ABSTRACTS OF PAPERS
SESSIONS
1. Workshop Practices: Artists at Work
II. Orthodoxy, Heterodoxy and Exegesis
III. Byzantium and the Steppes
IV. Anna Komnena: Her Alexiad and its Cultural Context
V. Venice and the East
VI. Coins and Ceramics in their Archeological Context
VII. Architectural Studies in Honor of Richard Krautheimer
VIII. Genre and Cliche in Byzantine literature
IX. Late Empire
X. New Technology for Byzantine Studies
XI. Georgia
XII. Byzantine Romances
XIII. The Legacy of Byzantium
XIV. Late Antique and Byzantine Manuscripts
XV. Cultural Literacy and Cultural Ritual
XVI. Urban Landscape
XVII Pioneers of Byzantine Studies in America
XVIII. Palaeography and Codicology
XIX. Walls
XX. Early Christian and Byzantine Church Decoration
XXI. Hagiography
XXII Late Antique and Byzantine Decorative Arts
XXIII. Barbarians and Romans
XXIV. Syria
I. WORKSHOP PRACTICES: ARTISTS AT WORK Co-Chairs: Carolyn Connor (University of North Carolina) and Rebecca Come (Bates College)
Evidence for Ivory and Bone Working in Late Antique Rome: The Palatine East Excavation
Archer St. Clair (Rutgers University)
Excavation of the north east slope of the Palatine hill, immediately southwest of the arch of Constantine, was undertaken between 1989 and 1993 under the joint sponsorship of the American Academy in Rome and the Soprintendenza archeologica di Roma. It revealed a major building complex in the form of a late antique aristocratic domus and various ancillary structures. The domus rests on and incorporates Republican, first century A.D. and Antonine remains.
Among the most important finds from the excavation are over 1500 bone and ivory objects, constituting the largest and most varied collection unearthed from Rome, and indeed the entire western Mediterranean area. The majority were concentrated in a series of layers in stratigraphic sequence securely datable, on the basis of coinage and pottery evidence, from the second quarter of the fourth century through the first half of the fifth century A.D. Each layer displays a good degree of chronological coherence and probably represents no more than several decades.
The objects excavated are primarily artifacts, including pins, needles, ligulae, handles, gaming pieces and dice. There are also plaques carved in relief and intaglio, pyxis fragments, jewelry, and dolls. Bone is predominant, but ivory is represented in all classes of finds. Of primary importance is extensive evidence for the working of bone and ivory in the form of blanks, partially finished objects, and discards, as well as debris from bone and ivory carving including discarded articular ends of long bones, cut outs, offcuts, and lathing and hand carving debris.
Although the craft of ivory carving has received considerable attention in recent years, and meticulous study of finished objects has dramatically increased our understanding of carving techniques, there is surprisingly little evidence for actual working procedures as regards ivory and bone. The Palatine East finds provide the first evidence of this sort for the city of Rome, long presumed to be a center of ivory carving during the late antique period. Documentation and evaluation of this material is in its early stages, but its significance for the study of workshop practices, patterns of consumption, and carving techniques is clear.
The Case for a Flexible Approach: Floor Mosaic Workshop Practices
Christine Kondoleon (Worcester Art Museum)
Recent scholarship has addressed the techniques of mosaic artists with renewed interest. Scholars, however, remain divided about the the exact sources for mosaic images. Many support the notion that stock images circulated among the workshops through the medium of model books; others argue only for the use of cartoons or drawings assembled by designers for specific commissions. Mistakes and omissions, often the result of careless copying or misunderstanding of the model, provide evidence for artistic transmission. Although some confusions are inevitably due to the limitations of the artists, certain modifications reflect a dynamic interplay between the designer, the craftsmen, and their models. We know that the mosaic workshop was divided into designers and craftsmen from the epigraphic and literary evidence.
Compositional series, such as 84 examples of Orpheus mosaics, have been used to demonstrate the existence of model books. Another such series is The Triumph of Dionysos, one of the most frequently illustrated themes in ancient art. Twenty-five floor mosaics have thus far been discovered, while there are scores of sarcophagi reliefs with versions of this composition. The example of the Triumph found in the banquet hall of a Roman house in Paphos, Cyprus, provides an excellent test case for the existence of model books. This paper will examine the Cypriot members of the triumphal group in light of their mosaic and sculptural parallels. As a result of this investigation, a firm impression of Roman mosaic workshop methods emerges which suggests that both sides of the model book debate may be considered accurate.
The Artist and Scribe Theodore at Work on his Psalter in 1066
John Lowden (Courtauld Institute, London)
Very few illuminated Byzantine manuscripts reveal precisely where or when they were made, never mind by whom, for whom, or why. The marginal Psalter in the British Library, MS Additional 19352 is one of the rare exceptions. As it is also a superb production of a crucial period in the history of Byzantine illumination, it merits careful study.
The proposal that the Psalter's scribe Theodore, protopresbyter of the Studios Monastery in Constantinople, was also its principal artist has been made before, but thus far without any cogent argument in support. For example, when Theodore says in the colophon on folio 208r that the book was "written and written in gold" (ypaov xai XpvaaypadgOev) by his hand, this has been understood to mean "written and illuminated." But as a significant part of the Psalter was literally written in gold, it seems to me more likely that Theodore meant exactly what he said at this point. Yet it does not follow that merely because Theodore did not say that he had painted images in the book, he had not done so. His remark has to be seen within a scribal convention which overlooks the presence of images.
The key to identifying the extent of Theodore's contribution is to step away from the well-worn path that involves concentrating attention on the supposed genealogical relationship between particular images to the Psalms in this book and in the other marginal Psalters.
Instead, it is those features of planning and content which make Theodore's manuscript unique that need to be considered. Careful examination of how the Theodore Psalter was produced leaves no doubt that Theodore himself must have organized and executed the book's intricate relationship between texts and images. This is particularly apparent in those elements specifically included to promote the Abbot of Studios, for whom the book was made by Theodore. But it is also evident in carefully contrived adjustments to the layout and illustration of some of the Psalms.
Every Byzantine manuscript provides an enormous body of evidence of craftsmen at work. The possibility that scribe and artist might be one and the same person needs to be borne in mind whenever an illuminated manuscript is considered. From this point of view, the methods appropriate to the study of the Theodore Psalter have a wide application even if the manuscript itself, like every Byzantine work, is unique.
A Palaiologan Funerary Icon from Gothic Cyprus
Annemarie Weyl Carr (Southern Methodist University)
This paper explores in the person of a single painter the meeting of different cultural traditions that is often discussed in terms of workshops. It examines one work: an icon from 1356 or slightly thereafter that was produced in Nicosia, Cyprus, and is now in the Byzantine Museum there. It lets us watch a single, very gifted painter respond in the terms of his own artistic background m the requirements of a complex society in which varied traditions--local, Middle Eastern, Crusader, western European, and Byzantine--had played upon one another for a full century and a half.
The icon is the work of an excellent Palaiologan painter, the earliest Palaiologan painter we know on Cyprus and very probably a foreigner from Byzantium. Its shape is oddly tall, however, measuring 252 x 43 cm. It is one of four such panels in Nicosia; it seems clear to me that-Palaiologan as it is in style--it was designed to be hung in a Gothic architectural setting. The patrons of this hybrid are portrayed on the icon. Below Christ and two angels, two parents-Manuel Xeros the anagnostes and his wife Euphemia-present with tender gestures their daughter Maria, who died a virgin in 1356. The names, language and clothing of the family are Greek and Orthodox: Greek parents commemorated their daughter in a Gothic setting. Maria's face, moreover, has a finely inflected, portrait like quality that seems to bespeak western, perhaps Italianate, style. This is not, however, a stylistic quality. The style is Byzantine; what is exceptional is its use for a female face. Such striking individuality is more often seen in western than in Byzantine portraits of women. Our Palaiologan painter apparently responds to expectations of female portraiture nurtured in a Crusader society, but responds with the means of his own art. The prominent commemoration of a daughter, on the other hand, is something deeply rooted in the Byzantine art of Cyprus--more in Cyprus, in fact, than in Byzantium itself--, and the fact of Maria's centrality seems to have its roots locally in the Greek culture of the patrons themselves.
No less than the form, the funerary purpose of their icon is notable. Old people interviewed on Cyprus today about the customs of their youth speak again and again about dedicating icons when someone was ill or died. And icons with an overtly funerary theme do occur on Cyprus. They me, however, rare except in the Lusignau centuries, and rarer still in Orthodox art outside of Cyprus. It is in mural painting that such imagery occurs. In producing such an icon, our painter was not drawing on firmly rooted Byzantine artistic tradition. Bather, he was inventing a type of icon. The impetus to this invention seems to have come from Gothic practice. The Frankish lords of Cyprus had brought with them from Outremer the practice of the funeral stab, a stone stab with a life-sized portrait of the deceased incised upon it that was laid into the church floor above the grave. Dozens of such slabs survive from Cyprus; (mown from the late 13th century onward, they become numerous after the Black Death, at the very period of our icon. They may have prompted Manuel and Euphemia to produce their unusual, large-scale commemorative portrait of their child. Maria's curious pose, understandable either as standing up or as tying down full-length, seems m reflect the Gothic funerary stabs. If prompted by Gothic stabs, however, the painter drew upon Byzantine, not Gothic formulae. Maria wears the Orthodox wedding wreath and Byzantine court clothes, and she ties not in the Gothic praying posture, but with her arms crossed. This gesture, (known sporadically in Byzantine funerary murals from the 11th century onward and eventually adopted for the Akra Tapeinosis, was the Byzantine posture of death and resurrection. Here again the painter applies the material of his own tradition to a novel commission shaped by the interaction of multiple traditions.
The icon that resulted was not simply Byzantine; it was. certainty not Gothic; with its elegant, surety foreign painter, it is hard even to call it Cypriot. It was, however, a success: an effective response m its context. It created a type of commemorative funeral panel that became a recurrent form in the art of Lusignan Cyprus.
II. ORTHODOXY, HETERODOXY, AND EXEGESIS
Chair. Elizabeth Clark (Duke University)
Authority And Heresioiogy In The Early Church
Holly Edmisten (University of Kentucky)
Most scholars agree that the early Church was a rather unified body which was able to find the authority to effectively defeat heresy. The basis for this understanding is the claim of heresiologists such as Tertullian and Irenaeus that only they and their allies possessed apostolic authority and held the truth. Adolph Von Harnack mistakenly stated that the Church was organized "into a real confederation under the primacy of the Roman Church." Scholars since have hesitated to give Rome such a high position but most continue to view the early church as a sort of alliance with common goals and beliefs.
In fact, the pre-fourth century Church was not unified under one banner and Tertullian and Irenaeus only became representatives of the Church after their views won out more than a century later. It has been assumed that there was a standard of Orthodoxy that the early heresiologists were defending and that heretics were rejecting. Though there were certain basic beliefs held by a majority of those who called themselves Christian there was no common rule of faith accepted by all.
The techniques employed by the heresiologists expose much of the condition of the early Church. In this paper I concentrate on the ways heresiologists, both before and after Nicaea, utilized Scripture in their defense against the heretics. Before there was a standard for Orthodoxy Scripture was not used to combat heresy point by point. Hence, we find Tertullian asserting that "our claim must not be made to Scriptures." Tertullian and Irenaeus refused to pit Scripture against Scripture because there was no single accepted interpretation. After the Nicene Creed was instituted with the aid of political forces, heresiologists were able to use Scripture more confidently and effectively. With an official interpretation of Scripture Hilary of Poitiers was able to claim that "heresy does not come from Scripture but from the understanding of it..." He and other supporters of Nicaea held the "true" understanding and saw it as their duty to correct the mistakes of the heretics.
The evidence presented in this paper, essentially gathered from the writings of the four most influential heresiologists of their times; Tertullian, Irenaeus, Hilary of Poitier, and Athanasius, does damage to the claim that the early Church was a unified body with an enforcable standard of Orthodoxy.
A Star is Born: The Patrification of Athanasius
Patrick T.R. Gray (York University)
Referred to as the "star of Alexandria" by the Sixth Century, and understood to be an essential "father" of the Church--someone, that is, whose writings could be used as a standard of doctrinal orthodoxy--, Athanasius himself was unfamiliar with that very notion, and certainly possessed no such status in his own time. Patrification was a process that had to be invented.
Undoubtedly Athanasius laid the groundwork by subtly reconstructing his own role against the Arians. A part was played, too, by the Apollinarians who collected and preserved the athanasian corpus. The essential work was done by those who engaged in propaganda on behalf of Nicea in the later Fourth Century--people like Gregory of Nazianzus and Hilary of Poitiers-- who, as part of their propaganda, glorified Athanasius as the unfailing champion of orthodoxy. Indeed, the patrification of Athanasius was intimately connected with the conciliarization of Nicea.
The process was carried further by Cyril of Alexandria who, in his defence of the title "god-bearer" for Mary, was the first to impute to Athanasius not just unfailing enthusiasm for orthodoxy, but doctrinal infallibility. It was with Cyril, too, that the "one incarnate nature of the Word of God" formula, fathered upon Athanasius by his early Apollinarian champions, entered into the mainstream of theological debate, gaining much credence by virtue of its attribution to him and which, having gained that credence, made it all the more imperative for the monophysite side in subsequent debates to reaffirm Athanasius' authority as a father.
In the struggle between chalcedonians and monophysites to lay claim to the authentic patristic tradition-a struggle which by the very terms under which it took place focused unprecedented attention on, and gave unprecedented weight to, the teaching of the "fathers" who made up that tradition--, chalcedonians had no choice but to affirm with equal or greater fervour the authority of Athanasius, though the difficult task fell to them of divorcing him from the formula of the apollinarian forgery, and of explaining him as a closet diophysite. Paradoxically, then, Athanasius emerged on both sides with even greater patristic authority than he had possessed before; in the implicit canonization of certain fathers which was taking place, Athanasius enjoyed pride of place as the archetypical "father".
Justinian's Quaestor Discusses Divine and Human Law
Michael Maas (Rice University)
Junillus Africanus, who followed Tribonian as Justinian's Quaestor, wrote the Instituta Regularia Divinae Legis, a Latin treatise on biblical exegesis, at Constantinople in the early 540s. Drawing on the teachings of Paul of the Persian, a scholar of the School of Nisibis who had spoken at Constantinople, Junillus composed the Instituta at the behest of Primasius, a North African bishop in the imperial capital on church business who later would come to support Justinian in the Three Chapters Controversy.
The exegetical approach of the Instituta is that of the Antiochene school, and so it illustrates dialogue between the Syriac and Constantinopolitan realms. Junillus, however, does not parrot Theodore of Mopsuestia, a leading light of Antiochene exegesis long supposed to be his chief influence. The christology of Junillus and Paul, the supposed conduit of Theodore's ideas, was orthodox, and there are important differences in other areas. The work additionally contains material not to be clearly traced in the Antiochene exegetical tradition. Thus the door opens wider to see the Instituta as the product of a Justinianic environment.
The Three Chapters Controversy, in which Justinian anathematized Theodore's Nestorian christology, provides the immediate context for Junillus' composition. The Instituta may be seen as a pro-Justininic document, intended at least in part to support and legitimize Justinian's unpopular intervention in doctrinal affairs.
The Instituta give us the opportunity to hear the highest legal officer in Constantinople after the emperor talk about human and divine law. In his discussion of the various forms of divine government of the world, Junillus considers human government by men for their own sake, including a monarch on behalf of the state. He subordinates imperial legislation within a much grander hierarchy of divine law as revealed and illustrated in the Bible. This brings into discussion the status of imperial Roman law within a Christian scheme, an issue of considerable interest to the emperor. Junillus' treatise represents the intersection of the Roman legal tradition and the Christian exegetical tradition in a characteristically Justinianic fashion.
In collaboration with Professor David Satran of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, I am currently preparing a translation and monographic discussion of the Instituta.
The Transformation of Matter: Jewish Alchemical Arts in Late Antiquity
Naomi Janowitz (University of California, Davis)
Among the neglected rituals of Late Antique Judaism, the ones passed over the most are the alchemical rituals, or as they were called then, the "sacred arts". There are, no doubt, many reasons for this neglect of these obscure rituals designed to transform nature by transforming metals. The technical aspects of the rituals have frightened away scholars; the texts are extremely difficult to comprehend and the descriptions of the procedures obscure. Ignored by scholars of religion, the texts have been claimed by historians of science. However, the activities have scant relationship to the modern social practices and goals of science.
This paper focuses on one figure, Maria the Jewess, preserved in part by the active practitioner and compiler Zosimos (late 3rd/early 4th century), the primary source for most Greco-Roman alchemical treatises. The numerous citations of Maria found in Zosimos sketch a practitioner with a distinct personality and set of concerns. Maria is the technician's technician, offering criticism and improvements on accepted modes of operation. Zosimos preserved Maria because he held in high regard Jewish texts, especially Jewish women's texts. He repeats a widespread topos that angels passed heavenly secrets down to Jewish women, making them the repository of alchemical traditions. Jews are also important because Zosimos believes the sacred arts are a mode of sacrifice, and sacrifice was closely associated with the Hebrews.
The theme of sacrifice is important to Zosimos because he considers the sacred arts a type of sacrifice in which metal "bodies" are "cooked" in order to make them into pure spirit. Zosimos' foundation myth is the story of the fall of the first man into the body and the world of matter, leading to his subjugation to Fate. The sacred arts have the potential to reveal the processes found in nature by which this fall happened and can liberate spirit from matter. This theology places Zosimos and Maria squarely in the midst of Late Antique religious concerns; the sacred arts are the opting for a distinct ritual strategy to achieve a common religious goal.
Examining Maria's procedures and Zosimos' narrative descriptions permits us to distinguish the Late Antique sacred arts from subsequent medieval notions of alchemy which include, for example, the more familiar allegories about conception and birth. The paper attempts to locate more precisely the setting for the development of these early alchemical ideas. For the sacred arts to arise required, first, the perception that metal-working techniques were effective and, second, a well-developed religious theory of the transformative ability of sacrifice. This would place the emergence of alchemy in the first centuries C.E., rejecting the ancient notion sometimes repeated by modern scholars that alchemy has roots that go back to the third century B.C.E.
III. BYZANTIUM AND THE STEPPES
Chair.. Peter B. Golden (Rutgers University, Newark)
Hun, Horses, and Nomadism
Peter Heather (University College, London)
In 1981, Rudi Lindner published a very important article arguing that, by the time of Attila, the Huns no longer fielded a nomad cavalry army. There was, he argued, insufficient space for them to maintain sufficient numbers of animals (particularly horses, the animal of war) to maintain a nomadic lifestyle on the Great Hungarian Plain. Rather, they had abandoned nomadism as part of a general adaptation to life on the fringes of the Roman world. I would accept much of the overall historical vision underlying his argument, but will argue in this paper the case for a slightly different view of the nature of the Huns' adaptation.
Central to Lindner's arguments is the whole question of numbers. The sources give him total numbers for the armies of Attila of up to half a million men. If these were truly an army of nomadic cavalrymen, they would require at least 5 million horses (allowing 10 remounts per soldier), and each horse about 25 acres of grazing (in the conditions prevalent on the Hungarian Plain, Attila's base in the 440s). The Hungarian Plain, however, has a maximum of 42,400 kms of grazing, enough only for a maximum of 320,000 horses, and probably in reality a mere 150,000. There was thus simply insufficient space on the Hungarian Plain to support enough horses for Attila's armies to have consisted of cavalry. Hence, in Lindner's view, Hunnic armies of the mid-fifth century must have been largely sedentarized.
Apart from the fact that quite a lot is made of highly questionable overall figures for the size of Attila's army, the argument misses one extremely important point. Attila's forces did not consist solely of Huns, but of contingents from a wide range of subject peoples, many of them Germanic, fighting at least partly as infantry: Suevi, Sciri, Goths, Gepids, Rugians, etc. As Priscus' evidence makes clear, these groups had been included in the Hunnic Empire as involuntary subordinates.
This fundamental point prompts two observations in response to Lindner's argument. First, on Lindner's calculations, the Hungarian Plain would have had room for 150,000-300,000 horses, enough therefore for 15,000-30,000 Huns still operating as cavalry. I would not myself have thought, comparing these figures to other indications of numbers in the Migration Period, that there ever had been more than this number of Huns. I see no need, therefore, to conclude that the Huns proper--as opposed to their Germanic subjects--had abandoned use of the horse.
Second, proper nomads graze a range of animals for various needs; every hungry horse is the luxury item, and the animal particularly of war; other animals cater for everyday sustenance. On the edge of the Roman Empire, warfare became infinitely more profitable than it could ever have been on the Steppe proper. The luxurious gold jewelry of Hunnic period archaeological finds, and the huge sums of money Attila, in particular, extracted from Byzantium in the 440s, are very well documented. We also know that the Huns exploited the economic as well as the military potential of their Germanic subjects.
War against Byzantium and to dominate Germanic tribes thus opened up quite unprecedented sources of wealth, and in the process rendered a wide range of grazing animals redundant. By the same token, it also made the horse indispensable, since military success was the route to all this wealth, and the horse was central to nomadic warfare. I would suggest it more likely, therefore, that Hunnic adaptation to their new environment consisted not of getting rid of their horses, but actually of their other animals, and that, by this means, the Huns turned themselves from general nomads into military specialists.
Such a process of development was double-edged. It opened up the riches of Rome, but also made warfare, successful warfare, structurally necessary to the existence of the Hunnic Empire: both to bring in supplies of wealth and to keep unwilling subjects occupied. I would suggest that this explains the Empire's sudden collapse. Continuously successful warfare was not a practical possibility. As soon as military expansion was.checked, the Hunnic Empire could not but unravel.
The Nature of War on the Steppes, c400-650
Hugh Elton (Trinity College, CT)
During the fifth to seventh centuries, the Byzantine army spent much of its time fighting armies from across the Danube. The Huns threatened Constantinople, the Avars besieged the city. This paper addresses the question of how the steppe origins of many of the enemies of Constantinople determined the character of warfare on the steppes.
The armies of the Huns and Avars are traditionally thought of as being composed of horse archers. However, controversial doubts as to the nature of steppe warfare have been raised by Lindner. On economic grounds, he argues that there was not enough pasture in eastern Europe to support the Hun armies. Although he is right in arguing that Hun armies were not composed entirely of horse archers, his estimates of the numbers of Huns involved and their equine requirements are excessive.
Lindner's arguments draw attention to the stereotyping of our sources. Although most Hun and Avar armies did not consist entirely of horse archers, these mesmerized ancient authors, who often preferred to recycle existing descriptions than examine the contemporary nature of their enemies. Thus the accounts of Jerome and Zosimus and Sidonius Apollinaris of the Huns were derived from Eunapius. Less stereotyped are the accounts of Prisms, who visited the Huns in the 440s, Procopius and Theophylact. Their accounts of the societies of the steppes and their military practices do not completely fit the ancient preconceptions of such societies.
These accounts need to be viewed in light of modern anthropological work on nomads and their societies, which enable us to interpret both the literary accounts and the archaeological evidence. Armies of this type pose specific economic problems for their society, requiring large areas of pasture. In warfare they had both weaknesses and strengths. Large numbers of horses and the consequent need for fodder meant that such armies could only campaign effectively when fodder was available, but reliance on fast-moving troops meant that they could be hard to find and pin down, making them particularly difficult opponents.
However, it is unlikely that Hun and Avar armies existed in such a 'pure' form. This was the effect of the local soil conditions in the Danubian basin which were not suitable for a pastoral nomad society. Over time, their societies were forced to adapt economically. Secondly, the numbers of Huns and Avers have been consistently over-estimated, and many of their military expeditions were substantially reinforced by allied peoples, most of whom fought on foot.
This hypothesis is then examined from the Byzantine point of view. The way in which Byzantines armies adapted to fight armies from the steppes tells us much about the threat they faced. This can be examined in practice, as well as in the theory expressed by the fourth century military writer Vegetius and the sixth century Mauricius. From this, I conclude that, despite the ancient stereotypes, the steppe armies faced by the Byzantines from the fifth century onwards differed only slightly from those of the Carpi and Goths from the third and fourth centuries.
Byzantium and the Khazars: A Special Relationship Reconsidered.
Mark Whittow (Oxford)
Our understanding of the steppe world in the early middle ages owes an immense amount to the work of T. S. Noonan: in particular to his studies of the Russian coin finds which have done so much to reveal the scale of Volga trade in the ninth and tenth centuries, and the consequent wealth which flowed into Rus, Bulgar and, above all, Khazar hands. Ostrogorsky talked about a "Byzantine-Khazar understanding" which was "one of the main features of imperial eastern diplomacy". In a paper published in Byzantine Diplomacy, ed. J. Shepard, S. Franklin (Aldershot, 1992), pp. 109-32, Noonan throws out this thesis. For the Khazars, he argues, "Byzantium was of secondary, and at times, peripheral importance". The relationship amounted to no more than that of "neighbours who had different interests and cultures but maintained a low level dispute over the eastern Crimea".
