Volume 115, Issue 1

The Great Palace of Constantinople has been subject to several investigations since the second half of the nineteenth century. All of them have been mostly concerned with the topographical, architectural and typological development of the imperial residence, leaving aside questions such as toponymics. This paper will deal with this issue taking into consideration the name of the complex of buildings that once was the core of the Constantinian Palace, the Daphne. Doing so, we will better understand the denomination of the Palace, and shed light on the functions related to several spaces, the courtly ritual and, in short, the representation of power through architecture in an imperial context. Besides, the present enquiry will challenge some topographical assumptions on the complex.

The question of the documentary value of the last statues of Late Antiquity has been much debated in many recent publications. This article contributes to this debate and addresses emperors’ statuary and its relation to the development of a Christian theology of the Late Roman emperorship. Traditionally, statues demonstrated the military, legal and economic power of Roman emperors, who were depicted as generals, judges or benefactors. Surprisingly, the Christianisation of imperial power seems to have had a limited influence upon the official iconography of emperors. The religious dimension rarely appeared on statues even though they became rarer in Late Antiquity. Whilst literary sources, especially Christian sources, increasingly mentioned emperors’ personal piety and demonstrative humility, particularly in the monumental context of Constantinople, imperial statues remained faithful to the traditional iconography of power that obliterated physical weakness and embodied autocratic power.

This paper evaluates the significance of emperor Heraclius Constantine III, the eldest son of Heraclius (610 -641), for Byzantium in times of political and military crisis. The first part examines how Heraclius established his family as an imperial dynasty of Byzantium between 613 and 622. The second section analyzes how the young emperor represented his father in Constantinople, while Heraclius waged war against the Persian Sasanids during the 620s. The final segment deals on the one hand with the joint rule of Heraclius and his eldest son after Byzantine victories against the Persians and, on the other hand, with the growing influence of Heraclonas. Finally, the contribution explores Heraclius Constantine’s III role as Augustus senior after his father’s death in 641. The until now often understudied emperor was thereby of essential importance for Byzantium’s stability in the first half of the 7th century.

In recent decades, historians of the Arab conquest have increasingly turned away from positivist reconstructions of the events of the Arab conquest. Through thematic analysis of conquest narratives, scholars have illustrated how the early Islamic community articulated its identity. Byzantine narratives of the Arab conquest have generally not been considered from this perspective. This paper takes the long view of the Arab conquest illustrating how centuries of Byzantine writers and chroniclers articulated and rearticulated this memory, as their identity shifted along with their political and diplomatic relationships.

The present paper undertakes a hermeneutic analysis of the hitherto little investigated preface of Theodore Metochites᾽ Paraphrase of the natural scientific works of Aristotle. Based on a problematic quotation at the very beginning of the proem, the article shows that paraphrase does not only mean, for Metochites, the language-specific clarification of the obscure Aristotelian texts but mainly the elucidation and simplification of the relationship of physics to the rest of the philosophical curriculum, as well as of the interconnection between Aristotle‘s separate treatises of natural sciences. The preface proves to be an indirect, i.e. encoded testimony for the exegetical competition of Theodore Metochites with his coeval George Pachymeres and the most prominent ancient paraphraser of Aristotle, namely Themistius (4th century CE).

The article discusses the bouleutic career of certain Theodoros, son of Komasios flourished in fourth-century Hermopolis. Based on an edition of a new papyrus fragment (P.Giss. inv. 307), it argues that Theodoros - before he was the riparius in 362 CE - served as the praepositus pagi. Also, a revision of CPR VIII 36,7 reveals that at a certain point in his career Theodoros was called the prototypos poleos, which is a forerunner of the later proteuon or the honorary titulature for members of the city council.

