Byzantine Studies Conference Archives

Twenty-Eighth Annual BYZANTINE STUDIES CONFERENCE

4-6 October, 2002

The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio

ABSTRACTS OF PAPERS

Reconstruction of the NE Gate of the Byzantine Fortress at Isthmia (C. Peirce)

The Byzantine Studies Conference is an association for the presentation and discussion of papers embodying current research on all aspects of Byzantine history and culture. The Conference meets in a different city every year. At meetings, over 100 papers are usually presented and discussed in a relaxed but professional atmosphere. Although most of our members are American academics, we have an international membership and many non-academic members. Graduate students play a large role in the conference and are strongly encouraged to present papers and participate in discussions.

This Book of Abstracts was compiled and edited by Emily Albu and Anthony Kaldellis from documents supplied electronically by the speakers. Copyright (C) is reserved by the individual speakers.

Copies of the Abstracts are available for purchase. Subscriptions for Series 6 (26-30, 2000-2004) are available for $45 as a set. This price includes postage. All orders must be prepaid in US currency; make checks payable to the Byzantine Studies Conference and send orders to:

Prof. Sharon Gerstel
Dept. of Art History and Archaeology
The University of Maryland
College Park, MD 20742-1335

For questions about orders of the Abstracts e-mail S. Gerstel at:

sg113@umail.umd.edu

Abstracts of Papers--Byzantine Studies Conference, Ist-1975-Madison, Wis. [etc.]
Byzantine Studies Conference
V. 22/2: Author Index to the Abstracts of Papers, 1 (1975) to 25 (1999)
Key title: Abstracts of Papers -- Byzantine Studies Conference
ISSN 0147-3387

1 . Byzantine Empire - Congresses
DF501 .5b9a 949.5 77-79346
Library of Congress 77 MARC-S

SESSION I

CITIES AND SPACES

Chair: Timothy Gregory (The Ohio State University)

The Amphitheater as Site of Christian Memory:
Excavations in the Amphitheater of Durres (Dyrrachium)

Kim Bowes (Yale University)

The amphitheater of the ancient port city of Dyrrachium was one of the city's greatest Roman monuments. Set rather unusually in the heart of the Roman city and included within the late antique wall circuit, the amphitheater occupied a significant portion of the city's land area and utilized one of the city's low hills both to support its seating and increase its visibility. The later appropriation of the amphitheater for Christian cult and burial thus marked both the status commanded by the Christian community and its concomitant ability to reconfigure the city's pagan topography into spaces of Christian meaning.

The small Christian chapel in the Durres amphitheater is known principally to art historians, owing to the fine wall mosaics that grace its walls. This chapel, however, is only one of a group of Christian spaces that littered the amphitheater galleries, including a second chapel with frescos, an ossuary and a baptistery. The entire Roman structure, including both galleries and arena, was also used as a necropolis. The amphitheater thus represented a whole network of Christian cult sites, interconnected by the decaying galleries of the Roman building and peppered with the graves of Christian dead who desired proximity to the saint or saints memorialized here.

The Durres amphitheater was excavated in a vigorous, if unscientific fashion in the 1960's by Vangiel To?i, and the later interventions in both the chapel and its surroundings were either never recorded, or incompletely published. Thus, the date of the chapel and its mosaics remains unknown, the other Christian features have gone largely unrecorded and even the date of the amphitheater itself remains a mystery. However, unlike so many Roman amphitheaters, the Durres amphitheater was never restored, its Christian monuments never removed and the majority of its galleries and its arena never completely excavated. Thus, Durres represents a unique opportunity to understand the Christianization of amphitheaters and their appropriation as loci of Christian memory.

The International Centre of Albanian Archaeology, supported by the Packard Humanities Institute (PHI) will conduct a season of architectural survey and excavation in the Durres amphitheater during the summer of 2002. A team of American, British and Albanian archaeologists will record both the structural and decorative features of all the excavated Christian spaces and analyze their structural evolution. The team will also undertake a series of sondages to determine the date of principal chapel, and the general outlines of the amphitheater's post-Roman occupation. This season will hopefully be the first in a major project of excavation and restoration in one of Albania's most important ancient monuments.

Middle Byzantine Aphrodisias

Laura Hebert (Institute of Fine Arts, New York University)

The site of Greco-Roman and Byzantine Aphrodisias, situated in a fertile valley in southwestern Asia Minor, has been the subject of sustained archaeological research since 1961. Founded as a grid-planned town in the late Hellenistic period, the city prospered in the ancient and Late Antique periods. It included a monumental city center comprising the Temple and Sanctuary of Aphrodite, a Theater, two large public squares, public baths, and a number of other civic and sacred structures, surrounded by primarily residential areas. The city walls, erected in the fourth century A.D., enclosed an area of approximately 0.8 square kilometers, most of which was densely occupied.

For the seventh to the ninth centuries, the archaeological record at Aphrodisias is scant, but it picks up again in the late ninth century. It thus allows for a schematic picture of not only the physical, but also the administrative, structure of Middle Byzantine Aphrodisias from that time until ca. 1200, when the Seljuk Turks conquered the town and forcibly resettled its inhabitants elsewhere. Though areas outside the city center have not been extensively investigated, excavation has shown that large parts of the area enclosed by the city wall lay abandoned, with signs of human activity limited to occasional burials. The much smaller population occupied a far more concentrated area (roughly 0.2 square kilometers). It corresponded largely to the site of the former city center, which the Middle Byzantine occupants adapted to their needs. The ancient Theater, cut into one of only two hills on the otherwise flat site, became the center of the residential area, certainly because it was easily defensible. Houses were constructed within the cavea and orchestra, on top of the ruins of the collapsed stage building, and fortification walls were built around the hill. Near the Theater, a tenth- or eleventh-century church occupied a former crossroads, one of many signs that the ancient orthogonal street system no longer functioned. In addition to the Theater, another center of occupation was the Cathedral. Constructed originally as the Temple of Aphrodite, it had been converted to a church in Late Antiquity. Evidence suggests that it was a popular pilgrimage destination in the Middle Byzantine period, when it underwent a thorough renovation. Next door to the Cathedral lay the only ancient house known to have been renovated in the Middle Byzantine period, a large Late Antique house that at this time almost certainly became the Bishop's Palace. Finds from the house include a number of lead seals of Aphrodisian bishops and of various imperial officials, suggesting that the bishop now headed not only the religious, but also the civic administration of Aphrodisias. Immediately behind the probable Bishop's Palace, and alongside the Cathedral, was a wine or olive press, dating to the Middle Byzantine period. Because of its proximity to the Cathedral and probable Bishop's Palace, this and a series of adjacent structures related to the processing of agricultural produce should probably be considered as part of the episcopal complex.

Life and Death in Late Byzantine Troy

Kathleen M. Quinn (University of Cincinnati)

For the past decade, a team of archaeologists from the University of Cincinnati has been engaged in a systematic exploration of the post-Bronze Age remains of Troy in northwest Turkey. In addition to the expected wealth of Greco-Roman material culture, archaeology has also yielded evidence of Late Byzantine use of the Trojan mound, including a small residential settlement, expansion of a nearby water system, and two cemeteries.

Architectural evidence for Late Byzantine activity at Troy comes primarily from the area of the Greco-Roman Sanctuary on the southwest side of the mound. This Sanctuary had been used continuously for religious purposes from the eighth century B.C. until the late third century A.D. When occupation resumed in the Sanctuary in the late twelfth century, it is clear that the nature of the activities conducted there had dramatically changed. The two best-preserved Byzantine buildings from the Sanctuary÷one a three-room, rectangular structure and the other an oval building÷contain a wealth of Late Byzantine ceramics and small finds. The ceramics are all of local (or regional) manufacture with a few imports of types found in excavated material from Constantinople. The small finds are dominated by a wide assortment of glass bracelets, spindle whorls, and an interesting selection of horse trappings (including fragments of horseshoes, bits, and bridles). Preliminary study of the material suggests that the Late Byzantine settlement was primarily residential, and its location seems to have been dictated by the presence of an important water source in the cave nearby.

It was also during the Late Byzantine period that a series of tunnels, first excavated inside the cave by residents of Hellenistic Troy, were expanded and improved. These tunnels gave the Byzantines access to an important natural water source. It has been suggested that the extensive modifications to the cave were necessary to generate a healthy source of water following a series of earthquakes which may have damaged the water table and dried up pre-existing wells.

Other evidence for Late Byzantine use of the Trojan mound comes from the remains of two partially excavated cemeteries. One of the cemeteries has been uncovered during excavations around the cave. A second cemetery is located on the northwest side of the mound near the remains of a Greco-Roman theater. The tombs from both areas are simple, stone-lined cists, and all show evidence of multiple use. Most of the tombs contain modest dedications of jewelry and pottery, some of which is similar to that found in the Sanctuary settlement, and some of which appears to extend into a period later than any known Byzantine settlement at the site. It is this later pottery that suggests some cultural exchange between Byzantine Greeks and Seluk Turks.

Overlooked by previous excavators because of the lack of monumental architecture, the Byzantine period at Troy now offers significant stratified deposits conducive to archaeological study. The information presented in this paper is an overview of the first synthetic treatment of Byzantine material from Troy.

SESSION II

LITURGY, THEOLOGY, AND SPIRITUALITY

Chair: Georgia Frank (Colgate University)

The Liturgy of the Bridal Chamber:
An Introduction to the Problem of Its Origins

Gerasimos P. Pagoulatos (Hellenic Open University, Patras, Greece)

"Behold the Bridegroom comes in the middle of the night·I see Thy bridal chamber adorned, O my Saviour, and I have no wedding garment that I may enter there. Make the robe of my soul to shine, O Giver of Light, and save me" (three times).

In this paper, I study the problem of the nature and origins of the eleventh-century "Christ the Bridegroom" Byzantine liturgy. In particular, I study the history of the bridal chamber image from its origins in the third-century sources to its appearance in an eleventh-century Matins of the Holy Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday of the Byzantine Office. The sources I examine include the eleventh-century Matins, the Gospel of Philip, the Acts of Thomas, the Symposium by Methodius of Olympus, and the chapel of the Dura-Europos Christian House. The textual sources of the bridal chamber preserve a unique instance of a proper initiatory liturgy in pre-Constantinian Christianity that advocated the liturgical use of the arts and placed Christ's image at its center. The Dura-Europos Christian House chapel was an exception of an aboveground Christian edifice prior to the Peace of the Church where art was used in the room's initiatory liturgy with the image of Christ at its center. The eleventh-century liturgy indicates a striking similarity with these earliest descriptions of the bridal chamber.

