The Greek commentary tradition devoted to explicating Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics was extensive; it began in antiquity with Aspasius’ commentaries on selected books of the EN and reached a stage of immense sophistication in the twelfth century with the works of Eustratius of Nicaea and Michael of Ephesus, which served primarily educational purposes. The use of Aristotle’s ethics in the classroom continued in the late Byzantine period as well, but until recently scholastic use of the EN was known mostly through George Pachymeres’ compendium of Book 11 of his Philosophia. I am currently editing the last surviving exegetical commentary on the EN in the strict sense of the term, also penned by George Pachymeres, which represents a new witness to the resurgence of Aristotelian studies in late Byzantium. It also improves our knowledge of Pachymeres’ role as a teacher in the context of higher education, and of the use of ethics as a practical discipline. The discussion also takes into account the religious underpinnings of Pachymeres’ moralism, pointing to the way pagan ethics in late Byzantium are rendered relevant to their Christian readership.

In the decades between 1204 and 1261 the bronze horseman would be little more than a distant memory. After the conquest of Constantinople in 1261 by Michael VIII of Nicaea, the horseman was rediscovered. It became an intensely treasured relic of a bygone imperial era. In devastated, post-Crusader Constantinople two monuments continued to serve as grand symbols of a once proud empire: Hagia Sophia and Justinian’s column. Michael VIII made the column of Justinian part of the land holdings of the Great Church. Though the horseman triumphed over Latin adversity, the column did not emerge unscathed. The shaft of the column was stripped of its Justinianic bronze panels, which had originally made the column glow like gold. Palaiologan rulers had neither the funds nor the craftsmen to restore the metallic splendor of the column’s original appearance. Until the fall of Constantinople, they continuously invested their ever-diminishing resources into maintaining these two monuments, even as others (including the Holy Apostles) gradually crumbled. The soaring horseman became central to the elevation ritual in imperial coronations. Michael VIII payed homage to and competed with the bronze horseman by erecting a new column. Even though Michael VIII attempted to rival the column of Justinian and to cement his own legacy, he failed.

For intellectuals of the re-conquest generation, Prokopios became a helpful guide to the city they had lost and regained. George Pachymeres (1242–ca. 1308), a highly placed court historian, engaged in an intertextual dialogue with the lengthy account of the horseman written by Prokopios. Pachymeres set out to write an exemplary ekphrasis that would outperform Prokopios in vivid explication of Justinian’s monument. The narrative structure follows Prokopios, but emphasizes different points. Pachymeres created a narrative contrast between the Constantinople of his own days and the glorious Constantinople of earlier times by focusing on the horseman – the tangible imperial link that threaded together two eras. The narrative offered by Pachymeres provides a lens through which we can behold the experience of an intellectual returning from exile and a learned observer examining a monument of a glorious past. His extended description of the monument sought to reconstruct its creator’s reasoning by using his own powers of observation, thus addressing a failure of Prokopios. Pachymeres can therefore be considered an eager, early pioneer of the fertile terrain that is now known as "late antique studies."