This short essay presents four 11th century A.D. Byzantine lead seals, all of which are stored in the local museum of Kırşehir, in ancient Cappadocia, which is located today in southeastern part of central Turkey. The Museum of Kırşehir owns a minor collection of at least 13 Byzantine lead seals and a selection of four unpublished seals is being presented, which were sold to the museum by local antique dealers from the Turkish provinces of Kırşehir and Aksaray. All of the seals are dated to the late 10th and early or mid-11th centuries A.D. No. 1 is an overstruck seal with a parallel piece which is a very unique specimen and raises some sigillographic and prosopographic questions. The three other seals are discussed with a focus to Byzantine dignitaries and their offices during the 11th century A.D. The descriptive discussion at the beginning briefly touches upon a some geographical and historical issues related to Kırşehir and its museum. This small collection of seals provides important evidence regarding the seal owners and the administration of the themes of Cappadocia and Charsianon on the eastern border of the Byzantine Empire. The paper offers a substantive analysis of the material, with a discussion and resolution of the sigillographic inscriptions and imagery.

It is the purpose of this article to present the archaeological, epigraphic and literary evidence on the materials of honorific statues in Late Antiquity with a fresh outlook to delve into their cultural meaning and potential for manipulation and power display. The article questions how material choice and employment fits the conventions of state tradition and social customs, whether certain materials were deemed more prestigious and appropriate for the statues of the imperial family versus other honorands, and whether this prestige depended on the cost of the material or other visual/cultural factors. The results of the inquiry show that the choice of materials depended on a mix of factors and diverse local practices, and of all the available materials, bronze remained as the most widely-manipulated one.

This article investigates the plausibility of the proof presented at the Sixth Ecumenical Council (680/81) to show that the Logos of Patriarch Menas (536-552) and the two letters of Pope Vigilius (537-555) were forgeries. These texts were among the most important testimonia of the so-called Monotheletes, and prove the assertion of one operation and one will in Christ long before the controversy of the seventh century. Through an analysis of the conciliar acts and other texts it is shown that the argumentation of the council was not only incoherent and self-contradictory but actually scandalous, since the evidence presented by an authentic papyrus roll of the Acts of the Fifth Council, with its clear proof of the authenticity of the Vigilius letters, was ignored. In an adoption and further development of the frequently overlooked treatment of this matter in the 1971 edition of the Acts of the Fifth Ecumenical Council (553) (ACO, ser. I, 4/1) the following is demonstrated: the discovery of the longer first edition of the Acts, containing the Vigilius letters, in the original papyrus rolls of the Acts of the Fifth Council led, from the beginning of the so-called monenergist-monothelete controversy, to the (re‐)introduction of the disputed texts into the shorter second edition contained in codices. It is indisputable that these texts are authentic.

The emperor Justinian’s (527-565) penchant for naming institutional bodies after himself is a well-known feature of his reign - not only to modern scholarship but already for his contemporaries. The present study takes a closer look at the cities which were conferred the name of Justinian and Theodora since it may shed light on the emperor’s vision for the empire and his relations to the cities. The study sets off with an investigation of the various contexts, incentives and initiators for the grant of Justinian’s appellation to the cities. In brief, the confer of imperial epithets concerned the relation between the emperor and his subjects, who petitioned with him for this honour and received his name as a token of benevolence. The emperor’s favour conveyed power, and those below him strove to get his attention. In passing, the study also considers the longevity of the imperial eponyms. They did not usually stick in the subsequent centuries, partly because there were far too many cities named after the couple than was handy for the central administration, but also because the eponyms lost their function in the course of time.

The famous middle Byzantine alchemical manuscript Marcianus graecus 299 contains annotations from the late Byzantine period, most prominently in its opening quire. This article examines a text on the very first page of the manuscript, a text written in a late Byzantine Greek script, but in a language other than Greek. A number of words in this undeciphered text can be correlated with Arabic technical vocabulary that would also have been used in other Islamicate languages such as Persian and Ottoman Turkish. Certain features such as accentuation on the final syllables of words make Turkish or Persian the most likely candidates.

The silk production around Naupaktos is better documented than other examples of the silk industry in Byzantine Central Greece, especially in terms of its organisation, industrial layout and technical parameters. However, in comparison with its much better-known Theban counterpart, the Naupactian silk industry remains underexplored in current scholarship. This article focuses on synthesising the information about the industry provided by the surviving writings of John Apokaukos, the metropolitan of Naupaktos c.1200-1232. It also seeks to evaluate how the result of this investigation may complement or revise our current knowledge of the silk industry in Byzantine Central Greece.