This paper studies how displaced royal families in the Roman principate speak about their royal ancestry. Gaius Julius Antiochus Epiphanes "Philopappos" and his sister Julia Balbilla, who were descendents of the Orontid dynasty of Commagene in northwestern Syria, are objects of this study. The kingdom of Commagene was twice incorporated into the Roman province of Syria, first upon the death of Antiochos III Epiphanes in 17 CE, then during Vespasian's reign in 72 CE. Philopappos and Balbilla were displaced and eventually integrated into the circle of the Roman senatorial élite. The two siblings are examples of displaced royal families "at work," creating their extraordinary status within the Roman principate through monumental and literary works that claim inheritance to their ancestral past.
This paper will first review relevant scholarship – such as David Braund on client kingship (1984), Joel Allen on hostage and hostage taking in the principate (2006), Paul Burton on Roman foreign relations in the Republic (2011) – to clarify the operating terms of amicitia, fides, and foedus that formed the socio-political context within which Philopappos and Balbilla operated. The second part of the paper will discuss how the visual and inscriptional programme of Philopappos' monument at Athens and Babilla's graffitti poetry on the statue of Memnon in Egyptian Thebes negotiate socio-political contexts. This paper argues thatPhilopappos' monument did not only speak to his extraordinary status as humbled royalty under Rome, but also his belonging to Athens, and how Commagenian royalty and Roman citizenship attributed to his sense of belonging. Similarly, Balbilla was a valued member of Hadrian and Sabina's court specifically because of her conscious pronouncement of her family's royal blood and their piety, which qualities were pronounced in her graffiti poetry. Together, Philopappos and Balbilla marks a change in the nature of client kingship from Trajan onwards, as royal members become valued not for their ability to govern kingdoms, but for their extraordinary status as royal Roman citizens.
Interest point detection is a fundamental approach to feature extraction in computer vision tasks. To handle the scale invariance, interest points usually work on the scale-space representation of an image. In this letter, we propose a novel block-wise scale-space representation to significantly reduce the computational complexity of an interest point detector. Laplacian of Gaussian (LoG) filtering is applied to implement the block-wise scale-space representation. Extensive comparison experiments have shown the block-wise scale-space representation enables the efficient and effective implementation of an interest point detector in terms of memory and time complexity reduction, as well as promising performance in visual search.
The removal of trace gases from the troposphere is, in most cases, initialized by reactions with hydroxyl radicals, and the products of these reactions are eventually deposited on the Earth's surface. The concentration of these hydroxyl radicals is therefore a measure of atmospheric self-cleansing. In theory, hydroxyl-radical concentrations can be enhanced by the recycling of some of the reaction products. The only known efficient recycling process involves nitrogen oxide and leads to production of ozone, yet observations in regions with high hydrocarbon and low nitrogen oxide concentrations show substantially elevated hydroxyl-radical concentrations, up to ten times higher than expected. If we normalize observed hydroxyl-radical concentrations to the maximum achievable in model calculations with variable nitrogen oxide concentrations, this photochemical coordinate system uncovers a common feature in almost all of these observations: even in the presence of inadequate amounts of nitrogen oxides, hydroxyl-radical concentrations are enhanced to the theoretical maximum obtainable at very much higher nitrogen oxide concentrations. This means that this important part of the self-cleansing capability of the atmosphere is working at maximum efficiency even in regions with a high burden of biogenic hydrocarbons and low nitrogen oxide concentration. Since these processes do not involve nitrogen oxides, tropospheric ozone production is greatly reduced compared with the expectation from current theory.
The removal of trace gases from the troposphere is, in most cases, initialized by reactions with hydroxyl radicals, and the products of these reactions are eventually deposited on the Earth's surface. The concentration of these hydroxyl radicals is therefore a measure of atmospheric self-cleansing. In theory, hydroxyl-radical concentrations can be enhanced by the recycling of some of the reaction products. The only known efficient recycling process involves nitrogen oxide and leads to production of ozone, yet observations in regions with high hydrocarbon and low nitrogen oxide concentrations show substantially elevated hydroxyl-radical concentrations, up to ten times higher than expected. If we normalize observed hydroxyl-radical concentrations to the maximum achievable in model calculations with variable nitrogen oxide concentrations, this photochemical coordinate system uncovers a common feature in almost all of these observations: even in the presence of inadequate amounts of nitrogen oxides, hydroxyl-radical concentrations are enhanced to the theoretical maximum obtainable at very much higher nitrogen oxide concentrations. This means that this important part of the self-cleansing capability of the atmosphere is working at maximum efficiency even in regions with a high burden of biogenic hydrocarbons and low nitrogen oxide concentration. Since these processes do not involve nitrogen oxides, tropospheric ozone production is greatly reduced compared with the expectation from current theory.