In recent studies of Byzantine political comment and particularly of opposition to imperial policy the period after Justinian has received a certain amount of space. But the reigns of Justin II and Tiberius II are still neglected by comparison with that of their predecessor, while the spell exercised by Procopius’s Secret History tends to dominate all approaches to contemporary political attitudes. The fascination of the Secret History for modern scholars has, too, inclined them to look only at the negative aspects of political criticism, and to fix their attention on what seem to be ‘mainstream’ writers in the tradition of Procopian history. I want here to try to demonstrate the limitations of such an approach by means of an analysis of the literary sources available for these two reigns. It may be that in the end both reigns must remain imperfectly understood; yet the policies and character of the unhappy Justin II evoked violent excesses of praise and blame and provided an inevitable foil for the well-meaning and amiable Tiberius. Kaiserkritik in East Rome is a concept which needs closer study, and the history of this short period demonstrates that it must be sought in a range of sources which genuinely reflects the spectrum of Byzantine life. There were certain common literary features about the critique of emperors in more formal political works; but political criticism did not confine itself to classical histories, and I suspect that the attitudes revealed by the more popular sources are more interesting and more important. Modern study of Byzantine Kaiserkritik has been neither sufficiently wide-ranging in scope nor sensitive enough to the interaction of genuine opinion with literary form.

The chronology of Byzantine history in the middle of the seventh century is obscure and confused. Among the unsettled problems is the date of the early Arab raids into Asia Minor after the Arabs completed their conquest of Palestine and Syria in 640. The scanty Greek and Oriental Christian sources need supplementation from the Arabic ones. Although Charles C. Torrey published his edition of the Futūḥ Miṣr or History of the Conquest of Egypt, North Africa and Spain by Ibn ‘Abd al-Hakam more than fifty years ago, Byzantinists do not appear to have consulted the important section on Egypt which has not been fully translated into a western language. Yet Ibn ‘Abd al-Hakam, who was born c. 798-9 and who died in 871, is a significant and early historical authority. He provides a short reference to an Arab expedition against Amorium in the year A.H. 23 (A.D. 644): ‘… according to Layth b. Sa’d [and] he said ‘Wahb b. ‘Umayr was commander of the forces of Egypt in the Amorium expedition [fī ghazwati ‘Ammūriyata] in the year twenty-three and the commander of the forces of Syria [was] Abu’l-A’war al-Sulamī’.’

Historians of literature have not been kind to the Byzantine learned romance, least of all to Eustathios Makrembolites’ Hysmine and Hysminias, written in the second half of the twelfth century. As early as 1670, P. D. Huet wrote: ‘… rien n’est plus froid, rien n’est plus plat, rien n’est plus ennuyeux: nulle bienseance, nulle vray-semblance, nulle conduite; c’est le travail d’un escolier, ou de quelque chetif sophiste, qui meritoit d’estre escolier toute sa vie’. Krumbacher calls it ‘ein in nervösen Windungen aufgeführter stilistischer Eiertanz’; and Rohde considers its only originality to be that it is ‘die echt byzantinische Verquickung von süsslicher Ziererei mit wahrhaft ungeschlachter Rohheit des Wesens, welche sie überall merken lassen’. As recently as 1967, B. Perry curtly dismisses all four Byzantine learned romances in one paragraph as ‘slavish imitations of Achilles Tatius and Heliodorus …written in the twelfth century by miserable pedants’

Those portions of the Angevin archives at Naples which had survived earlier disasters were destroyed in 1943, Yet documents issued during the fourteenth century by the various Neapolitan branches of the Angevin dynasty can still be discovered in private archives and elsewhere. Such texts are particularly important when they concern Latin Greece for which the sources are strictly limited. The hitherto unknown act published here shows Angevin administrations at work both on Corfu, where the Latins had established Neapolitan institutions, and at Naples, where the Angevin Princes of Achaea and Taranto kept their archives. This document throws light both on the early genealogy of the Tocco and on the way in which the family initiated the acquisition of its extensive possessions in Greece and the Ionian islands; it contributes to the reconstruction of the history of the Tocco family during the decades before the period described in their family chronicle, the first folios of which are missing so that it now effectively begins around 1375. In the case of Corfu in the early fourteenth century, the existing accounts are based in part on exceptionally unsatisfactory materials in the shape of confirmations of privileges granted to the Jewish community. These confirmations, which were issued around 1370 and which contained copies of earlier documents, were preserved in the archives of the Corfu synagogue. They were available to the nineteenth-century Corfiote scholar Andreas Moustoxydes in certified copies translated into what J. A. C. Buchon, to whom Moustoxydes ‘communicated’ his papers, described as ‘detestable Italian’. Moustoxydes used these documents in a careless way, with misprints and contradictions, while Buchon’s versions of what they contained vary from those of Moustoxydes; any control of their content is now impossible since the archives at Corfu, including those of the Jewish community, were destroyed in 1943. Reliable information such as that provided by the document of 1345 preserved in the Tocco family archives and published below is, therefore, especially valuable.

In a recent article Professor CI. Cahen pointed out various problems resulting from the history of the region of Kastamonu, which on account of its remoteness from the political centres attracted little attention from the chroniclers. One of the problems is the incompatibility of the narratives of the oriental sources and the writings of the Byzantine historian George Pachymeres with respect to some events of the reign of the Seljuk Sultan Masud II: Pachymeres while referring to the history of Kastamonu produces a certain Ali Amourios, his brother Nasir ed-din — a person of lesser importance—and their father, whom he also names Amourios. The same Amourios and his sons are also mentioned by Nikephoros Gregoras, who, however, passes over in silence the sons’ names.