The point of this paper is to suggest that while much of what Noonan has said is a valuable corrective to previous exaggeration, taken as a whole Byzantine-Khazar relations do add up to more than Noonan's minimalist conclusion The evidence for Khazar-Byzantine cooperation, marriage links, and cultural influence can only be matched in the empire's relations with the Christian West. Byzantine foreign relations were characterised by the ruthless pursuit of self-interest. From that perspective, ties between Constantinople and a distant non-Christian steppe power that lasted nearly four hundred years stand out as exceptional. The relationship no doubt rested on a prosaic base, no more elevated than the Byzantine need for an ally in the north, and the principle that "my enemy's enemy is my friend", but the significant part it played in Byzantine thinking about the northern world is a real factor in the early middle ages that should not be lost with the bath-water.
Byzantium's Initial Encounter with the Chinggisids in the Thirteenth Century
John S. Langdon (Marlborough School, Los Angeles)
In his important article "Нинейсная Империя и Восток" (1978), P.I. Zhavoronkov of Moscow University delves into some of the complex interactions between Seljugs, Turkmens, Byzantines, Armenians, Khwarizmians, Arabs, et al. in Asia Minor and surrounding lands during the Period of Byzantium in Anatolian Exile; Bruce G. Lippard's University of Indiana dissertation "The Mongols and Byzantium" (1984) makes effective use of Islamic as well as Byzantine sources to increase our understanding of Anatolian geopolitical and economic developments during the period of exile after 1243, and then to extend the story of Byzantium and the Mongols to encompass Palaeologan policies toward both the Ilkhanids and Jochids attendant upon the Byzantine recovery of Constantinople in 1261. My researches on the Vatatzae recently published in Byzantium's Last Imperial Offensive in Asia Minor: John III Ducas Vaatzes' Crusade against the Turks (1992) sought to shed further tight on the scope of warfare on Byzantium's Anatolian frontier with the Turks at the very time of the first appearanace of Chiggisid forces in Western Eurasia in the 1220s. By the end of the next decade, Batu's Jochid Kipchak Ordu burst into the Russian steppe. Thereafter, Byzantine diplomacy in Nymphaeum (the usual capital of the Vatatzae/Lascarids after 1222) sought to capitalize on the Chinggisid whirlwind simultaneously sweeping against Byzantium's rivals in Asia Minor and the Balkans. My current researches assess the startling symmetry between (a) John III Ducas Vatatzes' strategic moves as he turned toward hinterland Balkan imperialism after the failure of his campaign against Constantinople, 1235-36, and (b) the ebb and flow of Mongol imperialism from China to the fringes of the Latin West attendant upon Ogedid-Toluid dynastic rivalries and ambitions.
With the recent explosion of scholarship on the Chinggisids, a fresh assessment of pertinent passages in Acropolites and Gregoras (and Pachymeres) sheds important tight on nomadization and warfare along the fringes of the Byzantine (3aat7,sia, and, taken with evidence in other sources, reveals how the Anatolian-Byzantine government viewed the Mongols. The conclusions of Pelliot, Morgan, and other prominent historians of the Chinggisids based upon study of contemporary and near-contemporary Islamic sources can be corrolated with evidence in Byzantine, Latin, and Armenian texts to team about bath Anatolian and Balkans affairs during the period of exile. In particular-as the Islamic, Byzantine, Latin, and other sources are compared-a picture of extraordinary Byzantine diplomatic intelligence about the geopolitical moves of the Chinggisid princes and noyons emerges during the reigns of Vatatzes and his son Theodore II Lascaris, who together laid the groundwork for the better-known Mongol diplomacy of Michael VIII Palaeologus and his son Andronicus II. There is explicit testimony in William of Rubruck's account of his mission to the Mongols that Vatatzes sent envoys to the court of Mongke at Qaraqorum to initiate direct dipomatic relations with the Chinggisids.
As part of my current historical enterprise, the topos of nomadic migrations southward across the Ister-Danube is examined in a selection of Late Antique and Byzantine sources-that to assess the validity of the Acropolites-Gregoras scenario of the late 1230s. The Balkan campaigns of Vatatzes are reinterpreted in view of far-flung Mongol geopolitical and dynastic moves. Zhavoronkov's synthesis of the dynamics of Byzantium's Anatolian strategy after Kose Dagh and into the reign of Michael VIII is carefully corrolated with developments in the Balkans; Lippard's detailed treatment of Palaeologan policies toward the Mongols is taken into account in analyzing earlier decisions facing Vatatzes in both Asia Minor and the Balkans. A few comments about the waning of the Byzantino-Mongol nexus and the poignant tittle church of the Theotokos Moug%tmiiaaa above the Phanar conclude the paper.
IV. ANNA KOMNENA: HER ALEXIAD AND ITS CULTURAL CONTEXT
Chair. Thalia Gouma-Peterson (College of Wooster)
Anna Comnena: Woman and Historian
Charles M. Brand (Bryn Mawr College)
This short paper will examine Anna Comnena's Alexiad to see whether she, as a woman, can be differentiated from mate historians.
Certainly Anna Comnena has been examined before, by Georgina Buckler and Naomi Mitchison among others. Bum these works are now quite old, and something has been learned about women's voice.
The primary problem of the paper is to differentiate between Anna's voice as an individual and her voice as woman.
As an individual, she was a princess by birth, the eldest child, an earnest classical scholar, a wife, a mother, a convicted conspirator, enclosed for a quarter century in a gilded cage and given only comparative freedom in her final years. These circumstances condition a great deal of her outlook, including a mountain-high pride. Her patent devotion to her father, her mother, her grandmother, her fiance (Constantine Doukas), her husband--and her passionate hatred of her brother seem to arise out of her personal circumstances.
As a women, she tries to conceal her pride with the "humility topos" found in an exaggerated form in nearly alt women writers of the medieval west (Hildegard, Marie de France, Christine de Pizzan, for instance), and sometimes in monastic authors. As a woman, I believe, she pays more attention to the philanthropic actions carried out by Alexius: the development of the school and orphanage at the Mangana, for instance. The mate
historians of the age, white noting the founding of the Pantokrator, give no attention to the famous hospital there, which is known only from the chance survival of its charter.
In examining Anna, I propose to utilize her approximate contemporaries, Psellos, Attaleiates, Kinnamos, and Nicetas Choniates. The comparison of their prologues, for instance, suggests that Anna is more straightforwardly devoted to glorifying her subject than Kinnamos or Nicetas. These tatter can propose an abstractedly philosophical purpose for historical writing, the elevation of examples of virtue and vice for future contemplation, something Anna does not attempt.
I plan to look closely at some comparable events for which Anna, Kinnamos, and Nicetas had similar sources: for example, the sea-battle around the Count of "Prebentza's" ship (told to Anna by Marianas Maurokatakalon), the 1146 retreat from Ikonion (told or written by a subordinate office to Kinnamos), the attack upon Prosakon in which Nicetas perhaps participated. Anna seems most vividly to reproduce her source, with a clear sense of scene (the moonlit sea) and lively drama, but has no interest in or knowledge of the broader meaning of the event. Kinnamos accurately records the increasingly chaotic retreat, the sense of near disaster, but contrives to make Manuel took heroic throughout. Nicetas also is very aware of the realities of warfare, notably the inadequacy of the material support system, which caused the failure of the assault on Prosakon.
In the end, the woman in Anna was largely suppressed by the overwhelmingly powerful traditions of learned Greek literary style and Byzantine historical writing. We are fortunate that Anna as an individual (with her passionate loves and hates) contrives to shine through the conventions.
The Women of the Alexiad
Emily Albu (University of California, Davis)
Anna Komnena makes her presence felt on every page of the Alexiad. Sometimes she herself appears as an actor. More pervasively she colors the narrative with her own feelings, judgments and prejudices -- which include disdain for womanly cowardice (15.2.2). On one level Anna has internalized her society's stereotypical views of women. Yet she frequently singles out women who belie those stereotypes, women whom she admires for their bravery, piety, intelligence, savvy, or administrative competence: the enigmatic Maria of Alania (with whom Alexios shares an intimate friendship) defends her son's rights and her own safety, remaining in the upper palace until Alexios confirms those privileges in a chrysobull (3.1.2; 3.4.6), later escaping punishment though implicated in an attempted coup (9.8.2); the ambitious matriarch of the Komenian family, Anna Dalassena, leads the women and children of her household to safety when Alexios executes his own coup (2.5.1-9) and earns her granddaughter's special praise for able governance of Constantinople during Alexios's absence (3.7.4-5); Anna Komnena's mother Irene Doukaina, extolled for saintliness and comprehension of the difficult Church Fathers, overcomes her natural modesty to accompany Alexios on campaign (12.3.1-10), nursing him in illness and guarding his person when plots threaten.
Women also appear in a wide variety of minor roles. The Protovestiaria Maria urges and even threatens George Palaiologos until he abandons his loyalty to Nikephoros Botaneiates and supports the rebellious Alexios Komnenos (2.6.2). Men show loving concern for their wives and families, as does George Palaiologus when he carefully ensures the safety of his wife Anna and mother-in-law Maria (2.6.3). Anna Komnena reports with apparent fascination the spectacular deeds of bellicose barbarian women: wearing armour and appearing in battle, Gaita calls back the fleeing cowards in the army of her husband, Robert Guiscard (4.6.5; cf. the cowering, lamenting Sikelgaita portrayed by Guiscard's biographer, William of Apulia: Gesta Roberti Wiscardi 5.292-322); Tancred's mother successfully defends Otranto from a Byzantine siege (12.8.2-4). Anna is interested in the legal rights, confirmed by chrysobulls, of female colonists at Neokastron / Alexiopolis, who may inherit property when no male heirs survive (14.9.4). The panoramic sweep of female characters includes references to the philosopher Theano (12.3.3), ancient female warriors and Athena (12.3.8), and even some Bogomil groupies who follow Basil -- "women of bad character, utterly depraved" (15.8.3).
What does Anna reveal about these women and their world, and about herself? I begin with the conclusions from my dissertation, testing and expanding these using new methodologies and the recent explosion of research on medieval women.
A Vindication of the Rights Of Women to Power by Anna Komnene.
Barbara Hilt (Toronto)
Anna Komnene lives on through the Alexiad, her biography of her father. It is thereby possible to explore what twelfth-century Byzantine society and the Komnenian imperial system meant for a woman. Anna Komnene is a particularly fruitful source of analysis since her views have provoked scholarly debate. On one hand she has been accused of misogyny; on the other the A lexiad is the basis of arguments for the favourable status of women in Byzantium in comparison to many other societies. Such contradictory interpretations of the same work beg for resolution, particularly since the Alexiad is the one of the few texts where it may be possible to glimpse a woman's self-consciousness and her views of her world. One method to resolve the contradiction is a detailed analysis of Anna's treatment of two of the most prominent women in the Alexiad, and indeed in Byzantium, Anna Dalassene and Eirene Doukaina.
Anna Komnene devoted time and space to these two women, who held very different positions and filled different roles, but were equally powerful in the world of twelfth-century Byzantium. Historians' twentieth-century bias towards the primacy of public power-holding sometimes blinds them to the very real place of family power in the kin-driven scheme of the Komnenoi, which is axiomatic to an understanding of the significance of women in Byzantine society at this time. Both rotes made perfect sense to Anna, who presented both women favourably as controlled and intelligent. Self-control was the high point of virtue in Anna's time and the reverse of the most damaging accusation against women, which was that they were uncontrolled and ruled by their emotions. Anna's women, on the contrary, were firmly in control, not only of themselves but of whatever situation they found themselves to be in. For Anna Dalassene, this was government, for Eirene Doukaina it was home and husband. Both Anna Dalassene and Eirene Doukaina were Anna's heroines. And yet, Anna is clearly on the defensive regarding her mother and grandmother, realising that their involvement in affairs of government could result in criticism of her father's mettle. But her defence should not be understood as disapproval of their roles. On the contrary, her spirited vindication of her female relatives reveals a woman who could comprehend the values of her society while holding a different view herself.
This paper will argue that a consideration of Anna's opinion of her mother and grandmother will reveal a woman who not only believed that women should hold power in society, but that they were capable of doing so. Such an argument sometimes portends a feminist, but Anna Komnene was not a feminist. If she was alive today, she would be the object of much vigorous consciousness-raising, for she never took the vital step of seeking the roots of difference between women and men. But she saw the roots of power in her own society very clearly and approved of women taking part in every sphere. By presenting an explanation of the intricacies of Anna Komnene's treatment of two powerful women, this paper will proceed towards a better understanding of Anna Komnene herself.
Convergence of Silence and Articulation: Anna Komnena's Filial Devotion and Philosophical Zeal
Sarolta A. Takacs (Harvard University)
Anna Komnena's description of John Italos, the uncouth "consul of philosophy" (ϋπατσς τιϋν φιλοσόφων), will stay with everyone who has read the Alexiad. While Italos' teacher and predecessor, Michael Psellos, stands out as one who acquired the perfection of all knowledge, which included Chaldean learning, and was able to shake the accusation of heresy, Italos failed to do the same. It might come as a surprise to the reader that Italos' students frequently visited the palace, where the imperial couple, according to Anna, were laboring over and searching the Holy Scriptures (5.8). Anna digresses at this point of the narrative and relates a conversation she had with her mother (5.9). We are told that the physical nature of things did not interest Irene, who diligently read "the dogmatic pronouncements of the Holy Fathers, especially of the philosopher and martyr Maximos," in order to reap the benefit of true wisdom. We can glean from the Alexiad that Anna was, unlike her mother, very much interested in the physical nature of things, i.e. the mechanics of things and, by extension, the workings of the universe. Clearly, filial devotion and intellectual pursuit did not always go hand in hand, but Anna manages, through silence, to project family agreement on divisive philosophical issues.
Anna was one of the few women-intellectuals of the high middle ages and a pivotal figure in a period of great intellectual changes and anxieties. We read, for example, of her involvement in the revival of Aristotelian scholarship. A closer look at Anna Komnena, the devoted and independently thinking daughter of Alexius I and Irene, via the Alexiad, especially the section on John Italos (5.8-9), the inaugural lecture of Michael ό τον 'Αηχιάλαυ, and George Tornikes' funeral oration, will offer us a glimpse at the tapestry of intellectual life in eleventh and twelfth century Byzantium; a tapestry that featured contrasting patterns.
V. VENICE AND THE EAST
Chair. John Osborne (University of Victoria)
The Enigma of Enrico Dandolo's Tomb in Hagia Sophia
Thomas Dale (Columbia University)
Doge Enrico Dandolo died in May 1205, shortly after the Latin conquest of Constantinople. According to Villehardouin's contemporary account, the Doge "was buried with great honor in the Church of Saint Sophia." Three-hundred years later, Marin Sanuto specifies that Dandolo was entombed in "una cappella de'Veneziani" within the church. The original tomb has vanished. It was probably destroyed by the Turks, for we learn from Antonio Stella (1558) that Mehmet II presented Dandolo's sword and spurs to Gentile Bellini in gratitude for the Venetian painter's services in 1479-80. This paper examines the possibility that traces of Dandolo's tomb chapel may survive in an unexpected location: the central bay of the south gallery.
My hypothesis is prompted by a marble plaque, inscribed "HENRICUS DANDOLO," set within the pavement opposite the Deesis mosaic. If this (19th-century?) inscription does faithfully record an oral tradition of the lost tomb's original location, then the symmetrically disposed holes in the pavement around it could be connected with an enclosure, comparable to the one that the Loos drawing shows projecting from the opposite wall. Furthermore, the Deesis mosaic, which Dragan Nagorni (1982) has recently redated to the early thirteenth century, might have been conceived as part of the same project. Distinct from the imperial ex-votos elsewhere in the south gallery, the intercessory theme of the Deesis would have been an appropriate pendant to the tomb. Together with the original enclosure, it would also have defined the sacred space of an oratory. Comparable funerary oratories were frequently improvised within pre-existing church buildings in the West, and among the numerous fourteenth-century Venetian examples, three are associated with Dandolo's own family.
This unusual tomb site could only have been contemplated by the Venetians. From 1204 until 1261, they. controlled the patriarchal office and the administration of Hagia Sophia. The Venetians would also have been particularly attuned to the imperial resonances of the space, since the Doge, like the Byzantine emperor, seems to have occasionally occupied an oratory in the south choir gallery of his own palace chapel, San Marco. Now, by insinuating Enrico Dandolo's presence in the Byzantine emperor's oratory, the Venetians could perpetuate the Doge's new title as ruler of "one quarter and a half of the Roman empire."
The Stones of Venice Speak: Evidence from the Fourteenth Century
Debra Pincus (University of British Columbia)
Beginning in the twelfth century, and then dramatically accelerating in the thirteenth, Venice incrusted its most important religious structure, the church of San Marco, with richly colored marbles brought back from Byzantium, the Levant, and North Africa. These marbles were not simply booty; they came to Venice in part, as documents tell us, through a deliberate collection policy of the Venetian government, carried out by Venetian ships sailing the Eastern routes.
The investigation of this paper is fueled by a remarkably precise depiction of Eastern stones executed in mosaic, an integral part of the fourteenth-century Mission of the Apostles cupola of the Baptistery of San Marco. The cupola, in a significant re-working of earlier baptistery schemes, presents the twelve apostles in individual acts of baptism, carrying out Christ's directive to bring the Gospel "to every creature." Each of the Apostles is shown baptizing in a specific place, labeled and given local color. The topographical force that the twelve scenes reach for is furthered by the presentation of the baptismal fonts as highly recognizable Eastern marbles, made vibrant through a bravura representation of veining. Four identifiable varieties of Eastern marbles are shown.
The fictive marbles of the Apostles cupola provide a point of departure from which to examine anew the real stones that revet the exterior and interior of the church. The Baptistery mosaics help us to see the distinctly Venetian message operating in this panoply of marbles. More than a celebration of Venetian dominance in the East, the stones speak for the Venetian Eastern expansionist policy -- at the heart of thirteenth and fourteenth-century Venice's construction of itself as a sea-trading empire -- as a sequel (and modern-day realization) to the conquering of the East by the Apostles in the first centuries of Christianity.
Venice Beyond Constantinople
Elisaveta Todorova (Northern Kentucky University)
With the capture of Constantinople by the. joint forces of western knights and Venetian navigators Venice gradually turned into a major mediator in commerce and started acquiring possessions in the area.
The period's novelty was Venetian penetration beyond Constantinople through the bottleneck of the Kommerkion on the Bosphorus, thus accessing Byzantium's breadbasket, the Black Sea region. Only modest transactions were recorded for the first half of the thirteenth century, while the Polo brothers by the middle of the same century were familiar with the Black Sea geography and navigational practices.
Penetration in the Black Sea basin rested on who controlled the Straits, but deployment was a matter of local agreements. So, during the period of Fax Mongolica and even after the fall of Constantinople to the Turks when the last Venetian mude came to freight expensive merchandise, movements of people and commodities as far as China, Iran and India were secured via the Black Sea ports of Tana, Caffa and Trebizond thanks to the Tatars' control of Central Asia.
Setting outposts - factories and colonies - was never an easy choice: the limited number of natural ports with access to fertile hinterland and trade routes attracted all kinds of seamen, indigenous and Venetians included, who in this particular area were constantly challenged and controlled by the Genoese. Conflicts and clashes were often an outcome, both on land and sea, while a peaceful cooperation dominated everyday life and business activity.
Known mostly as merchants, sailors, soldiers and craftsmen the Venetians rarely turned into permanent colonists; even evidence for such disappeared after the Ottoman occupation, although Venetian boats continued to frequent the commercial Black Sea ports as late as the end of the seventeenth century.
The purpose of this paper is to single out the reasons for the Venice's sheer trading activity in the Black Sea versus the Genoese colonial empire. Comparisons with the rest of Venetian Romania will permit a better understanding of Serenissima's long-lasting interest in the Pontic markets.
VI. COINS AND CERAMICS IN THEIR ARCHAEOLOGICAL CONTEXT
Chair. William Metcalf (American Numismatic Society, New York)
Imitations of Byzantine Coins at Caesarea Martinis: The Continuation of Civic Tradition
Peter Lampinen (Combined Caesarea Expeditions)
As its corpus of late Roman and Byzantine coins continues to expand, Caesarea Maritima offers new information on the economic life of a major civic center in late antiquity. One trend that becomes clearer as more data is accumulated is the importance of imitative coinage in the economy. Although imitative and other official local coinages were a fact of life for many regions of the Roman empire when contemporary theory and practice did not support the idea that the central government was responsible for the day-to-day economy, it was not evident that that situation continued into the later periods of the eastem empire, specifically after the centralization of minting operations and financial administration under Diocletian. A tow level of imitative coinage persisted, but not pervasive and located usually at the fringes of imperial control, such as in England.
The finds at Caesarea suggest that, from a period beginning in the mid-5th century, through the 6th, to the end of Byzantine rule in the mid-7th century a significant proportion (perhaps 20% or more) of circulating small value coinage consisted of non-imperial issues of varying quality compared to their official counterparts. Somewhat surprisingly, the majority of these unofficial issues comprise very small bronzes that were certainty a fraction of the value of the smallest denomination, the bronze nummus. Many of these pieces are thin cast bronze flans with no trace of a type, being merely blank metal. Recent finds in CCE Area CC31 provide one firm date for these bronze blanks; a quantity being found mixed with a number of imitative nummi of Justinian I. At the end of the 6th and into the 7th century a new series of imitations appeared, based on the 12 nummi struck at the Alexandria mint in Egypt. 12 nummi imitations appear in Egypt itself, most likely after the fall of Egypt to the Muslims in 742 CE, but the Caesarea types form a distinct and separate series that clearly circulated alongside the official Byzantine coinage, which at this time (outside of Egypt) was essentially restricted to the follis of 40 nummi and its half. The identification of these fractional imitations upsets the conventional view that inflationary pressures had rendered the nummus and other fractions of the follis valueless by the 6th century, causing them to disappear from circulation. In addition, the numbers of these fractional nurnmi, when added to the total coinage for the 5th through 7th century, give further proof that the long held view of a down turn in civic life and monetary activity in the Byzantine period in the east is not correct.
The hypothesis is presented that civil authorities, presented with a catastrophic tack of circulation coinage, permitted or at least tamed a blind eye to the production of imitative coinage to alleviate the shortage. The economy required more currency than the distant central government saw fit to provide, and needed it in smatter denominations than the government felt necessary for its own usage. Wide spread activity of this nature at a local level has not to our knowledge been noted before for this period of Byzantine numismatic history, and this lacuna raises important questions concerning the analysis of archaeological data. In any case, these minute bronzes can be seen as successors to the local currencies authorized by civic authorities in the early centuries of the empire, thus conserving a five hundred year tradition.
"Ceramic Evidence for East Mediterranean Trade in Late Antiquity."
Robert Scott Moore (The Ohio State University)
One of the archaeological methods that scholars most frequently use in examining trade is the study of pottery and amphorae, the containers for seabome transport. Several factors contribute to the usefuluess in examining the remains ofpottery and amphorae for information regarding trade. The remains are extremely durable, last for thousands of years, and were common objects of this time. The art work and design of both pottery and amphorae allows the origin of manufacture to be determined, which is useful for understanding trading routes and extent of trade.
The analysis ofpottery from various western sites has been very usefitl in helping to better understand trade in the Western Mediterranean. The quantification and classification of pottery and amphorae has led to a clearer picture and a more accurate understanding of the direction and nature of trade. Scholars, however, have neglected the Eastern Mediterranean and have utilized little ceramic evidence in an attempt to understand more fully the nature of trade in the East.
Ceramic evidence that relates to trade and trading activity in the eastern Mediterranean is an overlooked source that scholars interested in eastern trading activity need to investigate. Using material from selected sites in Greece and Cyprus, this paper will make an attempt to analyze the ceramic evidence to illuminate the state of trade in the Eastern Mediterranean in the fourth to seventh centuries AD. In particular, a careful analysis will be made of the recent discovery of a large dump of pottery, around three and a half tons, by the Ohio State University Excavations at Lsthmia for evidence of trading activity and eastern ties. To accomplish this analysis, this paper will focus on three methods. The evidence from the Ohio State University Excavations will be compared with preliminary indications from other projects, particularly sites located in Cyprus, to determine how the ceramic evidence from Iathmia both matches and deviates from these other sites. The evidence will also be quantified with relation to type and size. This analysis will determine the specific components that make up the ceramic evidence from the site. This breakdown will aide the historical analysis by illustrating the type of goods traded as well as the predominant trading patterns. Finally, using Geographical information System software, a computer analysis of the social landscape of Isthmia in conjunction with trading routes and trade goods will be created. This will illustrate the various trading routes and the importance of their trade to the site. The combination of these three methods will show the importance and continuity, as well as volume, of the eastern Mediterranean trade.
Capernaurn and the Ceramic Chronology of Early Islamic Palestine
Jodi Magness (Tufts University)
The site of Capernaum, on the northwest shore of the Sea of Galilee, is probably best known for its ancient synagogue. However, it is also the site of a village that existed from the early Roman period to the Middle Ages. From 1978 to 1982, excavations were conducted on the Greek Orthodox part of the site, under the direction of Dr. Vassilios Tzaferis of the Israel Antiquities Authority. The first volume of the final report was published in 1989 (V. Tzaferis, Excavations at Capernaum 1978-1982. Vol. 1, Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns). The volume includes chapters on the architectural and stratigraphic remains, the pottery (domestic and glazed wares), and the coins. Five strata were distinguished, dated from the seventh century C.E. up to the Crusader conquest. In this paper, I propose a revision of the chronology of the two earliest strata (V and IV), based on a reexamination of the ceramic and numismatic evidence.
