Much has been made of the presence or absence of seventh- and eighth-century coins on several sites in Greece, primarily in Athens and Corinth. Kenneth Setton and Peter Charanis have paved the way for a cultural-historical interpretation of coin finds, but a thorough comparison of both single and hoard finds from Greece with others from the Balkans suggests a very different interpretation. Instead of signalising decline, low-denomination coins, especially from Athens, may point to local markets of low-value commodities, such as food, as well as to the permanent presence of the fleet.

An individual claiming to be related to the Emperor Romanos IV Diogenes (1068–71) took part in a major Cuman invasion of Byzantium on the eve of the First Crusade. This article assesses the date of the assault, which is recorded by the Russian Primary Chronicle, by John Zonaras, and by Anna Komnene in the Alexiad. The identity of the man referred to as the False Diogenes by the Byzantine sources is considered, and it is argued that, rather than being an impostor, the individual in question may well indeed have been the son of Romanos IV Diogenes. Modern scholars have tended to ignore this possibility, instead following Anna Komnene’s meticulous character assassination of the man who accompanied the nomad attack. This paper therefore also seeks to address the question of the identity of ‘Pseudo-Diogenes’, to examine Anna Komnene’s methods of savaging a natural rival to her father for the imperial throne, and to assess her motives for doing so.

This article explores the criticisms levelled by the satirical illustrated newspaper Punch at the Beaconsfield Government’s decision to occupy Cyprus in July 1878. The Government’s public response to these in the media and Parliament will be analysed through the iconography of cartoons, poems and satirical commentaries and placed in their historical context. While historians have tended to use the cartoons as light-hearted comic relief and the poems and commentaries not at all, such material has real substance. The peculiar acquisition of Cyprus by the Beaconsfield Government excited passions, both euphoric and reproachful, in British political and newspaper circles. In order to determine the extent to which Punch’s arguments were accurate, this article compares the actual policies with the views of the Beaconsfield Government and with those of Punch.

This article will attempt a comparative reading of George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss (1860) and Alexandros Papadiamantis’s H φόνισσα (1903), aiming to illustrate how both texts are preoccupied with the problem of inventing spaces for their deviant and superfluous female characters. Although enmeshed in the dominant ideologies of their time, such as the evolutionary pattern of life as a sign of progress, and women’s marginalisation and domestication within this model, these novels simultaneously reject these ideologies. Interestingly, both Eliot’s and Papadiamantis’s problematic heroines are associated with water and experience a cathartic death by water. As a deus ex machina, the overflowing waters of the river in the first case, and the rising waves of the sea in the latter, provide a sanctuary, an intermediate space, where the two exiled heroines escape from traditional definitions of women as homeless containers or empty receptacles. George Eliot’s Maggie and Papadiamantis’s Frangoyannou discover an alternative geography in water, as the Darwinian aquatic space, a site of contestation, is reappropriated and transformed into a nursing space. This return to an intrauterine bliss, however, apart from its revolutionary potential, signifies also a return to essentialism and suggests the impossibility of ascribing any space to women except for that of endless metaphoricity. In the open-endedness of these two texts, women are floating signifiers, both promoting and transcending female archetypes.

The interpretation of Thanasis Valtinos’s The Descent of the Nine as a narrative signifying the defeat of the Greek Left in 1948–9 is limited and historically specific to post-1974 populism in Greece. This article challenges the interpretation of the text as a ‘grand narrative’ for the Greek Left. The novella’s inclination towards figuration reveals a more complex individualistic and potentially allegorical view of the narrated events. This figural contamination of the text’s literal meaning results in irreconcilable ambiguity, a hitherto neglected formal feature relating to its theme of ‘failure’. This, in conjunction with the text’s broader resistance to metaphorical synthesis, makes the novella a strong candidate for its inclusion in the canon of Greek post-modernist fiction.

Byzance est là oú je suis.

Thus runs the suggestively recurrent theme in a recent novel by Julia Kristeva, the famous psychoanalyst, linguist and semiotician (Meurtre à Byzance. Paris: Fayard, 2004). Kristeva, who immigrated to France from Bulgaria in the 1960s, here seizes the opportunity to set forth problems concerning her own East European and Orthodox background. She does so in a form that to a remarkably high degree mirrors her own work as a scholar: Meurtre à Byzance, with its manifold references to medieval and modern literature, is imbued with intertextuality and polyphony, literary devices which she herself as a theorist has largely helped define. And the complex story is not, as one might expect from the title, a historical detective novel set in a Byzantine milieu, but a romantic yet critical story about contemporary society, our search for origin and meaning, our longing for — as Kristeva puts it — a Byzantium of our own.