I argue that the bridal chamber is an initiatory liturgy in which the real presence of Christ is signified by the image and the initiates are ontologically transformed to unite emotionally with Christ through contemplation of His image. I also argue that the image of the bridal chamber discussed extensively in the third-century sources continued to exist in a monastic milieu and finally appeared in the eleventh-century "Matins of the Bridegroom" of the Byzantine Church Divine Office for the Holy Week.

None of the liturgical scholars have analyzed this image. Theologians have considered the bridal chamber a heretical subject because of its allusion to Gnosticism and therefore have ignored its preservation in monastic milieus and appearance in the eleventh-century liturgy. Art historians think that images were not used in the liturgy before the sixth century and it was not until after 843 CE, that is, the end of Iconoclastic debate, that the Byzantine Church began to use them liturgically. Archaeologists are not certain what the real function of the baptistery room was because they have not studied the literary evidence sufficiently.

My study of the bridal chamber image will be interdisciplinary. I will bring historical, literary, theological, archaeological, and art historical research to bear on the interpretation of a major image of Byzantine Christianity.

The analysis of the bridal chamber will prove that the liturgical use of images began at least in the third and not as commonly thought in the sixth and eleventh centuries. It will also indicate the transformation of religious metaphors in a variety of literary, theological, architectural, liturgical and visual environments.

Augustine and the Decline in Baptistery Construction:
The Evidence of Archaeology and Text

Caroline Downing (State University of New York College at Potsdam)

St. Augustine's views on doctrinal, social and moral issues have profoundly influenced the Church, even up to the present. It is the contention of this paper that Augustine's views on baptism, in particular, were one factor leading to the decrease in baptistery construction in the fifth and sixth centuries.

Physical evidence of the decline is clear. Archaeological remains of baptisteries, despite many problems in determining accurate dates, still show that by the seventh century very few baptisteries were being constructed. A chart created from the evidence of published baptistery remains demonstrates this decline. Of course, reasons for the decline in baptistery construction are multiple and complex, including such factors as political instability and conversion of the majority of citizens to Christianity (reducing the need for adult baptism). Another reason was a significant change in the Church's attitude toward baptism, which I propose was due in great part to the philosophical arguments of St. Augustine.

Augustine's writings were disseminated widely and much discussed in his lifetime; even his sermons were recorded by notaries and published. Bishops, who were tied to their sees, often used personal letters as a means of publicity; Augustine, whose see was Hippo Regius in North Africa, was of necessity adept at exploiting this means. Jerome once wrote to Augustine complaining testily that a letter from Augustine ostensibly intended for himself had in fact been widely circulated throughout Italy before he even received it!

Baptism was a charged issue for Augustine, whose views on the subject have been characterized as differing quite profoundly from those of his fellow churchmen. His views on original sin, sharpened by his arguments against the Pelagian heresy, and later against Julian, are pertinent. Original sin had long been associated with baptism, in art as well as in literature. In the third-century baptistery excavated at Dura-Europos, a diminutive Adam and Eve, added after the time of the original decoration, are painted directly above the baptismal pool. Clearly they are meant to call to mind the reason for the necessity of baptism: the sin of the first parents. But Augustine insisted upon infant baptism not only because of original sin, but also because even the sins of the infant's own actual parents could be a source of sin in the infant (Enchiridion 46). And Augustine's experience with desire that could not be controlled by his own will, so poignantly lamented in The Confessions, led him to view nature itself as having been corrupted by original sin, and humans as a consequence unable to avoid sinning. Since even after baptism humans cannot control their powerful physical desires, baptism allows only the possibility (actually an impossibility) of not sinning. Augustine had another reason to be suspicious of adult baptism, the complex issue of rebaptism and the Donatist heresy. Augustine repeatedly denounced both Donatists and the practice of rebaptism.

Because Augustine's views on rebaptism and on baptism and original sin led him to devalue adult baptism, he continually championed infant baptism. This in itself could be a reason for a decline in baptistery construction. Infant baptism requires no elaborate baptismal pools, no auxiliary rooms such as consignatoria, no long readings from scripture, or the like. Since the views of "this adamantine man" became Catholic doctrine, it certainly seems possible that they would have been powerful enough to influence early church building programs.

Spiritual Relationships among Monks during the Middle Byzantine Period

John D. Beetham (Catholic University of America)

A short but remarkable document is contained within the archive of the Esphigmenou monastery of Mount Athos. It records provisions made by the protos of that monastery for his spiritual brother when the latter returned after a thirty-six year absence, during which time he had directed a monastery in central Asia Minor. When this monk returned, the protos of Esphigmenou provided him with land on which to live and instructed that he should be remembered in the monastery's liturgy. Both monks had been tonsured by the same spiritual father at Mount Athos.

The document from Esphigmenou attests to the strong ties created among those linked by spiritual kinships, that is, relationships that are described in the language used for family but are created through religious ceremony rather than blood ties. The subject of spiritual relationships is one which has not been fully studied. Work has been done by I. Hausherr on the role of the spiritual director in late antiquity, and by R. Morris on the links created among laypeople who had the same spiritual father. R. Macrides has studied spiritual kinship among laypeople created by baptismal sponsorship and adoption. Not as much attention has been given to spiritual relationships among monks. This paper examines such relationships on the basis of materials gleaned from monastic archives, as well as evidence from monastic typika and hagiography.

Overview of Theological Ideas in George Pachymeres' Paraphrasis (PG Vol. 4, Cols. 608-609) of Ps.-Dionysios Areopagite's On Divine Names (DN 587B1-588A2)

Oleh Kindiy (Catholic University of America)

George Pachymeres (1242- ca. 1310) is primarily renowned among the scholars of Byzantium as "an objective historian." However, there is little known about him as "a scholar and writer of wide-ranging interests, including philosophy, rhetoric, mathematics, and law" (The Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium. ed. by Alexander P. Kazhdan. v. 3. New York; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991, p. 1550). In this paper, a short passage of theological content is translated and given a certain contextual perspective through a comparison with the texts and ideas Pachymeres made use of while compiling his Paraphrasis of several tomes of Ps.-Dionysios the Areopagite (ca. 500), using auxiliary sources, such as the Scholia of Maximos the Confessor (580-662) and John of Skythopolis (or Scholastikos, ca. 536-50).

There is a certain intellectual bondage of ideas between Pachymeres and Dionysios, which can be explained by the popularity and authority of the mystical trend of spirituality in the intellectual circles of Byzantium. From Plato via Plotinus and Proclus, on the Hellenic side, and via Origen, Dionysios, Scholastikos, on the Christian side, the tradition of a sophisticated philosophizing with a highly developed hierarchical and cosmological world-view had been handed over to Pachymeres. Therefore, there can be traced, at least partially with the examples of several theological terms in the chosen passage, the way this tradition had been perceived till the period of the late Byzantine theological thought represented by Pachymeres.

The examples Pachymeres notes and emphasizes in his Paraphrasis are the following: a) Dionysios' ties with antiquity, philosophy, and the Athenian Areopagus; b) his relation to Timothy and Paul, and thus to the Apostolic succession, ecclesiastical authority, and the province of Asia; c) his allegiance to the "scriptural rule" and self-reference to his Theological Outlines; and d) an allusion to the rhetorical devices of syllogisms and geometrical methods refuted by Paul.

In several sentences of the introduction of Pachymeres' Paraphrasis of Dionysian On Divine Names, the main themes are the capacities and limits of humankind; the spiritual ascent from dispersed sensual perception to the unity of the intellect; kataphatic and apophatic approaches to theology. However bold the conclusions might be, only the further study of the entire text will allow us to evaluate Pachymeres' fidelity to the Dionysian ideas, the originality of his own thoughts, and his reception of Scholastikos' Scholia. All we want to point out in this paper is that in works of Dionysios, Scholastikos, and Pachymeres we observe how the idea in the form of a text "grows," evolves. The text is preserved as the center of a certain theological and philosophical school of thinking and has become an inspiration for numerous commentaries and theological treatises, having been also adopted and transformed for the new generations of different audiences. Thus, Pachymeres accomplished his task of transmitting this intellectual tradition, laying the foundation for successive generations of the Byzantine theology.

SESSION III

Archaeology I

Chair: Sheila McNally (University of Minnesota)

Ceramic Evidence from the Monastic Settlement of John the Little,
Wadi Natrun, Egypt

Darlene L. Brooks Hedstrom (Wittenberg University)

Kellia, Nitria and Scetis are three of the earliest known monastic sites in Egypt. The extensive excavations at Kellia illustrate the complexity of monastic settlements in the Early Byzantine period and testify to the longevity of monasticism under the Abbasid and Fatimid caliphates. Recent excavations at Scetis provide comparable material to Kellia for assessing the regional character of monastic living in the NW Delta. The topos of John the Little in Wadi Natrun, one of several sites at Scetis, is a settlement with diverse architectural phases similar to those found at Kellia; however unlike Kellia, which was abandoned in the 9^th century, the site of John's community lasted well into the 14^th century. Therefore, this settlement affords the opportunity to begin examining how monastic living fared after the Crusades and the rise of the Mamluks.

This paper will provide an introduction to the ceramic corpus recovered thus far from three areas of exploration at the topos of John the Little. Several complete vessels and diagnostic pieces accord with examples found at Kellia and at comparable monastic sites such as Gebel an-Naqlun, Saqqarra, and Esna. With much of the ceramic typology of Early Byzantine and Islamic Egypt still under debate, this preliminary study of the ceramic evidence from Scetis will demonstrate the importance of the site for studying the distribution and production of both luxury and daily use vessels in the NW Delta. Examples of Coptic glazeware, Fayyumi ware and later Ayyubid vessels indicate that the monks at the topos of John the Little were not isolated from trade routes, but were recipients of gifts, used standardized vessels for every day use, and owned vessels more commonly associated with the trading markets in Fustat/al-Qahira and Alexandria.

