This article is a detailed critical review of all the major scholarly publications in the rapidly expanding field of the Justinianic Plague published from 2000 through 2018. It updates the article in this journal by Dionysios Stathakopoulos from 2000, while also providing a detailed appraisal of the state of the field across all disciplines, including: literary studies, archaeology, DNA evidence, climatology, and epidemiology. We also identify the current paradigm for the Justinianic Plague as well as survey possible avenues forward for the field in the future.1

A pair of anonymous rhetorical exercises in Greek, dating perhaps to the eleventh century, contain a refutation and a confirmation of the myth of Ganymede, in which the young Trojan shepherd is abducted by Zeus in the form of an eagle to live with him in heaven. This article analyses the opposing arguments about divinity and sexuality in the two exercises, argues that they contain a unique aetiological account of the violet, and situates them in the reception history of Ganymede.

This article explores the narrative strategies employed in the monumental painting of the middle and late Byzantine period and considers whether the different methods of narration and the degree of narrativity can reveal anything about the function of the work, its creators, its audience and finally its period; in other words whether a narratological approach to visual representation could be a tool for analysing a work of art in socio-historical terms. This is determined firstly by identifying similar narrative structures in contemporary literature and secondly by looking for information on how contemporary viewers ‘read’ the ‘story’ in monumental narrative paintings.

This article examines Joseph Bryennios’ Forty-Nine Chapters, a text that has been hitherto explored mostly for the information on social practices in late Byzantium. The analysis of the text's rhetorical techniques indicates that Bryennios departed significantly from other contemporary collections of kephalaia which relied on the inherited wisdom of gnomologia. I argue that the pervasiveness of figurative language and vivid analogies in the Forty-Nine Chapters shaped his specific didacticism and unveiled the author's acquaintance with the technique of rhetorical amplification.

This article discusses the stay in Greece of Italian and Polish political refugees of the 1830–1 and 1848–9 European revolutions. The article depicts the human geography of the refugees and examines the experience of exile both collectively and individually. Apart from studying the émigré communities as a whole in Athens, Patras and Syros, this paper also analyses the problems and expectations of specific refugees in Greece after 1849 (e.g. Antonio Morandi, Marco Antonio Canini, Oronzio Spinazzolla). This contribution thus adds to our understanding of both Greece under King Otto and the Mediterranean by highlighting aspects of transnational mobility and interaction of peoples and ideas in the mid-nineteenth century.

The historiography of the Greek civil war has made significant progress during the past decade, but the origins, role and activities of paramilitaries remain under-researched. Most studies have focused on the period of the ‘white terror’ and explored the collusion between the state and the paramilitary groups. Although such studies have advanced our understanding of this turbulent period, they have not discussed important issues such as the motivation of the rank and file members, the sociopolitical networks used to recruit and mobilize support and the diverse conditions under which militias emerge. The article will address this lacuna and provide new insights into the origins, development and legacies of paramilitarism.

This article recounts the little-known story of the ‘Literary Evenings’ (1945–6), a series of literary recitals staged at the Greek National Theatre and organized by members of the Generation of the 1930s. Set against the background of intense political rivalry that followed the Varkiza Agreement, the ‘Literary Evenings’ capture the post-war aspirations for the popularization of high culture. Drawing upon hitherto unexplored archival material, this article aims to offer a new, historically informed understanding of the Generation of the 1930s, while also directing attention to the aural consumption of literary texts as an unacknowledged force behind canon formation.