 Thank you so much. We too are very pleased to be at Barnes. It's a wonderful situation to be able to come together with all of the graduate student scholarship in the area. And I'm very pleased to introduce Kailin M. Jewel, a PhD candidate in the Department of Art History at Tyler School of Art of Temple University. She's currently the recipient of a dissertation completion grant awarded by the Graduate School for Architectural Decorum and Aristocratic Power in Late Antiquity, the Gens Anichi, under Dr. Elizabeth Bulman, which she will be defending soon. She has received multiple travel grants for her research, including from the International Center for Medieval Art and the Research Center for Anatolian Civilizations at Kach University in Istanbul, as well as developing substantial digital scholarship expertise through being awarded multiple fellowships in the Center for the Humanities at Temple, the Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Alliance and Collaboratory, and in the Digital Scholarship Center and Paley Library at Temple University. This has resulted in a recent publication in Peregrinations, Journal of Medieval Art and Architecture. Kailin has lectured widely from the College Art Association to specialized conferences, such as the annual Byzantine Studies Conference, the famous Kalamazoo International Congress on Medieval Studies, the most recently in which she co-chaired the Italian Art Society-sponsored sessions with Amy Gillette here at the Barnes, and her forthcoming appearance at the International Medieval Congress at the University of Leeds, for which she received support from the Delaware Valley Medieval Association. She also has been selected as spotlight lecturer in multiple capacities at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. This summer, she'll be returning to a Stanford-sponsored archaeology site in Sicily to work as the architectural historian on the Martza Mamie Maritime Heritage Project, which is a sixth century shipwreck whose cargo included prefabricated marble architectural sculpture intended for the construction of a church. Please join me in welcoming Kailin Joule to speak on topographies of aristocratic power in the late antique Mediterranean. Kailin. Thank you, Dr. Cooper. Thanks to the Barnes. Thanks to everybody for attending today. In 413 CE, Bishop Aurelius of Carthage bestowed a sacred veil upon the head of a young woman named Demetrius, who, along with her family, had fled Rome in the aftermath of the Visigothic sack of the city a few years earlier. Through this ritual, known as the Velatio, Demetrius became a consecrated virgin of the church, and her family reaped the benefits of having produced this so-called living martyr. Several decades later, Demetrius moved back to Rome, where she was responsible for the construction of a church dedicated to the first of the martyrs, Saint Stephen, which was located on the Via Latina. Nearly a century later, in the city of Constantinople, a relative of Demetrius, a woman named Anichaea Giuliana, built a church dedicated to Saint Polyuctos, a monument whose ostentatiousness might have prompted Emperor Justinian to build Hagia Sophia. These churches, Rome's Santo Stefano and Constantinople's Saint Polyuctos, provide just two examples of the architectural patronage of the Gens Anichae, a legendarily powerful family known primarily through the textual and epigraphic record. Described by scholars as having had a tentacular role in the political and religious life of the late antique Mediterranean, the Anichaea's widespread topography of power is clearly visible in the appearance of inscriptions across the empire. As we can see in this heat map, where red areas indicate a high epigraphic frequency. Useful as this visualization is in terms of placing individual Anichae in specific geographical locations, what it cannot demonstrate are the motivations behind these widespread topographies of power and how they appeared on the ground. It is the goal of this paper to explore these concentrated nodes of Anichaean authority to reveal how individual members of the family impacted the fabric of urban centers with an emphasis placed upon Rome and Constantinople. More specifically, I discuss Demetrius's Santo Stefano and Anichaea Giuliano's Saint Polyuctos and their roles in the cultivation of an aristocratic decorum of architecture that provided these Anichaean women with visible topographies of power within the politically tumultuous transformation of the Roman Empire during the fifth and sixth century CE. Through a thorough consideration of the archeological and textual records, I argue that the construction of these buildings often strategically dedicated, located and decorated served as physical markers of a distinctly aristocratic authority. We begin at the third mile of Rome's Via Latina where today we find a very lovely, quiet archeological park, please go, it's lovely. Lining the ancient road is a series of impressive ancient mausoleum, a few of which contain wonderfully preserved examples of Roman imperial funerary decoration. Tucked into the northeastern corner of this park are the remains of a ruthless rectangular structure which now functions as a storeroom for the materials excavated from the surrounding area. It is this unassuming monument that marks the site of Demetrius's church dedicated to St. Stephen. The precise date of construction for St. Stefano is hard to pin down as is common for many late antique monuments. We are fortunate, therefore, that the Liber Pontificalis makes reference to it