Chemical Analysis of Port Saint Symeon Ceramics

Scott Redford (Georgetown University)

Port St. Symeon ceramics are the most common glazed ceramics of the 13^th century Mediterranean. Transported by trading networks of the Italian maritime republics, they have been found around the Mediterranean as far west as Pisa and the Black Sea as far north as the Crimea. Their popularity seems to be based on, 1) decoration consisting of abstractions of astrological and heraldic signs common to Latin, Greek, and Islamic societies alike and, 2) availability based on consistent and mass manufacture and transport.

Because of their ubiquity and the ambivalence of their decoration, PSS ceramics have been hard to locate both culturally and in terms of manufacture. Their conventional name was given to them after the 1930s excavation of the port of Antioch, Port Saint Symeon, or al-Mina, uncovered many examples of these ceramics and kiln furniture, establishing their manufacture there in the 13^th century. PSS ceramics have continued to be associated exclusively with that small port and with its Latin masters. PSS ceramics have been called the "most typical" of Crusader ceramics by one noted scholar.

In 1996, I initiated a research project to undertake the chemical (Neutron Activation) analysis of PSS ceramics with Dr. James Blackman of the Smithsonian Institution. The aim of this study was to understand production and distribution of this pottery in order better to locate it within the nexus of the booming trade in the 13^th century eastern Mediterranean.

The project takes as its baseline the site of Kinet (Crusader Canamella, Arab al-Tinat), a Mediterranean port on the border between the Principality of Antioch and the Kingdom of Armenian Cilicia. Canamella was a Templar port. Kiln furniture and unfinished sherds of PSS ceramics were recovered from Kinet's medieval levels.

In addition to Kinet, excavated pottery from Antioch and Port Saint Symeon has been analyzed, allowing for the isolation of chemical signatures for three production centers. The data set of excavated material has been expanded to unprovenienced ceramics in museum collections. To date, PSS vessels in Dumbarton Oaks, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the David Collection, and the Freer Gallery of Art have been sampled. Based on a comparison of the clay from these vessels, attributions have been made to different production centers.

In this way, the study of archaeologically provenienced ceramics and chemical analysis are helping to localize one category of medieval artefact, opening the door to grounded discussions of cultural meaning and interaction.

A Hoard of Byzantine Pentanummi

Peter Lampinen (Combined Caesarea Expeditions)

A newly discovered hoard of over 1000 Byzantine bronze 5 nummium (pentanummi) pieces originated in the Syria-Palestine region. Hoards consisting solely of small denomination Byzantine bronzes are scarce in their own right, and this find reveals some very unusual features in addition.

The coins are of a familiar type, with right facing bust of the emperor on the obverse and XP (Chi-Rho) monogram with denomination on reverse. The type was struck by three successive emperors in the 6^th century, Anastasius I, Justin I and Justinian I up to 538 AD, the year of Justinian's coinage reform. This hoard shows anomalous features, most notably unrecorded stylistic variations and several overstrikes that prove they were in fact struck in the early 7^th century, most likely during the reign of Heraclius. The suggestion is made that they are local productions of the Syria-Palestine region in the chaotic interval between the Persian and Islamic incursions.

Reasons will be offered for the re-introduction of a coin type after a nearly one hundred year hiatus, and the problems that ensue for the archaeologist using numismatic data for dating purposes.

SESSION IV

Interpretation of Texts

Chair: Sarolta Takacs (Rutgers University)

Cult and Competition:
Textual Appropriation in the Fifth-Century Life and Miracles of Thekla

Scott Johnson (Oxford University)

In this paper I relate some preliminary conclusions from my D.Phil. research into the fifth-century Life and Miracles of Thekla. Principally, I try to demonstrate that the portion of the work dedicated to the Life was composed as a unit with the Miracles and was designed to be read as such. In support of my argument I make a brief comparison between the biographical elements of the Life and Miracles and the contemporary rewritings and translations of the second-century Acts of Paul and Thekla. Even though Stephen Davis in The Cult of St Thecla (Oxford, 2001) has recently analyzed these texts in the context of pilgrimage activity in Seleucia and Egypt, no detailed study has yet been made on the way the Acts was received in the fourth and fifth centuries. I argue that the Life and Miracles reveals its author not only as competing for episcopal preeminence with the official ecclesiastical establishment of Seleucia÷a fact emphasized by the text's editor Gilbert Dagron (Vie et Miracles de Sainte Thcle, Brussels, 1978)÷but also as competing textually with other lives of Thekla, whose cult was being appropriated at this time by a number of textual communities (in Syria, Egypt, and elsewhere in the East). By rewriting the story of Thekla's life and by situating her post-mortem miracles in Seleucia, the author of the Life and Miracles was claiming both textual and locative priority in the spectrum of texts and places devoted to Thekla. On the basis of this evidence I also venture some general conclusions on the reception of early-Christian apocryphal texts in Byzantine literature.

This paper stems from a broader interest in miracle collections in late antiquity. There are nine such collections in Greek which all concern a different saint and extend in date from the fifth to the eighth centuries. My D.Phil. thesis is an attempt to consider these catalogues as one dossier of texts, dependent upon one another for their individual textual evolution, but more importantly, dependent as a group upon certain social and religious assumptions about the importance of locality for the reception of the miraculous. In this paper I compare other, contemporary miracle-collecting activity by Christian writers in the East and West to further contextualize the Life and Miracles of Thekla. The miracle collections of Augustine and Gregory of Tours, for example, both show similar tendencies toward emphasizing local details in order to legitimize the supernatural activity they record.

While the paper described here is concerned primarily with the textual transmission of the lives of Thekla, I suggest further avenues of inquiry and comparison based upon my broader field of research. I hope to get feedback from Byzantinists working on saints' lives that contain stories of miracles within their narratives: such texts provide a necessary framework for looking at miracle collections as a literary phenomenon in their own right.

Recovering a Byzantine Author: Sophronius of Alexandria

John Duffy (Harvard University)

Compared to his well-know namesake -- the seventh century patriarch of Jerusalem --, Sophronius of Alexandria barely hangs on to existence in the realm of scholarship. This second and later Sophronius was patriarch of Alexandria for almost twenty years in the ninth century (841-860), but is now little more than a name, as a glance at the standard reference works will quickly confirm. Indeed, apart from the two instances we will mention, the rest is largely silence. Hunger's Die hochsprachliche profane Literatur der Byzantiner (II, 14) makes a one-line passing remark on his grammatical work, while Beck's Kirche und theologische Literatur im byzantinischen Reich (p. 496), with almost equal brevity, simply records that a lost treatise by him on icon veneration is known only from a citation in a Christian Arabic chronicle of the later ninth century.

Recent developments should change that situation considerably.

Among the sensational 1975 Greek manuscript finds at Mt. Sinai are thirteen parchment leaves (9th-10th cent.) preserving parts of the first five books of the Iliad and accompanied by an interlinear exegesis under the name of Sophronius. These materials are being prepared for publication by Professor Nikolopoulos in Athens.

Less spectacular in detection, but obviously of no less importance, is the revelation that the treatise on holy icons has been lying for centuries, dormant and more or less totally unnoticed, in a thirteenth century manuscript currently housed in the British Library. And what is more, immediately following that work is a second document on the same subject with the title: Tou makariou Sophroniou patriarchou Alexandreias peri ton pansepton eikonon kata antithesin kai antiphrasin. I have now begun to prepare the first edition of these two texts for the Greek series of the Corpus Christianorum and my talk presents a preliminary report on progress made to date. I pay particular attention to issues such as the general style and content of the argumentation and to the place that Sophronius' treatises might occupy in the larger context of iconodulic writings.

The Sarcophagus of Basil II (d. 1025)

Paul Stephenson (University of Wisconsin, Madison)

The mortal remains of Eastern Roman emperors were, as a rule, installed within the Church of the Holy Apostles in Constantinople. There were exceptions to this rule, often not at the dead emperor's choosing. A notable exception was Basil II, who chose to be buried outside the city's walls, in the church of St. John the Evangelist at the Hebdomon Palace complex. Clearly, this was not through lack of space at Holy Apostles, since there was room enough, or just about, within the Mausoleum of Constantine the Great for the sarcophagus of Basil's younger brother, Constantine VIII (d. 1028).We are informed of Basil's choice in a number of sources, the most important of which is the emperor's own epitaph, originally an inscription associated with his sarcophagus. This epitaph, reproduced and translated below, also provides the basis for a plausible explanation for his self-imposed isolation, which we will outline.

˜∞ììïé íbî ™ììï˘ù ô‡î �Àìáé -áóéì¥"î Other past emperors previously

á–ôï…ù �òïáæñòéóáî åŒù ôáæcî ôfi�ï˘ù¯ designated for themselves other burial places.

‰çg Åb µáóýìåéïù, �ïòæ½òáù çfiîïù, But I, Basil, born in the purple chamber,

´óôèíé ô½í­ïî ‰î ôfi�Ö" çƒù ^∂­Åfiíï˘ place my tomb on the site of the Hebdomon

ëád ó᭭áôý˙" ô‡î ˆíåôòÑô"î �fiî"î and take sabbath's rest from the endless toils

ï≈ù ‰î íÀøáéù šóôåòçïî, ï≈ù ‰ëáòô¥òï˘î. which I satisfied in wars and which I endured.

ïŽ çÀò ôéù årÅåî Šòåíï†î ‰íeî Åfiò˘, For nobody saw my spear at rest,

ˆæ\ ïy ­áóéìåfù ïŽòáî‡î ë¥ëìèë¥ íå from when the Emperor of Heaven called me

áŽôïëòÀôïòá çƒù í¥çáî ­áóéì¥á, to the rulership of this great empire on earth,

ˆìì\ ˆçò˘�î‡î ±�áîôá ôeî ˙"ù øòfiîïî but I was vigilant through the whole span of my life

^°ñíèù ôa ô¥ëîá ôƒù î¥áù ‰ò˘fiíèî guarding the children of New Rome

•ôb óôòáôå1⁄2"î ˆîÅòéë‡ù �òeù ‘ó�¥òáî, marching bravely to the West and

•ôb �òeù á?ôïfù ôïfù 'òï˘ù ôïfù ôƒù ≤". as far as the very frontiers of the East.

