable of handling. Despite the abundance of research on adding Byzantine fault tolerance (BFT) to a system, BFT systems have found little use outside the research community. Reasons typically cited for this are the difficulty in implementing such systems and the performance overhead associated with them. While most research focuses on improving the performance or lowering the replication cost of BFT protocols, little has been done on making them easy to implement. The goal of this thesis is to evaluate the viability of BFT web applications and show that, given the right abstraction, it is viable to build a Byzantine fault tolerant web application without extensive reimplementation of the web application. In order to achieve this goal, it demonstrates a BFT implementation of the Apache Tomcat servlet container and the VQWiki web application by using the UpRight BFT library. The UpRight library provides abstractions that make it easy to develop BFT applications and we leverage this abstraction to reduce the implementation cost of our system. Our results are encouraging — less than 2% of the original system needs to be modified while still retaining all the functionality of the original system. Given the design trade-offs that we make in implementing the system, we also get comparable performance, indicating that implementing BFT is a viable option to explore for highly-available web applications.

With over 3,400 lines of poetry and no single monograph dedicated to her literary productions, Aelia Eudocia is an understudied poet. This project, the first of its kind, explores Eudocia's three poems as a unified whole and demonstrates how they exemplify the literary and cultural concerns of the fifth century. Since her poems are each apparently unique, I approach them first in isolation and tease out their social background, literary dependencies, and possible interpretive strategies for them before painting a broader picture of Eudocia's literary contribution. The first of her surviving poems is a seventeen line epigraphic poem from the bath complex at Hammat Gader, which acclaims the bath's furnace for its service to the structure's clients but, at the same time, illustrates the religious competition that surrounded late antique healing cults, of which therapeutic springs were part. Next is the Homeric cento, which borrows and reorders lines from the Iliad and Odyssey to retell parts of the biblical narrative. Eudocia's attempt at this bizarre genre underscores the interplay between the Homeric poems, and the classical culture they represent, and the biblical story, with its theology and ethics. Last is the Martyrdom of Saint Cyprian, the first verse hagiography of its kind, which, because of the disparate sources available to Eudocia, is divided into two sections. The first part relates the conversion of Cyprian, an Antiochene magician, a story, I suggest, that depends on the Christian apocrypha, particularly for the development of its heroine, Justa. The second part recounts, in a speech by Cyprian himself, how he learned magic and why he converted. This section provides a glimpse into the ways late antique Christians understood paganism and the rhetoric they used to limit its hold in the later Roman empire. The big picture of Eudocia's poetry is that of a corpus, which uses Homeric language to convey fifth century, Christian concerns, and of a poet who can aptly be called a Homeric Christian.

This thesis describes a Byzantine fault tolerant coordination framework for Web services atomic transactions. In the framework, all core services, including transaction activation, registration, completion, and distributed commit, are replicated and protected by Byzantine fault tolerance mechanisms. The traditional two-phase commit protocol is extended by a Byzantine fault tolerant version that can tolerate arbitrary faults on the coordinator and the initiator sides, and some types of malicious faults on the participant side. To achieve Byzantine fault tolerance in an efficient manner, and to limit the types of malicious behaviors of the coordinator, a novel decision certificate is introduced. The decision certificate includes a signed copy of the participants’ vote records, and it is piggybacked with all decision notifications to the participants for each participant to verify the legitimacy of the decision. The Byzantine fault tolerance mechanisms, together with the extended two-phase commit protocol, have been incorporated into an open-source framework supporting the standard Web services atomic transactions specification. Performance characterizations of the framework show that the implementation is fairly efficient. Such a Byzantine fault tolerant coordination framework can be useful for many transactional Web services that require a high degree of security and dependability.

“A Diachronic Examination of the Erechtheion and Its Reception” examines the social life of the Ionic temple on the Athenian Akropolis, which was built in the late 5th century B.C. to house Athens’ most sacred cults and relics. Using a contextualized diachronic approach, this study examines both the changes to the Erechtheion between its construction and the middle of the 19th century A.D., as well as the impact the temple had on the architecture and art of these successive periods. This approach allows the evidence to shed light on new areas of interest such as the Post-Antique phases of the building, in addition to affording a better understanding of problems that have plagued the study of the Erechtheion during the past two centuries. This study begins with a re-examination of all the pertinent archaeological, epigraphical, and literary evidence, and proposes a wholly new reconstruction of how the Erechtheion worked physically and ritually in ancient times. After accounting for the immediate influence of the Erechtheion on subsequent buildings of the Ionic order, an argument for a Hellenistic rather than Augustan date for the major repairs to the temple is presented. Copies of both the Erechtheion’s special Ionic order and the maidens of the South Porch were incorporated into many Roman monuments. This study examines the significance of these quotations in the light of Vitruvius’ opening statements in De Architectura, where the Roman architect calls female architectural supports “caryatids.” The surviving architectural evidence, in conjunction with the accounts and depictions of the Erechtheion by the early travelers to Athens, provide the bases for reconstructing the different phases of the afterlife of the Erechtheion. After it served as a pagan temple, the Erechtheion was transformed into a pillared hall in Late Antiquity, a basilica church in the Byzantine period, an elaborate residence in the Frankish period, and finally into a house for an Ottoman official. After the Venetian bombardment of the Akropolis in 1687, the building served as a gunpowder magazine, and as a ruin to be admired for its antiquity. By gauging the aesthetic reception of the Erechtheion by early travelers to Athens, this study attempts to appreciate the temple’s timeless appeal and its role in the creation of the nascent Greek state’s national identity.

