The nature and development of Roman Corinth to the end of the Antonine period

The purpose of this thesis is two-fold: first, to examine and re-assess the material remains of Roman Corinth in the light 'of modern scholarship; secondly, to use this evidence, in combination with the literary sources, and thus to define, more clearly than has been done hitherto, both the nature of the original foundation and the way in which it developed. The work depends primarily on material remains, since the literary sources are limited and often overworked. A vast amount of material has been made available from the excavations of the American School over the last sixty years; there are scattered reports of earlier work going back to the 1890s; and there is a substantial body of unpublished material. Aerial photographs, taken in the 1940s and 1960s, which have not been studied before, have made it possible to form a much better idea of the city as a whole and to reconstruct the basic road system. The end of the Antonine period provides a convenient, if somewhat arbitrary, date at which to conclude the study in general, since most of the excavated areas and literary references date from before this time. My conclusion is that the evidence now available shows that Roman Corinth, far from being simply a continuation of Greek Corinth, as most scholars have assumed, was founded as a Roman colony, in accordance with normal Roman practice, and that it retained its Roman identity throughout the period under discussion

Athenaeus the Navigator

Copyright © The Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies 2008. Published version reproduced with the permission of the publisher.This study concerns navigation in a geographical sense and in the sense of the reader finding a way through a complex text with the help of points of reference. Recent studies in Athenaeus have suggested that he was a more sophisticated writer than the second-hand compiler of Hellenistic comment on classical Greek authors, which has been a dominant view. Building on these studies, this article argues that Athenaeus' approach to his history of ancient dining draws on traditional poetic links between the symposium and the sea, and expands such metaphors with a major interest in place and provenance, which also belongs to the literature of the symposium. Provenance at the same time evokes a theme of imperial thought, that Rome can attract to herself all the good things of the earth that are now under her sway. Good things include foods and the literary heritage of Greece now housed in imperial libraries. Athenaeus deploys themes of navigation ambiguously, to celebrate diversity and to warn against the dangers of luxury. Notorious examples of luxury are presented – the Sybarites and Capuans, for example – but there seem to be oblique warnings to Rome as well. Much clearer censure is reserved for the gastronomic poem of Archestratus of Gela, which surveys the best cities in which to eat certain fish. The Deipnosophists deplore the immorality of the poet and his radical rewriting of their key authors Homer and Plato, while at the same time quoting him extensively for the range of his reference to geography and fish. This commentary on Archestratus is a good example of the Deipnosophists' guidance to the reader, Roman or otherwise, who wishes to ‘navigate’ the complicated history of the Greek deipnon and symposium

Tunnel spectroscopy of localised electronic states in hexagonal boron nitride

Hexagonal boron nitride is a large band gap layered crystal, frequently incorporated in van der Waals heterostructures as an insulating or tunnel barrier. Localised states with energies within its band gap can emit visible light, relevant to applications in nanophotonics and quantum information processing. However, they also give rise to conducting channels, which can induce electrical breakdown when a large voltage is applied. Here we use gated tunnel transistors to study resonant electron tunnelling through the localised states in few atomic-layer boron nitride barriers sandwiched between two monolayer graphene electrodes. The measurements are used to determine the energy, linewidth, tunnelling transmission probability, and depth within the barrier of more than 50 distinct localised states. A three-step process of electron percolation through two spatially separated localised states is also investigated

The impact of ‘exile’ on thought: Plotinus, Derrida and Gnosticism

This article examines the impact of ‘exile’ – as an individual or collective experience – on how human experience is theorized. The relationship between ‘exile’ and thought is initially approached historically by looking at the period that Eric Dodds famously called the ‘age of anxiety’ in late antiquity, i.e. the period between the emperors Aurelius and Constantine. A particular interest is in the dynamics of ‘empire’ and the concomitant religious ferment as a context in which ‘exile’, both experientially and symbolically, appears to assume an overbearing significance. Plotinus’ narrative of emanation and epistrophe as well as a group of narratives often classified as ‘Gnosticism’ are juxtaposed as two radical examples of a wider spiritual trend at the time according to which ‘exile’ could be considered constitutive of human experience. By way of an historical analogy, the insights gained from this study of late antiquity are then used to guide an analysis of the current, ‘restless’ epoch, in which experiences of displacement and exile on a mass scale undermine traditional notions of belonging, thus reviving the gnostic vision of cosmic reality as an alien, exilic environment. The article concludes with a discussion of Jacques Derrida’s work as an example of contemporary gnosticism, in which a ‘metaphysics of exile’ is presented in the disguise of an ‘exile from metaphysics’

What makes a school Catholic?

This research aims to look at how a group of primary head teachers’ in the North West of England perceive the Catholic nature of their schools and how they give their account of Catholic education for twenty-first century Britain. They go on to describe their feelings about the mission of their school. The head teachers’ views of how they identified their school’s Catholicism are critiqued in the light of Catholic Church teaching on the nature of Catholic schools and compared to academic and theological models of Catholic education