ëád íáòô˘òï†óé ôï†ôï ¦¥òóáé ëád úë½ıáé, The Persians and Scythians bear witness to this,

ófî ïxù \∞­áóçfiù, \πóíáÑì, ˜∞òá³, ˜π­èò. and along with them Abasgos, Ismael, Araps, Iber.

ëád î†î •ò‡î, ™îıò"�å, ôfiîÅå ôeî ôÀæïî And now, good man, looking upon this tomb

åŽøá…ù ˆíåý­ï˘ ôaù ‰íaù óôòáôèçýáù. reward my campaigns with prayers.

Select Bibliography

S. G. Mercati, "Sull'epitafio di Basilio II Bulgaroctonos," and "L'epitafio di Basilio Bulgaroctonos secondo il codice Modense Greco 144 ed Ottoboniano Greco 324," in his Collectanea Byzantina, II (Bari, 1970), 226-31, 231-4; J. Ebersolt, Mission archŽologique de Constantinople 1920 (Paris, 1921), 1-27; P. J. Thibaut, "L'Hebdomon de Constantinople. Nouvel examen topographique," EO 21 (1922), 31-44; Th. Makridy [= Makrides] & J. Ebersolt, "Monuments fun?raires de Constantinople," BCH 46 (1922), 363-93; Th. K. Makrides, "To Vyzantinon Evdomon kai ai par'autoi Monai," Thrakika 12 (1939), 35-80; J. Demangel, Contribution ˆ la topographie de l'Hebdomon (Paris 1945), 1-2, 53-4.

SESSION V

Women and Byzantium

Chair: Alice-Mary Talbot (Dumbarton Oaks)

The Case of Iusta Grata Honoria and Imperial Women in Late Antiquity

Ian S. R. Mladjov (University of Michigan, Ann Arbor)

Though still greatly restricted by their social environment, imperial women in the Late Empire loom considerably larger than their predecessors. The career of Iusta Grata Honoria embodies the prospects open to imperial daughters by the 5^th century. Among the women of the Theodosian house, Honoria is remembered as a traitor who conspired with the Empire's sworn enemy to exact vengeance on her brother Valentinian III. Honoria's reputation is based on the testimony of several sources that relate a similar tale but often disagree over its details. Various elements of Honoria's life and its chronology remain open to scholarly dispute and deserve to be considered from the point of view of prosopography.

Honoria was born to Flavius Constantius and Galla Placidia, half-sister of Emperor Honorius, in 417 or 418. In 421 Honorius associated his brother-in-law on the throne, but Constantius III died seven months later. The widowed Augusta Galla Placidia remained influential with her brother until the siblings quarreled in 423. Exiled, Galla Placidia and her two children sought refuge with her nephew Theodosius II, emperor at Constantinople. Later that same year Honorius died in Ravenna and his chief notary Iohannes seized the throne. Theodosius II sent out his generals Ardaburius and Aspar to eliminate Iohannes, and in October 425 Honoria's brother Valentinian III was crowned Augustus.

Honoria became Augusta by mid-426 but only reappears in the sources some fifteen years later, when the poet Flavius Merobaudes described her as the moon reflecting her brother's sunlight. Honoria's fortunes changed in the middle of the century. At about thirty-two years of age, invested with the symbols of imperial power but expected to remain chaste in keeping with the dignity of the court, Honoria was caught in an illicit affair with her procurator Eugenius. Eugenius was executed, while Honoria was deprived of her imperial rank and temporarily banished from court. Whether she was pregnant and exiled to Constantinople as implied by Count Marcellinus is unclear. By July 450, Honoria, betrothed and then probably married to the future consul Flavius Bassus Herculanus, had appealed to Attila to "save her from her brother's power" and "avenge her marriage."

First to learn of this, Theodosius II immediately wrote to Valentinian III, advising that Honoria be turned over to Attila. Valentinian, however, conducted an investigation and denied Attila both Honoria and a share of the Empire. Priscus claims that, at the time, Honoria's life was spared as a gift to her mother. During his invasions of Gaul (451) and Italy (452) Attila repeatedly demanded Honoria as his betrothed÷producing the ring she had sent him as pledge÷and her share in the "royal wealth." We may presume that she was still alive, and the "Honoria question" remained part of diplomacy through 452. Her mother had died in November 450, and with the death of Attila in 453, she may have lost her last protector. If Valentinian was bent on revenge, he was now free to exact it. There is no reason for the man who personally cut down Aetius to have refrained from punishing his rebellious sister. She was certainly dead by May 455, when, on Valentinian's own assassination all the surviving imperial women in Rome became the object of dynastic aspirations.

In addition to having been an unresolved mystery, Honoria's career is significant as testimony to the options open to imperial women in the Late Roman Empire. What Gibbon once termed Honoria's "adventures" illustrate all four careers a daughter of an emperor could pursue in her age. Unlike their predecessors, 4^th- and 5^th-century imperial women could contract not only the customary unions to members of the elite and/or for dynastic purposes, but now they had recourse to the additional two options of remaining single or marrying barbarian leaders.

In the beginning, while honored with the exalted rank of Augusta, Honoria was supposed to keep chaste and unmarried, following a novel and popular option adopted by imperial families in the 4^th century. She spoiled that directive by having an affair with Eugenius. Since Herculanus, to whom she was later betrothed, is described by Priscus as a man of "such good character that he was suspected of designs neither on kingship nor on revolution," we may safely conclude Eugenius and his relationship with Honoria were perceived in exactly the opposite way. Valentinian apparently thought Honoria was trying to raise another man to status of emperor and possibly to replace him. Unwilling to marry the nobleman Herculanus, or seeking revenge after being forced to marry, Honoria turned to Attila. We do not know what she asked of him, but the barbarian king proceeded to present himself as her champion and fianc?. Attila's claim that Honoria be sent to him as his betrothed indicates a real or fabricated attempt at a marriage between a Roman princess and a barbarian king. That Honoria did not marry Attila and may never have intended to do so is of no consequence÷his interpretation of her appeal as an offer of marriage is simply another example of a new option for the marriage of imperial princesses: unlike Honoria, her mother Galla Placidia and her niece Eudoxia did marry barbarian kings. Thus, in an intriguing though unsuccessful career, Honoria epitomizes all four prospects open to a woman of her rank in Late Antiquity, prospects that remained largely unchanged until the age of the Komnenoi.

The Literary Structure of Prokopios' Secret History: A New Explanation

Anthony Kaldellis (The Ohio State University)

The Secret History of Prokopios is the most widely read work of Byzantine literature, and probably the single most influential source for the reign of Justinian. In a tone that is sometimes hysterical, it offers a detailed criticism of Justinian's administration, and a behind-the-scenes look at the private life of the court. But historians have been at a loss as to how to approach this text. It resists categorization by genre, and even its fundamental coherence has been questioned. Does it have an underlying structure, or -- as per the current consensus -- is it a hasty selection of information that Prokopios could not include in the Wars?

In this paper I offer a new explanation for the structure and content of the Secret History. Though it does not conform to any known genre, it is fully a literary work, in the sense that the selection, order, and presentation of events is subordinated at all times to specific literary themes. It is the task of the interpreter to discover those themes and explain how the work is structured around them.

For instance, the last part of the Secret History, concerned with financial and administrative issues, is a point-by-point response to Justinian's legislation, particularly the Novels. Many Novels have not survived, but most of Prokopios' text can be matched up with extant laws, often with exact verbal allusions. His purpose is to prove that Justinian did not adhere to the good provisions of his own edicts, or to demonstrate the sinister intent behind other specific edicts. This part of the text is therefore a legal commentary of sorts. This connection has not been seen because historians generally do not read the Novels, while legal scholars are not interested in the literary aspects of the Secret History.

The Secret History deconstructs Justinian's regime on three levels, the third being the legal one. I offer similar arguments about the other two. The first, on Belisarios, has also perplexed scholars: it claims to be about Belisarios, but its protagonist is first Antonina, then Theodora. There is also an extended digression on the king of Persia; does this part of the text have any coherence? I will argue that it is in fact closely structured around the theme of "rule of women," or gynaikokratia. The order of accusations yields an overall argument about the rule of feminine vice, and its effects. The progression of this theme can explain every major aspect of the text, such as selection, order, and nuance.

The Secret History is a carefully written work of literature that follows its own rules, not any formalized genre. By exposing the unity behind its different parts, I hope to provide a new interpretive model for passages that have long interested scholars, such as Prokopios' portrayal of women and his demonization of Justinian.

Theodore Balsamon's Canonical Images of Women

Patrick Viscuso (Independent Scholar)

Canon law often contains legal stipulations limiting the actions of women in order to prevent defilement and impurity. In particular, provisions concerning sexual morality contain detailed descriptions of female anatomy and faculties. This brief study will examine the descriptions of women contained in the writings of the Byzantine canonist, Theodore Balsamon (ca. 1130/1140 - death after 1195) resident at Constantinople during the reign of Manuel I Komnenos.

Balsamon, a chartophylax of the ecumenical patriarchate and patriarch of Antioch, was noted for his commentaries on the received corpus of Byzantine canon law as well as the Nomonkanon in Fourteen Titles. He is also the author of legal treatises and canonical responses dealing with a variety of subjects, including marital issues, abortion, and childbirth. The canonist's works were extremely influential and emerged as a standard source for Orthodox canonists and theologians.

Based on the examination of selected texts, a systematic presentation will be made of Balsamon's scientific and theological thought on women's bodies, cognitive faculties, and spirituality. An analysis will be made regarding the effect of these views on women in canonical legislation. An attempt will be made to determine the limits of the canonist's direct experience of his subject material and the use of literary sources. Among the questions considered will be intended audience and possible criticism of contemporary sexual mores. More general conclusions will be derived on the construction of women in Byzantine social ordering and class relationships affected by gender.

