This chapter claims that Pound’s reconfiguration of Sophocles’s Trachiniai as a Noh play works towards the realization of the dream of the long Imagist poem that coheres (first articulated in 1916), enabling Pound to return to the writing of the Cantos – much as H.D.’s translation of Ion in the 1930s had allowed her to return to writing and led to Trilogy. Pound’s Women of Trachis offers a condensed image not only of the play which it translates, but also of Pound’s own body of work up to that time. Yet the translation also undercuts the triumphant narrative it seems to present, an undercutting that the soon-to-be-composed late Cantos will seek to refute. Section: Rock-Drill and Thrones recruit first other tragedies to balance and further clarify the relation between poetics and politics that remain ambivalent in the Sophocles translations, and then pre- and post-Athenian Greek texts that, in Pound’s excerpting, seem to harness the Greek language towards a monosemic vision dictated by Pound’s politics. The Trachinian Herakles himself has to be further translated into other mythical figures in the Cantos in order for the promise he represents to be fulfilled.

This chapter delves into the phenomenon of the so-called mixed style, a distinctive feature found in certain literary compositions of the twelfth century. While focusing primarily on the renowned collection of four supplicatory poems known as Ptochoprodromika, it also examines instances of blending lower and higher language registers in the Grottaferrata version of the Digenis Akritis poem and in the Verses from Prison penned by Michael Glykas. The objective of this study is to re-evaluate existing scholarly viewpoints regarding the principles and functions underlying the shifts between language registers in these works, adopting a narratological perspective. In other words, by analysing the employed types of voice, such as direct speech, narration and metanarration, the chapter seeks to determine whether we can identify more specific principles governing the changes in language levels, beyond the general distinction between ‘more popular’ and ‘more learned’. It endeavours to demonstrate that the selection between lower and higher registers is intricately linked to the narrative distance of the speaking voice from the events being recounted.

The Byzantines had direct access to much ancient material about Alexander, and so their view of him, compared to that of other cultures, tended to be more grounded in history. Yet they also continued to develop the Romance tradition in new directions and combined it with parallel Christian interpretations that tied the Conqueror to prophesies made in the book of Daniel and apocalyptic scenarios involving Gog and Magog. These different elements combined in various permutations when the Byzantine historians turned to Alexander in their surveys of world history. Alexander was also invoked in rhetoric that praised the Byzantine emperors, often to show that they had surpassed him, but he was not a meaningful model of kingship for them as he imparted no lessons about how to actualy rule a kingdom.