The liturgical hymns on the life of Christ composed by the sixth-century Constantinopolitan poet Romanos the Melodist inscribe theologies of literary composition which incorporate writing into the economy of salvation. His dialogues between Jesus and various characters from the gospels habitually insert acts of writing and literary documents into the biblical narrative. Romanos figures Jesus’ death on the cross as an act of self-inscription where Christ signs a ransom for humanity using his body as parchment and his blood as ink. The poet himself signs each of his poems by encrypting some variant of the phrase BY THE HUMBLE ROMANOS into an acrostic that determines the first letter of each stanza. The poet attaches his identity silently to his work, performing the humility he hopes to achieve while assimilating his own writing to Christ’s work of redemption.

This article offers a survey of research on Procopius over the last six years as well as going into detail on certain disputed questions in Procopian scholarship; special attention is paid to the discussion of the Buildings in Antiquité Tardive 8 (2000). In particular, the author argues in detail for dating Wars VIII to 552 and for maintaining an early date for the composition of the Buildings. He upholds the traditional view of Procopius as a lawyer, rather than as a military engineer, and notes the failure of the notion of genre as a method of resolving the discrepancies between Procopius’ works.

This article explains the context of the slogan aired by troopers of the Anatolikon in the presence of Constantine IV (668-85): ‘[if we] believe in a trinity, [let us] crown [all] three’. The number ‘three’ was of symbolical significance for the Anatoliks, reflecting the Holy Trinity (the antithesis of Islam), the original number of themes, and the usual number of co-emperors in the Heraklid dynasty. The ‘collegiate’ rationale of the themata conflicted with the rejuvenated imperial ideology of the emperor, who may have tried to dilute the power of the themata in 681, after the sixth ecumenical council had triumphantly defeated monothelitism and re-established the authority of a single emperor, on the pattern of Justinian the Great. At that point in time, the co-emperors were deposed and mutilated.

A close reading of Western texts belonging to the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries reveals the process by which the legend of the Trojan War came to be associated with the conquest of Constantinople. After 1204, attempts in the Morea to re-work Benoît de Sainte-Maure’s Roman de Troie attest to gradual changes in the relationship of the Frankish conquerors with their territories in the former Byzantine Empire, but also with their lands of origin. A parallel ideological transformation may be shown to have occurred within the Byzantine tradition. This evidence sheds light on the Late Medieval contexts in which were composed the Iliad of Constantine Hermoniakos, the anonymous Πόλεμος τῆς Τρωάδος, the Byzantine Iliad and Achilleid.

While most Christian writers who described the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks in 1453 regarded the disaster as divine retribution for the sins of its inhabitants, carried out through the agency of the barbaric and infidel Turks, the historical work of Laonikos Chalkokondyles takes a very different approach to the problem. It argues that nations rose or fell partly through luck, but also according the virtue they possessed, so that the Turks, rather than being mere agents, could in fact take the credit for their success. In this approach, Chalkokondyles reflects not classical Greek literature, but a western tradition to be found in Livy and Cicero, a strand of thought that he may have adopted as a result of contacts with Renaissance Italy.

The purpose of this article is to put together recent linguistic and historical studies, in order to challenge the views of ‘older’ Greek and Albanian scholarship with respect to the presence of a solely Greek or Albanian population in the regions of Epeiros, with specific reference to the district of Dropull in the light of primary sources dealing with the Albanian immigrations of the fourteenth century. It will show that Greek and Albanian-speaking populations had all along been living together in Epeiros, while in the fourteenth century immigrant Albanians migrated into the regions of Gjirokastër. The reactions of local milieux against the new settlers shall be attributed to the disintegration of the previous local elites.

For T.S. Eliot, ‘the ghost behind the arras’ refers to ‘some simple metre’ typographically dislocated and dimly heard if not openly seen. This paper examines in some detail the ways in which C. P. Cavafy appropriates the predominant Modern Greek verse form, the ‘political verse’ (politikos stichos), in new contexts and asks what they contribute to the understanding of the poet’s poetics. It will be argued that the most dominant ‘ghost’ is Palamas’ Ηφλογέρα του βασιλιά (1910), mirroring the poet’s attempts to communicate his response to the demise of the ‘Great Idea’ of national expansion.

Echoes of Sikelianos’ poetry can be detected in many poets, but his presence in Seferis is particularly interesting in the light of the close personal relationship which developed between the two poets from the 1940s. The poetic dialogue starts with Seferis’ Στροφή (1931) and develops continuously until his last book of poems, Τρία Κρυφά Ποιήματα (1966). Seferis, attracted by Sikelianos’ linguistic richness, recreates the older poet’s words ingeniously in his search for a new poetics. I examine this dialogue chronologically to show that exploring the presence of Sikelianos in Seferis’ poetry enhances the understanding of the younger poet and reveals that, however great the differences in matters of technique between the two poets, their attitudes to poetry and poetics are in the end closely related.

The purpose of this note is to indicate how a recently re-edited inscription may contribute towards the solution of a long-standing problem posed by a short notice in the Liber Pontificalis. This notice appears to report that, following his failure to force Pope Martin I to accept the Typus issued by the emperor Constans II (641-68), the cubicularius and exarch of Italy Olympius led an expedition against the Saracens living in Sicily. He then died of disease ca. 652. The standard edition, and a recent translation, run:

In the last issue of this journal there appeared an article by Bissera Pentcheva in which the author argued that before iconoclasm the cult of Mary knew no images, in particular in processions, and that in addition images of Mary had no significance as protector of the city. Such phenomena first appeared in the tenth century and were then projected back on the past. In order to examine this thesis we will need once again to review the sources.