The twelfth book of the military manual, Strategikon, attributed to Emperor Maurice, written about A.D. 600, contains a mini-treatise on the infantry. Although added to the work later, it seems to reflect earlier practices and equipment, some from the time of Justinian. Among the weapons to be carried by the light armed infantry it lists: ‘hollowed out wooden stocks with short arrows in small quivers, which can be fired a great distance with the bows and seriously injure the enemy’. What are these hollowed out pieces of wood, J. F. Haldon hesitantly, but correctly, identified them as crossbows. They were light enough to be carried by individual soldiers, and were clearly different from the revolving ballistae mounted on wagons spoken of in the next chapter (6) of this little treatise.

It is often suggested that Digenes is in some way connected with oral poetry, whether the oral folk poetry of the modern ‘acritic’ ballads or the type of oral epic tradition identified by Milman Parry and A. B. Lord in the Homeric poems and in modern Yugoslavia. Some clarification of the possible role of oral tradition in the composition and transmission of Digenes now seems overdue, and in this paper I propose to examine the texts of the poem in the light of recent work on ‘oral literature’, so as to define more precisely in what sense any of these can be described as ‘oral’, and then, more tentatively, to suggest a possible framework for the growth and transmission of the poem which might account for these results.

Between 1891 and 1898 the indefatigable Greek archivist A. Papa-dopoulos-Kerameus published in five volumes the , The Analects of Jerusalemite Gleanings, in which he edited a large number of texts and short listings of documents dealing specifically with the history of the Greek patriarchate of Jerusalem and more generally with the broader historical frame of reference. Despite the richness of the documentation which his publications revealed the scholarly world has taken little notice of this rich source of materials for the history of the Jerusalem patriarchate as well as for the details of Ottoman administration of the region. The present state and disposition of the manuscript collections of the patriarchate are not known to me and in contrast to the collections of the Greek patriarchate of Alexandria and of Mount Sinai I am not aware of any detailed program of exploitation and systematic description of this collection.

The texts which are being published here for the first time are part of a group of drafts conserved in the Cavafy Archive, which George Savidis first brought to light; they are poems ‘which Cavafy did not have time to finish, and which he was considering with distress during the last months of his life. Carefully preserved by the poet himself in makeshift dossiers, each with its provisional title and the date, they cover the period from 1918 to 1932 and, together with the nearly completed drafts of a few already published poems… and of some unpublished but completed poems, offer us a unique, unexpected, extremely moving image of the stages of Cavafy’s creation’. Among these unfinished poems, which number approximately thirty in all, there are five that treat of the emperor Julian the Apostate; these are the ones which we are presenting here, with the dual aim of making accessible in the future this new evidence of Cavafy’s interest in Julian (about which Professor Bowersock writes in this same volume), and of offering a sample of the complete edition of the drafts, which Professor Savidis has authorized me to prepare.

The publication of five poems, hitherto unknown, by the poet Cavafy - all on the theme of Julian the Apostate - and the projected edition of his reading notes on Gibbon’s Decline and Fall illuminate not only the poet’s obsession with Julian but also the principles of his craft. It is perhaps not too presumptuous for an historian to attempt an assessment of Cavafy’s work on Julian in the light of the rich new material, for he is said himself to have declared that he was an historical poet: This remark finds confirmation in a critique from May 1927, written earlier by the poet or by a sympathetic associate, with a threefold categorization of Cavafy’s oeuvre into Of the sensual and historical categories it is said that there is sometimes so great a degree of overlapping that classification becomes difficult but not impossible. Several of the Julian poems prove this point.

In the introduction to Angelos Sikelianos: Selected Poems, the translators speak of Sikelianos’s ‘mythological attitude… toward life’ and of his conception of myth not so much ‘as a rhetorical or metaphorical device but as a spontaneous creation of the human soul directed toward the revelation of a hidden spiritual life’, in short, of mythology as a kind of religion closely related to Schelling’s perception of the function of myth. These remarks, written originally some years ago, may have their just proportion of truth, but in keeping with most introductory remarks, they strike me as rather too general, rather too undiscriminating when one brings them face to face with Sikelianos’s practice at different moments of his career. I want to try to be more discriminating by considering the role of myth - specifically ancient Greek myth - in the poet’s work both early and late in his career. I think it is a changing role, perhaps not in his fundamental association of gods with a contemporary landscape and his revelation of those mysteries that lie hidden in our everyday lives, but in the mode of this association and this revelation, and in the depth of their poetic significance.

Surrealism as a full-blown artistic movement, or, as many of its exponents preferred to see it, a full-blown way of life, was very much a French product. The line of descent from Jarry’s Ubu (1896), via the self-conscious modernism of Apollinaire and Blaise Cendrars, to the Dadaist activities of 1916 represents the continuation of that semi-official anti-culture which had existed throughout nineteenth-century France. With the destruction of the officially sanctioned culture of Nationalism and Catholic conformism in the débâcle of the First World War, there was a sudden vacuum in French intellectual circles which the anti-culture was quite ready to fill. In the words of an early member of the movement, Roger Vailland: ‘Surrealism was not a literary school. It was above all a common ground and meeting-place for young petit-bourgeois intellectuals particularly aware of the futility of every activity expected of them by their background and their era’.

The Modern Greek particle ná has two main uses, as a subordinating particle and as a deictic particle. In this first use, it occurs with verbs in a variety of complement structures, as in (1), as well as with some apparent main-clause verbs, as in (2), that have special (i.e. non-declarative) illocutionary force, and may be derivable from underlying abstract complement structures:

In 1956 Manos Hadzidakis composed music for a movie entitled , ‘Hurdy-Gurdy, Poverty and Self-Esteem’. While the film itself enjoyed a moderate success, one of the songs from it, ‘Carnation over the ear’, became enormously popular all over Greece. It was in the form of a modern folksong, and the refrain contained some words which have a direct bearing on the theme I wish to develop here:

‘hit your tambourine, babe,/you Turkish Gypsy girl!’

‘Venizelos himself is as you know the most orderly and conservative of revolutionaries but many of his followers are not.’ This statement, included in a June 1917 telegram to the Foreign Office by Lord Granville, Britain’s diplomatic representative to the Greek Provisional Government in Thessaloniki, provides an important guide for understanding much of Eleftherios Venizelos’ political career. Loyal to the basic principles of turn-of-the-century European liberalism, Venizelos nonetheless committed himself to extremist initiatives and authoritarian methods on several occasions. And despite pressures for more radical action by supporters, Venizelos generally tried to contain the extent of his campaigns for political change. Bearing these broader points in mind, along with his constant attention to Greece’s relations with the European powers, it is also possible to understand Venizelos’ attitudes towards the establishment of a republic in Greece. His controversial role regarding this question, at times seemingly erratic, becomes clearer with a close examination of his private statements, many of which are recorded in his correspondence with trusted friends and colleagues and in the dispatches of foreign diplomats to whom he expressed his thoughts.