At two places in the tenth-century manuscript of the Chronicon Paschale extracts from an anonymous chronicle have been added, with the attributions and At the first place a series of fourteen extracts, recording natural catastrophes and other disasters from the late fifth century to the mid-eighth century, is inserted in the context of the account of the Nika Riot. At the second place a single extract is inserted in the margin in the context of the account of Phocas’ deposition of Maurice.

A familiar orthodoxy in Byzantine history is that the empire’s economy began to stagnate in the eleventh century. It was a turning-point marked by the development of large estates at the expense of independent peasants and the onset of demographic decline. The demographic trend has been much discussed and generally pessimistic conclusions have been reached. Recently, Lemerle has asserted that the labour force was less plentiful than land.

‘Narrative always says less than it knows, but it often makes known more than it says’

(Gérard Genette)

In this paper I wish to argue the relevance of detailed literary and stylistic analysis for a fuller understanding of learned twelfth-century texts, using as my model the elaborate eulogy in the Timarion of a prominent but hitherto unidentified member of the Doukas-Palaiologos family. The passage in question, so far taken at face value, may be interpreted as a highly-wrought and carefully contrived piece of irony, or, in other words, as a subversive ‘send-up’ of one of the most fashionable branches of the twelfth-century aristocracy.

Recent researches into the history of the Cretan Academies have added a new dimension to our understanding of the extraordinary flowering of scholarship and literature termed the Cretan Renaissance. We now know that the small island of Crete, dominated for so many centuries by Venetian overlords, had developed by 1560–1632 a resident intelligenzia capable of furnishing three Academies: the Vivi of Rethymno, founded in January 1562 by Francesco Barozzi; the Stravaganti of Irakleio, founded in 1591 by Andrea Cornaro; and the Sterili of Chania, granted a meeting-hall in August 1632 and additional protection by a decree of December 1637.

Contradictory statements such as the above are characteristic of the controversy which has surrounded the song tradition loosely called ‘rebetiko’, since it first became a cultural thème du jour in Greece in the late 1940s.

‘“Reality”,’ wrote Angelos Terzakis in 1934, ‘is an invention of the nineteenth century’. In saying this Terzakis echoes similar pronouncements of the non- or anti-realist reaction in Europe in the first half of this century, a reaction which, after some vicissitudes, has come to constitute an orthodoxy for much of the modern critical thinking often grouped under the label ‘structuralist’.

One of the striking features of Constantine Cavafy’s poetry is his apparent and pronounced originality. It seems to have an existence independent of poetry preceding it. Thus when studying Cavafy one has difficulties in detecting influences of earlier poetry. Indeed, in his mature years Cavafy was often able to appropriate his inherited tradition in such a revisionary manner that the old texts were transformed in his poetry almost beyond recognition and thus beyond the authority of their authors. The new poems proclaimed their originality and denied any indebtedness to their possible precursors.

The traditional Greco-Turkish antagonism culminated in the bitter military confrontation which took place in Anatolia immediately after the First World War. While the Greeks fought for the establishment of a foothold in western Anatolia and Thrace, the nationalist Turks resisted vigorously the invasion of what they considered to be their indisputable fatherland. The crux of the problem lay in the Greek determination to bring the entire Hellenic race under a single Greek state. This Hellenic Megali Idea (Great Idea) envisaged a future Greater Greece which was to include Epirus, Macedonia, Thrace, western Anatolia and the Aegean islands. The ultimate fulfilment of the Megali Idea would be achieved with the incorporation of Constantinople (İstanbul), the most important administrative, religious, commercial, and cultural centre in the Near East, into the future Greek state. According to Greek nationalists, such a state was to materialise with the final dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, a process which they regarded as inevitable. Deeply rooted in Greek national and religious consciousness, the Megali Idea had for one hundred years inspired official Greek foreign policy.

In the post World War II era, the strain in the trilateral relation between the United States, Greece and Turkey is one of the most disquieting and vexatious elements to emerge from American foreign policy. The so-called southeastern flank of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) is currently beset with tensions that threaten to impede its contributory role in NATO’s overall defense strategy for southeastern Europe (if they have not already done so). In this political drama, the principal antagonists, Greece and Turkey, have a number of outstanding differences which on occasion have brought them to the precipice of war.

In this paper I want to examine the significance of Makarios’ combined roles of Archbishop and President of Cyprus for his style of leadership and his political oratory. In so doing I hope to shed some light on certain aspects of ‘The Cyprus Problem’ which has hitherto received scant attention by political scientists and sociologists.