The presence of a hoard of 282 gold coins minted between 696/97 and 743/44 C.E. provided the main evidence for the dating of Stratum IV, and serves as a linch-pin for the chronology of the other strata. The publication team assumed that the hoard was buried shortly after the latest coins in it were minted, during the turbulent years around 746/47 C.E. Thus, the published dates for Stratum IV are ca. 650-750 C.E., and Stratum V was assigned to the first half of the seventh century. According to the publication team, the presence of "Mefjer" or buff ware and glazed pottery in Stratum IV contexts attests to the appearance of these types in Palestine in the seventh century C. E. However, comparisons between the ceramic assemblage from Stratum IV and that associated with the earthquake destruction level of 746/47 C.E. at Pella indicate that they are not contemporary. Instead, the latest ceramic types present in Stratum IV find their closest parallels in Abbasid assemblages dating to the second half of the ninth century C.E. at Pella. This appears to be the date of the burial of the gold coin hoard. There is also no indication that Stratum IV was brought to an end by an earthquake; the burial of the hoard points to some perceived impending danger instead of to a sudden natural disaster. Stratum IV should be dated from about the mid-eighth to the second half of the ninth centuries, and Stratum V should be assigned to the first half of the eighth century. The village uncovered by Tzaferis, which appears to have been established at the beginning of the eighth century, provides valuable archaeological evidence for the early Islamic settlement in Palestine.
VII. ARCHITECTURAL STUDIES IN HONOR OF RICHARD KRAUTHEAIER
Chair: Slobodan Curcic (Princeton University)
The Santa Croce Drawings: a Re-examination
Gillian Mackie (University of Victoria)
The Oratorium of Santa Croce at the Lateran Baptistery, Rome, a re-used second or third century building, was dedicated as a shrine of the Holy Cross by Pope Hilarus I (961-68). It survived into the sixteenth century and was finally demolished on the orders of Sixtus V (1585-90). Its remains have not been found, and present knowledge of it depends largely on drawings made during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. These, however, show puzzling inconsistencies, which have prevented a fuller understanding of the building. Analysis of the corpus of drawings reveals that they can be divided into two groups. The larger group includes all the drawings with inscriptions which locate them firmly at the Lateran Baptistery, as well as drawings which are clearly dependent on them. The building depicted in these drawings was distinguished by a cruciform ground plan with polygonal corner chapels, a low central tower with great arched windows, and an interior clad in deeply bevelled marble panelling. This group of drawings includes the work of Giuliano da Sangallo and Baldassare Peruzzi, among others. By contrast, the drawings of two anonymous fifteenth-century artists, which in one case are located by the inscription "in roma", possess many features which distinguish them from the main group. They portray a building built on a similar ground plan to the Lateran Holy Cross, but differing from it in important aspects of both elevation and decoration. The unique features include domed, circular corner chapels, a tall, hexagonal central tower with blank walls and a hipped roof, and a rich interior decoration consisting of horizontal bands of multicoloured marble in opus sectile above a plain dado. It is suggested that the second building be identified as the "copy" of Hilarus' Santa Croce which Pope Symmachus (998-519) built at the Vatican. The Vatican Holy Cross chapel was one of three which Symmachus built in imitation of Hilarus' Lateran chapels, repeating their dedications. on the evidence of the drawings it now appears that Symmachus' chapels were copies in more than name, since they replicated important features of the Lateran chapels' architecture, notably the intricate ground-plan of Santa Croce. The Vatican Holy Cross stood until the mid-fifteenth century when it was demolished on the orders of Pope Nicholas V (1998-1955), in preparation for the laying of foundations for the new choir of St.Peter's. These drawings would constitute our only information about the physical appearance of the Vatican Holy Cross. Both artists of the second group of drawings also depict a smaller cruciform chapel adjacent to the main building: it is suggested that this structure represents Symmachus' San Giovanni Battista, which was demolished in 1952.
The Adoption of the Islamic Inverted T-plan in Byzantine Domestic Architecture in Cappadocia
Annie-Christine Daskalakis and Thomas F. Mathews (Institute of Fine Arts, New York University)
Because art historians have been more interested in the wall paintings of Cappadocia, their architectural investigations have usually been limited to the painted churches themselves, omitting the sometimes extensive complexes that surround them or occur apart from frescoed churches. Lyn Rodley has dramatically changed this situation with her very detailed and systematic survey of over two dozen of the most important ensembles (Cave Monasteries of Byzantine Cappadocia [Cambridge, 1985]).
As her title indicates, however, Rodley has offered a monastic interpretation for most of the sites. This is consistent with a long and venerable tradition. Since its first reporting by priest archaeologist de Jerphanion, the rock-cut architecture of Cappadocia has been subjected to an exclusively monastic interpretation. While this bias might be forgiveable in Father de Jerphanion, it should not have governed all subsequent research. A church, of course, is no sure sign of a monastery. Leo VI observed that "oratories have been erected to God in nearly every dwelling, not only of the eminent but also of the more lowly" (Novella 4). Leo the Deacon, in the only contemporary text that refers to the caves of Cappadocia, tells us that the "people"--and he uses the word ethnos meaning the inhabitants in general, not simply monks--lived underground (Historiae III, PG 117, 713). The problem, then, becomes one of distinguishing the secular residential complexes from the cenobitic.
An examination of the planning of many of the Cappadocian complexes reveals a layout much more like a spacious and well organized mansion than a monastery. In such complexes the basic ingredients of a traditional monastery plan are missing, namely an enclosing wall, a refectory, and cells. Instead an inverted T-configuration often governs the nucleus of the plan. The vertical of the T is the principal hall of the ensemble; the crossbar is the transverse entrance hall that precedes it and that opens onto the courtyard in front of it. This nucleus is developed with rooms placed right and left, often symmetrically. The church may be somewhat removed from the nucleus or omitted altogether. Greek monasteries assumed a variety of shapes depending on local topography and on the degree of their involvement with the secular world, but they never seem to have adopted the inverted T-plan. On the other hand this distinctive plan enjoyed a wide popularity in domestic architecture in Islamic lands--in Syria, Egypt, North Africa, Sicily, and Spain--not to mention Venice. Its use in the mansions of Cappadocia gives us a precious insight into the life style of the great landowners of Anatolia and their cosmopolitan, if not frankly Islamic, tastes. In fact, the wall-paintings of Cappadocia consistently feature the donors themselves in Arab caftans and turbans. In their other habits of life they probably followed Arab customs as well, furnishing their interiors with a profusion of carpets and cushions, sitting cross-legged on the floor, and heating themselves in winter with portable coal braziers.
The Chapel in the Late Byzantine Monastic Context
Svetlana Popovic
The main characteristic of the Middle and late Byzantine monastic settlement was its established spatial iconography in which various sacral buildings - chapels played a significant role. The Katholikon as the main monastery church with its subsidiary chapels was the central point of the spatial iconography and spiritual focus of the community. The chapels built at the certain locations of the settlement played a different but not less a important role in the life of a monastery. Their meaning and disposition were in close connection with their function within the established iconographical spadai model In the early development of monasticism in the 4th and 5th centuries, oratories - chapels were also present within monastic communities. A testimony of this could be found in different written sources through a variety of tenpins which cover the meaning of the "chapel" (eukterion kimitirionnaos parakklesia etc).
St. Sabas the founder of the Great Lavra in Kidron Valley, erected a small chapel (eukterion ) for the monks of his Lavra and one for himself in the cave-tower where he alone dwelt. In the Lavra of St. Euthymios in Palestine, which was turned to a konovion after his death, a chapel (kimitirion ) was built as a burial place for St. Euthymius.
in the We of St. Nikon (10th C) his chapel was called Theon Naos, and later in the 11th century Grigonos Fakounanos built a burial chapel (kimitirion ) in his monastery of Petitzos (Bachkovo). The chapel of St. Nicholas, in the Great Lays on Mount Athos was called a parakklesion according to the late inscription The long development of monastic practice through the centuries brought about at the end of the 10th and the beginning of the 11th century an established spatial model of the koinovion community which practicaly remained unchanged to the end of the Byzantine world. The role of chapels in this monastic context was dearly defined. The monastery enclosure at its main entrance had an Entrance Chapel with its prophylactic and apotropaic meaning The central position in the monastery was reserved for the Kathoiikon with subsidiary chapels mostly of the commemorative function attached to its walls The most prominent feature of many Late Byzantine monasteries was the monastic tower with a chapel at its top level providing the sacral space for private liturgy of a prominent monk who dwelt there. Infirmary, as an obligatory part of the monastic settlement had a chapel often dedicated to Hagioi Anargvroi - the heeling saints. Outside the monastery, in its vicinity, was situated a cemetery chapel Finally. on the vast monastic estates different chapels were scattered for the daily service of the monks who happened to be at work there. On Mount Athos in Byzantine times, some of the monasteries had as many as thirty chapels and even more within their spatial boundaries. All related facts brings us to the conclusion that the chapel in a Late Byzantine monastery functioned as a part of the complex organism From the scatered chapels of the early monastic periods in the fast lavras and koinovions, they transformed disnosttiommeantng and their architectural structure, within the developed Late Byzantine monastic context.
VIII. GENRE AND CLICIEk IN BYZANTINE LITERATURE
Chair: Ihor Sevtenko (Harvard University)
Philosophy Wears a Crown: The Image of the Emperor Julian in the Works of Libanius
Stephen A. Stertz (Kean College of New Jersey; Dowling College)
This paper examines Libanius' image of the emperor Julian in his works written before and after Julian's death and compares it with Julian's self-image and the more conventional attitudes toward Julian found in, e.. B., Themistius. Libanius is well-known as the "city sophist" of Antioch who never willingly wrote an imperial panegyric before Julian's time (cf. Or. 1. 97), and, unlike Themistius, refused to hold any Roman office. Nevertheless, during Julian's reign Libanius referred to Julian as "philosophy innate in a king" (ch. 55). In the earlier Or. 13, ch. 7, Julian is praised merely for having a better education than his predecessors, a conventional to os of panegyric, often found in Themistius' speeches in honor of various emperors as well as in earlier such works, but in the orations given by Themistius after Julian's death, the emperor appears as divine. Julian himself adopted a far more modest self-image in his Letter to Themistius, part of what F. Dvornik called Julian's "reactionary ideas on kingship," involving the restoration of republican forms. The self-deprecation in Julian's Misopogon is also far from that emperor's image in Libanius. P. Athanassiadi-Fowden's argument that Julian's parable in his oration To the Cynic Heracleios indicates that he saw himself in a serious, literal, way as a new Heracles in the manner of Dio of Prusa's panegyrics cannot be taken seriously, but this self-image, even if not intended to be taken literally, may have influenced Libanius' later image of Julian. To Libanius most emperors were threats to his native city at worst, Platonic auxiliaries at best, but a crowned philosopher who restored worship of the Hellenic gods, gave at least lip service to local rights, and broke with the idea of imperial exaltation, was a Platonic philosopher-king when alive, a god when dead. Under other circumstances Libanius would have at most stuck with conventional panegyric or, more likely, would have merely entreated the emperor for favors to his native city. Julian's self-image never reached such heights as Libanius' image of him.
Miles Quondam et Graecus: Ammianus Marcellinus: Res Gestae, 31.16.9 Iran Shahn, id (Georgetown University and Dumbarton Oaks) Towards the end of his work, Ammianus described himself as Miles ouondam et Graecus. This short phrase has not been satisfactorily explained and many interpretations have been given to it; for a recent discussion with some bibliography, see J.F. Matthews, The Roman Empire of Ammianus, (The John Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 1989) pp. 452-472. A close examination of the phrase, strictly within the bounds of the passage to which it belongs, reveals that its interpretation does not need or require extra-textual help but must be sought within this contextualization. What Ammianus meant by what he said is more implied than expressed and the paper will bring out the implication of the phrase. '
Theories of Religious Narrative in the Prefaces of Early Byzantine Saints- Lives
Derek Krueger (Univ. of North Carolina at Greensboro)
Early Byzantine hagiography is a complex genre which transmitted a code of values to a Christian society through identifiable aesthetic techniques. In prologues of early Byzantine saints' lives, as well as asides within the body of the texts, authors addressed their audiences directly, making explicit statements about their aims and presenting a conception of how their work was to be interpreted and used by their readers.
Much of the material in these sections must be understood as topoi. Rather than things to be disregarded on account of their conventionality, these to of reveal much about the hagiographical genre as a whole. These prefaces framed an understanding of the saint's transcendence of the corrupted nature of ordinary folk, and in some cases presented the saint as an exemplar. Here the author might summarize the message to be derived, whether it be to repent one's sins, to give alms, or to be steadfast in one's orthodox beliefs. Thus the author guided the reader to perform a moral exegesis of his narrative, to read the story as one reads a parable. (The use of direct scriptural citation is also relevant.)
Analysis of the prefaces of particularly accomplished hagiographers reveals a sophisticated understanding of how hagiographical narrative was believed to accomplish the representation of holiness. With specific reference to the Historia monachorum in Aecvoto, Theodoret of Cyrrhus's Historia religioua, and the works of Cyril of Scythopolis and Leontius of Neapolis, this paper shows how Early Byzantine authors cued their readers to interpret their texts typologically. This mode of reading, common in the interpretation of holy scripture, was in turn used as a compositional technique, that is hagiographers composed typological narratives. In their texts, the saints stands in typological relationship to Christ or to one of the prophets of the Septuagint. Symeon the Fool's entry into Emesa is modeled on Jesus' entry into Jerusalem; the monks of the Egyptian desert reenact the temptation of Christ. But implicit in the prefaces to saints' lives is the understanding that the saint imitates Christ because the hagiographer is imitating the evangelists. The hagiographer presented himself as composing a "biblical" narrative. Furthermore, hagiographical representation (mimesis) was also a form of "imitating" (again mimesis) of the saints. The hagiographer places himself in typological relationship to the saint, and consequently, also to Christ. Like Christ in the parables, the hagiographer told stories which taught a moral point. Thus the prefaces to saints' lives are a source for Byzantine theories of religious narrative.
Restoring the Image: a Reappraisal of Romanos' Easter Kontakion, Τ6ν πρ6 ήλίου ήλ1ον (Maas and Trypanis No. 29, 'On the Resurrection VI').
Anthony Hirst, King's College London
The literary study of Romanos has tended to concentrate on particular aspects of his style- vivid imagery, lively dialogue, skilful sound patterning, etc.- and there have been very few thorough investigations of individual kontakia as integral works of art. Although Romanos is universally acknowledged to be a master of style, it is often said that the structure of many of the kontakia is unsatisfactory, and their narratives marred by inconsistencies. Even those generally acknowledged to be the best, such as the Easter Kontakion, have not escaped such criticism.
The first part of the paper indicates how commentators and translators have made the narrative of the Easter Kontakion appear far more incoherent than it is. Approaching the text with expectations derived from the Synoptic Gospels, they have made the unjustified assumption that, at the beginning of Romanos' narrative, the myrophores are already on their way to the tomb. This leads to a common misconstruction of the syntax in the opening lines of the first strophe, involving a recurrent mistranslation of προέφθασαν as 'hastened towards', which can be traced back to Pitra's Analecta Sacra. When the accumulated layers of misinterpretation are stripped away, it becomes clear that what Romanos is telling us is that the myrophores despatched Mary Magdalene to the tomb before they themselves set out, and that they then remained at home until Mary returned from her second visit to the tomb. Once this is understood the supposed incongruities of the narrative disappear.
The second part examines the implications of the narrative structure. Although the unifying thematic of the kontakion is άνάσταστς (signifying both the Resurrection and the raising of the fallen), the focus of the narrative is not the Resurrection itself, but Mary Magdalene's part in the Resurrection. The narrative follows her movements almost without a break; and Romanos' departures from the Gospel accounts all serve to underline the significance and centrality of her role. Furthermore, she is shown as wiser than the apostles, more privileged than Moses, and the counterpart of Eve. She is accorded a function in the economia second only to that of Christ, seeming to usurp the place of the Virgin Mary. At first sight this is perplexing. But Romanos is heir to the Syriac tradition, and influenced in particular by Ephrem, who repeatedly conflates the two Marys, attributing to the Virgin Mary elements of Mary Magdalene's experience in the garden of the Resurrection. In another kontakion, 'Mary at the Cross', Romanos has Jesus promise his mother that she will be the first to see him 'after the tomb'. But in the Easter Kontakion it is Mary Magdalene who, alone, is the first to see the risen Christ. Is there a gross contradiction between these two kontakia? Surely not. If we approach the Easter Kontakion from the perspective of Ephrem, we can see it as a celebration of the Theotokos- present under the guise of Mary Magdalene- her role as central to the Resurrection as to the Incarnation. We need no longer be perplexed by the theological elevation of Mary Magdalene; and we understand why the kontakion is so pervaded by the vocabulary and imagery of the Annunciation and Nativity.
Thus the paper reveals what had been obscured- both the literary and the theological coherence of the Easter Kontakion.
Genre, cliche, and reality: friendship topoi in and out of Middle Byzantine epistolography
Margaret E. Mullett (The Queen's University of Belfast)
The workings of genre in Byzantine literature have only recently begun to be investigated with the assistance of genre theory in any other literature, or even the experience of generic analysis in classical literature. The significance of inclusion or modulation of genres or the way in which genre, like art, can say the unsayable, have been one of the more interesting approaches to Byzantine literature in recent years. The building bricks of genres are topoi, and though the identification of topoi was a preoccupation of even historians since the 1970s, largely so that they could avoid placing any credence on them, there is still a need to examine the relationship of genre and topos to establish whether all genres have their resident topoi.
The concept of cliche in Byzantine literature is harder to examine. In contemporary English usage 'a word or expression which has become trite from overuse' it demands in the study of Byzantine literature some demarcation with the concept of topos. (When is a cliche not a cliche? When its a topos.) One possible line of investigation might to examine the standard topoi of one genre when they appear in another. For example, several of the epistolary topoi of Byzantine friendship-letters appear out of context, sometimes in surprising circumstances: 'One soul in two bodies' appears incongruously in a monastic context in the Life of Cyril Phileotes;Anna Komnene uses Aristotle's views on the effect of absence on human friendship in the context of the Norman wars. Could these topoi have crossed the borderline into cliche, or is it precisely their use in an unexpected context which rescues them from triteness?
A further issue is raised where friendship-writing is concerned: the issue of the detection of relationship in Byzantine literary texts. May it be assumed that the presence of friendship-topoi in a Byzantine text suggests a relationship of friendship between writer and recipient? My analysis of the personal network of one middle Byzantine writer, Theophylact of Ochrid, suggests that the correlation is not great, and may even be inverse. Study of the entire network of all middle Byzantine writers is necessary before firm concusions may be drawn, but in this paper I wish on the basis of a few selected topoi to explore this ground.
IX LATE EMPIRE
Chair and Commentator. Paul Magdalino (Harvard University)
The 'Common Chrysobulls' of Cities and the Patterns of Ownership in Late Byzantium
Demetrios Kyritses (Harvard University)
It is well known that during the late Byzantine period various communal privileges were granted to certain cities of the Empire through imperial chrysobulls, some of which still survive. This paper does not deal with the political, fiscal or commercial aspects of those privileges, but with the least studied aspect of the chrysobulls, namely the special status granted to the lands and other immovable possessions of the residents.
The most important case concerns Thessalonica. Of the chrysobulls granted to this city none survive, but from various references in documents from the Athonite achives we can learn a lot concerning their content. A - parallel case is that of Verrois, whereas a less typical exemple is that of Rhentina in Chalkidike. Our documentation is completed by the extant chrysobulls for Croia, Monemvasia and Ioannina, as well as the charter of privileges of the Thessalian Phanarion.
The two most important aspects of the status granted to the immovable goods of the residents in most of the above cases are the notions of "t2Eu9Epta' and "60VLxozrls". The first meant, at least initially, that the property was not attached to any kind of obligation for public service and included, but was not restricted to, the notion of immunity from taxation. From this "freedom" emanated the notion of "*6ovucotgs', about whose meaning there have been several discussions. In our case, it means the unlimited right of transmission. The sources are ambiguous as to the question of whether those privileges were attached to a particular group of people or to certain defined pieces of property. I believe that the latter was the case. As for the dating, it can be established that in most cases the first chrysobulls were granted around the time the city passed under imperial control.
The essential question is why the Emperor had to guarantee this particular status to goods that theoretically would be covered by the legal notion of individual property. I do not believe that we have to do simply with grants of tax immunity. The sense of the 'common chrysobulls' is better understood when set in the context of the erosion of the notion of full ownership in late Byzantium. This was accelerated by the particular conditions of the reconquest of the European provinces in the thirteenth century, when large landed properties were acquired by the state to be granted out under various conditions to individuals. The common chrysobulls were a guarantee to the urban middle class, those who were wealthy enough to possess properties, but were not members of the aristocracy of imperial service in order to profit from the various forms of state-granted proprety. Protected from state intervention, the "free' lands of the citizens were not protected from being bought off by the great landowners. This process, which is attested in our documents, led to the burghers' reaction, as manifested by a new clause in the chrysobull for Ioannina in 1319, one of the first instances when this social group is officially recognized as institutionally distinct-
Some Artistic Portrayals of the Last Imperial Family, 1400-1470
Marius Phillippides (University of Massachusetts, Amherst)
The faces of numerous members of the last generation of Constantinopolitan Greeks are rather well-known to us; more so than known to us than the faces of any previous generation of Byzantine Greeks. In the quattrocento numerous Greeks traveled to the west their features were immortalized by western artists who had seen them and had even conversed with them. This was indeed a penod, n which the west became increasingly more familiar with the Greeks of the east, who cane to western Europe in droves as pauper princes, as supplicants, as teachers of ancient Greek language and literature, as itinerant scholars, as mercenaries, and as refugees fleeing the poverty of their homeland and seeking refuge from the Islamic threat Such joumeys had been unprecedented and when Emperor Marvel II Palaeologus carte to Italy and then moved on to Pans and London, his appearance made a vivid impression; his search for aid against the infidel had taken him fur from Constantinople; no other Byzantine emperor, since the days of Constardne the Great had traveled so for. Flits journey inspired numerous portrayals, which have been discussed exhaustively. Portraits of Cardinal Bessarion, the Trebaonchan scholar who contributed so much to the Italian Renaissance, were painted ftequentty; a number of them survives; the Neoptatoric cardinal's are consistently assigned to the portraits of Saint Augustine (a minor point that has not been sufficiently stressed by modem scholarship thus fur).
The depictions of Manuel II's sons in Greek and western at will be briefly discussed. While Constantine XI [the last Greek emperor of Constantinople] had never had his portrait painted by a western artist, as he never traveled to the west, portraits of his brothers have survived. Thus the likeness of Thomas, the last despot of the Morea, was painted by none other than Pinturicchio (and still survives in the Libreria Piccolomini of Siena's duomo); Pinturicchio also pained the portrait of Thomas' unruly son, Andreas, in a fresco in the Apartamento Borga.
The portraits of John VIII Palaeokngus will be discussed, especially ice this emperor's famous portrayal by Benozzo GozzA included in 1 viaggio deli Magi in the Palazzo MedictAiccadi has come under question reeerrdy (A Aldid Luefvut, ad, The Chapel of the -MM Benozzo GozzoPs Frescoes in true Palazzo Medic-Riccad Florence [New York 1994]). A review of al the surviving portraits of John All will follow (with i&ustradorns) and it will be argued that Gozzof s fresco is, after al, a depiction of the Greek emperor, while he visited Florence in 1438/39 doing the famous Cotatta The paper's main contribution wig consist of the identification of a °new" portrait of John All. This painting belongs to a New England Museum; it will be illus=ed, discussed, aid accordigly added to the growing corpus of portrayals of John VIII , who was Probably the only Greek emperor of Constantinople to receive such attention by the artists of Italy's Ri ascinento. Cf. the old works by S. P. Larpros: (i) (i) Σιχ6νεε 'Ιωάννου Η ' τοΓι ΙΙσλωαi,*υ χστ ΙλστρυτΡχου 'Ιωσήφ,' HjUr. 'ΡFλλπνουν6ωσν 4 (1907), 385-408; (i) 'Air Ηχ6κc Βωνσrσκίνου Toll ΙΙαλοχολόγοτι; Niz.'Ιλλπνουνπωαν 3 (1906), 229-243; (i) 7Ι6oc Fυχ6νες To,] Κωνσmντίνου ΙΙαλmολ6γου; ΝΕ= 'Ελλπνσυνι{υων 4 (1907), 238-240; and (iv) ΑαίνΕιαια nit Rυίσν[ινmν Ai+toxoorr6oury (Athens 1930).. The post-Byzantine miniatures of the sixteenth/seventeenth Veneto-Cretan artist, George Klontzas will not be discussed here; of. A D. Pafouras, 's, '4 Ζωyα6kc LEW$Lος &6vrUS ς]$iq ά -1Μ). (Athens 1977), and M. Phfppides, "Constatine XI Dragas Palaeologus, Rex Quondam Rexque Fuueus. The Creation of a National Myth,- Abstracts of the Nineteenth Annual Byzantine Studies Conference (Princeton 1993).