SESSION VI

Architecture and Decoration

Chair: Ioli Kalavrezou (Harvard University)

Faces of Stone: Donor Portraits in the Mosaic Floor Pavements of Early Byzantine Palestine

Karen C. Britt (Indiana University)

The prevalence of donor portraits as a standard feature in the adornment of the walls of churches during the Byzantine period is revealed by extant examples in a small number of well-preserved churches as well as by literary and epigraphic sources. The portraits, which often included inscriptions, provide valuable insight into the modes, methods and reasons for the patronage of church construction and decoration. However, issues of patronage in the case of the churches throughout the empire that have been unearthed during archaeological excavations and hence, are in a poorer state of preservation, often remain a mystery. A surprising and unique exception is Byzantine Palestine, where more than a few mosaic floor pavements have been discovered that include portraits of male and female donors. Nowhere else are they such a feature of church floor decoration.

It appears that the donor portraits can be broadly divided into two categories: formal and informal. The formal portraits consist of busts or rigid, hieratic full-length figures. The informal portraits capture the donor engaged in activities of daily life. Interestingly, a combination of the two categories of portraiture can occur in the same mosaic pavement. For example, two intercolumnia pavements in the sixth-century church at Kissufim in the Negev contain portrait compositions; one of the pavements depicts two female busts while in the other a male figure is shown leading a camel. Both portraits have inscriptions that reveal the identity of the figures and, in the case of the informal portrait, this is particularly helpful since without the proper name of the male figure there is nothing to distinguish the subject of this pavement from an ordinary pastoral scene commonly found in the iconographical repertoire of this region.

In this paper, the choice of iconography, compositional arrangement and stylistic details of the donor portraits, along with their inscriptions, are examined in an effort to determine who the donors were, (i.e. clergy, governmental officials, or local aristocracy) and whether the portraits represent only the donors themselves or whether there are instances when the donor commemorated others÷living or deceased. An attempt is made to discern whether the portraits are true likenesses or merely portrait-types. Trends in the placement of the portraits within the mosaic pavement (displayed prominently or relegated to inconspicuous areas) are analyzed in order to ascertain if their locations have any function or significance. The aforementioned areas of inquiry, in addition to an examination of the attitudes of the Church towards art in the written sources, are necessary to gain an understanding of the most important question concerning these donor portraits: how should they be interpreted? Are the portraits examples of aggrandizing memorials or symbols of humility since the images of the donor and his/her family appear on a surface below the feet of the faithful?

A New Group of Middle Byzantine Architectural Sculpture
from Panakton (Boeotia)

Heather E. Grossman (University of Pennsylvania)

The several fragments of architectural sculpture uncovered during recent excavations at the site of Panakton reveal strong stylistic similarities to other works from the regions of Attica, Boeotia. All of the nine works are incomplete, suggesting they are spolia from ancient and earlier Byzantine monuments in the Skourta Plain. This paper constitutes the first public presentation of these materials. As such, it adds new pieces to the relatively small known corpus of archaeologically contextualized middle Byzantine sculpture, and provides further evidence of an atelier working in the Attica-Boeotia region in the later twelfth and early thirteenth century.

The sculpted fragments can be divided into three functional groups: altar table pieces, door jambs, and epistyle fragments, some of which were reused as door lintels at the Panakton site. All of the works were found in or near the late medieval village's church. The first group of nineteen fragments represents at least two bevel-edged slabs, most likely used as the church's altar table and adjacent prothesis table. The second group comprises three non-joining, but identically profiled, sections of door jambs. The remaining pieces comprise seven fragments of epistyles decorated with foliate, guilloche and zoomorphic motifs.

The technique and designs of the carvings closely connect them to the sculpted ornamentation of the katholikon of Hosios Meletios, a church visible from Panakton and an important monastic center in the region. The sculpture from that building has been dated to the twelfth century. Close parallels can also be found in sculpture from the twelfth-century church of Christ the Savior in Amphissa, the twelfth-century katholikon of the Sagmata monastery near Thebes, and from the twelfth-century Hagios Nikolaos sta Kambia, near Orchomenos. Contemporary pieces from Athens, in the Little Metropolis as well as in the collections of the Byzantine and Christian Museum and the Athenian Agora, provide further comparative materials.

The strong comparisons link the Panakton fragments to the twelfth- and early thirteenth-century carving traditions of Attica and Boeotia. Moreover, the atelier patronized by the monastery of H. Meletios and its metochia, recently described by C. Vanderheyde, likely created the majority of the Panakton pieces (for her description see, "La sculpture architecturale du katholikon d'Hosios Meletios et l'emergence d'un style nouveau au d?but du XIIe si?cle," Byzantion 64:2 (1994) 396-402). Though the original context of the pieces cannot be determined with certainty and may only become apparent with further excavation in the Skourta Plain, it seems clear that the pieces are spolia from local monuments and that little new carving was undertaken for the decoration of the church of medieval Panakton. The fragments demonstrate a local taste for spolia from before the Frankish conquest; this choice was likely prompted either by a conscious desire to maintain continuity with earlier, local religious structures, by economic necessity, or some combination of these two factors.

The Use of Relief Sculpture on Late Byzantine Church Faades

Jelena Trkulja (Princeton University)

The use of relief sculpture on Byzantine church faades--from the Justinianic era until the beginning of the Paleologan period--is rather uncommon, and when encountered is applied in a sporadic and unsystematic fashion. A twelfth-century Athenian church, known as the Little Metropolis, exemplifies an uncharacteristically enthusiastic approach to architectural sculpture. In most other monuments sculptural decoration consists of spolia from Late Antique and earlier buildings, or of reliefs that were originally elements of church furniture (parapet slabs, pilasters of the templon screen, etc.). These odd pieces are applied to faades in an arbitrary manner. They are displayed as trophies, ornaments pleasing to the eye, and not as the elements of a coherent decorative program. The church of the Koimesis at Merbaka is the case in point. In some of the Comnenian buildings, sculptural pieces are used to frame windows and doors, but their decorative role ends there. They do not extend to other areas of the walls in a programmatic way.

During the Late Byzantine period architectural sculpture gains prominence, not least because the tradition of stone carving was revived, and original sculpture was used instead of spolia. Frequently combined with ceramoplastic and painted decoration, sculptural decoration becomes increasingly organized.

The differences in local building practices contributed to uneven propagation of the trend. Nonetheless, the increased interest in sculptural decoration is evident in various parts of the Byzantine world: from Bulgaria (the fourteenth-century church of St. John Aliturgitos in Mesembria) to Peloponnesus (Panagia Pantanassa in Mistra, 1428). In the churches belonging to the so-called ÎMorava School', where the tendency was fully developed, the sculpture is organized into a sophisticated decorative program completely integrated with architecture. Moreover, it can be claimed that growing popularity of sculpture was paralleled by increasingly more Îsculptural' treatment of the whole building. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the ÎMorava School' churches.

This paper will offer a unified picture of the development of sculptural decoration over time. It will consider the relationship between sculpture and other forms of external decoration (ceramoplastic, painted), and determine its place in the general decorative scheme. Most importantly, it will show how the evolution of relief sculpture has reflected on the design of faades and appearance of a building as a whole.

SESSION VII

Manuscript Studies

Chair: Nancy Sevenko (U.S. National Byzantine Committee)

Putting Vergil on Display after 476

David H. Wright (University of California at Berkeley)

There are eight surviving ancient codices of Vergil, all from the fifth century, some only fragments, two of them palimpsests, but with careful examination it becomes clear that they were books of very different character, made for different purposes. None has a documented date (now that Alan Cameron has discounted the evidence for the Mediceus) but good evidence from the style of script, colophons, decoration, and illustration places the first around 400 and the last two around 480 and 500 (within a decade or so) [see my recent books on the Vatican and Roman Vergils]. For defining the character of these different books various data are needed, including the approximate reconstructed original size, the ruled area, and the approximate size of the letter M (data to be distributed at the meeting).

Considering the books in chronological order, from such data it is clear that the first two were intended to be held in the lap for reading. Even if the luxurious Vaticanus was very bulky, its page size made it small enough to be held and the pages turned while reading for pleasure, enjoying the illustrations as you came to them in the text. The unillustrated Mediceus is still smaller and easier to hold for reading. The larger Veronensis had an entirely different purpose, for it was designed as a vast repository of scholia, a reference book for special study rather than for continuous reading; it was the kind of book that in the Carolingian era would have been laid out in three columns, as was the Tours Vergil. The more formal Palatinus is significantly larger, probably best read on a table. The Oxyrhynchus fragment comes from a book almost that big but is noteworthy primarily because it is written in tentative Square capitals, the first attempt to introduce into a book the style of grand lettering in imperial inscriptions of former times, such as the bronze letters set in marble on the Arch of Constantine.

The last three books in the sequence (Sangallensis, Romanus, Augusteus), on the other hand, were much too big to hold; they had to be displayed on a stand. One may wonder if such books were actually read, or rather displayed like today's coffee-table book for the admiration of guests. Furthermore, Square capitals in scriptura continua (as in the Sangallensis and Augusteus, with the Oxyrhynchus fragment the only ancient books known to have been written in Square capitals) are intrinsically difficult to read and the large Rustic capitals in the Romanus are so artificial as also to be difficult. Above all, the removal of illustrations from the text in the Romanus made them suitable only for display, and the large initial decoration at the start of every page, even in the middle of a sentence, made the Augusteus specially ostentatious. It is striking that this presentation of the preeminent national poet came towards the end of the fifth century as the last remnants of the Latin Empire collapsed and a Gothic king took control of Ravenna. These extraordinarily luxurious books were nostalgic expressions of longing for the grandeur of the past, returning to the Square capitals of the greatest imperial inscriptions (no longer in use), and including in the illustrations of the Romanus support specifically for pagan traditions.

Iconography and the Question of a Model for the Madrid Skylitzes

Christine Havice (University of Kentucky)

The variety of styles in the Madrid manuscript of Skyltizes' Chronicle has long been studied, most notably by JosŽ Maria Fernandez Pomar (1964) and then by AndrŽ Grabar (1979). Following an observation by Ihor ⁄ev?enko (1984), codicological analysis of the manuscript reveals that these styles are due to three teams of artists working simultaneously on the manuscript in what we may call parts A, B, and C (corresponding largely to Grabar's stylistic parts AB, C, and D). Codicology has also revealed that the artists working in the Byzantine style of part A labored systematically for the first third of the manuscript, while disruptions in patterns of production in parts B and C suggest less stability as its later portions were illuminated.

