It is the purpose of this paper to challenge some traditional assumptions about authorship and style in twelfth-century Byzantium, and to present a new, if tentative, interpretation of the fourth Prodromic Poem, which may have important implications for an understanding of literary perceptions of every-day life in twelfth-century Constantinople, as well as for the ways in which texts can be read.

In the ninth book of the Alexiad, Anna Comnene tells the story of the simultaneous revolts against her father Alexios which broke out in Crete and Cyprus in the year 1093. The rising in Crete was shortlived, as the Cretans changed their minds and murdered their leader on hearing the news that the emperor’s fleet was approaching. Of the Cypriot revolt, however, Anna has the following tale to tell: The Cypriots, under their leader Rapsomatis, at first refused to fight after the emperor’s forces landed in Cyprus, apparently expecting to talk their way out of a conflict. Rapsomatis, a complete novice in the arts of war, had embarked on the revolt more as a game than in earnest; and was easily defeated by Manuel Voutoumitis, captured and sent to the emperor’s brother-in-law John Doukas who was in charge of the campaign.

General interest in the ‘everyday’ life of past societies and cultures, particularly when they are felt to be relevant to our own civilisation and its history, is a widespread and usually taken-for-granted phenomenon of our times. Books on subjects such as ‘Everyday life in Greece and Rome’ or ‘Daily life in Carthage’, consisting of popularised (and often, perhaps inevitably,’ rather oversimplified, and even muddled) renderings of more esoteric scholarly research,-are regular additions to the vast amount of ‘serious’ and ‘non-fictional’ literature printed each year and produced by the world’s (and more particularly European and North American) publishing houses.

A collection of mostly eleventh- and twelfth-century epigrams in the late thirteenth- or early fourteenth-century manuscript ‘Marc. gr. 524’ was partially published in 1911 by Lampros in expectation of a definitive edition by Konstantin Horna. Unfortunately this edition never appeared. A high proportion of material in the collection relates to art and in the past Byzantine art historians have been reproached for their neglect of such evidence. Some of the most descriptive pieces are now well known, having been published for their art-historical interest by Cyril Mango and more recently by Paul Magdalino and Robert Nelson and, as historical documents, by Wolfram Hörandner.

The Cambridge and Bradford Boeotia expedition, which began systematic work in 1979 following a reconnaissance in the previous summer, constitutes an attempt to provide a framework for understanding the development of the society and the culture of the area from prehistoric to modern times. It is anticipated that the survey will take some ten years, with work by specialists in history, palynology, the history of vegetation, statistics, artifact analysis, and so on, all of which will supplement an archaeological surface survey. What follows is an initial report on the findings of the social-anthropological work carried out during short summer field-trips in the first five years.

‘Waiting for the Barbarians’ is probably the most discussed of Cavafy’s poems after ‘The God abandons Antony’. Its sources, its date of composition and its diachronic symbolism, along with Cavafy’s unfathomable intentions, have generated a large number of interpretations and debates. Reading the poem today one cannot escape from these layers of interpretation, a kind of metadiscourse which regulates the new approaches either compliant or defiant to those already existent. It seems that the accumulated interpretations of a literary text sometimes discomfort those who seek stable and obvious meanings rather than a multiplicity of opinions and conflicting approaches. The very bulk of scholarship related to a certain poem or poet discourages a new reading and makes the critic hesitant and apprehensive. Nevertheless the diversity of interpretive approaches helps us both to realize their relativity and to ascribe them entirely to the various interpreters.

The convulsions which began to shake the Greek military regime with the first student protests at the end of 1972 and which reached their climax in 1973 with the uprising at the Polytechnic in November, have been exhaustively analysed and discussed. However, they have always been viewed either through the prism of internal political developments or in the light of events in Cyprus. The international context remains largely unexplored.

The only element which has been taken into account is the ‘American factor’, yet the reasons for the change in American policy towards the regime in the Autumn of 1973 have not been sufficiently analysed. Such testimony as we have comes from representatives of the Greek or American governments. Spyros Markezinis, the junta’s civilian Prime Minister, attributes the fall of his government to the war in the Middle East. Certainly, Kissinger in his memoirs does not conceal his displeasure at the junta’s refusal to facilitate the transportation of war materiel to Israel at the most critical phase of the Arab-Israeli War in the Autumn of 1973.

Readers of the judicious paper by John Haldon on ‘“Jargon” vs. “the Facts”?’ Byzantine History-Writing and Contemporary Debates’ will have looked in vain for comment on the status of visual evidence. It is not that art is entirely unmentioned — a reference is made to the history of art and of cultural production in general as belonging to the history of the human past. But no consideration is given to the role of the visual as communication in Byzantine society or as a particular kind of ‘unwritten’ figural evidence which might form a characteristic arena of expression separate from the discourses of texts. Yet it is clear that one outcome of the current theoretical debates on how to read texts and images has been a new questioning of the meanings of visual evidence and of its value in history writing. Contrary to the belief of some historians, methodological changes in history writing have a direct impact on art history writing too. The most obvious result has been an increasing emphasis on ways of understanding how images worked in Byzantine society in preference to an exclusive concentration on the categorization and arrangement of art in line with modern and often anachronistic notions. The inevitable outcome is that the study of art can no longer be considered the preserve of the traditional art historian.