Nestor-Iskander's The Tale of Constantinople, Byzantine, Western, and Muscovite Sources on the Fall (1453) and Its Conqueror, Mehmet II
Walter K. Hanak (Shepherd College)
paradoxically in scholarly literature, comparatively little has been written on The Tale of Constantinople by Nestor-Iskander, a youthful observer of the events and the leading personages that participated in the fall of the city to the Turks and its conqueror, Mehmet H. Though the validity of this text had been questioned, only recently has its authenticity been demonstrated. The focus of this paper, then, is upon the diary portion of the Tale, and two themes will be explored.
First, the question must be addressed how Nestor-Iskander viewed the fall of the imperial city, its causality and significance for Eastern Christendom, and the resulting tragedy and consequences of the event. At the same time, however, his characterization of the fall is disputed by other Byzantine, Muscovite Rus', and Western sources. Some observe the same events in more sober and pragmatic terms, and view them as a consequence of a declining empire whose ultimate collapse was not unexpected. Hence, this was a major shift in the fortunes of international politics. For Nestor-Iskander, however, the event was a great tragedy that should be interpreted in prophetic and Christian terms. The emotionalism that he incorporates into his diary lends to the hopelessness of the situation, but the accuracy of his descriptions provides credibility for this source.
Second, Mehmet II, who earned his historical fame as the Muslim conqueror of the city, even if undeservedly, is described in numerous accounts, on the one hand, as a savior of Orthodoxy and therefore is characterized in Christian terms, whereas. on the other, as by Nestor-Iskander, the conqueror is portrayed as an infamous and contemptible cowardly individual who does not deserve the historical acclaim and fame that had been bestowed upon him. His skills as a sultan and conqueror are brought into question, and these attributes and shortcomings merit analysis through an incisive comparison of the numerous descriptions provided in the several sources.
The contrast between Nestor-Iskanders text, and Byzantine, Muscovite Rus', and western sources, presents a paradox of interpretations. The fall of Constantinople was a major event in the fortunes of Eastern Christianity, however, a prophetic expectation emerged that the damage would be repaired.
X. NEW TECHNOLOGY FOR BYZANTINE STUDIES
Chair. Judith Herrin (King's College, London)
New Tree-Ring Dates for Byzantine Buildings
Peter Ian Kuniholm (Comell University)
Recent work by the Aegean Dendrochronology Project has allowed us to determine absolute dates for timbers in some nineteen monuments or parts of monuments in the first millennium A.D. Until March 1995 our earliest absolutely-dated tree-ring was A.D. 927 on 'the inner end of a timber at Enez, Hg. Sophia. Now we can report an extension of this chronology 565 years back to A.D. 362 on the inner-most ring at Amorium. Tree-ring dates for the following monuments or parts thereof are as follows:
Kiitahya, Fortress
Northeast Corner Towers: Tower 33 992E
Upper Castle (Yukari Kale), East Curtain, SE Comer, Round Tower 984++v
Upper Castle (Yukari Kale), West Curtain 966w
Istanbul, Hg. Sophia, NE Buttress, Intermediate Room 892w
Castelseprio 867w
Zadar, Sv. Donat 866v
Istanbul, Hg. Sophia, Room over the SW Vestibule 854w
Vise, Ayasofya 833w
Istanbul, Hg. Sophia, so-called Baptistery 814w
Trilye, Fatih Camii 799w
Istanbul, Hg. Eirene, post-740 earthquake construction 753v
Perinthos, Degirmendere, mill-construction upstream from the city 626++w
Thessaloniki, Hg. Sophia, Primary 618+w
Istanbul, Hg. Sophia, Tertiary 581w
Istanbul, Hg. Sophia, Secondary, after dome collapse of 559 563v
Istanbul, Hg. Sophia, Primary 527w
Istanbul, Hg. Eirene, rebuilding by Justinian? 521w
Venice, drillhole below San Marco 496v Amorium, Tower, Trench AB 487+w "B" after the year means the bark is present and therefore this is the felling year for the latest timber that we were able to date. "v" means that there is some some subjective reason for thinking only a very few rings are missing from the
exterior of the wood. "w" means that there is an unknown number of rings missing. Naturally, an abstract cannot convey the complexities of these monuments. Neither is it possible to go into the details of provenience or stratigraphy, nor is it possible to explain the limitations indicated by the B/v/w notations on the date-list above. However, dendrochronology is one way of trying to sort out the history of the development of Byzantine architecture. Now that the chronological framework has been built, the architectural historians are free to set about making sense of it.
Photography and Palimpsest (Garrett MS. 24)
Don C. Skemer and Ted Stanley (Princeton University)
Garrett MS. 24 at Princeton is the oldest extant manuscript of a Georgian translation of Alexander of Cyprus's "De venerandae ac vivificae crucis inventione," a Greek text of ca. 600; the translation was copied by the Georgian scribe Johannes Zosimus in 986 at St. Catherine's Monastery on Mt. SinaL G6rard Gantte (University of Louvain) traced the manuscripis provenance from its description in 1883 by A. A. TSargardli to subsequent decades, when more than 30 leaves were removed from the manuscript and in time donated to the G6ttingen Staats- and Universitatsbibliothek and to Selly Oak College, Birmingham. A rebound volume of the remaining 99 leaves was purchased by Robert Garrett of Baltimore in 1924 and donated to Princeton in 1942. Garrett MS. 24 is located in the Manuscripts Division, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Libraries.
This manuscript has been of scholarly interest because it is a palimpsest in which fols. 63r-99v were written over erased Aramaic and Greek texts datin respectively from ca. 500 and 750-800. While the undertext was noted briefly by Professors Anton Baumstark (University of Bonn) and Robert P. Blake (Harvard Umversity) in the 1920s, it appears that the palimpsest leaves may not have been studied with the aid of ultraviolet light until 1992, when Jergen Raasted (University of Copenha en) identified the Greek undertext on fols. 63r-70v as being from a heirmologum of ca. 75800 from the area of Syria/Palestine/Egypt, including kanans and heirmoi attributed to John of Damascus, Kosmas of Maioumas, Andrew of Crete, and Kyprianos. In addition, fols. 87r-90v, 99r-v were written over cut-up leaves of a Christian-Palestinian-Aramaic manuscript of the A ophthegmata patrum of t1n5n Ysho (or En~nisb), a Syriac redaction of the 5th-century Book of Paradise of Palladius.
Tn an effort to facilitate reading and transcription of these and other as-yet unidentified Greek texts on fots. 71r-86v and 91r-98v, which are chiefly in a sloping pointed majuscule bookhand of the 7th-8th cenhuies, the authors experimented with several photographic techniques traditionally used to detect and record obscured, erased, or faded text and images. These techniques include black-and-white ultraviolet/visible florescence and transmitted-li ht infrared photography. Based on technical literature and on experience at the Library o~ Congress and at Princeton, the authors emphasize the readfly available equipment (camera, film, filters, and light sources) and pradical knowledge reqaired for an institution or individual researcher topmduce readable photography of palimpsests at reasonable cost, without the expense of electronic imaging technorogy, as well as to permit codicological insights into the original manuscripts reused as palimpsest.
"Portraits of Byzantium." A Multi-media Project
Henry Maguire (Dumbarton Oaks and the University of Illinois)
This presentation reports on a multi-media application, with the title Portraits of Byzantium, that is being produced by the Lambrakis Research foundation in Athens, who are also the sponsors of the Sophia project on Byzantine history. Portraits of Byzantium will be a CD-ROM, aimed at English-speaking audiences, particularly undergraduate college students and interested members of the general public. The production manager is George Tsakarisianos, and the designer Arian Kotsis. Several Byzantine specialists are engaged in advising and collecting material.
Portraits of Byzantium will differ from the earlier Sophia project in being less academic in its structure and presentation (the latter was designed to complement the curriculum of Greek high schools), for it is intended to have an appeal outside of the classroom. At the same time, it will have the capacity to provide the user with a large amount of factual information, systematically organized in a catalogue of subjects.
With the multi-media format, designers can combine texts, charts, diagrams and maps with still and moving images and with sound, to provide both hard information and sensory experience. Ideally, therefore, the product should combine the best features of the traditional text book with the best that films, videos, and musical discs can offer. The format is interactive, allowing the user to choose his or her own route through the material; thus the product can be designed with pathways at different levels: some giving more, some less information; some relying more on text, some more on sound and images; some more evocative and impressionistic, some more "academic" and factual, etc. The challenge for the designers of such CDs is to find a way to control the multiple possibilities of the medium in such a way as to come up with an effective product that can appeal to and instruct several types of audience, and that is both imaginative and intellectually satisfying. This presentation will show how tho team responsible for Portraits of Byzantium has tried to address this challenge, applying the latest technology to the long-standing task of disseminating a knowledge and appreciation of Byzantium and its culture.
The Dumbarton Oaks Hagiography Database Project
Alice-Mary Talbot and Lee F. Sherry (Dumbarton Oaks)
The Dumbarton Oaks Hagiography Database Project, directed by Alexander Kazhdan and Alice-Mary Talbot, is designed to provide Byzantinists and other medievalists with new opportunities of access to an important and underutilized corpus of hagiographic texts. Included in the final version of the database will be information from the Greek vitae of saints of the 8th-10th centuries, accounts of the translations of their relics, and collections of miracles. Selected notices from the Synaxarion of Constantinople are also being analyzed for data. The project will provide a hierarchical subject index (the database proper) on all aspects of Byzantine civilization, from everyday life to liturgical vessels to proper names.
The vitae of saints can be invaluable in the information they furnish on aspects of daily life neglected by chronicles and historical narratives: the family, childhood games and education, rural society, modes of travel and the like. Scholars tend, however, to use a relatively small number of vitae, those which are well-known and easily accessible. It is extremely time-consuming to read a large number of vitae in search of information on a single topic of interest. The D.0 project is therefore designed to make possible a systematic search of all the Greek vitae from a given century on any topic, i.e., to provide a comprehensive subject index. The user of our database will be able to make searches under such categories as Medicine, Monasticism or Agriculture, or specific searches on individual words such as "nun", "plow", or "barley-gruel".
Using a programmable relational database application called Advanced Revelation, we have entered the data from each vita into computer records, each of which is linked to the relevant paragraph of the Greek text of the vita. (typed in WordPerfect). Eight texts are not included because of copyright refusal. The data consists of key words, proper names and topographical names. The data is entered as part of a tripartite classification system: Category--Subcategory--the data word itself: for example, Monasticism--Monastic Officials--Abbot. The record contains the page and line number of the Greek text, basic information on the saint (e.g. name and dates), and a note field in which appear the key words or phrases transliterated in Roman letters.
The first phase of project, the vitae of the 9th-century saints, is now completed and ready for distribution on 10 floppy diskettes. In addition to the database per as we provide in WordPerfect files introductions to all the saints and their vitae along with a full bibliography. A Users' Manual is also included.
This set contains the indices of 58 texts. 60 MBs of hard disk space is required. Loading time is twenty minutes. Licensees will need an IBM PC or compatible machine, DOS, WordPerfect and the WP Greek
Language Module. The database resides in a run-time version of the Advanced Revelation program which is provided.
XI. GEORGIA
Chair: Helen C. Evans (The Metropolitan Museum of Art)
Some Specific Aspects of "Byzantine " (Mixed) Mural Painting Technique Disribution in Middle Age Georgia
Irakli lakobashvili (K.Kekelidze Institute of Manuscripts, Tbilisi)
The art of Medieval Georgia, and specially mural paintings for a long time have attracted attention of historians, art historians, archaeologists and conservators. Scholars explore examples of Georgian medieval mural paintings as parallel material for studying Eastern Christian, Russian, Balkan and Western Christian countries art. Without proper knowledge of Georgian mural paintings (and Georgian medieval art in general as well) it is impossible fully understand history of art and specially mural paintings history in the countries of Byzantine circle.
In spite of this interest towards monuments of Georgian mural paintings until now it has been little known about materials and technique of paintings. The situation is the same in the countries of Byzantine circle. Our Paper's objective is to propose primary results of many years studying of mural paintings materials and techniques in Georgia in VIII - XIV c.
All Georgian mural paintings of VIII -X c. which have survived completely of fragmentary on the territory of Georgia are carried using "dry' technique. "Dry technique means that all layers of colours (prepared on the bases of different glues) from very beginning to final stageare applied to dry rendered wall. New, "mixed" technique appears in end of X c. mural paintings in south Georgian region Tao-Klarjeti (nowadays north-east Turkey). In central parts of Georgia this technique first time was used in Upper Svaneti (western Georgia) in 1096 Iprari church by the "King's Painter Tevdore" (as the painter calls himself in the large donator's inscription with the date). In new, "mixed" technique for the first, preparation layer of a painting it is used water diluted colour which is put on wet (not fully dried) lime rendered wall surface. Further layers of painting are put on a already dried wall and colours are based on different kind of organic glues. Using this technique Tevdore painted in Upper Svaneti in 1111 St. Kvirike church and in 1130 Nakipari Saviour church. From that period in Upper Svaneti and in all western Georgia mural paintings mostly are painted by using this new technique.
The "mixed" technique possibly was invented in Byzantine Empire in IX-X c. and was spread all over the Christian world (scientific literature about this issue is very rare). From Byzantine this technique should come to south Georgia and later on spreaded by the King's Painter Tevdore in western Georgia. From X-X111 c. the "mixed" technique is the only one mural painting technique which is used in Byzantine world.
The situation is different in the eastern Georgia. XI-X111 centuries' classical Georgian mural paintings, are carried out in traditional, "dry technique. It is inadmissible to suggest that the highest qualification Georgian artists have not known the "mixed" technique which that time was widely spreaded in Byzantine Empire and in western Georgia. eastern Georgian classical artists have deliberately carried on using old, traditional technique. Explanation of this fact must be search in the ideological sphere.
In the beginning of XIII century when Georgia was conquered by Mongols the "dry painting technique was desert. From XIII c. all Georgian artists carried out mural paintings using a different technique, namely they used colours which were diluted in lime water.
Some Remarks About the Georgian Codex S-1276 (Tbilisi)
Thamar Otkhmezouri Komeh Kekelidze Institute of Manuscripts, Tbilisi, Georgia
The Georgian codex S-1276 is a collection of translations of homiletic and hagiographic writings by Byzantine authors. When investigating the colophons and the codicological and paleographic data of this codex, Helene Metreveh came to the conclusion that the first part of it was an autograph of the famous Georgian translator Ephrem Mtsire, written at the end of the eleventh century A.D. in one of the monasteries of the Black Mountain near Antioch. This codex is now preserved in the Komeli Kekelidze Institute of Manuscripts, Tbilisi,
The aim of Ephrem's literary activities was to introduce to Georgian readers the Byzantine cuhure of his time and especially the most popular and modem ideas of Byzantine scholarship. This orientation is reflected in his translations and also in the composition of his own collections, which were drawn up in accordance with "Greek rules" as he states in one of his colophons. This is how his autograph S-1276 is composed.
The marginal heliacal sign , one used only elsewhere in the Greek manuscripts of the works of the Cappadocian Father St. Gregory Nazianzenus, is found in the margins of his autograph. This sign marks the most theological passages in St. Gregory's writings because "&ά το ήλιού τής δικαωούύρς EP ταίξ Beiαag Γραφαίς τόν Bebv Sνομάrεοθαι" (a frequent explanation of this sign in the Greek manuscripts of St. Gregory's works). Ephrem, who translated St. Gregory's writings into Georgian and who knew the manuscript tradition of this author, transferred the sign into his autograph, using it for the same purpose.
In Ephrem's autograph, the diacritical signs, typical of Byzantine manuscripts, are also found. They are: a -.rynemba, ) - iota, and '-- oxia (these terms come from a grammatical note by Ephrem or a later grammarian, preserved in the collection of Ephrem's translations of St. Gregory's works, where the functions of these signs are explained). Ephrem knew their functions in the Greek manuscripts and in adapting them into Georgian, he made use of them in his autograph in a special way: in joining two words into a composite.
It is evident from Ephrem's colophons that, working as he did on the Black Mountain, he had very close contacts with different scriptoria and scholars in Antioch. He even seems to have consulted the Patriarch of Antioch, John Oxites, about the translation of some difficult passages in the Byzantine works he was translating. Thus, by translating and composing collections of different authors in Byzantine style, he was actively involved in Byzantine cultural life.
The Outside Carved Decoration of the Georgian Churches in Iskhani and OW
Dora Piguet-Panayotova (Paris)
The sites of li;khani and 03`ki both belong to the basin of ~orokh, which comprised the ancient Georgian province of Tao-Klard~etl, now in Oriental Turkey. The churches of 1Uhani are situated on a high plateau on the right bank of the river Olty, a tributary of the river torokh, while the church of 09ki takes up the highest site of the village, on the left bank of the river Tortum. The great church of Iskhani and that of Mi, both of large dimensions, are to be associated with the cruciform architectural. type crowned with a dome. They show a new system of supporting the cupola, which rests on four hollow supports instead of massive pillars. The architectural forms were innovative and acquired an unusual adornment. The l9khani cathedral had its final embellishment in 1032, while the small church standing nearby had been decorated in 1006. The building of O% had taken ten years, up until 961.
The present research includes the decorative layout of the facades, the adornment of the portals, porch, window frames, cornices and especially the cupola. Pursuing the origin of the ornamental motifs, I found out that some of them show inspiration from the 7th century capitals inside the Iskhani church. The carved decoration revealed the revival of the antique elements, inherited from the East Byzantine provinces, the Sassanians, which had been adopted by the local tradition and fused with the Georgian artistic patrimony in the early Christian epoch. Thus the "renaissance" of decorative forms, well-known in Byzantium and Bulgaria during the 9-11th centuries, produced also on the soil of Transcaucasia, exploring the local ornamental repertory as well as the Sassanian motifs which penetrated again through the Abbasid culture. There is a predominance of non-figural motifs, geometric and foliated, subject often to interlaced designs whose prototypes might be seen in the Roman-Hellenistic ensembles. However, the interlaced patterns had a great success in the Abbasid architecture which was imposed on them since the 9th century. But introduced in the Georgian carved decoration, they reveal a new artistic treatment.
The Abbasid fashion was a phenomenon that could be observed all over the Mediterranean area. The Georgians had all the reason to be inspired by it. Actually, the country turned into an Arab emirate during the middle of the 7th century. The ruler of Tao-Klardzeti, whose kingdom formed part of the emirate, was at the same time, vassal of the Byzantine emperor. Really Tao-Klardzeti was playing a very important role in the political scene, thanks to its military forces and economic prosperity. The princes Bagrationi who were ruling over it, desired to rival with the neighbouring sovereigns. In the willingness to demonstrate richness and power, they undertook the building of the enormous monastic complex as Iskhani and Otki. One major condition for the brilliant development of the Georgian architecture was the "detente" of the political situation between the Arabs and Byzantium in the last decades of the 1 Oth and first half of the 11th centuries.
Finally, the outside carved decoration of the Georgian churches in Iskhani and O§ki shows original features then unknown in Byzantium, as well as an elaborated style which was to continue to brilliantly develop during the future centuries.
XII. BYZANTINE ROMANCES
Chair and Commentator. Roderick Beaton (King's College, London)
The Literary Context of the Novels of Twelfth-century Constantinople
Elizabeth Jeffreys (University of Sydney)
Recent edition's (by Conca and Markovich) of two of Byzantium's novels allow a more informed apparaisal of the nature of these texts. This paper will examine the social status and literary awareness of the novels' authors, arguing also that the initiator of the primary version of Digenis Akritis should be classed amongst them. The paper will offer suggestions about the literary and social pressures that led to the reappearance of this genre of writing in Constantinople during the 1140s.
Eustathios Makrembolites' Hysmini and Hysndnias: Re-writing and Re-reading the Greek Novels
Ruth Webb (Princeton University and King's College, London)
The responses of Photios and Psellos m the ancient Greek novels by Heliodoros and Achilles Tatius show an acute awareness of the rhetorical qualities of these texts and of the narrative complexity of Heliodoros in particular. However, these critical discussions of the ancient novels are brief and necessarily limited in their approach. Yet there is another source for Byzantine responses to the novels to which we can turn: the medieval Greek romances themselves. I will suggest that Eustathios Makrembolites' novel, Hysnuni and Ilysndnias can be read as a sophisticated commentary upon the ancient works and one which may even anticipate some of the discoveries of modem theoreticians.
Makrembolites adopts the basic plot structure of the ancient genre (the lovers, meet, elope, are separated and endure many adventures before finally being reunited) as well as many narrative motifs (pirates, shipwreck, slavery) and techniques (descriptions of paintings, dreams). In several instances the novel seems not only to presuppose the reader's knowledge of the ancient genre but to play upon the reader's expectations.
Hysrnini and Hysndntas represents a response not only m the details of the ancient novels but also to their overall plot. As Bakhtin pointed out in his study of 'chronotopes', the ancient Greek novels are characterized by their circular structure: the hero and heroine experience adventures which test them, only to return from this 'adventure time' to their point of departure without having undergone any essential change. Hysnum and Hysndnias, although not mentioned by Bakhtin, illustrates his concept of 'adventure time' more clearly than any of the ancient examples of the genre: the hero and heroine find themselves participating in the same rituals at the beginning and the end of their adventures, but in very different roles. Makrembolites thus appears m have been acutely aware of the circular nature of the ancient narratives and of the way in which the couples' adventures take place in a time and space which is outside the world from which they start out and to which they return.
However, a reading of Makrembolites' reading of the ancient genre does not support Bakhtin's claim that the characters themselves undergo no changes but remain exactly as they were at the beginning. Makrembolites' novel, as M. Alexiou has pointed our, can be read as an exploration of psychological development depicted principally through the hero's dreams and inner reactions to events. Read as a commentary upon the ancient novels, Hysnuni and Hysndnas can be seen to underline the development of the characters in those works as a vital theme, but one which is represented primarily through external events. There is no doubt that Hysnuni and Hysndnias benefits from being read in conjunction with its ancient models. However, far from being a mere receptacle of influence, it can shed light on the Byzantine reception of the ancient genre and perhaps on the ancient novels themselves.
Eros and the "constraints of desire" in Eustathios Makrembolites' Hysmine - and Hysminlas
Margaret Alexiou, Harvard University
This paper constitutes a radical revision of my earlier discussion of Makrembolites' novel (1977), partly in the light of recent scholarship, both on the Komnene period in general and on the novel in particular, but, more profoundly, upon my own close re-reading of the text alongside Plato's Symposion and Phaidros. It is not a 'mere love story', as H-G. Beck has claimed, with titillating - even pornographic - passages, nor can it be compared without distortion either with its late antique prototypes, or with post-modem novels and sex manuals (1986:146-59). Rather, it is a complex and peculiarly twelfth-century Byzantine reflection on ambivalent tensions between sensuality and spirituality, exploring sexual behaviour - male and female, aggressive and submissive - as well as the constraining boundaries of gender and status, freedom and slavery. I argue that it concerns the power of Eros, and the interconnectedness between human, animal and vegetal life cycles on the one band, and the cycles of seasons, planets and gods on the other. Such an approach was pioneered by Sofia Poliakova in her sensitive interpretation of the novel as an 'allegory of love' (1979:89-124, 124-78), but taken to reductive extremes by Karl Plepelits as a straight allegory of Christian love (1989). My own re-interpretation is based on the premise that the author was attempting to integrate Platonic and Christian concepts of Eros into a new, Komnene synthesis of 'Hellenism', while at the same time dealing perhaps more explicitly than any other Byzantine romance with the physicality of sex, and the maturation of the individual young man and woman, whose love, as Roderick-Beaton has suggested, is immortalised through art (1989:84).
After a brief review of vexed questions of dating, in the course of which I adhere to the 1140's as the most persuasive (Poliakova 1979, Suzanne MacAlister 1988 and f.c. 1995; contra Cupane 1974, 1978, Beaton 1989), I analyse in turn (1) narrative structure (time and place); (2) interaction between gods and humankind; (3) symbolic time and space, as suggested by the cyclical movements of spheres and seasons. Close attention is paid to three extensive ekphraseis, each strategically placed at key turning-points in the first cycle of the novel (I-VII), and each followed by dialogues crucial to its movement (1.4-5, II.1-9, IV.5-18). In the second cycle (VII -XI), which has received less careful analysis than the first, images of water (u8wp) take over from images of fire (-Op), as Hysmine leads Hysminias to redemption and freedom under the aegis of 'Eros Basileus' (Magdalino 1992).
In conclusion, I shall attempt to situate this novel in relation to late antique precedents (including the little-known 'Parthenope and Metochios' papyrus fragment), to its twelfth-century paralieis (Theodore Prodromos' Rhodanthe and Dosikies ), and to some post-Byzantine narrative techniques.
There will be a two-page hand-out (excerpted text and translation), and two slides (from L.A. Hunt in M. Angold, ed. 1984, figs. 14-15).
Literary Uses of Folktale Motifs in the Palaeologan Romance of Kallimachos and Chrysorrhoe.