Corresponding to these stylistic and codicological divisions in the manuscript are iconographic patterns, some of which have been noted in the literature. What has not yet been recognized, however, is the significance of these variations for the question of whether the Madrid Skylitzes was copied from a model or created new in the twelfth century. ⁄ev?enko argued for the latter, on the basis of formal analyses and comparisons with other twelfth-century illuminated manuscripts in the West. By contrast, Nicholas Oikonomides (1992) pointed out important iconographic details which only a Byzantine artist working in Constantinople itself would know, claiming the Madrid manuscript for the capital. In light of other artistic and paleographic evidence of a Sicilian origin for the Madrid manuscript, I would like to retain the essence of Oikonomides' conclusions by interjecting the Constantinopolitan manuscript as a model then imported to Sicily. If we note that ⁄ev?enko's evidence came largely from part B of the Madrid manuscript, while Oikonomides' from part A, it becomes possible that both were correct.

Examination of the iconography of the miniatures across the three parts of the manuscript confirms that, in part A of the Madrid Skylitzes, the style is indubitably influenced by Byzantium, as is the iconography. In parts B and C of the manuscript, the relationship of miniatures to details in the text is more generic, and the miniatures reveal little or no awareness of iconography or visual conventions characteristic of part A. As one example, the miniature at fol.34v (in part A) represents the Imperials using Greek fire, in conformity with the text, to destroy the anchored fleet of the rebel Thomas. The only other miniature which illustrates an episode where the text specifies Greek fire appears on fol.226v, at the end of part C: The artist represents a naval battle but omits the "liquid fire" specified even in the accompanying inscription. From this we may posit that the artist had no miniature with details such as found in part A and so worked from the text, creating a generic battle scene without the dramatic detail. To establish this pattern of variation across all three parts of the Madrid Skylitzes, this paper also re-examines the image of the enthroned basileus.

This paper suggests that the team of artists responsible for part A of the Madrid Skylitzes had before them an illuminated book -- logically, the manuscript from which the scribe had copied the text, the manuscript Oikonomides' artist had illumined in the capital -- which was not used by the artists of parts B and C, for reasons that have yet to be understood. If such is the case, it also means that the Madrid manuscript is not homogeneous, and that any discussion of its miniatures must take into account varying iconographic traditions and narrative strategies across its three parts.

Un-orthodox Imagery in the Madrid Skylitzes

Elena N. Boeck (Yale University)

The 574 surviving illustrations of the Madrid Skylitzes provide rich scenes of imperial, civic, and military life in the Byzantine empire. But are they Byzantine images? While several previous studies have posited that the Madrid manuscript is a copy of a Comnenian original, this study argues that the iconography of the visual narrative, even images in the so-called Byzantine hand, is too un-orthodox to be considered an imperial commission.

The presentation of Iconoclasm in the visual narrative casts considerable doubt on the manuscript's presumed imperial origin. Not simply is Iconoclasm presented in a misunderstood and misguided manner, but the imagery in several specific cases is clearly un-Orthodox. The most glaring example of this is the fact that John the Grammarian is often depicted with a halo and is in no way distinguishable from his Iconodule enemies. How could a Byzantine patron have approved of image after image in which the arch-villains of Byzantine history, Iconoclast emperors and patriarchs, are assigned symbols of sanctity? Both groups were clearly anathematized and damned in the various compilations of the Synodikon of Orthodoxy. During the time in which the Skylitzes is presumed to have originated as an imperial commission, the Bogomils resurrected the Iconoclast controversies.

Given the circumstances of the reign of Alexios Komnenos, it seems highly improbable that images favorable to Iconoclasts could have been produced at that time. Anna Komnena devotes a considerable portion of Book 15 to her father's crushing of the Bogomils. We know that Alexios revised and updated the Synodikon and personally interrogated Bogomils. Euthymios Zigabenos specifically links the Bogomils to the Iconoclasts saying "they [the Bogomils] banish all pious emperors from the fold of Christians, and they say that only the Iconoclasts are orthodox and faithful, especially Copronymus." It seems unlikely that an imperial workshop could have produced images so insensitive to such a burning issue for both imperial and Church leaders.

The construction of the visual narrative, the process of selecting and excluding episodes from the chronicle when planning the iconographic program, also exposes evidence of desacralization. A sequence of six images illustrates an incident in which Iconodule Patriarch Methodios is accused of illicit intercourse. In a rare use of nakedness in the manuscript, an image depicts the patriarch displaying his lack of genitals in front of empress Theodora. In this specific case, an image of public humiliation was chosen to be highlighted, while the concomitant miracle recounted in the text, in which St. Peter himself withered the genitals of Methodios to save him from carnal desire, is excluded. The detached view of history that this image embodies is just a small, but glaring, example of the overall cultural ambiguity of the visual narrative.

In sum, rather than a regal representation of reality, the visual narrative presents a voyeur's view of Byzantine history. Rather than grope for explanations of the perverse peculiarities in order to make it fit into a Byzantine context, it would be better to devote more attention to the manuscript's ambiguous identity.

SESSION VIII

Gifts and Diplomacy

Chair: Sarah Bassett (Wayne State University)

Questionable Gifts: Constantine VIII and Relics of the True Cross

Lynn Jones (Independent Scholar)

According to a legend formulated in the late fourth century the True Cross was discovered in Jerusalem, then part of the Byzantine Empire, by Helena, mother of Constantine I. The agent, site and circumstance of this discovery established Byzantine control of the Cross. It was a Byzantine practice to distribute fragments of the Cross, often enclosed in Byzantine-produced reliquaries, to foreign rulers, dignitaries and religious officials to reward orthodoxy, confirm the political legitimacy of the recipient or promote one individual or dynasty over another. Some emperors made the distribution of Cross relics a key weapon in their diplomatic arsenal÷Justin II, for example, distributed fragments of the Cross enclosed in sumptuous reliquaries to Radegund and the new Pope John, among others. The imperial court controlled distribution of these relics; for much of the medieval period other Christian cultures could obtain fragments of the Cross only from Byzantium.

This paper examines textual accounts describing gifts of the True Cross presented by the emperor Constantine VIII to Norman noblemen and clergy. These accounts are found only in Norman sources; to my knowledge none of the relics that they describe survive. I examine the textual traditions describing these gifts and compare the written descriptions of the relics to surviving contemporary examples. I argue that only one of the tales is credible. I suggest the second served to boost the prestige of the supposed recipient and to attach an imperial provenance to a relic that did not originate in Constantinople. I demonstrate that the third account, which was not recorded until the second half of the twelfth century, reflects the shifting view of Byzantine power and prestige by those now involved in the Crusades. In this account the imperial provenance of the relics is less important than a vision which provides a Norman count with divine approval of his plans to acquire the relics and to take them from Constantinople by subterfuge.

Constantinople, Siena, and the Polesden Lacey Triptych:
An Angevin Commission for a Crusader Empress

Rebecca W. Corrie (Bates College)

In its 1994 exhibition of Byzantine art, the British Museum brought a spectacular and intriguing tabernacle to scholarly attention. Clearly made for personal devotion, it resides today in the collection at Polesden Lacey in Surrey. Owing to its combination of Greek and Latin saints and Byzantine and Italian stylistic elements, Mojmir Frinta had earlier attributed the image of the Virgin and Child with scenes and saints to the Dalmatian coast. But Maria Vassilaki and Robin Cormack, who wrote the 1994 entry, identified a Byzantine origin for one of the two hands, and wisely attempted a more precise localization, proposing even the possibility of Constantinople. In this paper, I follow their preference for a more precise localization, but with a somewhat different result, for I think that a close look at its likely client as well as its prototypes, identifies this work as the collaboration between Byzantine and Sienese painters at Siena in the second decade of the fourteenth century.

At the outset, astonishing matches between our tabernacle and several others produced by the Ducciesque painters identified as the Monte Oliveto Master and the Masters of Tabernacles 35 and 39 encourage this hypothesis, matches not only in format, but in the Virgin herself, her throne, and her throne cloth. At the same time, the saints arrayed around the central portion argue that the triptych was intended for a female member of the Angevin dynasty that ruled the Kingdom of Naples, while carrying out a policy aimed at asserting control over the Crusader states between 1267 and the later part of the fourteenth century. Indeed, these saints point to Siena, the house of Anjou, and the Crusader states, for we find on the right Saints Francis, Dominic, and Louis of Toulouse, along with Nicholas, John the Baptist, and Anthony Abbot. To the left is a similar array: Saints George, Cosmas and Damian, and Michael. Several of the male saints appear in distinctly Byzantine form. But it is the four female saints who may be most significant. Centered beneath of the Virgin are Saints Lucy and Mary Magadalen, as they appear in Sienese images, and Saints Theodosia of Constantinople and Catherine of Alexandria in Byzantine form. But I think we can get still closer to the events surrounding the production of this tabernacle. In 1993 Hayden Maginnis provided Siena's Tabernacle 35 with a thoroughly convincing client, the son of Robert, King of Naples, Peter of Anjou, who was in residence in Siena in 1314 and 1315, along with his brother Philip, Prince of Taranto. Philip had just married Catherine de Valois Courtenay, titular Empress of Constantinople, through whom the Angevins hoped to claim an increasingly elusive Crusader kingdom, and she is a likely recipient for the Polesden Lacey Triptych. Certainly it remains tempting to place the production of this triptych in the East, identifying it as a Greek copy of a Sienese tabernacle. But the apparent inclusion of a Sienese hand in the painting of the saints and the itinerary of our Angevin princes suggest instead the presence of a Greek painter in Siena, along with the many historical and methodological considerations such a localization might entail.

Bride, Book, and Visuality

Cecily J. Hilsdale (University of Chicago)

Study of Vatican Greek manuscript 1851 poses a methodological problem for art historians, philologists, and historians alike not only because of the absence of proper names on any of the surviving folia but also because the images find few parallels for comparison. It is modest in scale yet highly sumptuous, and tells the story of the arrival of a western princess to marry a Byzantine porphyrogenitos. Each page, rich in visual and textual narrative, reveals much about social values, perceptions, and expectations of brides and foreignness in the Byzantine world. Scholarly attention, however, has almost entirely concerned issues of chronological identification ö an issue that certainly merits close and careful attention, but should not preclude other interpretive strategies.

