Volume 112, Issue 1

By focusing on the known details of Laonikos Chalkokondyles’ biography, on his relation to Byzantine historiographical tradition, by comparing his historical work to that of contemporary intellectuals living under the Ottomans as well as those in the west, examining his portrayal of Mehmed II, his adoption of a Herodotean model, the revival of Herodotus in the Renaissance more generally, and the reception of the ᾿Aπόδειξις in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, I argue that Laonikos was writing for an elite circle of Byzantine émigrés and other intellectuals with access to classical Greek in the west, rather than for the post- Byzantine intellectuals associated with the Ottoman court.

In this article, we present a colophon epigram found in the manuscript Napoli, Biblioteca Nazionale, gr. II C 33. We edit the text, provide a translation and commentary and supply it with a thorough metrical analysis. Throughout the article, we investigate whether the scribe meant this colophon to be one text or three separate texts. By doing so, we will touch upon broader issues, such as Byzantine metrics in general and the Byzantine habit of compiling texts from an antiquarian perspective.

This paper treats the fifth-century AD apocryphal Acta Barnabae (= ABarn). § I sets out briefly the consensus view of ABarn’s main aim - to establish the autocephaly of the Cypriot Church by endowing it with an apostolic founder, Barnabas, in a text modelled on Acts which affects to be contemporary with Acts and to be the work of John Mark. § II examines ABarn’s detailed interactions with Acts, its foregrounding of Barnabas over Paul, and its centralising of Cyprus in early Christianity; ‘itinerary style’ is highlighted as a prominent feature of ABarn’s striving for verisimilitude. § III treats ABarn’s use of further ‘novelistic’ strategies for the same purpose; they mostly draw on topoi, but sometimes arguably on personal knowledge of Cyprus. § IV reflects on ABarn’s curious downgrading of its inscribed author, John Mark. This is attributed to the anti-Monophysite stance of the fifth-century (Orthodox) Cypriot Church towards both the Antiochene and Alexandrian Patriarchates.

Cassiodorus, Jordanes, Ennodius and Marcellinus Comes offer quite different accounts of the battle between Ostrogoths and imperial troops which took place at Horreum Margi in 505. A careful study of these sources indicates that Theoderic and Anastasius were uneasy when mentioning the respective allies and that they both tried to hide the other’s involvement in the conflict. Ennodius’ mention of discordia is very important to understand both the causes and the consequences of Horreum Margi. In fact, Anastasius attacked an ally of Theoderic in order to show that the king was not willing to come to the rescue of his foederati. The Ostrogothic quick reaction led to an unforeseen conflict and opened a period of tense relations between Ravenna and Constantinople, whose end, a few years later, was sealed by Cassiodorus’ first letter, a document centered on the concept of concordia.

While narratives about the ascent of the souls through the air and their examination at toll-gates were very popular in Byzantium, it would be wrong to believe that they were universally accepted. Andrew of Crete conceptualised the afterlife in such a way that no room was left for dramatic encounters with demons. Theodore of Stoudios accepted that the souls of the deceased were judged but never spoke of bands of evil spirits, which represented different kinds of vices. It seems that at least in the eighth and early ninth centuries the ecclesiastical elite found the fanciful accounts too much to stomach.

This paper examines the two main motifs in the Συναξάριον τοῦ τιμη- μένου γαδάρου and the Γαδάρου, λύκου κι ἀλουποῦς διήγησις ὡραία: the Ass’s Confession and the Mule’s Hoof, tracing them back to Medieval western rather than Ancient Aesopic sources. The Appendix deals with the dating and geographical provenance of the common ancestor of these two texts.

Leontios Eustratios, called Philoponos, was a prolific scribe and tireless traveler, though neglected by modern research. The first part of this article is devoted to the reconstruction of Leontios’ life and activity, while the second describes a new witness of the theological works by the patriarch Nicephorus and offers new data for research on philology and textual transmission.

F. 1v-9v of the codex Vat. gr. 1020, which is dated to the first half of the 14th century, contains seven unknown and anonymous letters, the last one mutilated. In this study, at first, the ascription of the letters to Maximus Neamonites as proposed by the database of the PINAKES is rejected, and a number of assumptions are made concerning the name of their writer in the light of the little prosopographical information offered. The content is studied, as well as the style of the letters and their place in the literary context of the Palaiologan Rennaisance of the 13th-14th centuries. A critical edition of the letters completes the article.

The paper traces a three-century-long tradition of a mistaken attribution of the Defence of Eunuchs by Theophylact of Ohrid. Since Peter Lambeck, chief librarian of the Hofbibliothek in Vienna, identified in 1671 the author of the treatise as Theodore Pedagogue, a poorly known tutor to the emperor Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus, the incorrect attribution was readily adopted and further disseminated by a series of scholars of the next generations. Although the issue of the authorship was successfully resolved as early as 1768 by Angelo Bandini, head of the Laurentian Library in Florence, the information remained unfamiliar to writers of the following centuries, leaving the entrenched error to persist until the late 1970s, on the eve of the first critical editions of the Defence (Gautier 1980, Spadaro 1981). The article follows the tangled history of the erroneous attribution, attempting to establish a kind of stemmatic regularity between several branches of the abortive tradition.

The hexagram was first minted during the darkest days of the final Roman-Persian War (602-628) when Roman fortunes were at their lowest. As a result, commentators have read the coin’s novel inscription, Deus Adiuta Romanis (God, help the Romans) as evidence for the ’stressful and desperate’ state of the empire. This paper presents the case that reading the coin alongside evidence for popular military practices instead paints a picture of the Roman state apparatus deftly manipulating mass propaganda. For the Romans in the 610s, these new coins signalled not defeatism but defiance and the promise of victory.