Maria Hatjigeorgiou (Hamilton, New York)
As Roderick Beaton (The Greek Novel AD 1-1985) has aptly remarked, "Greek literary fiction of all periods has always been something of a Cinderella." This "something" of magic and fairy tale quality is what I will explore in the Romance of Kallimachos, hoping to show that it draws upon a rich source of folktales and that it is the result of the author's unexpected skill in manipulating themes and motifs. I am not going to examine here whether these folktale elements are, as has been argued, traces left from the contact with the Western tradition. This issue may not be of major importance for a literary approach to the text. What counts, however, is the way in which this Byzantine, perhaps courtly, author of the early 14th century perceived, "read," and wove together various strands from both the oral and the learned traditions. By doing so, he was able at the same time to address and appeal to a broad audience of diverse social backgrounds.
The relationship between the Romance and folktales has been already discussed in an effort to trace the possible folktale source which served as the narrative model for the Romance. This Quellenforschung, however, has led. to a reserved or even negative appraisal of the text, on the grounds that the author's attempt to mix folktale elements without consistently following the narrative logic of the folktale has undermined the literary value of the Romance. However, I believe that, in line with Agapitos' recent work on the narrative structure of the vernacular romances, this literary value can be defended. I will argue, therefore, that what appears as inconsistency is a deliberate effect, as the author employs his folktale motifs with a freedom and originality that are strikingly close to a modem concept of poetics.
I will investigate more closely some of the folktale elements that are used in a reverse or "unorthodox" way in the narrative. Drawing on Vladimir Propp's Morphology of the Folktale and on Stith Tompson's Motif-Index of Folk Literature, I will focus in particular on the appearance and "function" of the "magical object," a typical motif of the magic folktales, and on the roles and "functions" of the hero and heroine. Further, the varying frequency of magical and supernatural elements, including their virtual elimination towards the end of the story, constitutes a narrative rhythm deliberately produced to thwart the expectations of an audience already familiar with the conventions of the folktale genre.
Intimate knowledge of the folktale's magical thought and at the same time ironic distancing from it are probably the virtues of a style that the author seeks to demonstrate, if he is to appeal to an audience more sophisticated than we had so far suspected. One may wonder whether this technique, consciously combining folk oral tradition with courtly learned refinement, could be considered an indication of an early Renaissance narrative style. After all, as Alexander Kazhdan has pointed out, "even Byzantine literary works can be regarded as a live literature capable of influencing contemporary writing."
XIII. THE LEGACY OF BYZANTIUM
Chair. Robert S. Nelson (University of Chicago)
The Cult of The Mother Of God Осđиовица (She Who Overshadows)
Asen Kirin (Princeton University)
Осđиовица (Osenovitso) is a Slavonic term applied to the name of the Virgin to signify a specific aspect of her cult. This is an extremely rare case of the utilization of an original term instead of translating from Greek, or using a Greek word. I attempt to explain the origin, the meaning, and the significance of the term Octxosxuw in the content of the formation of Old Slavonic as a liturgical language. The cult to the Mother of God Осđиовица is documented only in Rila Monastery (south-west Bulgaria), founded by St. John of Rila (876-946). The focus of this cult is the miraculous icon depicting the Virgin and St. John of Rila together. This icon dates from 1851, but the cult can be traced back to the medieval period. That the cult was well established by the early fourteenth century is attested by the inscription in the Rila Monastery tower (1335).
Originally, scholars accepted the interpretation of the local monastic tradition which understood Осđиовица to mean "protectress." In 1917 lordan Ivanov pointed out that the term might derive from the verb осđийти (oseniti-to overshadow). No evidence was ever sought in support of this hypothesis. In 1917 Iordan Ivanov rejected it, claiming that осđийти derives from осđийти , a term supposedly applied to an icon donated to the monastery by a member of the aclkxa (Rs6nu ) dynasty. Duichev supported his argument with examples from medieval sources displaying similar confusion in the spelling of the name acilixa. Ever since, Duichev's view has been generally accepted and has never been challenged. I disagree with Duichev's explanation, because I believe it unlikely that an epithet derived from donor's name would have been applied to a icon and the cult centered on this icon. In my view, there are two important questions in regard to the epithet 0ctxosxga that still remain unanswered: what is the origin and the meaning of this term, and why does it lacks a Greek parallel?
Accepting lordanov's hypothesis I turned to the earliest period in the history of Old Slavonic and studied the use of the terms for "shadow" and "overshadowing" in regard to the original Greek texts. The verb octxurx is found in the earliest Slavonic texts. It corresponds to three Greek verbs: 'άποσχία'ζω, έπισmα'ζω, and περιστελλω. "Επιαχτάζω" refers to divine overshadowing and it is used in the Bible to describe acts of theophany, in which it is God who overshadows. Thus, for instance in Luke's account of the Annunciation (Lk 1.35) the Virgin is being overshadowed, a formula repeted in the homiletic literature. In liturgical poetry, the Akathistos Hymn for example, the Virgin herself is described as casting a shadow of protection. The standard imagery of the Greek texts was repeated faithfully in the Slavonic translations. Nevertheless, in some rare cases the translators developed imagery absent in the original, which derived from the connotations of the Slavonic terms used. The Slavonic equivalent for σχηνη is сđиь, (lit. "shadow"). In this way Slavonic texts merged the concept of the Virgin as the Second Tabernacle with that of a protectress casting a shadow, which, I believe, explains the appearance of the cult of the Mother of God Осđиовица--"She who overhadows."
An Overall View of Prophet Images in Post-Byzantine Painting in Bulgaria from the Late 15th to the Late 17th Century
Ljubica D. Popovich (Vanderbilt University)
Surveys of Byzantine and Post-Byzantine paintings in Bulgaria by their very nature do not explore a single topic. Monographs of individual churches most often do not exhaust all aspects of a given monument, and give little attention to comparisons with other chronologically close works. This study, by contrast, offers another approach: an overall view of the representations of prophets and the texts that they carry. Findings are based on fieldwork in Bulgaria (1990), when over thirty churches from the Turkish period were examined. Despite many losses, these painted ensembles still contain about 550 figures identified by their epithets as "prophets". Among these, 353 figures are identified by name. Some of them hold attributes (a total of twenty-six examples), and the others carry rolled scrolls (Seslavtsi and Dobrsko monasteries). Among the inscribed scrolls, so far, a small number of texts has been identified (eighty-eight examples). Selections of prophets' quotations, judging by this fragmentary evidence, offer certain changes from the well-established pre-conquest tradition in monumental painting (Bobo§evo, St. Demetrios, one of two churches which will be examined more closely here), but in a majority of instances, the tradition is followed. This is especially evident in the cases of Isaiah (Isa 7:14, Isa 6:6), Daniel (Dan 2:34, Dan 7:9), Jonah (Jonah 2:3), Habakkuk (Hab 3:2), and finally Elijah with Elisha (IV Kings 2:2 fol., III Kings 17:1).
The languages of the texts are the Bulgarian recension of Old Church Slavonic (Dobrsko), Greek (Arbanassi, St. Demetrios), or the two combined (Krapetski and Seslavtsi monasteries). Occasionally, the epithet is inscribed in Slavic, while the scroll text is in Greek.
In these small post-conquest churches prophets are given various locations: apse (Arbanassi, St. Archangels), drum of the dome and soffits of the arches (Separeva Bania, St. Nicholas), transverse arches of the nave (Arbanassi, St. Athanasios and the Nativity) and most often, tunnel vault of the nave and the narthex.
The iconographic types of prophets also remain true to established tradition. More than thirty-eight characters, of which two are female (Anna and Sibyl), carry the epithet "the prophet". Besides the sixteen authors of the Biblical Books, the group can be augmented by the two kings, David and Solomon, Elijah and Elisha, a number of Forefathers, the Old Testament High Priests, the three young companions of Daniel, and finally Balaam. They are depicted in full figure (Separeva Bania and certain churches in Arbanassi), in long or short free-standing bust (Sofia, St. Petka Samardziska), in bust contained within medallions (Ilientsi, St. Elijah), or in bust encircled by floral scrolls (Bobo§evo, St. Elijah), the latter form deriving its inspiration from prophet representations in the Tree of Jesse.
These selections of figures and texts, their formal aspects, and placement in Post-Byzantine paintings in Bulgaria have close parallels in the preserved monuments of the same period in Greece and Serbia. Therefore, they share the tradition established on the large Balkan territory after the Turkish conquest, the tradition undoubtedly nurtured and inspired by such religious and cultural centers as Mount Athos.
The Angel of the Wilderness: Russian Icons and the Byzantine Legacy
Ellen C. Schwartz (Eastern Michigan University)
The reign of Ivan the Terrible saw the widespread development of images of John the Baptist, his patron saint. The iconography of John as the Angel of the Wilderness, one of these image types, was originally a Byzantine invention. This version developed into a variety of iconographic subtypes in the course of the sixteenth century. The winged ascetic figure appears in a number of forms and contexts, from a narrative version set in the appropriate desert to a frontal form in devotional image isolation. Even more interesting is the number of attributes associated with him in these scenes. The most common is the axe at the foot of the tree. This illustrates the passage from Matthew 3:10, "And now also the axe is laid unto the root of the trees; therefore every tree which bringeth forth good fruit is hewn down," stressing the role of the Baptist as the forerunner of Christ. Other attributes, however, make this point and additional ones using a different form. More unusual details include a chalice along with a scroll held in the Baptist's hands. The scroll is inscribed with the text from the gospel of John, 29:1, "Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sins of the world," adding the theme of the liturgy as a route to salvation to the image. This point is made clearer in the most unusual attribute used occasionally as part of this presentation--the small recumbent figure of Christ in the chalice. This combination of elements alludes most vividly to the sacrifice of Christ, which the death of the Baptist prefigures; the chalice refers to the daily reenactment of this sacrifice in the liturgy. This body of Christ as part of the liturgical offering shows direct influence from a scheme of apse decoration in Byzantine churches which developed in the twelfth century, thus adding a new layer of Byzantine influence to an originally Byzantine iconographic type.
The adaptation of Byzantine iconography from monumental and icon painting, however, is only one aspect of these icons as part of Byzantium's artistic heritage in Russia after 1453. The second and more pervasive is the continuity of style
these icons exhibit with the Paleologan and later styles of Byzantine painting in various media. Russian icons from several regions show the imitation or impact of both fourteenth-century Paleclogan stylistic elements as well as fifteenth-century exaggerations. This large body of work helps to document Byzantium's long-lived legacy in the icon painting of Russia.
What and Where Is Byzantium:? The Presence and Absence of a Civilization in American University Textbooks
Philip Shashko (University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee)
This essay is a commentary on the presence and absence of Byzantine history and civilization in recent textbooks on world and medieval European history and civilization used in American colleges and universities. The examination of the textbooks reveals a striking deficiency not only in making known the intrinsic value of the Byzantine experience but also in the representation and interpretation of the place, role, and significance of the Byzantine Empire in European and world history.
The more than thirty textbooks examined include general works on world and European history and civilization, specialized works on the history and culture of Medieval Europe as well as anthologies of primary sources and some interpretative reference works. The great majority of world and European history and civilization textbooks include either one or more chapters or parts of a chapter on the Byzantine Empire in which authors survey the more than one thousand years of enduring state and civilization in very general terms. More often than not only selected periods of Byzantine history are examined, usually those Byzantine events that had a direct relationship on Western European, Arabic or Slavic civilization. Many of the chapters have such headings as "The Classical Legacy in the East: Byzantium and Islam;" "Rome's Other Heirs;" "The Byzantine East;" "Civilization in Eastern Europe: Byzantium and Russia;" and "The Byzantine Empire and Civilization." In most cases the Byzantine Empire is lumped together in one chapter under the common title of "Byzantium and Islam" as if the Byzantine state and civilization were just a religion.
The majority of the textbooks on European civilization deal primarily with the Western experience and have only scantly references to Byzantium. Most source books and readings on medieval history include no Byzantine sources and if they do, they insert parts of Justinian's Corpus Juris Civilis or Procopius' Secret History. Furthermore, there are textbooks on the heritage of Western civilization, the makers of the Western tradition, the evolution of Medieval thought and religion, the history of science or the position of women that have negligible information on Byzantine developments and some barely mention Byzantium.
Most textbooks portray distorted, contradictory or very partial images and perceptions of Byzantium. In some textbooks it is either explicitly claimed or implied that Byzantium is not pan of the European or Western civilization even when it is admitted that the Byzantine Empire was a contributing factor to the rise of the Westem European civilization. Byzantium, the inheritor and transmitter of Greek and Roman civilization to the East and West, the center of Hellenism and the rise of Christianity, is persistently consigned to the periphery of European civilization. Sometimes the biases toward Byzantium are very obvious. One historian, for example, wrote that the Crusaders returned to the West with vast booty from Constantinople and that "the greatest prize of all was the immense store of relics that the westerners liberated from the Byzantine capital and brought home." (When students were asked to interpret the meaning of liberated in the above sentence, all of them said that it meant freeing the relics from the Byzantines.)
The treatment, mistreatment or total lack of exposition of the Byzantine Empire in American university textbooks distorts not only Byzantine history and civilization but also that of the Slavic world in particular and European and world developments in general. It also raises numerous historiographical and methodological questions in the minds of all critically thinking students. Furthermore, the presence and absence of Byzantium in textbooks brings into question such problems as the mutual interdependence among cultures and issues of continuity and change in history.
The essay attempts to present some of the reasons why the accomplishments of the Byzantine Empire, the intrinsic value and permanence of its civilization, its place and role in European and world civilization are not adequately presented in American university textbooks.
XIV. LATE ANTIQUE AND BYZANTINE MANUSCRIPTS
Chair. Jeffrey C. Anderson (George Washington University)
The Last Important Pagan Art Patron in Rome David H. Wright (Oakland, California)
The familiar and beautifully carved ivory panel in the British Museum showing a scene of apotheosis can be placed in the middle of the fifth century on the basis of style. Without attempting here to settle the vexed question of its full meaning, at least we can take it to be specifically pagan in intent. (In passing I must point out that the reading of the monogram as SYMMACHORUM is very unlikely because the cutting of the monogram clearly makes the element at the upper left a C separate from the R or P below it; if it were intended to be an initial S the letter should be larger and the continuity of strokes unmistakable.) But it is not the last important pagan work in Rome.
The Codex Romanus of Vergil can be placed in Rome in the last quarter of the fifth century on the grounds of figure style, decorative features, script, and type of parchment. It is an extremely pretentious coffee-table book, originally 410 folios of the very finest parchment, roughly 35 by 33.5 cm., with a half-page illustration for each of the Eclogues and a pair of frontispiece illustrations for each book of the Georgics and of tha Aeneid. The first Pclogue illusnaEon is a very clumsy copy of an ancient illustration in "papyrus style" but the rest of the Eclogue and Georgics illustrations were improvised out of stock motifs without attempting to illustrate the text precisely.
The Aeneid illustrations, on the other hand do generally illustrate a spec passage in the text and must have been adapted from an earlier and better model. In the Storm at Sea, for example, that passage is verses 92-4 of Book I, where Aeneas desperately inveighs against the storm. Obviously this clumsy painter could not have invented so accurate and expressive an illustration on his own; he must have copied it from an illustration resembling in style those in the Vatican Vergil, Roman work of around 400. Allowing for greater or lesser stylistic modifications, the same can be said for all the other surviving Aeneid illustrations in the Codex Romanus except one.
That exception is the Sacrifice in Honor of Anchises, the only surviving illustration m Book V. Here the small part at the left showing the tomb, the serpent, and the servant sacrificing a sheep corresponds to the text fairly well but the rest contradicts the text in every possible way. The palms and crowns do not at all resemble the prizes described and the three enthroned Trojans, each with a nimbus, are incomprehensible in terms of the lively actions specified in the text. They come from the repertory of late antique imperial and consular iconography and their prominence requires us to assume they are a meaningful modification of an older iconography. It is a reasonable guess that the central figure is Aeneas giving orders for the sake, but Vergil specifies that Aeneas performs the sacrifice himself (as he is shown in one of the surviving illustrations in the Vatican Vergil). The basic meaning here is a trio of VIPs authorizing and presiding over a pagan sacrifice.
Of course Christians read and admired the language of Vergil. It is not inconceivable that a wealthy Christian patron might have an illustrated Vergil including sacrifice scenes necessary to the text. But the iconographic modifications here seem intrinsically to endorse and promote the pagan sacrifice, to associate it with official ceremonies. That seems to me to require us to suppose this extremely wealthy and ambitious patron was an active pagan in Rome at the end of the fifth century.
On Giving Churches and Receiving a Book: The Vienna Dioscorides (Med. Gr. 1) as a Document of Exchange Ann
Marie Yasin (University of Chicago)
Since Anton von Premerstein's 1903 examination of the Vienna Dioscorides, it has been accepted that the manuscript originally functioned as a gift from the people of Honoratou to the patrician princess Anicia Juliana. We know from the inscription and visual language of the presentation page that the lavish copy of Dioscorides' De Materia Medics was given to Juliana in return for the construction of a church of the Theotokos in the town. However, no subsequent scholarship has examined the social and historical implications of this exchange.
This paper will raise the questions of how and why this expensive Greek herbal was considered an appropriate return-gift on behalf of the Honoratians. What were the dynamics of expectation and reciprocity at work in the exchange between a municipality and its wealthy patron? On what level does the object itself serve as a document of this exchange?
Though there are no extant remains of Juliana's church in Honoratou, the textual and archaeological evidence for the inscriptions on churches she built in Constantinople emphasize her hope for preservation of the memory of herself and her family. The form and content of the Dioscorides manuscript shows it was designed as a fulfillment of this request. The decoration of the full-page illuminations on the first six folios can be seen as a deliberately constructed attempt to predetermine the reception of the manuscript so as to legitimate the value of the gift being offered. They present an ideal image of the object itself by establishing a learned genealogy for its medical text and illustrating the inspired production of its illuminations. In the culminating scene of presentation, the artist privileges the identity of the recipient over the donors by defining Anicia Juliana in glorified terms of status, wealth and generosity. Thus, while the Vienna Dioscorides has become an important object in the art historical canon, its scholarly value far exceeds aesthetics alone. It offers an opportunity for exploration of the social and political dynamics of a particular gift exchange and exemplifies the way in which an object-based methodology may advance our understanding of patronage and reciprocity in the late antique world.
Patriarchal Politics in the Paris
Gregory Glenn Peers (Johns Hopkins University)
In a recent essay, Henry Maguire described the significance of the assimilation of angel and emperor in the Paris Gregory (BN gr. 510, fol. Cv). Both figures wear the same dress, the imperial loos, and Maguire argues that this iconography signifies Basil I's desire for expiation for murderous sins in life and ascent to the company of the angels after death. However, the active involvement of the patriarch Photius in the production of the manuscript is not fully explored; this paper argues for a degree of subtle visual subversion on the part of the patriarch.
The political meaning of the miniature in the Paris Gregory can be fully explicated only with an examination of the development of the imperial loros in the pre-Iconoclastic period. The loos grew out of the Roman trabea triumohalis, a long ceremonial swath of cloth worn over the toga during the processes consularis. On consular diptychs of the fourth to sixth century, the trabea became increasingly prominent and ornate.
Contemporary to the elaboration of the trabea, the iconography of the consular loros was absorbed into religious art and the archangels as ministers of God were depicted wearing this ceremonial garment in monumental art. Archangels were represented in this costume to make orthodox visual statements about angels' subservience to Christ. Taking the ninth-century reconstructed mosaics of the angelic powers at Nicaea (Iznik) as faithful copies, the debt these mosaics owed to the iconography of consular diptychs is clear. The angelic powers are dressed in loros and chlamvs like the consuls on the diptych of Magnus. (518); they are disposed in pairs precisely like diptychs; and they are standing and carry vexilla like on the diptych of Probes (406). Evidently, the mosaicist and programmer saw a commensurability in the offices and iconography of consular and archangelic ministers.
Against this iconographic background, the assimilation of emperor and archangel in the Paris Gregory takes on a different aspect. With the mosaics at Nicaea restored shortly after 843, a clear model for loos clad archangels, subservient to and attendant on the Virgin and Child, was available to Photius and his painter. Rather than asserting the primacy of the imperial office, then, the loros has another meaning in the context of the Paris Gregory; it affirms a station of ministration for the emperor, equal to the archangels, and subject to Christ. In other words, the dedicatory page does not show only a place, that is some heavenly zone inhabited by angels and fortunate emperors, but more particularly a mode of activity, ministering and guarding the true faith; and, as promised in the page's inscription, joyous rewards will come for that selfless and ceaseless service.
The illustrations of the emperors, contemporary and historical, must be seen in light of Photius's poltical views. By drawing on the Introduction ('Επαναγωγή) of the law codes, and the Hortatory Chapters of Basil (Ηααιλείου κεφάλαια παραινετικά) from the same period as the manuscript and likely written by Photius, it will be argued that the giving of this gift should be seen as a highly charged act meant to indicate to Basil the proper place and behaviour of emperors before God and the patriarch.
Middle Byzantine Illuminated Liturgical Manuscripts Function and Appreciation of the Miniatures
Dimitrios G. Katsarelias (Institute of Fine Arts, Metropolitan Museum of Art)
The majority of Middle Byzantine miniatures were painted in de luxe liturgical manuscripts. Apart from the miniatures artistic value and iconography, an examination of their function and appreciation is essential for their better understanding and accurate interpretation. While a number of theories have been proposed, the question of function is still debated, and little attention has been devoted to the understanding of the miniatures by the Byzantine.
In this paper, I will attempt to define the primary function of miniatures in liturgical manuscripts by referring to contemporary literary sources on the subject and examining the role of the miniatures in a richly illuminated liturgical codex, the Mount Athos Esphigmenou 14, dating from the late eleventh century. The profusion and high quality of illumination in most liturgical manuscripts does not only reflect the Byzantine patron's love for luxury and display. Sources show that miniatures decorating liturgical manuscripts functioned as works of art to be admired, as talismans protecting their patrons and as a visual exegesis to aid the reader in his or her study of the text. The aesthetic appreciation of these miniatures did not take place when liturgical codices were in use during the church services. Literary evidence suggests that illuminated liturgical codices were meant for more than liturgical use. One such use was the study of the text by a select group of viewers, intellectuals and patrons during which the aesthetics of the accompanying miniatures were appreciated.
XV. CULTURAL LITERACY AND CULTURAL RITUAL
Chair. Fred Paxton (Connecticut College)
The Education of Aristocratic Children in the Fourth century: whose Responsibility was it?
Michele Renee Salzman (Univ. of California, Riverside)
We know a good deal about education and literacy among aristocrats in the fourth century in general terms, but we know far less about the religious education of aristocratic children. This is a question of some significance, since it bears upon larger issues. Recent articles have raised concerns about previously accepted notions about the fundamental role of women in converting aristocratic families to Christianity. These studies have looked at the epigraphic evidence and rhetorical tonoi. However, none of these studies on the role of women have looked in a systematic way at how the late antique aristocratic family handled the religious education of its children. If we look at the literary evidence -- admitedly anecdotal -- a rather different pattern emerges than the traditional one that places women as mothers in the forefront of the religious training of their children.
As this paper will show, the literary evidence suggests that it was the paterfamilias who was responsible for the religious education -- as for education in general -- of his children and family. So, for example, when Jerome is trying to encourage Furia to remain a widow, he satirizes the reasons that young widows want to remarry by having the helpless widow cry out, "Parvulos meos quis erudiet? Vernulas quis educabit?"(Ev. 54.15)
And in Antioch and Constantinople as well, as analysis of the writings of John Chrysostom reveals, it was the Christian father who was assumed to be taking the leading role in the religious education of his children, especially his sons. This emphasis is paralleled in pagan aristocratic families, as seems to be the case from Prudentius' testimony (Contra Svmm. 1.197 ff.). Thus analysis of these and other literary anecdotes suggests that it was the father who was held responsible for engaging religious educators and setting a role model for his children, especially his sons.
Christian women could play a role in religious education nonetheless. They could teach reading to their young children at home. The literate mother would be the most likely one to teach her daughter to read since aristocratic girls, unlike thier brothers, did not generally go to school The literate Christian mother might teach reading using the scriptures, and there is some evidence to show that some aristocratic women did this. But the anecdotal evidence suggests that the role of women in the religious education of aristocratic children -- especially male children -- was limited, and that motherly influence was greater on daughters than on sons.
Greek and Coptic Education in Byzantine Egypt
Raffaella Cribiore (Columbia University)
The term Coptic does not apply to a uniform language, but to a series of dialects. The Coptic script, which was invented in the third century, made possible to transcribe Egyptian phonetically in Greek, It used the Greek letters together with six Demotic signs to render the sounds of the Egyptian language that did not exist in Greek. Coptic was invented in bilingual milieus and its ties not only with the Greek script but also with the Greek language are multiple. They are not confined to the importation of Greek religious terms, but also involve a permeation of Greek vocabulary of everyday life and Greek constructions and methods of word-formation.
Traditionally Greek and Coptic education are considered strictly separated and belonging to different environments. Comparing Greek and Coptic school exercises, however, one sees that elementary education in the two languages followed a common and gradual pattern. It is true that in Coptic education religious texts were largely used in place of secular texts, but a similar phenomenon, even if less exclusive, was happening at the same time in Greek schools.