Regardless of chronology, it is clear that both the text itself and the accompanying miniatures were intended for a bride, and in particular a western bride, as noted by Hans Belting in 1970. My analysis of the relationship between word and image demonstrates that the message of the manuscript would be comprehensible to a newly arrived foreign bride with little to no knowledge of Greek. The pages visually and textually tell us of her long journey, of the honor accorded the various messengers, and her reception in Constantinople and integration into the imperial family. Notions of inclusion and transformation dominate the narrative and set the pace or tempo of the story.

In the Vatican codex, we find a visual evocation of the ideal diplomatic marriage, not an attempt to mirror reality but a didactic projection of expectations. The narrative structure of the manuscript represents the proper or ideal social structure of incorporation. It emphasizes total inclusion, transformation and final fully-integrated display, thus stressing her transformation from western to eastern. My paper, after considering chronological issues, explores the implications of the bride and the book and the complex kinship relations set off by their exchange. I argue that the book intimately stresses the bride's new identity, slowly leading her through a web of Byzantine expectations.

SESSION IX

Byzantine Identities I

Chair: Elizabeth Bolman (Temple University)

Unpacking the Darmstadt Casket

Alicia Walker (Harvard University)

A group of four, c. tenth- to eleventh-century ivory panels in the Hessisches Landesmuseum, Darmstadt, Germany (Kg. 54:215 a-d), indicate by their consistent size, common framing elements, and stylistic comparability that they originally adorned the same wooden-core box. A now-lost, presumably ivory lid would have provided a fifth plaque for this set. The two long plaques of the group are each decorated with a series of three vignettes, while the shorter, side panels each depict a single scene. Although the repetition of lattice canopies above each of the eight scenes implies a unified program for the box, the specific nature of its meaning has defied interpretation. Some of the images clearly derive from classical precedents÷such as the heroic deeds of Heracles÷but others refer to late antique and Byzantine types÷such as the generic "Holy Rider." One scene depicts a cross-legged, seated figure familiar from Sasanian and medieval Islamic imagery. This diversity of iconographic references has led one scholar to describe the box as a hodgepodge, that is to say, a grouping of scenes without any unifying theme.

The present paper focuses on the iconographic reading of each of the eight scenes and proposes an integrated meaning for the overall decorative program of this box. Techniques of visual rhetoric apparent in this object are compared to rhetorical strategies that emerged in literature during the middle Byzantine period. In contrast to recent suggestion that this box may have served as a diplomatic gift, it is proposed that the message of this object precluded such use; the Darmstadt Casket was produced for a Byzantine audience and would have been intended to circulate within an elite and erudite social group.

Byzantinizing the Baptistery: From the Holy Land to Parma

Ludovico Geymonat (Princeton University)

Works of art are crucial evidence of the reception and assimilation of features which Western travelers, pilgrims and crusaders were exposed to in Byzantium and the Holy Land. The cycle of paintings in the Parma Baptistery provide a profitable case study ö the extensive material still preserved and the rich literary sources concerning its context allow for a thorough analysis of how the appropriation of Byzantine and Crusader art took place and was implemented in a representative monument of a medieval commune.

The paintings in Parma (Italy), dating from the first half of the thirteenth century, constitute an extensive program including both narrative cycles and rows of figures. Excellently preserved, they cover the huge gothic hall of the late twelfth-century Baptistery. The iconography of several monumental baptisteries from this time is linked to the Holy Sepulcher, and the Baptistery at Parma was built and decorated during a period of intense contact with the Near East. The iconography of most of the figures and scenes, along with some stylistic characteristics and peculiar decorative motifs, can be explained only by a wide-ranging assimilation of Byzantine features. This assimilation is broadly accepted and attested ö the new assessment I make, on the base of a close reading of specific iconographies and stylistic features, is that the Holy Land served as its principal source.

At this time, the powerful medieval commune of Parma was witnessing at first hand some remarkable events: the dramatic rise of the Franciscans, the spread and repression of heretic movements, the power struggle between the Italian communes and the emperor Frederick II, who was definitively routed during his siege of Parma in 1247. Internally, the city was divided by a bitter conflict between the bishop and the developing city-government. These are the circumstances in which the building and the decoration of the Baptistery were carried out, and the backdrop against which we must understand the assimilation of eastern features and iconographies. Significant historical evidence ö regarding the patron, the painter and the intended meaning of the decoration ö provides telling clues about the role and significance of the appropriation of Byzantine art in such a context, and indicates the peculiar use in Parma of imagery taken from the Holy Land.

Orthodox Magic: An Amulet Roll in New York and Chicago

Glenn Peers (University of Texas at Austin)

The amulet roll now divided between the Pierpont Morgan Library (MS 499) and the University of Chicago Library (cod. 125) is an artifact of great interest for several reasons: it is a unique object, to my knowledge, in that it is a non-liturgical roll of some 511 cm in length with a width of 9.3-9.5 cm; on the recto, several Greek texts, including excerpts from the Gospels, the Nicene Creed and Psalms, are gathered, while on the verso a lengthy text in Arabic was written by a non-scribal hand, which records "various magical operations" (according to an early catalogue) and a date of 1363 C.E. (according to a re-reading by Leslie MacCoull); and it is an extensively illustrated roll, with twenty-seven pictorial units on recto and verso.

Yet the roll has largely escaped notice, as its bibliography is limited to an article of 1936 by Sirarpie Der Nersessian and another of 1989 by Isa Ragusa. While highly admirable works of scholarship, neither scholar extended her study to include the unique characteristics of this object. Rather, each focused on the cycle of illustrations that comprises the longest extant cycle of the Mandylion legend. And despite recent energetic interest in the phenomenon of the Mandylion, primarily The Holy Face (1998) and Il volto di Cristo (2000), this roll has subsequently attracted no more than passing mention.

This paper represents an attempt to place that Mandylion cycle within the specific conditions of the roll's creation by focusing attention on the material character of the object and on its purpose as a magical charm. The Mandylion cycle is, as mentioned, extensive, and its inclusion on the roll is due to the widely acknowledged apotropaic character of the two relics of this legend, the Mandylion and the letter of Christ to King Abgar of Edessa. Together the Mandylion and the letter became magical signs placed on liminal spaces, like bases of church domes, lintels of doors and gates to cities, and the letter was carried in amulet forms.

It is the combination of this illustrated legend with the other texts and illustrations within a specifically Arab Christian context that gives the object its special interest. For those reasons, this paper will not only attempt to explain the association of the Mandylion cycle with the other texts and illustrations on the roll, but also offer some explanation of its place within a specific cultural context of fourteenth-century Christians in Egypt. Moreover, the roll represents a unique instance of a balance between orthodoxy and heteropraxy. The texts and illustrations are unobjectionable in their character, but their presentation on an amulet roll and their application to apotropaic ends, as the Arabic text describes, likewise reveals a highly personal element to the commissioning of this object. This paper, therefore, hopes to bring attention to a unique monument, neglected despite its division between two well-known American collections.

SESSION X

In Search of Edessas

Chair: Michael Maas (Rice University)

Edessa on the Front Lines: Rome's Client State in the Third Century

Steven K. Ross (Louisiana State University)

Although it was founded as a city in the post-Alexander period, and figured in the Near Eastern diplomacy of Rome and the Parthians throughout the early centuries of the present era, Edessa in Osrhoene is best known for its role as a seedbed of early Mesopotamian Christianity, as an important Byzantine-era city and later as one of the frontline Crusader principalities. Evidence can now be brought to bear, however, indicating that this small kingdom or "toparchy" was more important, at an earlier date, than has been realized. Edessa was in fact crucial to Roman frontier policy in the Severan and post-Severan period, at a time when the rise of the Sassanid Persian dynasty posed a vital threat to Roman strategic interests.

Under the last king of the native Semitic Abgarid dynasty, Abgar X (a contemporary of Gordian III), Edessa took a leading role in the defense of the northern Mesopotamian district against the Persians, Rome itself being unable to respond quickly enough to prevent a strategic disaster. As can now be shown with near certainty, Abgar X was in fact appointed by Gordian (perhaps in a face-to-face meeting) to a post within the provincial defense structure, which he held simultaneously with his position as monarch of the pro-Roman client kingdom. He lost this post, however, before Gordian returned to the area in person for his fatal confrontation with Shapur I of Persia.

Indications are now emerging that Edessa, which tends to be overshadowed in the pre-Christian sources by its pagan neighbor and rival Harran, may actually have eclipsed Harran by the early third century, and may in fact have played a leadership role in the local context, apart from its relationship with Rome. This paper examines some of the evidence, numismatic and textual, for this early political prominence, which set Edessa on the road to its later importance in the Christian period. Moving beyond the end of the monarchy, we find indicators that Edessa retained its role of importance even as it settled into the character of KOL. EDESSHNWN--"the colonia of Edessa."

The Edessene Background to Chrysostom's Homilies at Drypia:
Ephraim's Carm. Nisb. XLII and the Second Translatio of Mar Thoma

Paul Kimball (State University of New York at Buffalo)

In the wake of Theodosius' victory on the Frigidus in AD 390, Italy's alpine regions attracted an enthusiastic missionary effort, directed at first from Milan and Aquileia, which resulted in two well-known instances of martyrdom in the high valleys of the Alto Adige: that of St. Vigilius of Trento on June 26, 405, and of Vigilius' prot?g?s, Sissinius, Martyrius, and Alexander, three Cappadocians collectively known to the church as the "Anaunian martyrs" on account of the setting of their passio in the Val di Non in May, 397. Vigilius himself took the leading role in promoting the veneration of these newly-minted martyrs until his own death at the hands of the same Alpine sect in the Val Rendena. In 398 he dispatched some of the relics of the Anaunian martyrs with a letter detailing their murder to John Chrysostom, the recently enthroned bishop of Constantinople whom Vigilius had known during their rhetorical studies in Athens. The remains and accompanying epistle were conveyed to the eastern capital by one Jacobus, vir illustris and probably comes; the manuscripts of Claudian's Carm. Min. 50 inform us that he served as magister equitum during Alaric's invasions of Italy in the first decade of the fifth century. Although the PLRE would have Jacobus already installed in this latest office before his embassy, which the PLRE dates to 402-404, J. Vanderspoel has pointed to ambiguities in the wording of Claudian's testimony which suggests that Jacobus escorted the Anaunian martyrs to Constantinople while on an unrelated diplomatic mission c. 400-402, only after which he was awarded his cavalry command.