The epic is a cultural phenomenon (if not a trait) represented in ancient, medieval, and modern Greek literature, both oral and written. The question naturally arises whether there is any continuity in this genre in Greece from one age to the next, from ancient to modern times. We can seek an answer on a number of levels, but for this brief paper I have limited myself to two: narrative pattern (or, the type of the hero), and the formula, the phraseology of the poetry.

This paper deals with the influence exerted by a host language (Greek) upon a minority language in Greece (Romany). It is based on oral data which I collected in 1973-4 in the suburb of Agia Varvara a few miles north-west of Athens where several hundred Gypsies have long resided. After describing the pertinent sociological factors which regulate the interaction of Greeks and Gypsies in this community, I shall discuss the linguistic evidence which is mainly drawn from convergent vocabulary and idiom but not exclusively; there are at least strong hints that some influence may also have been exerted by Greek on the phonological and the morphological level.

1. On 29 April 1933 Cavafy died in Alexandria, the city in which he was born. There is some reason for satisfaction in this. Visitors to his apartment on the second floor of 10 Rue Lepsius knew how self-contained Cavafy’s small and familiar world in Alexandria was. Rue Lepsius was home for the last twenty-six years of Cavafy’s life: ‘Below, the brothel caters for the flesh. And there is the church [St. Savvas’s] which forgives sin. And there is the hospital where we die.’ The first floor of 10 Rue Lepsius never catered to Cavafy’s flesh, but the church forgave his sins, and he died in the hospital. He could have died in an hospital in Athens where he had gone the year before for treatment of cancer of the throat. He stayed there for a time at the Hôtel Cosmopolite, and from Kifissiá he found the sight of Hymettos and the mountains to the north ‘boring’. He returned home to die, ‘an Alexandrian of the Alexandrians’, an epitaph he very nearly composed for himself.

The image of the circle recurs again and again, in a wide range of motifs, in Palamas’ poetry. Indeed, some areas of his poetry seem to exhibit a positive preoccupation with circular images of both nature and artifice, the most frequently occurring of which are the sun, moon, crown/garland ring the simple circle and the girdle of embrace Chains also appear to function in some poems as symbols of encirclement. The majority of the contexts in which these images occur are metaphysical in theme and a great number of the images themselves are associated with ideas of daemonic power over Man. The question of the psychological motivation that underlies the symbolism of such images as the ‘ring’ and ‘chains’ in Palamas’ poetry has been discussed to some extent by most of his critics. What I intend to do here is to examine the poet’s use of the whole range of ‘circle’ imagery as an aesmetic device and as a form of symbolism which he clearly considered to convey most effectively his ideas about his own dilemma and about the meaning of existence around him. I shall deal only with those images which can be called ‘specifically’ circular in that they are given expression by one or more of the key words discussed and are not just vague suggestions of some such idea.

During the years of the German Occupation (1941-4), Nikos Kazantzakis was confined to the island of Aegina. Unable to participate in the Resistance, he vowed (a) to re-enter politics as soon as the Germans left, and (b) to devote the years of enforced confinement to liberating himself from all his manuscripts. But the second part of the vow was not as selfish as it might seem, nor was it unrelated to the first. This is because the intellectual challenges which Kazantzakis set himself during the Occupation were almost all concerned with his country’s welfare. More specifically, they were an attempt to investigate, define, and evoke that elusive quality ‘Greekness’ in preparation for the time when he and his compatriots, once again free, would presumably be attempting to apply their self-knowledge to the everyday problems of reconstituting the nation’s political life.

The name of Nikos Kazantzakis continues to arouse controversy. Much of it, especially in Greece, is political in nature and revolves around the confusion concerning Kazantzakis’ relation to Marxism. The confusion arises because of the ways Kazantzakis’ activities and writings have been interpreted. For example, even before the latest military regime in Greece and while he was still alive, Kazantzakis was anathema to the royalists. Consecutive right wing governments, both before and after World War II, waged war against him and his books; he was called immoral, red, and a Bolshevik troublemaker. In the fall of 1924, in his native Crete, he was actually arrested. In the spring of 1928, in Athens, he was accused of being a Russian agent. Yet his books were banned in Russia—particularly those he wrote about that country—and the Greek Communist party refused to include him in its ranks, labelling him bourgeois, decadent and even fascist. In fact, his offer to join the communist controlled resistance in the 1940s was rejected. Such responses neidier prevented the International Peace Committee from offering him the Peace Award in Vienna in 1956 nor did it bar the Chinese communists from inviting him to the Peoples’ Republic of China as one of their ‘chosen Foreigners’ and, upon the occasion of his death in 1957, from praising him: ‘Kazantzakis was not only a great writer. He was actively interested in social and political issues. He was also a devotee of peace’. More recently, views about him have ranged from those in which he is considered an egomaniac, oblivious to the fate of others, a man whom ‘the really important things—political tyranny, social injustice, economic exploitation—interested … the least’, to those in which he is seen as an advocate of equality, peace and the cooperation of the world’s people, one who to the end of his career sided with the ‘ideas of genuine Democracy and Socialism’.