The concept of a prosperous late antique eastern Mediterranean has become well-established in scholarship. Lycia (Turkey) is considered to be one such prosperous region in particular. This article questions the notion of ‘prosperity’ and its application to the Lycian region and argues that only certain coastal areas experienced what might be considered ‘prosperity’ in this period. Moreover, it is argued that some settlements, specifically those of the interior, did not experience ‘prosperity’, but may have even declined. Thus, a generalized application of ‘prosperity’ should be approached with caution as it masks nuances in the settlement development and economy of micro-regions.

This article is a detailed critical review of all the major scholarly publications in the rapidly expanding field of the Justinianic Plague published from 2000 through 2018. It updates the article in this journal by Dionysios Stathakopoulos from 2000, while also providing a detailed appraisal of the state of the field across all disciplines, including: literary studies, archaeology, DNA evidence, climatology, and epidemiology. We also identify the current paradigm for the Justinianic Plague as well as survey possible avenues forward for the field in the future.1

The scholia to the canonical manuscripts of the Collection in Fifty Titles and Collection in Fourteen Titles serve as an excellent case study in the potentials of marginalia to illuminate historical narratives and broaden our understanding of how the Byzantines encountered and read their traditional texts. This article explores these potentials by a) offering an overview and taxonomy of the canonical scholia; b) (re)discovering a Macedonian ‘proto-commentator’ hiding in plain sight in the margins of one manuscript; c) sketching some of the scholia's hermeneutic particularities in comparison to the twelfth-century canonical commentaries.

A pair of anonymous rhetorical exercises in Greek, dating perhaps to the eleventh century, contain a refutation and a confirmation of the myth of Ganymede, in which the young Trojan shepherd is abducted by Zeus in the form of an eagle to live with him in heaven. This article analyses the opposing arguments about divinity and sexuality in the two exercises, argues that they contain a unique aetiological account of the violet, and situates them in the reception history of Ganymede.

This paper draws attention to the twelfth-century French romance Partonopeus de Blois and its author's original use of the name ‘Byzantium’ instead of conventional ‘Greek’ or ‘Constantinopolitan Empire’. It investigates roots of the modern-day belief that the term has been applied as a designation of the medieval state only since the sixteenth century. A linguistic and literary analysis challenges the premise and explores possible scenarios of the name's introduction into the Old French text. A suggested interpretation de-emphasizes the popular east-west ideological context in favour of simpler story-telling concerns.

This article explores the narrative strategies employed in the monumental painting of the middle and late Byzantine period and considers whether the different methods of narration and the degree of narrativity can reveal anything about the function of the work, its creators, its audience and finally its period; in other words whether a narratological approach to visual representation could be a tool for analysing a work of art in socio-historical terms. This is determined firstly by identifying similar narrative structures in contemporary literature and secondly by looking for information on how contemporary viewers ‘read’ the ‘story’ in monumental narrative paintings.

For John Duffy

This article explores the fate of the Stone of Unction — the marble slab upon which, according to tradition, the dead body of Christ had been anointed for burial — in twelfth-century Byzantium. Focusing upon the Stone's association with Manuel I Komnenos, the article examines the imperial handling of this Passion relic in relation to broader trends in the devotional culture of the contemporary Byzantine élite. The special bond between the emperor and the relic, it is argued, should be seen as a manifestation of the pervasive desire, much in evidence during the Komnenian era, to personalise and even privatise the sacred.

This article focuses on what hitherto unpublished land grant documents from the Malta archives of the Order of St John tell us about the countryside of Rhodes during the fourteenth century. In so doing, an attempt is made to discern trends in various aspects of these land grants, utilizing quantitative weightings where possible. We see that the relationship between the Latins and the Greeks in fourteenth century Rhodes was on the whole amicable and mutually rewarding. The countryside of Rhodes appears to have enjoyed one of the more harmonious relationships between Latins and Greeks to be found in the post-1204 Byzantine world.

This article examines Joseph Bryennios’ Forty-Nine Chapters, a text that has been hitherto explored mostly for the information on social practices in late Byzantium. The analysis of the text's rhetorical techniques indicates that Bryennios departed significantly from other contemporary collections of kephalaia which relied on the inherited wisdom of gnomologia. I argue that the pervasiveness of figurative language and vivid analogies in the Forty-Nine Chapters shaped his specific didacticism and unveiled the author's acquaintance with the technique of rhetorical amplification.

This article discusses the stay in Greece of Italian and Polish political refugees of the 1830–1 and 1848–9 European revolutions. The article depicts the human geography of the refugees and examines the experience of exile both collectively and individually. Apart from studying the émigré communities as a whole in Athens, Patras and Syros, this paper also analyses the problems and expectations of specific refugees in Greece after 1849 (e.g. Antonio Morandi, Marco Antonio Canini, Oronzio Spinazzolla). This contribution thus adds to our understanding of both Greece under King Otto and the Mediterranean by highlighting aspects of transnational mobility and interaction of peoples and ideas in the mid-nineteenth century.

This case-study concerns Greek Aristotelianism in the seventeenth century. More specifically, my article deals with the impact of neo-Aristotelianism upon the formation of the philosophical curriculum of the Greek-speaking world during that period. I examine aspects of the – rather understudied – influence exerted by Cesare Cremonini on Theophilos Korydalleus. The terms ‘authentic interpreters’/‘authentic interpretation’ and ‘νεώτεροι’ in Theophilos’ works of natural philosophy not only highlight the influence of Cremonini, but also hint at critical views held by the former, as well as terminology which is either absent or has a different meaning in treatises of the latter.

This essay examines the metaphorical use of musical terms in Greek aesthetic discourse during the interwar period by illuminating a crucial yet neglected moment in the reception of anti-rationalistic philosophical and aesthetic tendencies that had greatly influenced European modernist literature since the late nineteenth century. In particular, it points out the ways the reception of Bergsonian theories in Greece co-determined the formation of a new concept of Modern Greek narrative fiction, clearing the ground for the first modernist attempts to ‘musicalize’ fiction. The essay thus proposes a broader perception of the term ‘musicalization’ than the mere imitation of musical techniques in narrative texts, since the aesthetic discourse features not only actual music but also ‘music’ as an aesthetic category synonymous with transcendence, ambiguity and fluidity.

The historiography of the Greek civil war has made significant progress during the past decade, but the origins, role and activities of paramilitaries remain under-researched. Most studies have focused on the period of the ‘white terror’ and explored the collusion between the state and the paramilitary groups. Although such studies have advanced our understanding of this turbulent period, they have not discussed important issues such as the motivation of the rank and file members, the sociopolitical networks used to recruit and mobilize support and the diverse conditions under which militias emerge. The article will address this lacuna and provide new insights into the origins, development and legacies of paramilitarism.

This article recounts the little-known story of the ‘Literary Evenings’ (1945–6), a series of literary recitals staged at the Greek National Theatre and organized by members of the Generation of the 1930s. Set against the background of intense political rivalry that followed the Varkiza Agreement, the ‘Literary Evenings’ capture the post-war aspirations for the popularization of high culture. Drawing upon hitherto unexplored archival material, this article aims to offer a new, historically informed understanding of the Generation of the 1930s, while also directing attention to the aural consumption of literary texts as an unacknowledged force behind canon formation.