But Greek and Coptic school exercises sometimes occur together on the same ostracon or tablet, or in tablets of the same notebook. In a notebook of the early Byzantine period, for instance, (British Museum GK.Inscr. 3019), the same student wrote a Homeric rhetorical paraphrase and conjugation of pronouns together with part of a Psalm in Coptic. Or a grammatical ostracon probably belonging to the VIII century (MPER XVIII 280) shows a partial conjugation, of the verb t$L6dUKW m Greek and Coptic.
Maintaining the very strict traditional division between Greek and Coptic material, especially in the first stages of education, involves deep conceptual problems. We can ask ourselves how Coptic education was structured, and whether the teaching of the Coptic alphabet was radically distinguished from the teaching of the Greek alphabet or the two proceeded along parallel and interweaving lines. There is evidence that in the first centuries after the invention of Coptic the two languages were taught together. But it seems likely that even later on, at least up to the VIIlth century, the two scripts were learned side by side.
Thus sometimes in school exercises carrying alphabets the Greek and Coptic signs are neatly separated, or a tablet contains Greek alphabets and syllabaries on one side and their Coptic equivalents on the other. It is essential to distinguish between Coptic language and Coptic script. Students learned to write first, before learning to read. A Coptic text with fragments of the Passio of the martyr Panine confirms that beyond any doubt. At the beginning of their education students had to copy passages that they could not yet read, only in order to learn the script. It seems likely that instruction in the two scripts in the first stages of education was given at the same time and in the same setting.
Worldly Time and Temporal Eternity in Holy Land Pilgrimage in the Early Byzantine Period
Hagith Sivan (University of Kansas)
Roaming God's lands and bringing home tales formed two powerful and inimitable attractions for Christian pilgrims to Byzantine Palestine. Embarking 'on a pilgrimage enable the participant to weave a multi-dimensional map of time composed of two major features: own journey into the past, and recreating the present out of the past. This presentation will analyze the cocoon of time in which pilgrims moved during their journey and its relations with calendral or 'real' time and with the physical environment in which such pilgrimages were undertaken.
A pilgrimage was essentially a voyage of discovery set in an unfamiliar territory whose essentials had been gleaned from a sacred text. ln charting this territory the pilgrim seemed to have been endowed with a 'faculty for oblivion' which obliterated the immediate surroundings while forging a link with a remote past. Yet, the journey itself was carefully punctuated by a complexity of liturgical routines which contributed to the shaping of an earthly yet spiritually imbued calendar based on processions, assemblies, sermons, prayers and, above all, on the initiation of the pilgrim into the Christian community through baptism in Jerusalem.
Pilgrimage has been rarely presented by modern scholars as an experience in time and of time. Yet, no comprehensive understanding of so important a manifestation of Christian piety can be reached without exploring the 'time' of pilgrimage as an earthly and spiritual journey. How the past merged into the present, how beliefs in the power of the written words were translated into visual experience, how the Christian community of Byzantine Palestine employed ingenuity and imperial support to divorce the realities of the province from the idyllic world of a pilgrim, are few of the issues which such an exploration raises.
Eunuchs as Cultural Mediators in Byzantium Kathryn M. Ringrose (University of California, San Diego) This paper explores the role of eunuchs as mediators within the Byzantine world. Although our sources frequently express negative attitudes, language, and stereotypes when they refer to eunuchs, they also acknowledge the significance of eunuchs as political and cultural mediators. By the tenth and eleventh centuries eunuchs regularly operated across the boundaries between social groups that were significantly distanced from one another. Thus they mediated between the court and civic society, between aristocratic men and aristocratic women, and between religious men and women. Eunuchs also operated on the boundaries between different spiritual realms. In a world that assumed a reality that extended beyond the immediately visible, eunuchs were regularly portrayed as moving between visible and unseen or imagined realities. Thus they were mediators between the living and the dead, the sick and the healthy, the spiritual and the secular. They bridged the dichotomy between culture and nature.
To some degree these are roles that eunuchs have. played for centuries in the Middle East, and the Byzantines were in part carrying on a very old tradition despite the rhetoric of Roman law and Christian tradition. This paper, however, suggests that the changing structure of Byzantine society heightened the importance of the functions carried out by eunuchs, and that their ambiguous gender status equipped them to fulfill these roles as social and cultural mediators.
Anthropologists have identified several cultures in which alternate or third gender groups mediate between sharply defined social categories. Can we suggest that in the Byzantine case the control of powerful mediating positions by eunuchs encouraged construction of a distinctive gender category for them? Such a process would help to explain the continued existence of Byzantine eunuchs as a distinctive element despite formal hostility and prohibitions on castration. Finally, an understanding of the gender status of eunuchs in Byzantium should help us to understand other aspects of gender within that society.
Diplomacy of the Stick: Humiliation of High Ranking Foreigners in Tenth-Century Constantinople
Liliana Simeonova (Albany, NY)
Generosity and humiliation went hand in hand in the treatment which foreign ambassadors and heads of state, former or present, received in the imperial capital. The tenth century provides ample evidence of the two-faced Byzantine diplomacy, whose means included everything from flattery and gifts to mockery, humiliation and threats. Thus, the imperial government demonstrated - to their own subjects as well as to other nations - their capacity of rewarding Byzantium's friends and punishing its enemies at will.
Out of fourteen visits, which high ranking foreigners paid to the imperial court during the tenth century, at least four ended in open humiliation of the diplomatic agents. In the paper, presented at the Twentieth Byzantine conference, I discussed the arrogant treatment of the Bulgarian envoys by the emperors Alexander and Nikephoros Phokas in 913 and 965. The other two diplomatic missions, which were a fiasco, were Liudprand's second visit to Constantinople in 968, and the alleged imprisonment of the papal envoys who arrived in the imperial capital in the same year. The bishop of Cremona was humiliated both for his own and for his master's sake.
As for the Arab missions of the first half of the century, the Byzantines could give them a lavish reception at the palace while making them the unknowing victims of refined mockery: e.g., the transvestism enforced on the Arab envoys in May 946. The Arab prisoners of war (presumably people of noble origin), who were allowed to attend the imperial banquets at Christmas and Faster, were served on gold and silver plates and were eventually tipped; yet their clothing was deprived of the most explicit sign of military virtue and, ultimately, of masculinity - the belt, on which real men carry arms. The impotency of the defeated enemy was also demonstrated by holding the Arab prisoners' confiscated arms upside down in the Hippodrome under the eyes of the crowd.
The tenth-century triumphs of Byzantine emperors or generals contain quite a few elements of public humiliation of royal prisoners of war. Constantine Porphyrogenitus placed his foot, in theatrical fashion, on the head of a captured Arab prince during the triumph of his general, Leo Phokas. In 961 the emir of Crete and his family were duly paraded in the procession of general Nikephoros Phokas. Ten years later the Byzantine capital witnessed the greatest triumph in centuries: the captured treasures of the Bulgarian tsars were carried in a gilded chariot, behind it, in full regalia, rode John Tzimiskes followed on foot by Boris 11 of Bulgaria who was made divest himself of his regalia in public. Once humiliated in public, these royal prisoners were - as a rule - granted Byzantine court titles.
It should be acknowledged, however, that in its effort to intimidate foreigners the imperial government has never made foreign diplomats or visiting heads of state witness executions. Blinding and mutilation of rebels and overthrown monarchs as well as castration of their heirs were kept strictly behind the palace walls. Another six hundred years had to elapse before one of Byzantium's pupils, Ivan IV of Russia, made the execution of a political opponent- including impalement of the offender and public raping to death of his mother - a mandatory sight for the ambassadors accredited at his court.
XVI. URBAN LANDSCAPE
Chair. Kenneth Holum (University of Maryland)
Greece In Late Antiquity: Urban Decline and Rural Expansion
Michael Gaddis (Princeton University)
Greece under Roman rule posed a depressing picture to those who remembered its classical glories. The Roman province of Achaia struck contemporary observers, as well as some modem scholars, as an empty and impoverished backwater. This impression was particularly strong with regard to the late antique period, during which many cities shrank considerably and many more disappeared completely. The condition of Greece seemed to reinforce traditional ideas of late antiquity as a period of economic decline, depopulation and particularly a collapse of urban life across the entire Roman world.
The fate of a major city such as Athens exemplifies this trend. In the time of Hadrian, Athens was architecturally more impressive than it had been even at the height of its power under Perikles. By the late sixth century, however, many of the city's monuments lay in ruins, its temples abandoned and its schools closed. Athens had become nothing more than a small provincial town.
This gloomy picture of urban decline stands in sharp contrast to recent evidence regarding the rural landscape of Greece during the same period. Intensive archaeological surveys carried out in the last few decades show a countryside which experienced a dramatic expansion of occupation and cultivation starting in the fourth century and continuing through the fifth and sixth. Broadly similar results from a number of survey projects across different regions of Greece suggest that this was a general trend affecting the entire region.
The seeming paradox of urban decline alongside rural expansion can be best understood if it is viewed in the context of political, social and economic trends evolving in the late Roman empire as a whole. Greater pressure on government resources forced an end to the subsidies which had maintained Athens' status and grandeur, and an increasingly Christian state had less interest in a city so important to classical paganism. The new imperative of state policy was agricultural production; taxes were demanded in kind rather than in cash.
Particularly decisive for the economic development of Greece was the foundation of Constantinople and the state's elaborate arrangements for feeding its large population. Resources once available to other cities in the Aegean area were now diverted to the new capital, and many of those cities suffered visibly. Constantinople created a vast new demand for agricultural products which stimulated production throughout the region. Along with the foundation of a new imperial capital, meanwhile, came the rise of a new imperial aristocracy. Many members of this elite acquired and developed estates in Achaia, taking a leading role in the reoccupation of the rural Greek landscape. The overall effect of these developments, therefore, was to push people out of the cities and into the countryside.
City and Territory in Early Byzantine Cyprus: Hypotheses and Spatial Considerations
Timothy E. Gregory (Ohio State University)
Examination of the spatial distribution of the cities of Cyprus has long been taken as an important consideration in understanding of the history of civilization on the island. As long ago as 1940, George Hill anticipated important modem considerations when he noted that the distribution of Cypriot cities in the early Roman period, which was vastly different from the distribution in the Archaic and Classical periods, was the result of the economic exploitation of the island by foreign rulers, first the Hellenistic kings and then the Roman emperors. These ideas were furthered by T. B. Mitford in his 1980 article in ANAW which included a map of the island, divided into city territories, whose "temerity," he hoped, 'will encourage further consideration of these matters." Finally, at the 1986 International Byzantine Congress, Ioannes Kotler presented a provocative paper on a "Settlement Geographical Approach" to the early Byzantine Empire complete with an attempt to apply Central Place Theory to the period.
For whatever reason, the tantalizing suggestions of these scholars have not been pursued in the succeeding years. The present paper wdl combine documentary evidence, topographic information, modem land use, and the results of archaeological excavation and survey in a broad geographical analysis of the province of Cyprus in the early Byzantine period. It will test the hypotheses of previous scholars about the nature of settlement in Cyprus and the degree to which one can speak of society there as urban.or rural and the role of mining and a market economy in the early Byzantine period. The results have methodological implications and they invite comparisons with other areas of the eastern Mediterranean.
Artisans of Berytus in Late Antiquity: Social Evidence from Inscriptions and Artifacts
Linda Jones Hall (The Ohio State University, Columbus)
Beryms, famed for legal studies in the 3rd-6th centuries, also was a center of production by artisans who are known to us mainly through inscriptions and literary references to trade. Archeological finds suggest both production techniques and possible work settings for these artisans. This paper will focus on the kinds of artisans known to us from the inscriptions in Beryms and adjacent suburbs, some extant examples of their work, and the possible implications about the social situation of the workers and their clients.
Artisans of Beryms excelled in the production of textiles such as linen and silk. Their expertise in weaving, dyeing and otherwise ornamenting luxury fabrics is implied by epigraphic, legal, literary, and artistic evidence. The study of inscriptions which commemorate a kallienhissa, a n,-murarius; and a silk-worker may improve our understanding of the social status, ethnicity, and gender of artisans who are sometimes described as workers in imperial factories.
Mosaicists and painters decorated the floors and walls of private homes and public buildings. Churches depended on the didactic nature of such illustrations to convert even literate pagans, unfamiliar with the Scriptures. However, the owners of private houses continued to choose art with philosophical and pagan themes. The themes of the mosaics and paintings, as well as the signatures of a painter and mosaicist, found near Beryms and dated to 5th or 6th century, may tell us more about the artists themselves. Because the mosaics found in or near Beryms have similarities to those found in Apamea and elsewhere, it has been argued that these artisans may have been itinerant rather than located in permanent workshops in Beryms.
Glass producers and workers in metals (bronze, lead, gold) are also commemorated in inscriptions from Berytus and neighboring cities. Archeological finds of glass and objects of bronze, lead, and gold confirm the quality of their workmanship. Insights from the inscriptions and artifacts may expand our understanding of the lives and practices of the artisans of Beryms in the Late Antique period beyond the references in literature and legal codes.
The Kenchreai Basilica
Richard M. Rothaus (St. Cloud State University)
The important early Christian basilica at Kenchreai, the eastern port of Corinth, has never been properly published or studied. This has led to a proliferation of incorrect chronological and architectural information concerning this structure (for mentions of the basilica see A.K. Orlandos "' H '(3aGILucij '[CV KaygpECv." Praktika (1935) 55-6; R.L. Scranton et al., Kenchreai: Eastern Port of Corinth, 1: Topography and Architecture (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1978) 77-78; D.I. Pallas, "Korinth" in Reallexlcon zur Byzantinischen Kunst 4 (Stuttgart: Anton Hiersemann, 1990) 785-87, R.L. Hohlfelder, "Kenchreai on the Saronic Gulf: Aspects of its Imperial History" CJ 71 (1976) 223-226; M. Spiro, Critical Corpus of the Mosaic Pavements on the Greek Mainland, 9th-6th centuries, with an Architectural Survey (N.Y.: Garland Publishers, 1978) 88-92). Fieldwork in 1993, 1994 and 1995 by the author (with the permission of Robert Scranton and subsequently Ian Moms, directors of the site) has focused on architecture, stratigraphy and ceramic finds. While the study of this structure is not yet complete, its proper architecture and chronology have been defined.
Ceramic and numismatic evidence indicates that the basilica at Kenchreai was constructed in the very late fifth or sixth century, making it the latest of the many fine basilicas of the Corinthia. It was built at the landward end of the southern quay of the harbor and was incorporated into pre-existing buildings in this area. The harbor was damaged and partially submerged by seismic activity in the late-fourth century and never was fully rebuilt. The Kenchreai basilica is a five-aisle structure with narthex and exonarthex and different in form from the other Corinthian basilicas. Numerous ancillary rooms and structures, including a baptistery are known, and the area contains close to 100 burials from this period.
Of particular historical importance, beyond the rather late date of construction, is that the basilica functioned well into the seventh century. Early publication notes attributed its destruction to the Slavic invasions of the 580's, but this date is clearly contradicted by the ceramic and numismatic evidence. The destruction of the basilica cannot be used as evidence for a violent Slavic invasion, and the standard view (cf. J V.A. Fine, jr, The Early Medieval Balkans: A Critical Survey.from the Sixth to Late Twelfth Century (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1983) 40) that Christianity disappeared during the Slavic period is obviously contradicted. A mid-seventh century above-ground tomb found in the collapsed debris of the basilica indicates continued Christian activity at the site. The skeletal remains from this tomb were recovered in 1994, and the results of osteological study to occur in 1995 will be presented.
The early Christian basilica was partially destroyed by fire c. A.D. 650, but it is not certain that it was ever completely abandoned. In the I 1 th century a smaller chapel with a newly built apse at the east end was incorporated into the structure and this functioned at least through the 13th century.
XVII. PIONEERS OF BYZANTINE STUDIES IN AMERICA
Chair. Walter E. Kaegi, Jr. (University of Chicago)
A.A. Vasiliev: The Madison Years
John W. Barker (University of Wisconsin-Madison)
The role of Alexander Alexandrovich Vasiliev (1867-1953) as one of the major historians of Byzantium who were active in the twentieth century is well known. Born, raised, and trained in the final era of Tsarist Russia, and an emigre from the Soviet Union, Vasiliev was a living link with the great Russian tradition of Byzantinology, and a wonderfully productive and deeply significant contributor to the international development of Byzantine studies in this century. His one-volume history of Byzantium, honed through several versions to its final form in English, became one of the most important scholarly syntheses offered alike to the scholar and the general reader; it remains useful still, despite its overshadowing by Ostrogorsky's renowned book. Little better blessing to his life's work could be imagined than the fact that Vasiliev died on the night of April 29/30, 1953--exactly five hundred years after the fall of the Byzantine world that had been the focus of that life's work.
Though a cosmopolitan and international personality, Vasiliev spent the final and most influential part of his career based in the United States, becoming truly one of the pioneers in establishing Byzantinology among the recognized and respectable areas of academic studies. And the heart of that phase of his career was spent in Madison, Wisconsin, as a Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin. He arrived there in the autumn of 1925 as a replacement--at first temporary--of another great Russian emigre, Michael Rostovtzeff. Given a permanent appointment, he remained on the faculty there until his retirement in 1939, and he continued to live on in Madison until 1944, when he shifted his home-base, for the last nine years of his life, to Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, D.C.
Vasiliev led an active, rich, and diverse life while he resided in, and operated out of, Madison. A lifelong bachelor and inwardly lonely in that special Russian way, he was outwardly gregarious. He made many friends and left affectionate memories lingering in Madison long after his departure. It is upon these memories, and on a rich legacy of anecdotes, that I propose to draw, together with evidence from his University files and a large body of correspondence addressed to him that is still preserved. From such materials, I hope to offer a more personalized picture of this great scholar. This picture will serve to complement the useful biographical sketch of him that Sirarpe Der Nersessian published in the 1956 volume of Dumbarton Oaks Papers. It may also, I hope, preserve from unjust oblivion information that can give us a fuller and more balanced idea of both the academic and human qualities of this trailblazing figure in the early days of Byzantine studies in the U.S.A.
Byzantium in Buffalo: From the Life and Works of L. G. Westerink
John Duffy (University of Maryland)
The year 1965 was a good one for the State University of New York at Buffalo. The institution was in the full flush of expansion. The governor, Nelson Rockefeller, a strong supporter of higher education, was continuing to provide generous funding that stimulated unprecedented growth in many graduate programs. In Classics, new senior scholars were joining the faculty and more graduate students were being attracted from home and abroad. Among the new arrivals that year was L. G. Westerink.
Westerink's appointment to a Full Professorship could not be called typical for an American university, but it turned out to be an inspired move on the part of the leadership in Classics there and a "gift of Hermes" to Byzantine studies in North America. Before landing in Buffalo the 48 year old Dutchman had spent the first half of his working life teaching Latin and Greek in a municipal Lyceum in Holland and had no professional experience at a higher - level. What was different was that, even as a high school instructor, he had made himself into a dedicated and productive scholar, with five critical editions already published and as many more in preparation.
The next twenty-five years, all spent on the Buffalo faculty, were to be extremely fruitful ones for Westerink's work in medieval Greek literature. He tackled texts in philosophy, theology, medicine and belles lettres and from his workshop there flowed a remarkable series of editions and studies that set new standards of excellence and established him as one of the world's leading Byzantine philologists.
While this presentation will provide an opportunity to reveal something of L. G. Westerink's background and training, its main focus will be on the Buffalo years. What did he teach and how was he in the classroom? What was he like as a seminar leader and as a dissertation director? An attempt will also be made to explain his working methods and to characterize his philosophy of editing and the style of his editions.
Paul J. Alexander "There Is No One Whose Loss Would Be A More Serious Blow"
Rudi Lindner (The University of Michigan)
Paul Alexander was born in Berlin in 1910 and died in Berkeley in 1977. Trained in the law at Berlin, Freiburg i. Br., Hamburg, and Paris, he studied ancient history with Arthur Boak at Michigan and obtained a Ph.D. at Harvard in 1940. One of the first junior fellows at Dumbarton Oaks, he became a research analyst at the Office of Strategic Services and, after the war, began as a lecturer at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, where he rose to professor. After a short period at Brandeis, he returned to Michigan as Boak's successor and, after ten years in Ann Arbor, taught at Cal for the final decade of his life. To say that his colleagues held him in very high esteem does insufficient justice to the record.
An examination of Paul Alexander's professional career and life as a scholar affords us insight into a number of developments in the history of a humanistic field in the U.S. Twice a refugee, twice changing fields, Alexander was among those younger German Jews who made a new hfo ir: c rc world. His path paralleled not that of the older generation of emigres but those (mostly scientists) whose careers began here. His choices (to leave Dumbarton Oaks, for example) made him more an undergraduate teacher than a prolific researcher, and the rhythm of his work offers interesting contrasts to present-day practice. The movement of his interests from law to history to literature did not find emulators, and in fact the nature of his published scholarship moved away from the trend of his contemporaries. Finally, his ascent, from Dumbarton Oaks to the OSS, Hobart and William Smith, Brandeis, Michigan, and finally to Cal, represents changing expectations as well, as did his residencies in Rome.
Now that the generation of emigrds from central Europe is passing, to be replaced by their students and very different traditions of scholarship, it is appropriate to identify, first, the nature of the early influences on them, second, those American traditions they appropriated, and third, their contribution to the growth of their chosen field in their chosen land. A final question, of course, is the extent to which their contributions affect the work of today. As a scholar who obtained degrees both in Europe and the U.S.A., Paul Alexander melded together a number of traditions, and how those shaped his work, teaching, and legacy continues to fascinate.
Kurt Weitzmann: The Earlier Years
William Loerke (Dumbarton Oaks em.)
From his Gymnasium days on, Weitzmann led a double life: no matter what or where he was studying, he always indulged his passion to absorb and study. art in front of originals. Their peculiar power first struck him when shown engravings in the home of close friends. He soon sought out classical art and Dutch painting in the Kassel Museum, German Expresionist, Far Eastern, Polyneian and African art in the Folkwang Museum in nearby Hagen. It was no accident that his decision to study art history as well as classical archaeology was made, not in a classroom, but in the Kassel Museum.
Topics of his university seminars (1923-29) ranged widely and avoided Byzantium. Seminars in Greek Vase Painting with von Salis, LBwy and Noack; in WHrzburg the architecture of Neuman; in Vienna Manetti's Biography of Brunelleschi with von Schlosser; in Berlin, Islamic art with KHhnel, Baroque Painting with Weisbach, and with Goldschmidt Villard de Honnecourt, Rhenish Reliquaries, Flemish Painting. With this preparation, Weitzmann turned to the Paris Psalter and Byzantine ivories.
In 1930, at the age of 26, he was awarded the Early Christian stipend of the German Archaeological Society, the first art historian so honored. The funded the first of his five trips to Mt. Athos to photograph manuscripts for his study of Byzantine book illumination. This work led to contact with Profs. Morey and Friend and eventual transfer to the Manuscript Room in McCormick Hall. When he joined the Institute for Advanced Study in 1936, he had published four books and seven articles, a body of work which set his compass and earned his election as Fellow of the Medieval Academy of America in 1945, two years before the publication of Illustrations in Roll and Codex.
In an appendix to his Memoirs (1994), Weitzmann has left us a dispassionate survey of his life's work, accessible in reeditions, reprints and collected studies. Recent Memorial Minutes (e.g. Speculum, 1994) have defined the chief characteristics of his publications and his effective teaching. A closer look at Weitzmann, the young scholar, may help place his career in longer perspective and acquaint us with some of the experiences forming its spiritu recto-.
XVIII. PALAEOGRAPHY AND CODICOLOGY
Chair: John Sharpe (Duke University)
Another Item in the History of Scholia
Kathleen McNamee (Wayne State University)
The question whether scholia assumed their present form in late antiquity or in the Byzantine period has been argued and reargued. Gunther Zuntz wished to direct the search for the "invention" of scholia away from antiquity and into the 9th or 10th centuries, before which time, he believed, there existed neither a sufficient impetus to create marginal scholia, nor book formats and scripts appropriate to the job. Others have found reasons for considering an earlier date. Most importantly, Nigel Wilson has pointed out the resemblance of scholia to Biblical catenae, whose invention is set by tradition in 5th-century Gaza. Much of the discussion has focussed on a single papyrus codex, the Oxyrhynchus Callimachus-a large-format book of the 6th or 7th century with extraordinarily broad margins and copious, scholarly commentary. It is different enough from most contemporary codices that Zuntz acknowledged it as a "missing link" between the ancient practice of transmitting commentaries as independent books and the mediaeval practice of transcribing them as marginal scholia
It has not previously been noticed, however, that it is not the solitary "missing link." From Egypt of late antiquity come about two dozen papyrus codices, all much more fragmentary than the Callimachus but like it in layout, in density of annotation, and (sometimes) in learning. Literary texts, mostly Greek, account for about half the group. The other half are legal texts. The books are characterized by a new, very large format with extremely broad margins and by annotation that is sometimes lengthy and which is written with a new orderliness. For the legal texts in the group, palaeographers from Bischoff to Seider have traced the emergence of the new design to scriptoria attached to the law schools of 5th-century Beirut or Constantinople. Is it possible that a sort of "technology transfer" took place between legal and literary scriptoria-rather than between Biblical and literary, or somehow jointly with it-which inspired the development of new, large-format books for literary texts, and the transcription into their margins of long marginal notes and, eventually, scholia?The papyrological evidence is suggestive, particularly because of its bulk. It is admittedly not conclusive, however, and there are factors that would undermine such a theory. Two literary works of the new format, for example, are assigned dates in the 3rd or 4th centuries: earlier, that is, than the earliest of the legal texts, which are assigned to the 4th-5th century. Also one can detect an inclination toward copious (if not always orderly) marginalia in the 4th and 5th centuries in Rome and elsewhere. Parchment codices like the "Fragmenmm Vaticanum" (Cod. Vat. Lat. 5766), written probably at Rome, and the early 6th-century Vienna Dioscondes, copied in Constantinople, also have long and carefully copied marginal supplements, and the margins of the 4th-century Bembine Terence are filled with notes, although written informally by much later readers.