in an entry on Pope Leo the Great. Quote, God's handmade Demetrius built a basilica to St. Stephen on her estate at the third mile of the Via Latina. This places the monument's erection tentatively during the pontificate of Leo I between 440 and 461. Further evidence for this dating was discovered during 19th century excavations at the site conducted by the Pontifical Commission for Sacred Archeology under the direction of Lorenzo Fortunati. In 1857, after archeologists rediscovered the remains of a large villa complex on the Via Latina, he and his team uncovered a large fragmentary inscription. This reconstruction confirms the, it was reconstructed, and which confirms the association with Pope Leo and the fifth century date. The first two lines read, quote, when the Amnian Virgin Demetrius leaving this world brought to a close her last day, yet not truly dying, she gave to you, Pope Leo, these final vows that this sacred house arise. These references are useful not only in dating the monument, but they reveal an interesting and often remarked upon facet of Demetrius' life, her virginity. Clearly, this is something that was important enough to her identity, that she wanted to carve it into the material fabric of her church, and that the compilers of the Liber Pontificalis wanted to emphasize in their entry on Pope Leo the Great. Given that we know many elite women of the fourth and fifth centuries chose to renounce the secular world in favor of a life devoted to Christ, why was Demetrius' decision to do the same so remarkable? If we look more closely at some of these women, like Paula and Markella, who congregated in sumptuous palace complexes, unfortunately now lost, which were located on Rome's Aventine Hill, we find that they often made the conversion to the spiritual life as a result of becoming widows. Demetrius, on the other hand, was unmarried when she received the Velatio in 413. Although we do not have firsthand accounts of Demetrius' bailing ceremony, scholars like Natalie Henry and Peter Brown have reconstructed what must have been a very elaborate and conspicuously public occasion. Taking place in Carthage, the event would have occurred in Rome if the city had not been sacked by the Visigoths in 410. Given the prestige of the Aenechii and their close ties to the North African provinces, the event was likely well attended. According to Brown, the festivities that marked the ritual would have resembled the spectacles associated with the debut of a senator or consul, which we can see depicted in the lower portions of these late antique ivory diptychs. In addition to the senatorial and consular overtones, an echo of Roman marriage ritual was present in the bestowal of a veil by the bishop upon Demetrius, analogous to the veiling of the bride during the Roman wedding ceremony. Comparisons can also be made between consecrated virgins like Demetrius and the vessel virgins of pre-Christian Rome, as both were sworn through ritual to uphold their celibacy in the service of a deity. Yet unlike the vestals who could age out of their celibate lifestyle, the consecrated virgins of Christianity had to maintain their status for the rest of their lives. The preservation of the perpetual virginity of these women became a significant preoccupation of several late antique theologians, including Ambrose of Milan, Augustine of Hippo, Pelagius, and Jerome. Ambrose in particular wrote an entire treatise with instructions for newly consecrated virgins and how they should comport themselves, which opened with a comparison between them and the virgin martyrs like St. Agnes, who we see here in a seventh century mosaic from Rome. In this remarkable passage, Ambrose wrote, quote, virginity is not praiseworthy because it is found in the martyrs, but because it itself makes martyrs. He followed this with a discussion aimed towards parents of these women who might be apprehensive to take their daughters out of the pool of eligible brides as they were useful agents in the formation of strategic marriage alliances. Of this, Ambrose stated, quote, parents will refuse a dowry, but you have a wealthy bridegroom and content with the riches of his ancestral inheritance, you shall not want for gain. How much more excellent is chaste poverty than a large dowry, end quote. Of course, the bridegroom to whom Ambrose referred was surely Christ, but it is easy to see how the marriage language could have been attractive to families like the Aenechii who continued to seek traditional Roman alliances in the newly Christianized aristocracy. Let us return to Demetrius' church on the Via Latina in Rome, built in the decades following her Velatio in Carthage. Although the building was associated with Pope Leo, the choice of St. Stephen for the dedication was entirely up to Demetrius and probably resulted from her close contact with Augustine of Hippo, the man who was ultimately responsible for the arrival of St. Stephen's relics in North Africa in 416 CE. Three short years after the miraculous discovery in the Holy Land. Not only would St. Stephen have been on Demetrius' mind given her time spent in North Africa, I suggest that she could have viewed his transformation from deacon to martyr as a reminder of her own conversion from eligible bride into a consecrated virgin, the so-called, a so-called living martyr. Furthermore, the location of St. Ostefano within the walls of her family's villa, which at the time, continued to be filled with classical sculpture, was also within view of an ancient necropolis that imbued Demetrius' church complex with