Dr. Paravano recently obtained his PhD degree from the University of Vienna. His ANAMED project is on large cities of the Late Antique Roman East which were bustling places where ideas of community changed, coexisted, and clashed and a variety of social actors used different strategies to articulate and negotiate such ideas in multiple contexts. The delivery of public speeches in high-register Greek was one of these strategies, and so were publicly chanted acclamations, which were pervasive in Late Antique cities and constituted one of the main ways in which non-elite inhabitants of cities would participate in political life.
Leaving aside epoch-making events accompanied by acclamations, such as the Thessalonica massacre in 390 or the Nika riot in 532, Cosimo’s project at ANAMED centers on the different spaces used for acclamations on small-scale issues, which were less momentous, but part and parcel of day-to-day political life. By focusing mainly but not only on Antioch, he looks at how acclamations functioned as a lobbying means in competition with rhetorical speeches, which often mention them and counter their claims, and at the spaces in which both acclamations and speeches took place.