However the impetus arose to transcribe lengthy commentaries on literature or scripture into broad margins, two things are certain. First, in the 5th century there was no physical barrier to accomplishing this. Books of generous format survive in plenty, and scripts small enough for copying extensive scholia are known from several texts. Secondly, the idea of copying extensive commentary into the margins of books was very much abroad in this age. The question about the origins of scholia therefore really comes to this: in the absence of concrete evidence, is it reasonable to believe that some readers of profane literature in late antiquity filled the margins of their books with full and thorough commentary, perhaps even compiled, like catenae and the best scholia, from more than one source? The evidence of two dozen unnoticed papyri is ever more suggestive, and suggests that the answer is yes.
An Anonymous Copyist of Six Gospels and Psalters
Nadezhda Kavrus-Hoffmann (New York)
Among numerous Greek manuscripts written in liturgical minuscule from the second half of the XIth century to the beginning of the Xllth century, a group of six manuscripts obviously written by the same scribe drew my attention.
An anonymous copyist (not one manuscript has a colophon with his name or date) wrote three Gospels: Athen, Bibl. Nat. cod. 57; Moscow, Hist. Mus. cod. 13; Vatican, cod. Ross. or. 138, and three Psalters: Berlin, Univ. Libr. cod. 3807; Harvard, Univ. Libr. cod. 3; Vatican, cod. Barb. gr. 320. All six codices are luxurious and richly illuminated books well-known to scholars. Art historians have observed some similarities of artistic style among the Gospels and among the Psalters. However, the Gospels and Psalters have never been compared, and the group of six manuscripts has never been viewed as the work of a single scribe.
The handwriting of the anonymous copyist is easily recognizable. Especially distinctive are the letters ksi, ypsilon, uncial kappa; ligatures epsilon-pi, epsilon-tag, alpha-pi, and alpha-tag; and the tachygraphic abbreviation In titles the scribe used a neat, calligraphic coptic uncial.
Although all six manuscripts are without colophons, the Harvard Psalter can be dated rather precisely from Easter Tables that begin in A.D. 1105. This date raises questions for scholars: was the Harvard Psalter written in the beginning, middle, or end of the scribe's career, and to what period of time should other manuscripts of the group be attributed? Also, where did the talented scribe work? Palaeographic analysis can help to answer these questions. The even, well-controlled calligraphic script of the anonymous scribe can be characterized as liturgical minuscule at its acme, which occurred in the last third of the XIth century. The liturgical minuscule of this period displays an exceptional harmony in the proportions of letters. Flourishes added to some letters make the vertical script look less static. The revival of some features of the minuscule "bouletee" (the writing style of the first half of the Xth century) is clearly visible. Similar script can be found in the codex Ambrosianus B 80 Sup., which belonged to Andronikos Ducas, despotes, identifiable as the brother of the Emperor Michael VII Ducas (1071-1078). Another manuscript with a script similar to the anonymous scribe is the Psalter from Russian National Library in St. Petersburg, cod. 214, written about 1080 for an imperial family. Thus I believe the five undated manuscripts under investigation were executed during the last two decades of the XIth century and the first decade of the XIIth century.
Both palaeographic and artistic peculiarities point to Constantinople as a probable place of production of the six manuscripts written by the anonymous scribe. These manuscripts are closely related to two manuscripts executed for members of an imperial family and were very probably produced in one of the best Constantinopolitan scriptoria under the Emperor's patronage.
Utilizing Computer Technology to Identify the Handwriting of a Sixteenth-Century Scribe
Mark L Sosower (North Carolina State University)
This paper will discuss new applications of computer technology developed to analyze the handwriting of the scribe, Camillus Venetus (1518 - ca. 1589). Bona into a prominent family of printers, and the son of the important book-dealer and scribe, Bartholomeus Zanettus, Camillus Venetus worked at important workshops in Venice and Rome, and also was patronized by emminent nobles and humanists in Madrid and Padua. Since most Greek texts (other than the belles letters) came into print during the sixteenth century, knowledge about Camillus' activities is significant for understanding the dissemination of important Greek texts in music, mathematics, science, medicine, the military arts, and the fine arts.
A modem palaeographical analysis of Camillus' handwriting has long been necessary. Confusion about his handwriting began in 1910, when one of the photographs attributed to Camillus by Elpidio Martini in his pioneering article, "Chi era il copista Camillo Veneto," actually showed the handwriting of Camillus' father, Bartholomeus. The confusion has been compounded, because Camillus employed three distinct styles during his fifty-year career. As a result, many manuscripts that Camillus wrote have not been identified, and other manuscripts have been incorrectly attributed to another, called the `Tlapa scribe."
The analysis of Camillus' handwriting has been aided by a chart created through new methods, which shows distinctive letters and ligatures that were abstracted from diverse manuscripts, and placed side-by-side. A small portion of the chart is shown below. The eight columns of letters and ligatures were reproduced from manuscripts, which (from left to right) were written between 1541 and 1585.
(The manuscripts from which the letters have been abstracted have been dated by analyzing specimens of watermarks, which were reproduced using new technology. An example is the lion shown below in reduced scale.) Most of the letters and ligatures were included because they were identified by Professor Hunger as characteristic of Camillus' handwriting.(See H. Hunger, Reoertorium der griechischen Koptsten 800-1600. 113. Palaographische Charakteristika, Vienna, 1981, #212.) For example, the top row presents specimens of the ligature et, which that did not change over time. Some letters and ligatures were selected because they were written only at certain periods, and thus they help to determine and to date the different styles. An example of letters and ligatures that Camillus wrote differently over time are the specimens of crri shown in the bottom row. The dotted lines separate the diverse forms of cat used in the different styles.
The entire chart presents the letters and ligatures which can be used to identify Camillus' handwriting: early style (ca. 1537-52), which broadly imitated his father's handwriting; middle stvle (ca. 1552-72), which was influenced by scribes he met at Rome; and late style (ca. 1572-89), which was a reversion to the original style, and also reflected advancing age. Thus, Camillus may be shown to have written Lasso de Vega MS 1 (identified as being written by the "IIapa scribe") by comparing the letters and ligatures in this manuscript with the corresponding letters shown in the three columns at the right in the chart that have the determinative letters and ligatures of Camillus' "late style." Other unsigned manuscripts may be identified in a similar manner.
The methods used to produce the chart may be used generally for analyzing the handwriting of Greek scribes. This method promises to overcome two crucial limitations that have hampered the identification of scribes: palaeographers must observe one letter while visualizing the corresponding letter; and individual letters must be examined amidst the distractions of the other letters of the text.
Gabriel of Kallioupolis, Iznik, and the Gallipolite Style
Robert W. Allison (Bates College)
Gabriel of Kallioupolis left his home city at the time of the sixteenth-century Ottoman surguns, or forced deportations associated with Islamization of the city. Taking refu&e at Mount Athos, he joined the Philotheite brotherhood together with his brother
Matumos, who was tonsured Makarios. There his sympatriods, Maximos of Kalhoupolis, was already a leading monk and a precursor of the Athonite calligrapher's movement. Although Gabriel worked as a calligrapher at Philotheou, he was trained as an artist in a tradition of ceramic ornamental art that is reminiscent of the Iznik Style. The relation of his work to traditions of ceramic ornamental work is evident in his palette and use of color, his use of space, and his characteristic stylization in floral ornamental designs. He arrived at Philotheou with his ornamental style fully developed, showing himself to be a master even in his earliest work there. At Philotheou, he adapted this tradition to the ornamentation of the many liturgical manuscripts that he wrote for the monastery. In these Philotheite manuscripts, his work takes on a different character as paradisal imagery, echoing the notion of the Holy Mountain as the Garden of the Panagia.
As far as I am aware, Gabriel's ornamental style and his adaptation of traditions of ceramic art to manuscript illumination are unique. Moreover, because so many of his manuscripts are dated, it is possible to trace the progression of his use of colors and ornament at Philotheou. It is immediately evident from comparative study that Gabriel's work--its similarity to Iznik Style notwithstanding-represents a distinctive tradition, one that we can now identify as Gallipolite.
The purpose of this presentation is to put Gabriel's work before a community of historians of Byzantine and Islamic art in order to test both the question of its uniqueness and the thesis that this work is to be associated with the history of ceramic ornament, specifically, as a Gallipolite style.
XIX WALLS
Chair. Joseph D. Alchermes (New York City)
The Anastasian Wall Project 1994-95
James Crow (University of Newcastle upon Tyne)
The monument known in antiquity as either the Long Walls of Thrace or the Anastasian Wall lies 65 Ian west of Istanbul and stretched from the Black Sea coast across the peninsula to the coast of the Sea of Marmara, west of Silivii. It formed pan of the outer defences of Constantinople from the late fifth to the seventh century AD. The system of walls, ditches, interval towers and small forts was originally 50 km long, but less than half of the total length now survives above ground. It is best preserved in the rolling woodland of the northern sector where the Wall stands up to 4m in height. As it survives it nt the most monumental linear fortification dating from antiquity in continental Europe, comparable only with Hadrian's Wall in its complexity and preservation.
Large stone-built aqueducts survive to the east and west of the wall and in many places the linking water channels can be traced making through the hilly landscape. The most impressive of these at Kursunlugerme still stands over 20m. in height and can be dated to the fifth century. The Anastasiar Wall and the complex system of water provisioning for late antique Constantinople represents the most important surviving physical evidence for the hinterland of the city. Recent road building and other developments associated with the expansion of Greater Istanbul are, now posing a major threat to the surviving remains of the wall and the aqueducts.
The aims of Anastasian Wall Project are as follows:
The Survey in 1994
Dense vegetation obscures much of the landscape of the wall, a factor which greatly complicates the task of recording in detail the plan and topographic setting. In 1994 an 830 m stretch of wall-line was chosen for detailed survey near Dervis Kapi and an attempt was made to record the detailed topographic relationships between the Wall and its outer earthworks. A total station was used to record a dense mesh of spot heights at regular intervals over the selected area. This data was processed to generate a Digital Termin Model (DTM) used to create contour plans and a 3-D surface model. This has the effect of stripping the vegetation cover away and revealing clearly the underlying earthwork details and the line of the wall and interval towers. The orterworks of the Anastasian Walls were revealed far more clearly by this method and are seen to comprise a main ditch with crossing points, the main inner bank, probably an outer wall or proteichisma, and a series of shallower banks and ditches forming outer defences. Further surveys were carried out of the wall near the north coast and of exposed towers and small forts.
In 1995 the project alms to begin mapping the course of the aqueducts east and west of the wall using GPS (Global Positioning Satellite Survey) with the aim of reconstructing the water supply network using GIS (Geographical Information Systems).
Bibliography
Dirimtekin F. (1959) 'Adduction de lien a Byzance dams la region due "Bulgarie",' Cahiers Amheologique, 10, 217-243.
Crow J. G. (1995) 'The Long Walls of Thence', Constantinople and its Hinterland, ed. C. Mango and G. Dagron, Society for the Promotion of Byzantine Studies 3,(Variomnt, Aldershot), 107-122.
Fortification and the Ideology of the City in Late Antiquity: The Case of Athens
Monica Barran Fullerton (The Ohio State University)
Fortification provides physical evidence for the transformation of the city in Late Antique times. During the third century urban fortifications were repaired or built anew in response to the Gothic incursions. The new fortifications were especially notable for two features: the employment of spolia as the predominant building material, and the reduction in the area of the city that was enclosed. Both of these features became standard in early Byzantine fortifications, a fact that underscores their importance and serves as a caveat to those who would date individual circuits on the basis of style alone. Although Byzantine fortifications have been studied in detail, less attention has been devoted to their Late Antique predecessors and the innovations they introduced.
The city of Athens provides evidence for two very different fortifications, built within decades of one another. The so-called Valerian Wall followed the lines of the old Classical circuit and included the area of the city annexed ir. Roman times. The failure of this wall to deter the Heruli in 267/8 forced the Athenians to re-examine the configuration of their city. The result was the Late Roman Fortification, popularly referred to as the Post-Herulian Wall, a wall which drastically reduced the enclosed area of the city and was composed almost entirely of spolia. The Post-Herulian Wall follows a pattern of defense adopted elsewhere in the Empire and can be seen as a turning point between the Classical city and one that is decidedly post-Classical in outlook. For the city of Athens, so firmly rooted in the conservatism of its Classical past, such a change is of considerable import. The present scholarship on the Post-Herulian Wall, although recent, is now outdated in light of new evidence from excavations on the Acropolis and surrounding slopes. This evidence will be presented along with new ideas on the function and meaning of fortification in the Late Antique city.
Urban fortifications were more than physical barriers. At a time when barbarian invasions threatened to destroy all vestiges of Classical civilization, fortifications became a vital part of the urban landscape, and the image of a secure and powerful city became all-encompassing, as much to assuage the populace as to deter the barbarian. In this sense, fortification played a much larger role in the ideology of the Late Antique city than has previously been admitted. As the enclosed area of the city began to be contracted, fortifications no longer served to delineate the boundary between city and countryside, but assumed a new role as urban monuments, replacing the euergetism of previous centuries. Although often viewed merely as a sign of economic expediency, the incorporation of spolia not only aids in the embellishment of these monuments but also betrays a conscious archaism whereby images of the past are manipulated in an effort to assert cultural hegemony. This ideological aspect of reuse is one of the ways in which urban centers adapted to Roman domination and its eventual demise.
Early Byzantine Restorations of the outer City Walls of Athens - New Evidence from a Statue Base Epigram
Erkki Sironen (Academy of Finland)
This paper is a contribution to the lively discussion on the Late Roman fortification works and other public building activities attributed to the reigns of Theodosius II and Justinian in Greece, carried on by Dr Tasos Tanoulas (Athens), Prof. Timothy E. Gregory (Isthmia), and Dr M. Redde (in general).
The restoration of the outer city walls of Athens has been attributed to the Emperor Julian, then to the evidently wealthy sophist/philosopher Iamblichus around the beginning of the last decade of the fourth century, on the basis of a pair of epigrams found in 1936 in the Agora Excavations of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, and published in Hesperia in 1964. The later restoration of this particular circuit wall has been attributed to. the Emperor Justinian by his historian Procopius - but, on the other hand, denied in the Anecdota by the same author.
Until now, archaeologists have found only sporadic evidence to corroborate Procopius" record in the panegyrical De Aedificiis IV.2.24. John Travlos went so far as to call the work "a radical repair of the circuit wall" in his Πολεοδσμική έξέλιξιε τmν 'Αθηνων, ρ, p. 144-145, second edition, Athens 1993).
The present paper furnishes new evidence for Early Byzantine Athens by way of presenting a new interpretation of a neglected pair of epigrams on a fragmentary statue base found in 1939 in the Agora Excavations. The last four lines of the fragmentary inscription, datable to the later fifth or sixth century, record words in Greek meaning "noble", "a reward to this city", "reaching out his helping hand", and "having raised (the walls, as is evident) once again, up from the ground". There are numerous parallels for these phrases in Late Roman epigrams honoring high ranking officials or emperors for building works.
XX. EARLY CHRISTIAN AND BYZANTINE CHURCH DECORATION Chair. Linda Seidel (University of Chicago)
Fauna of the Terrestrial World: an Early Byzantine Scheme Reserved in Ethiopian Church Decoration
Marilyn E. Seldman. (St. Louis)
Ezana, the ruler of Aksum, accepted Christianity as the religion of his court perhaps as early as AD 324. He was the first to incorporate the sign of the cross upon Aksumite coins. Equally renowned was the Aksumite ruler Kaleb Ella Asbeha, who reigned c. 514-542. It was he who established Christianity as the religion of the Aksumite state. By the sixth century, monasteries had been established in the lands around the capital city of Aksum and the Bible translated from Greek to Ge'ez, the language of the .people. Kaleb Ella Asbeha sponsored the construction of the large cathedral of Zion at Aksum. Byzantine documents provide evidence of several embassies sent from Constantinople to the Aksumite court. Evidence suggests that Early Byzantine art provided -formative models for the sacred arts of the Ethiopian Church. Although very few works of Ethiopian art from this period are extant, sacred arts of later periods preserve decorative motifs and iconogiaphies that are typical of Early Byzantine art.
The decoration of several Ethiopia:. churches, which are datable to the eighth through the thirteenth centuries, includes elements of a decorative scheme that was popular in eastern Mediterranean. churches during the late fifth and sixth centuries. This scheme depicts the fauna of the terrestrial world, of which most extar:t Early Byzantine examples are floor mosaics, although the carved wooden ceiling beams of the Justirianic church at Saint Catherine's monastery, Mount Sinai provide an example of the scheme i.^^. a less durable medium. By the end of the seventh century, the scheme fell into disfavor.
Surviving Ethiopian examples of this decorative scheme include the painted murals of the church of St. Mary at Laiibala. he murals actually combine two schemes of decoration: a
._..„.._ give cycle scenes of the Infancy and Miracles of Christ as well as portraits cf saints, and birds and animals, the creatures of Go_,'s creation. Two earlier Ethiopian examples of the faunalscheme consist of carved wooden panels -- ceiling panels in the narthex of the monastery church at Dabra Damo and carved wooden panels from the church of St. Mary at Asmara. The
.els ... -_ - r churc•- ere preserved when. the hunch was cely ..._ .._ n the early twentieth century. Although there is no record of how these panels were incorporated into the fabric of the church, they appear to have been ceiling panels. Animals carved on the wooden panels include single animals (an ox., an elephar_t;, a predator attacking another animal, etc. TIone of t":e animals of the individual panels appears to have a symbolic meaning. Collectively, the carved wooden panels, like the birds and animals of the murals of St. Mary's church at. Lalibala, present the natural history of the terrestria_ world, a decorative scheme introduced to Ethiopia before the close of the sixth century.
The Hidden Cross-and-Tree Program in the Brickwork of the Apse of Hagia Sophia
Natalia Teteriatnikov (Dumbarton Oaks)
This paper is concerned with an unusual program of Hagia Sophia in Istanbul yet unknown to art historians, namely the three crosses and the tree hidden in the brickwork of the central apse conch. These images were uncovered during the restoration of Hagia Sophia when the plaster was removed from the exterior of the apse. They were recorded by R. Van Nice in his drawings of the east facade, but were not discussed in his studies of the church. At present, this part of the apse is covered with plaster and the images of three crosses and the tree are no longer visible. This paper aims to examine the location and meaning of these images and to discuss them as a coherent program.
As Van Nice's drawings and photographs show, three crosses and a tree are found in the exterior wall of the central apse conch of Hagia Sophia: each image is set in the wall among five windows. They are executed in red brick and incorporated within the fabric of the wall.
Although single crosses made in brick in walls of churches and public buildings are known, in the case of Hagia Sophia the configuration and !xation of three crosses and a tree are unique, suggesting that they constitute a special program.
The program consists of two Latin crosses at the center flanked by a monogram on the south and a tree on the north.
The core of the program -- three crosses -- belongs to the well-known theme of the three crosses on Golgotha on which two thieves and Christ were crucified. They are consistent with the type of crosses in the mosaic decoration and the bronze doors of Hagia Sophia, suggesting that the entire design of the building and its decorative program was carefully planned to implant the same messages throughout the building.
This paper will also show that Hagia Sophia program of the three crosses and the tree carried a message about the cross which came from Adam's tree, the cross prophesied in the Old Testament. A most vivid illustration of this program comes from the kontakia of Romanos the Melodist, a court hymnographer, whose hymns were chanted in the liturgy of Hagia Sophia during the time of Justinian. His kontakion "On the Victory of the Cross," which was used in the liturgy of Hagia Sophia on Wednesday of the fourth week of Lent and Good Friday, elucidates the link between the cross and the "wood of life." The idea of the divine providence of the cross was very much to the fore at the time of Justinian, and had a parallel development in contemporary visual art.
Constructed on the basis of contemporary theological and liturgical sources, this program carried a message to God for the protection of the church, and the salvation of its patron and its people.
Domus Sanctae Dei Genetricis Mariae: Art and Liturgy in the Oratory of Pope John VII (705-707).
Ann van Dijk (The Johns Hopkins University)
Dedicated to the holy mother of God, the oratory of John VII in old St. Peters served both as an expression of its patron's devotion to the Virgin Mary and as his burial chapel. While recent scholarship has done much to elucidate the first of these aspects, the relationship between the monument's form and its function, not only as the site of John VII's tomb but also of ritual activity aimed at ensuring the salvation of the pope's soul, has received little attention. This paper explores the rich and complex relationship that existed between the oratory's pictorial decoration and the liturgical ritual that took place there.
While there are no records documenting how the chapel functioned originally as a liturgical space, its relatively small size, the presence of an altar and the repeated reference to its papal patron through images, inscriptions and the placement of his tomb there strongly suggest that its primary function was the celebration of special, private masses for John VII's soul. This coincides with what is known about developing commemorative practices in the Roman church at the time. In his recent study, Christianizing Death: The Creation of a Ritual Process in Early Medieval Europe (Ithaca and London, 1990), Frederick Paxton observed that faith in the efficacy of such masses was "predicated on the assumption that the mass was a gift to God, which he would reciprocate" (p. 68).
The decoration of the wall above the altar revolved around an image that envisioned a slightly different act of exchange: John VII offers the oratory to the regal figure of Mary, whose orant pose expresses the pope's hoped-for response to his gift, her prayers of intercession on his behalf. This image lies at the intersection of the oratory's ritual and pictorial programs. During the celebration of the mass, John VII's represented act of donation functioned as a pictorial counterpart to the priest's. ritual offering of the gifts of bread and wine at the altar directly below, but with one important difference. Whereas in the prayers of the mass the priest offered the eucharistic gifts directly up to God, the decoration of the oratory visually invoked Mary's mediation of the offering.
The images of the surrounding christological cycle, and especially the Nativity positioned directly above, provided the foundation and justification for the central image of Mary and the role it called on her to play. Drawing on primarily Byzantine traditions of liturgical commentary and exegesis, this paper demonstrates how the creators of the oratory used art to supplement the text of the mass and introduce the concept of Mary's mediation into the Roman liturgy of commemoration. In so doing they made Mary the linchpin around which a whole economy of gifts revolved, by means of which John VII aspired to secure the eternal salvation of his soul.
Some Aspects of the Iconographic Program of the Church of St. Panteleimon at Nerezi
Ida Sinkevic (Lafayette College)
The church of St. Panteleimon, located in the village of Nerezi near Skopje, in former Yugoslav Macedonia, displays one of the major surviving painted cycles of the twelfth-century Byzantine monumental art. Commissioned in 1164 by a member of the imperial family., Alexios Angelos Komnenos, the painted decoration at Nerezi has been recognized by scholars for the high aesthetic quality and refinement of its style. Moreover, stylistic analysis of the paintings served as the basis for explaining emotional and human aspects of the program.
Not withstanding the importance of style, this paper maintains that human and emotive content of the cycle at Nerezi is equally, if not more, emphasized by its innovative iconography. Among many innovative aspects of the iconography of Nerezi's cycle, such as the new motifs introduced into traditional scenes and the appearance of new scenes, particularly intriguing are the actual arrangement of the scenes and their selection.
Concerning the selection, the prominence at Nerezi is given to scenes dedicated to the Passion and Sacrifice as evident from both the number and location of these scenes. The themes of the Passion and Sacrifice are also emphasized by the arrangement of the cycle in terms of paired images and scenes. For example, the scenes of the incarnation, theophany, and miracles of Christ, are spatially related to the scenes which either anticipate or portray Christ's sacrificial death. The spatial relationship is further enhanced by visual means, such as the corresponding compositional formulae and corresponding gestures, and by unified theological messages.
The composition of the program in terms of paired scenes is intended to emphasize human and emotive content of the cycle while at the same time assigning a new,
participatory role to the beholder. With scenes spanning the space of the church, the beholder is not only a viewer of a series of isolated symbols of the dogma, but rather a participant in an action which is happening within the realm of his/her space.
Ritual Swinuning and the Feast of the Epiphany
Sharon E. J. Gerstel (University of Maryland/Dumbarton Oaks)
In Byzantine monumental decoration, scenes from the life of Christ, generally corresponding to important feasts of Orthodoxy, are placed in the upper reaches of the church. This "feast cycle" has been interpreted in a number of ways; calendrical, topographical, representative of an imperial liturgy, etc. These interpretations, often complementary, are dependent upon the art historian's familiarity with the liturgical year and a close reading of texts such as mystagogical treatises, homilies, and testimonia by pilgrims and travellers.