This study is a new interpretation of the historian Prokopios of Kaisareia, the main historical source for the sixth century AD. It aims to show how philosophy and classical literature shaped his methods and objectives, and, by extension, the history narrated in his work. Prokopios belonged as much to the transhistorical context of classical historiography as he did to his own time period. The first chapter exposes the multiple layers of classicism in Prokopios' narrative, taking issue with the prevailing view that confines classicism to matters of vocabulary or style. The structures of the narrative, the literary devices, and the political messages conveyed by the historian through the use of sophisticated classical allusions, all reveal his debt to the classics. These devices must guide any future interpretation of his political and historical thought. The second chapter focuses on the introductory sections of the Persian Wars, which have long been regarded as merely anecdotal. By discovering classical antecedents, particularly in Herodotos, the analysis demonstrates how Prokopios sets the scene for later developments through the use of richly allusive stories, which reveal the inner truth about human qualities that become important later on in the narrative. The third chapter reveals the important role played by the political philosophy of Plato in the formation of Prokopios' historical vision. The historian is tied to dissident circles of Platonists who hated the Christian regime of Justinian, and the political narrative of the Wars is shown to allude throughout to the grim fate of philosophy under tyrannical Christian rule. The fourth chapter refutes the notion that the concept of fortune, or tyche, was merely a stylistic ornament, by which the historian gave his work a classical aura. A detailed examination of the narrative reveals that it was central to his understanding of the wars of Justinian, and deployed in such a way as to undermine the orthodox Christian ascription of both victories and disasters to divine providence. A subsidiary goal of the discussion is to consider in all cases the implications of these conclusions for our knowledge of the age of Justinian.

This dissertation argues that natural light in Byzantine churches was manipulated to reinforce visually the message conveyed by the service and to evoke feelings of religious reverence. It seeks to investigate the principal ways in which this was achieved. An initial experiential description of Mount Athos churches is followed by an analysis of key religious and philosophical writings and a theological interpretation of the liturgy in relation to the significance and role of light. There follows a discussion of parallels between the iconographic and architectural treatment of light; an analysis of the calendar, time-keeping methods, and instruments outlining the Byzantine temporal framework; a presentation of historical precedents; a discussion of the relevant aspects of a Byzantine architectural education; and an elucidation of the solid geometrical techniques of manipulating light advanced in the treatise by Anthemius; this is followed by a technical discussion and empirical documentation of key light effects. The research methods employed range from direct observation of the space and light in the church during the liturgy to historical inquiry into the tools, methods and their use in Byzantine times based on analysis, critique and interpretation of relevant primary sources, to the empirical documentation through the use of computer programs for calculation and simulation of key light effects. The outcome of this research clearly reveals that Byzantine churches were designed to enhance the experiential impact of the religious teachings and that light was actively manipulated toward this end: it provides literary evidence that light was thought to constitute the most essential quality of the divinity; it elucidates the bearing of antique traditions on the Byzantine handling of light; it illustrates the synchronization of light effects and liturgical events; it shows that the lighting design tended to conform to certain patterns and it demonstrates the tangible and refined way in which these effects were designed to transport the faithful from the perceptible reality to the realm of the noumenon.

This thesis examines the techniques of female portraiture in the sentimental, byzantine and pastoral novels of XVth and XVIth century Spain. The selected works are analyzed in light of rhetorical prescriptions on the subject. Chapter I reviews the bibliography, summarizes the canons appearing in ancient rhetorical treatises, medieval poetics, and Spanish renaissance rhetorics in the vernacular; recalls the existence of static female portraits in medieval Spanish literature, and points to the development of a humanistic portrait (which follows Cicero's eleven attributes of people in the De inventione) in the XVth century and the confluence of both canons in the Celestina. It suggests Brunetto Latini's Tesoro as a possible source of static portraits in medieval Spain. Chapter II shows shadings of characterization in the sentimental novel, the exclusive presence of the humanistic portrait, and a lack of static physical description of women in these works. Chapter III studies a XVIth century translation of the Theagenes and Chariklea because of its impact on Spanish fiction at the time, and finds that Heliodorus' characters are flat and controlled by fate, which indicates little influence upon Cervantes' method of characterization. Clareo y Florisea is the only XVIth century Spanish byzantine novel with a static female portrait; and Contreras changes radically the portrayal of his female protagonist in the two redactions of the Selva de aventuras. Chapter IV finds in the pastoral novel an abundance of static female portraits, as well as the most complete characterization of women in the genres studied. Although the static descriptions exemplified in medieval poetics reappear in the middle of the XVIth century in one byzantine and in pastoral novels, the humanistic portrait predominates in all works. Female description becomes more complex and the number of attributes described in each portrait increases, culminating in those of Montemayor's Diana. The emphasis on the individual properties varies from one genre to another, but in all three affectio and natura are stressed. Sentimental novels accentuate fortuna while byzantine and pastoral ones coincide in extending the descriptions of consilia and casus.