a funerary aspect appropriate for a personal monument dedicated to a martyred Christian saint. The juxtaposition of the newly built Christian church alongside pagan mausoleia would not have been entirely jarring given the late antique trend to place monumental ecclesiastical architecture over the burials of Christian saints. Yet the almost triumphal rise of Demetrius' church, admittedly hard to visualize given its current state of ruin among the ancient tombs of the pagan past could serve as a reminder to Demetrius and her family of the grace associated with Stephen's final words as he prayed for the mob that had stoned him to death. Quote, then he kneeled down and cried out in a loud voice, Lord, do not hold this sin against them. In his last moments on earth, Stephen did not curse his murderers or ask for their destruction. Instead, he prayed for their salvation. In a similar way, we have no evidence that Demetrius or her builders sought to destroy the monumental markers of the vibrantly pagan past that surrounded her church. Rather, she chose to leave them intact and perhaps hoped her architectural vote of offering to Saint Stephen would sanctify the site. Shifting to the eastern Mediterranean city of Constantinople and nearly a century later in the sixth century, Demetrius' relative, Anikia Juliana, rebuilt her family's church dedicated to St. Pauliuktos. Although the building no longer survives, its massive foundations were rediscovered in Istanbul's Saracane district during a 1960 road expansion project. Located along the northern branch of Constantinople's main ceremonial route between the Philadelphia and the church of the Holy Apostles, the subsequent archeological excavations uncovered an enormous amount of finely carved architectural sculpture that articulated the monument's interior. The building was large as the site plan demonstrates and internally measured approximately 50 by 50 meters square. According to Jonathan Bardil's reconstructed plan, the nave was lined on either side by a series of three large semicircular spaces, which would have been somewhat similar in form to those found in the naus of San Vitale in Ravenna, albeit with five arches instead of three. Crowning the side and central arches of these spaces were peacocks whose tail feathers unfurled over their bodies in a physical gesture of display to create the form of a semi-dome. On the soffits of the arches between the semi-domes were two pairs of confronting peacocks. Their tails also raised above their heads and in this fragment from the Istanbul Archeology Museum, we can see that their tails nearly touched at the arch's midpoint, which we can see right here at the tops of their tails. In total, the archeological record suggests that there were over 40 of these sculptural birds. That an elite woman living in sixth century Constantinople would choose to install peacock imagery in a church interior is not, in and of itself, remarkable, given the ubiquity of the motif in late antiquity, as we can see in these extant examples. Yet the sheer number and repetition of these birds inside a single church is surprising and can remind us of what Professor Dale Kinney has described as a, quote, discourse of display, whereby magnanimity, or magnificentia, could be amplified through the replication of specific forms. In addition to the sculptural peacocks at St. Polyuctos, a full page illumination of a peacock displaying his tail feathers appears in the opening pages of the sixth century of the Vienna diascorides, a manuscript that was given to Giuliana as a vote of offering from a suburban Constantinopolitan group of citizens for her generous donation of a church. The unconventional posture of these birds facing outward towards the viewer is striking for it breaks with much more common depictions in profile surrounded by vine-scrolls and often flanking vessels or wreaths as we can see in this example from Egypt, now on display in the Met. While scholars have repeatedly interpreted the appearance of these birds as terrestrial symbols for the beauty and abundance of heavenly paradise, I argue that Giuliana's peacocks should be understood as visual markers of display that recalled the aristocratic Romani toss of their Anichian ancestry. Their installation along the length of St. Polyuctos' nave created a gauntlet of male peacocks raising their feathers in highly conspicuous gestures of display for those that processed towards the altar. In a politically charged moment when the Anichiae were being overlooked in favor of the fresh-faced Justinianic dynasty, St. Polyuctos and its ostentatious decoration served as a reminder to viewers, including Emperor Justinian, who visited the church, of the power and authority of old Roman families like the Anichiae. From this discussion of both Demetrius' Basilica dedicated to St. Stephen in Rome and Anichia Giuliana's church of St. Polyuctos and Constantinople, we can begin to understand how aristocratic families like the Anichiae used the patronage of architecture to position themselves within the highest echelons of late Roman society. These buildings, thoughtfully dedicated, strategically located and purposefully decorated, each served to concretize the power of their aristocratic patrons. In historical moments, racked by war, plague, and political instability, the financing construction of solid, immovable buildings like St. Stefano and St. Polyuctos afforded aristocrats like those of the Gens and Anichiae with a sense of permanence and stability that they hoped would last in perpetuity. Thank you.