While it has become fashionable in recent years to link church decoration and liturgical celebration, extra-liturgical ritual has received little attention. In fact, many rites associated with church feasts, as well as significant events in the life of the faithful, the family, and the community, occurred outside of the church building. Familial rituals included mourning and funerary commemoration, engagements, marriages, and healings both physical and spiritual. These rituals are difficult to document and are rarely described in Byzantine sources. One must often search for information in anthropological studies of pre-modern Orthodox societies. Even then, extrapolation is a dangerous affair. Such rituals, however, filled the daily life of the faithful. It should come as no surprise that such rituals would eventually find their place on the walls of the church -- not as individual scenes but as telling details added. to pre-existing images.
This talk will examine the insertion of an image borrowed from an extra-liturgical rite into the scene of the Baptism. As is well known, the conventional Middle Byzantine artistic rendering of the Baptism already diverged from the New Testament description. The inclusion of the personified Jordan and attendant angels is linked to the text of hymns read on the feast of the Epiphany (January 6) and to the very manner of baptismal celebration. The insertion of another detail, however, demands a further explanation. From the eleventh century, scenes of youthful swimmers in the Jordan were inserted into scenes of the Baptism in both miniature and monumental painting. This detail is usually considered "genre," but the swimmers have another meaning.
Often depicted as little boys, the swimmers dive into the Jordan and swim towards Christ. I will demonstrate that these figures represent boys who dove into the waters on the Feast of the Epiphany to retrieve a wooden cross that had been thrown into the sea for the "Blessing of the Waters." Today, such ceremonies take place in most sea-side Orthodox communities, from Patras to Port Jefferson. But documentary evidence also tells us that this ritual was practiced in the Byzantine period. A Genoese statute from Kaffa, dated 1449, describes the Orthodox rituals that took place in this multicultural Crimean trading center. According to the text, on the Feast of the Epiphany, local boys dove into the sea to rescue the cross and were rewarded 75 aspen. [For an analysis of this document, see, S. P. Karpov, "Chto i Kak pzazdnovali v Kaffe v XV veke," Srednie veka 56 (1993) pp. 226-232.]
It is clear that the medieval viewer would have understood the church calendar from the arrangement of the narrative scenes of the life of Christ. Similarly, some might have participated in a quick tour of holy sites placed deliberately within their vision. The insertion of extra-liturgical scenes reflecting local rites into the decoration of the Byzantine church would have lent a more intimate aspect to the painted program. In this trimmer, the narrative cycle of the life of Christ also narrated a small part of the life of each viewer.
The Double Portrait of Kale Kavalasea from Mistra
Sarah T. Brooks (Institute of Fine Arts, NYU)
The frescoed portrait of Kale Kavalasea, represented in secular and monastic garb, with her daughter and son beneath the Virgin and Christ child, demonstrates the available range in representations of the family during the Late Byzantine period and provides the opportunity to focus attention specifically on the portraits of aristocratic women, an understudied category of Late Byzantine portraiture. It also offers important information concerning the development of the combined monastic and secular portrait, a type frequently referred to as the "double portrait", but which should more precisely be identified as the "mirrored portrait".
Kale's image with her children in the small private chapel of St. John in Mistra, dated to the late 14th or early 15th century, records the names of those depicted: "η [π]αρομια κορα καλη καβαλασεα σνν tots τεκνοιs αντηs", "η δη[ά τ]ον Θείον καί άγγελικού σχήμ[α]τοs μεταν(ο)μασθήσα καληνηκη μοναχή". Kale's children are identified as: "την ανν[α] λασκαρινα" and "[θ]εοδωροs οδηγιτριανοs". (See N. B. Drandakes, "O Ai Giannakes tou Mistra;" DChAE. 1987-1988, pp. 61-83.)
The portrait is unusual in that it juxtaposes images of Kale in monastic and secular costume, thus symbolizing her two distinct and separate life stages and their individual significance-- the pride taken in motherhood and the piety demonstrated as a servant of God. The only such surviving composition in Mistra, this double representation of Kale in one composition justifies the use of the term "mirrored portrait". The origin of the "mirrored portrait" appears to be a uniquely Byzantine development of the early 14th century, beginning with the examples in the Church of the Chora's parekklesion, Tombs D and E, Constantinople (ca. 1330). A parallel also can be found in manuscript painting, namely the portrait of John VI Cantacuzene (dated 1375, Paris gr. 1242, f. 123v). The surviving examples attest to the "mirrored portrait's" appropriateness in representing the aristocracy or the emperor. The occurrence of such a portrait in Late Byzantine Mistra testifies to the close artistic link between Constantinople and Mistra, and the apparent receptivity of one provincial, aristocratic woman, Kale Kavalasea, or her family to these innovations from the capital.
Unusual too is the coupling of the "mirrored portrait" with a family portrait composition. None of the examples cited previously include children, while excluding the spouse. The Typikon of the Convent of Our Lady of Certain Hope (ca. 1328, Ms. Lincoln College gr. 35) included deceased family members in family or marital portraits. The absence of Kale's husband in the portrait and the inscription is noteworthy. It suggests that the fresco was intended to convey the legal or emotional estrangement of Kale from the father of her children. The inscription confirms the unusual family relationships between the mother and her children-- evidenced by their three different family names, Kavalasea, Laskarina and Hodegitrianos. There are many possibilities for these discrepancies, among them: divorce, remarriage, and adoption. The portrait of Kale Kavalasea and her children, perhaps a rare, surviving portrait of a one-parent, aristocratic, Palaeologan family, testifies to the complexity of both Late Byzantine portraiture and society in the urban center of Mistra.
XXI. HAGIOGRAPHY
Chair. Alexander Alexakis (Columbia University/Dumbarton Oaks)
Fundraising in Late Antiquity: Purpose and Audience of the Historia Lausiaca
Claudia Rapp (University of California, Los Angeles)
The Lausiac History is generally known as an invaluable source for the history of early monasticism. Composed in the 420s, it is among the first works to record in written form the lives and teachings of the desert fathers that had been handed down by oral tradition for over a century.
Yet, the character of the Historia Lausiaca as a work of literature and especially as a historical document for its own time has received little scholarly attention. This is the more surprising since the circumstances of its composition are well known. The author, Palladius of Helenopolis, was a prominent bishop, a devoted supporter of John Chrysostom whose life he described in the form of a dialogue, and himself a disciple of the hermits and monks in Egypt and Palestine. The patron and addressee of the work was Lausos, the imperial chamberlain (praepositus sacri cubiculi) at the court of Theodosius II.
The Historia Lausiaca therefore lends itself to an investigation of the relation between text and audience. In particular, I will address the question of (1) how the author anticipates the interests of his audience, and (2) what other underlying strategies he pursues.
I will argue (1) that Palladius includes an unusually large number of stories relating to castration in order to reassure Lausos (whose office demanded that he was a eunuch) that many ascetics would have envied him his physical state. On the basis of a prosopographical study of Palladius' contemporaries mentioned in his work, combined with an attentive reading of his preface, I will show (2) that, beyond Lausos, his targeted audience were the women at the imperial court, especially Theodosius' pious sister Pulcheria, and that his aim was to incite them to generous donations on behalf of the monastic movement.
Constantinople and its Saints (IVth-VIth c.) The Image of the City and Social Considerations
Helen Saradi (University of Guelph, Canada)
In the hagiographical sources from the 4th to the 6th c., describing various forms of monasticism, a major theme emerges: the incompatibility between city and desert.
The reconciliation of the saints with the capital was achieved gradually in the course of the early Byzantine centuries at two levels. The first may be understood as a change of attitudes. The saints were gradually assuming a specific role, ecclesiastical, political and social, in the capital and this was recognized by the urban population. The second is related to their social status. Urban saints and especially those belonging to the upper class were accepted in the urban milieu without any conflict. They naturally blended into the urban institutions and traditions. On the other hand popular saints from the desert raised concerns regarding their sources of subsistance, they incurred the hostility of the clergy, and they projected an ideal contrasting with that of the city. They were integrated into the urban milieu gradually and in most cases on account of the support of the aristocrats and of the emperors. Even after they had accomplished their mission in Constantinople, namely to fight the heresies, they remained on the margin of the city's life. The urban clergy often felt intimidated by the popularity of these saints, while the Church openly cooperated with the state against some popular saints on various issues. The sources show that mainly "popular" saints caused conflicts with the ecclesiastical establishment. The nature of these conflicts was strongly antagonistic, a struggle for power over the Christians and the monastic community. It should be noted that the confrontations caused on account of heretical views of some saints are not emphasized by the hagiographers who tried to incorporate the saints into the official Orthodox Church. The contrast city-desert is also reflected in the ascetics' concern of the incompatibility between asceticism and bishopric. By the 6th c. the saints had adapted to the ecclesiastical establishment and they were appropriated by bishops. By then the process of incorporation of the saints into the life of the capital was completed. Constantinople could receive its saints as urban figures without confrontation with the civil and ecclesiastical establishments; in the hagiographical texts, the saints are presented as naturally belonging to the Byzantine capital.
Thus ideology and historical reality emerge as closely linked. The image of the city is conceived in terms of contrasts which betray significant social tensions, but above all ideological. When an ideological unity appears, in the 6th c., when the contradiction between city-desert had become less sharp, the city "ideology" was expressing a new urban "consciousness".
Hagiographic Models in the Vita of David, Symeon and George of Lesbos
Dorothy de F. Abrahamse, California State University, Long Beach
The vita of David, Symeon and George is one of the most problematic texts of iconophile hagiographic literature. Its story of three brothers is unique, in this period, in presenting a composite of the lives of three holy men embodying different styles of sanctity in the frame of a single family. Chronological improbabilities and late references have led some scholars to dismiss the work as a work of fantasy - "une vie fantaisiste", in Halkin's words. Others, noting its detailed narrative of iconophile resistance, the inclusion of valuable historical details on the restoration of icons and the author's detailed local knowledge have argued that it is an early and valuable component of the corpus of iconophile hagiography. This paper approaches the work as a layered composition that has compiled discrete traditions about three individual saints into a single work. One feature that may shed light on the composition of the work is the author's use of early hagiographic models in the portraits of the three saints.
The use of topoi and models of asceticism in hagiography is well known and a constant field of exploration for any student of a saint's life, and recent scholarship has expanded our understanding of the use of antique models in middle Byzantine saints lives extensively. The author of the vita of David, Symeon and George uses such models in an unusually explicit way, identifying for each of his saints the inspiration for the style of asceticism chosen. Thus the author tells us that Symeon "decided to emulate the deeds of Symeon the Elder, the one in the enclosure" (ch. 10), and that George "strove after and emulated precisely" the "most holy Sabas, great and renowned among the monks" (ch.11). David's eremetism in the wilderness is modelled after Antony the Great, who appears in visions throughout the biography. A fourth saint - Spyridon - appears in the vita to make a visionary journey to Constantinople to participate in the restoration of icons. With the help of the recently developed Hagiographical Data Base, this paper will compare these references to the use of earlier saints in other vitae of ninth century saints. How common were explicit models in descriptions of asceticism? How were they used in other texts? Were Antony, Symeon, Spyridon and Sabas conunonly referred to in other ninth century works?
Analysis of the text indicates that the author's use of ascetic models was based on short descriptive passages, available in synaxaria as well as the full biographies. Comparison of sources for each of the early saints will suggest what the author could have known and used in writing. Although the choice of Antony and Symeon as models seems obvious, references to Sabas and Spyridon require explanation. Some of the descriptions contain strong visual elements: could the author's use of the saints derive from pictorial representations of the saints selected ? Finally, the paper will explore the extent to which the model guided the composition itself: to what extent were the life, acts and miracles of eacrr of the saints an extension of their classic role models ? This analysis is intended to explore the composition process of the text, and, it is hoped, to shed some light on the role of the author as compiler and/or hagiographical composer. It may also demonstrate some uses of the new Hagiographical Data Base.
Classicism in the Life of SS David. Symeon and George
Douglas Domingo-Foraste (California State University, Long Beach)
The author of this life of three ninth-century iconophile brothers from Mytilene took pains to display his classical erudition while at the same time deriding the value of classicizing literature and classical education. This schizophrenic relationship with classicism, on the one hand, emulation, on the other, derision, may reflect the author's insecurity about the sophistication and "worldly" learning of the more provincial adherents to the iconophile movement. Seven instances in the life provide relevant material for a discussion of the author's view of classicism. Some are embedded in the accounts of the saints' lives from which the author compiled his account. Others are obvious insertions on his part to flaunt his knowledge of classical mythology and literary models. Three of these passages are merely parenthetical comments, but the other four are fairly lengthy, involved imitations and references to classical literary models and forms of education.
Three passages in the life provide short, but telling comments about the author's attitude toward classical literature: a mistaken reference to Mt. Ida in the Troad as the birthplace of Zeus (Ch. 5), a reference to the sun as "the charioteer of the day" (Ch. 19) and a reference to iconoclast attacks as "bacchic" (Ch. 28). The first, its error aside, is typical of the author's attitude. While inserting the reference in an apparently offhand fashion, the author displays his knowledge of mythology with obvious pride; but he also takes great care to mask that pride with a derogatory reference to "the Greeks" as the source of this belief and in what follows mockingly suggests that Ida now finally has a real divine presence in David.
The author inserts the second parenthetical reference, the one on the sun, in a story derived from an earlier account of the life of Symeon. He may have inserted the description in this particular portion of the vita because this story itself reflects his ambivalent attitude toward classical learning.
Hypatia (later named Febronia) comes to Symeon as a girl highly educated in both secular subjects, as her obviously symbolic name suggests, and religious ones as well. She is pointedly far more learned than the monk. Symeon eventually heals her from the muteness that had resulted from a vision and she becomes one of his disciples, an indication of the subservience of secular and religious higher education to the devotion to God of marginally educated provincials. Yet in the midst of this lesson the redactor of the vita inserts a highly artificial, poetic and even pagan personification of the sun as evidence of his own erudition.
The reference to the "bacchic" fury of the iconoclasts is designed to evoke the action of Euripides' play, itself a bundle of negative associations; and yet it is one designed to display the author's familiarity with classical literature.
Similar paradoxes occur in passages where the either the author or Symeon employs classical forms of expression and yet attacks the very substance of classical education that gave rise to forms. The proemium, for example, follows the form of the classical priamel [W.H. Race The Classical Priamel from Homer to Boethius. Leiden 1982] but attacks mythography (Ch. 1); in the account of the individual debate between Symeon and the iconoclast patriarch John VII (Ch. 29), the author has Symeon disparage classical rhetoric and then defeat it; Symeon's familiarity with forms of classical epistolography occurs in the context of the story of an obviously well educated official from Constantinople; and while the author expresses anger and revulsion at the poem inscribed on Theodore and Theophanes, like a good philologist he apparently emends it in order to make it scan (Ch. 23). All these instances indicate not only some defensiveness about the iconophiles' lack of education, but also a certain latent pride in the author's own sophistication.
Byzantium Facing the Carolingian West: Literary Convergence and Divergence in the Aftermath of the Dark Ages (ca. AD 750-850)
Stephanos Efthymiadis (Dumbarton Oaks)
The second half of the eighth century saw Western and Byzantine cultures confronted with a remarkable change. The literary eclipse that both worlds suffered in the so-called Dark Ages was superseded by a revival of learning and letters. The introduction of the minuscule script and the expansion of book production resulted in a new orientation of the literary culture in the Middle Ages. This paper aims to examine this cultural development and define its social context from a comparative perspective.
Byzantine and Carolingian Rbnaissances moved along various paths which my be worth reviewing here. In the East, Constantinople and its hinterland took the lead in this revival; but, just as foreign scholars were gathered in Charlemagne's court, several immigrants from the Byzantine periphery (Sicily and Arab-held Palestine) joined the Constammopolitan intellectuals and contributed significantly to the new literary movement.
In the period following the Seventh Ecumenical Council in Nicaea (787) various kinds of literary activity reappeared in the East. Historiography, hagiography and homiletic literature received renewed attention. In the years before the outbreak of the Second Iconoclasm (815) hagiography was largely represented by the composition of Encomia aiming at the glorification of Early Christian martyrs. Older Passions were rewritten in elevated diction and style. This literary genre seems to have met with a further development in the 820's: such hagiographers as the future patriarch Methodios, Ignatios the Deacon or Michael the Synkellos began to compose Lives of contemporary Saints used a convoluted kind of Greek.
Interestingly enough, a quick glance at the Carolingian West reveals a similar line of development in hagiography. Indeed, the Carolingian Renaissance is equally known for having reshaped extant pieces of hagiography in what has been called Learned Latin. In this context questions about the comprehensibility of this kind of hagiography cannot but arise.
At around the same time there was a heightened interest in the production of hagiographical collections, in the form of Legendaries in the West or of Menologia in the East. This my reflect the demand for more compact books, intended for individual study rather than reading aloud in the course of a public church service. Similar elements of transition are observable in the revision and compilation of grammatical and logical handbooks. Surviving gammaucal textbooks and lexica from the early ninth century suggest the priority of the written over the oral word.
A further interesting comparison my be drawn from the relative flourishing of homilies and sermons. Brave attempts were made to recover the older forms of public speech and appeal to the medieval man in the street, but, as it seems, homilies and semons were pronounced before clerics and monks rather than a wider audience.
Useful insight into the intellectual climate of the time can be provided by examination of the social status of the authors and commissioners of literary works. Contrary to the pre-carolingian and early Byzantine times, the cultivated class was more or less co-extensive with the sphere of clerical officialdom.
Cultural developments in the period ca. 750-850 are unique neither to Byzantium nor to the West and deserve to be studied in a wider as well as a comparative context. Clearly, this survey does not necessarily imply that Byzantium followed the same trends as Western Christianity; nor is there my reason to believe in this connection that the one culture influenced the other. It aims to analyze a interesting parallel phenomenon and suggest that signs of a deeper social transformation of the Medieval world, visible in the development of urbanism and changes in everyday life, are also to be detected in literature.
Classical Allusions in the Life of the Patriarch Nikephoros by Ignatios the Deacon
Elizabeth A. Fisher, The George Washington University (Washington, D.C.)
Among those works of hagiography written in the "high" or classicizing style, the Life the Patriarch Nikephoros by Ignatios the Deacon (ad. C. deBoor, NICVphQfj amhi niscooi on tarrtinooolitani oo s la historica [Leipzig 1880] 139-217) occupies a high promontory, if not the pinnacle, of classical allusion and
archaizing, classical style. The vocabulary and syntax of the work are learned and difficult, and its allusions sometimes obscure to the point of impenetrabf!ty. Written in the mid-ninth century, the Lifg is a document contemporary with the restoration of the icons after the Second Period of Iconoclasm. It reflects the literary preoccupations of the triumphant iconodules in a period described by Paul Lemere and Paul Speck as a pre-Macedonian renaissance of classical learning after a century of iconoclast rejection of the classical past (Paul Lemerle, Bvzantine Humanism (Canberra 1986) 120-168; Paul Speck, "Ikonoklasmus and die Anfange der makedonischen Renaissance," MDIKIAA BYZANTINA 4 (Bonn 1984)] 175-210).
Ignatios' deployment of classical allusions in the LAQ illustrates various ways in which the classics were used by iconodules against their rejectionist opponents. Ignatios assumes that his (presumably iconodule) audience is steeped in classical learning and tests that learning with riddling allusions (e.g.,
Demosthenes is identified only as "the orator from Paiania" [his Attic deme], p. 145) and obscure cultural references (e.g., to the different sorts of lyres used in antiquity, p. 150). Ignatios explains in detail that the Patriarch Nikephoros possessed thorough knowledge both of Christian writings (i.e., biblical and patristic) and of secular literature (especially the logical system of Aristotle). This latter knowledge enabled Nikephoros to argue persuasively to refute heretical error (p. 149).
The Llfa displays the Patriarch's rhetorical style in the service of orthodoxy and the iconoclast Emperor Leo's lacklustre rhetorical technique as the two examine the issues surrounding icon worship in an extended interchange carefully modelled on the Platonic dialogue form (pp. 169-186). The Patriarch
Nikephoros takes the role of a Socrates, who skilfully controls the course of the argument, while the Emperor Leo plays the overconfident opponent destined to lodge feeble protests before helplessly capitulating in defeat. The Patriarch not only demonstrates his learning in riddling classical references (e.g., to the gymnasium of Cynosarges, p. 171) and in allusions to rather obscure classical texts (e.g., to the Hesiodic Shield of Herakles, p. 178), but also displays a dizzying command of scriptural passages; the Emperor Leo never refers to classical literature or culture in his statements, but confines himself to matching Biblical quotations unsuccessfully with the Patriarch. The Patriarch demonstrates superior rhetorical skills with extensive arguments employing definition and euhemerism. The Emperor speaks sparely, interpreting Scriptural passages only in a literal sense and finally allowing his argument to collapse entirely.
When the literary style and rhetorical skill of the iconodule hagiographer Ignatios and his subject Nikephoros are contrasted with the meagre statements of the iconoclast Emperor Leo, one can only agree with Lemerle: ". . h is not so surprising that the decline and disappearance of iconoclasm coincided with a humanistic type of'renaissance'" (p. 120).
XXII LATE ANTIQUE AND BYZANTINE DECORATIVE ARTS
Chair, Stephen Zwirn (Dumbarton Oaks)
Disputing the Disputa: The Limits of Late Antique Art
Anthony Cutler (Penn State)
A large fragment of a silver plate in Malibu depicts on its interior two figures identified by inscription as Ptolemaios and Hermes, each accompanied by personifications, below a seated figure who is unidentified and now headless. This has twice been published (without argument, in Getty handbooks) once as of the fifth century and again as of the fourth. At the College Art Association in 1987 and then at length in print (J. Paul Getty Museum Journal 18 [1990] 5-32) 1 argued that the object was instead a north Italian creation of the late fifteenth- or early -sixteenth century. This was based on the "unRoman" thinness of the silver and punched inscriptions, the composition, and above all the iconography: Ptolemy and Hermes Trismegistus engaged in dispute before the figure of Nous, a scene unknown in Antiquity and one that fits much better in the context of Hermetic circles in Renaissance Padua. Many "Renaissance people" agreed with me, while several Late Roman specialists continue to insist that the plate "belongs" to them.
There the matter rested until about a year ago when Irena Calinescu, formerly a conservator at the Getty Museum and now of the Los Angeles County Museum, informed the that she had found previously unnoticed traces of leafy ornament on the outside of the vessel. This decoration seems to be related to the ornament of an indubitably Late Antique plate in St. Petersburg and a number of silver spoons; it therefore raises the possibility that the Getty plate is of like date. This paper will present the new evidence and reopen the question.
Though empiricists will insist that there must be a single, correct account of the plate, we are not yet at a stage where this desire for certainty can be satisfied. (Even as I write, the leaf decoration is undergoing "image enhancement" in the Getty Lab's computer). These are not only alternatives but also grounds on which to examine the sort of reasoning that we employ in arguments larger than that which concerns the proper time and place of the plate's origin.
Forging Salvation
Areti Papanastasiou (University of Chicago)
The labour of the first parents in a forge appears only within the context of a small number of Middle Byzantine ivory boxes decorated with scenes from the story of Adam and Eve. A box at the Cleveland Museum of Art, no.24.747, preserves a complete and unique version of this episode in which the structure of the furnace appears surmounted by a tree. When not ignored, this tree has been explained as a mere "interpolation" to the forge scene. Within the context of the garden of Eden, however, such prominent representation of a tree can hardly be considered accidental. Taking as a point of departure the fact that the incompatibility of tree and fire is a matter proper to the natural world and not visual representation, I will argue that the meaning of tree-and-furnace is not to be sought in the realism of the representation but in its function as a trope.
This image will first be examined within the context of the box itself. It will be argued that a spatial re-arrangement of the linear sequence of events on the sides of the Cleveland box, proposes a closed form of time within which the narrative of agricultural and technological progress becomes a quest for the return to Eden. An analysis of the development, transformation and shift in tropes will reveal that this return hinges upon notions of birth, creation and generation, in ways that recall the classical images of the human body as a forge, and the female womb as a furnace inside which babies are "cooked."
The image of the furnace as a creative and birthing womb is employed in homiletic and hymnographic literature with reference to the Incarnation. The Virgin herself is described either as the klivanos inside which Christ-the-bread bakes himself (Photios), or as the spiritual kaminos from which Christ gives birth to himself and the whole world, as prefigured by the deliverance of the three children from the fiery furnace (John of Damascus and service of the Orthros). Within this context, the paradoxical image of tree-and-furnace becomes an apt metaphor for both the mystery of the Incarnation and the salvation of the individual soul.
This paper will conclude with a discussion of the alchemical interests of Patriarch Cerularios and Michael Psellos, and the writings of Zosimus of Panopolis, where, Adam's wisdom and knowledge of metallurgy becomes a motivated account of the quest for self and the return to the original homeland.
© 2024 Byzantine Studies Association of North America, Inc. (BSANA) . All Rights Reserved.