Vanderspoel's more cautious chronology accords well with the date which K. Holum proposed for two homilies delivered by Chrysostom at the martyrium of St. Thomas at Drypia, some nine Roman miles (13 km) west of Constantinople across the R. Ayamama. The first of the pair is the best known, for in his oration Chrysostom takes pains to single out the participation of the empress Eudoxia, who escorted some unnamed relics to the church of St. Thomas in a nocturnal torchlit procession along the Marmara shore. Holum discussed the text at some length in his Theodosian Empresses (Berkeley, 1982) and determined that Chrysostom authored the homily between January 9, 400 and January 10, 402, i.e. the dates of Eudoxia's elevation as augusta and that of her son, the infant Theodosius II, as augustus. Vanderspoel himself noted the possibility that the anonymous saints conveyed by the empress were the martyrs of Anaunia, as had W. Liebschuetz, although the latter believed the martyr Phokas to be a good candidate as well.

This paper for the special session "In Search of Edessa(s)" elucidates the possible. connections between the ceremony at Drypia and the translatio of Mar Thoma's relics on August 22, 394 from his martyrium outside the Edessa's walls to the cathedral by Bishop Qura (Cyrus) as reported by the Chronicle of Edessa. After considering structural analogues and investigating possible verbal echoes between Ephraim Syrus' Carm. Nisb. XLII and Chrysostom's homily, I examine the eschatological preoccupations latent, to greater or lesser degree, in both texts. Looking to confirm my conclusions in this last line of argument, I draw on examples from the second and less well-known homily delivered by Chrysostom the following morning, and suggest that Chrysostom's extensive treatment of history before Abraham in this second sermon reflects attitudes towards the relation between archaic history and apocalyptic texts produced in Northern Syria during late antiquity.

Leo the Deacon's Military and Religious Digression on Edessa

Frederick Lauritzen (Columbia University)

Leo the Deacon's history describes the military achievements of Nicephorus II Phocas and John I Tzimisces, in Bulgaria and also in Syria. The digression on the invasion of Edessa by Nicephorus II Phocas (963-969) allows Leo the Deacon to play on two very important motifs in his general characterisation of the emperor. He manages to illustrate how he is committed to orthodoxy and to an expansionist policy which reminds one of the Roman past. This is achieved though his description of Nicephorus' attack on the city of Edessa (mod. Sanli Urfa in Turkey) in the Hamdanid Emirate. Here the emperor manages to find a miracle-working relic of which he had heard, namely an image of Christ. This is the only element described of the city attacked. This emphasis on the religious interest of Edessa is also increased by the use of vocabulary which reminds one of the Christological controversies but also the works of the Fathers of the Church.

But this religious tone is not out of keeping with the basically military context in which it is operating. In fact Leo changes the tone of the passage to include words and expressions which are specifically theological, giving Nicephorus an aura of piety. But this is not the only effect which he is trying to convey; Leo also uses a language similar to that of greek historians who tried to describe the expansion of the Roman Empire in order to draw a parallel between the military expeditions of the emperor and those of past generals of the Roman State. These include such authors as Polybius, Flavius Josephus, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Arrian and Cassius Dio.

Thus Leo is using a religious and military frame of reference in order to explain Nicephorus' presence in Edessa in 966. This shows how even at the level of a digression, Leo is trying to convey a new way of looking at historical writing in which religion and the military work side by side to achieve common goal, through appropriate echoes of the past.

The Material Culture Of Byzantine Architecture:
The Cases Of Greek Macedonian And Syrian Edessas

Dimitris Drakoulis (Architect MSc, Aristoteleion University of Thessaloniki, Greece)

The material culture of Byzantine architecture is examined through four levels of analytical data: buildings, towns and other human constructions on the first level, modes, techniques, materials and tools of construction on the second level, subjects who are creating, using, living and consuming the artifacts on the third level, finally rituals that accompany the building process and form the deeper structures of the non codified ideology of the subjects. The validity of this model is testified in the cases of the two cities with the same name: the Greek Macedonian and Syrian Edessas.

The chronological axis of the study follows the historical foundations of these two eponymous cities, and focuses on the period of their transformation in Byzantine regional cities. The first part deals with the intermediary points of these changes, departing from the Greek Macedonian Edessa, to the Hellenistic "metropolis", later a Roman city (with via Egnatia, the basic road that merges North - West with South ö East), to the regional fortified acropolis with semi-urbanized hinterland of the first Byzantine era. The second part deals with the Syrian Edessa, a Hellenistic colony, later capital of a Parthian kingdom (with a road again that merges South ö East with North ö West) to the "holy" city of Syrian Christianity. In the third part, a comparative analysis of the two cities shows their different fortunes ("tychae") in the context of Byzantine regionalism, the rising of which is seen through the combination of local material and construction techniques and the architectural tradition of the state. The local characters with their strong dependence from the Hellenistic and Roman era are functioning like vehicles of further dependence of the state tradition on its Greek and Roman past. So, the survival of this tradition is not only an effect of central decisions, but also presents serious dependencies on different local architectural traditions.

The result is a further enrichment of the Byzantine Habitat model with the integration of local elements. The choices in these two towns show the modes of constitution of the Byzantine town in general. The Byzantine "official" school, the tradition of the Justinianic "new church architecture" and the appearance of vaulting and, especially, of domes as a common architectural pattern for almost every church, mark clearly this development.

The settlements are described with their material outfit (private, social and religious buildings), their spatial layout and the interrelations between constructed and non-constructed space in the local environment, their sacred topography and rites, cults and other traditional behaviour. Finally, social structure and local history is examined in order to clarify better the vehicles of the architectural messages, the building subjects and their guilds on the one hand, "official" Byzantine architecture and its institutions on the urban level, legislation and aesthetic values on the other.

One additional argument for the persistence of classical architecture in these two local traditions is that the two towns continue their urban presence also in environments that could favour another type of urban development.

SESSION XI

History of Byzantine Scholarship

Chair: John Barker (University of Wisconsin, Madison)

Byzantinism and Nazism in 1930's and 1940's German Scholarship

David Olster (University of Kentucky)

Hitler, who fondly imagined that future generations would be guided by his every thought, had his dinner conversations stenographically recorded for posterity. In the course of his wide-ranging discourses, he several times lights on the emperor Julian the apostate, partly for his opposition to Christianity, but also for his putative opposition to the Jews. His view of Julian arises, I would suggest, from his awareness of contemporary German scholarship, and in particular, J. Vogt's work, Kaiser Julian und das Judentum. Hitler was not a scholar, and I do not suggest that he was an avid reader of German Byzantine scholarship. Nonetheless, his table-talk reveals the interplay between Nazism and one of the great schools of Byzantine scholarship.

Few schools of Byzantine history have produced scholarship at once so technically proficient and so ideologically driven as German scholarship from the mid-1930's to the end of the Second World War. Among the great scholars of this period stand Treitinger, Ensslin, Vogt, and above all, Doelger, who must be considered one of the greatest Byzantinists of all time. But the mix of contemporary political ideology and historical vision produced such curious works as Doelger's Die Europaische Staatsordnung, whose presentation of Byzantium as the bearer of the classical tradition, the cultural guide to the untutored west, and the protector and imperial master of the Slavs must inevitably draw comparisons with the European "New Order" of Germany's brief hegemony at the beginning of the 1940's. Similarly, Treitinger, who lost his life on the eastern front, argued that the decline of Byzantium was brought about by its "mixing with Slavs," embracing a fundamental precept of Nazi racial theory. This study will examine the interplay between historical context and historical analysis in the German scholarship of the Nazi era, and the manner in which experience served as a cognitive filter of scholarship.

This conflation of past and present (that characterizes every generation of historical scholarship, not the Germans alone), reveals the profound (and occasionally bizarre) relationship between scholarship and the political imagination. The assimilation of a culture's dominant discourse is hardly limited to these scholars, and they serve as a methodological example for the examination of other scholars and schools of scholarship, and perhaps, even ourselves.

Clyde Pharr and the Women of Vanderbilt:
The Translation of the Theodosian Code in Mid-Twentieth Century America

Linda Jones Hall (St. Mary's College of Maryland)

Austin, Texas, is listed below the signature of Clyde Pharr in his introduction to his magisterial translation of the Theodosian Code, published at last in 1951, after decades of work on the project at Vanderbilt University. Pharr, whose editions of Vergil and Homer, have assisted many students in mastering classical Latin and Greek, made his most lasting contribution to academe through the carefully annotated and edited translation of Roman laws set forth from the time of Constantine to the reign of Theodosius in the fifth century AD. Pharr's translation is the unrivalled authority for numerous books and articles published today in such fields as jurisprudence and social history, particularly relating to Late Antiquity.

Although the laws in the Theodosian Code offer a window into the Late Antique era, on topics ranging from slavery to marriage, from shipping to tax-collection, the story of the translation of the Code into English opens another kind of window into the academic culture of 1930s through 1950s. Pharr credits two editors for their assistance: Theresa Sherrer Davidson, his associate editor, and Mary Pharr Brown, his assistant editor. Dr. Davidson was not only a classicist, but also a lawyer and the wife of the distinguished Fugitive poet, Donald Davidson. Mary Brown Pharr had been a young graduate student involved in the project who married her mentor, and in the end, she was the only one to follow Pharr through the whole project.

Pharr acknowledges the help of his graduate students, the great majority of whom were women, and some of whom went on to earn doctorates. Such acknowledgment would not seem unusual, but at this time, at Vanderbilt there were policies in place which limited the enrollment of women to only a fraction of the male students. The Board of Trust minutes from this time affirm that during World War II, "exceptions" were made to admit relatively more women to the university.

In this paper, I will lay out the process by which the Code was translated into English, and the intentions of the translation committee. I will also demonstrate that various "books" of the Code appear to be almost entirely the work of female graduate students who published their translations as dissertations and theses. Although their names are mentioned in the preface to Pharr's translation, the extent of our debt to them has never been fully discussed. In the final analysis, Pharr deserves credit for his determination to bring this project to completion, often without appreciation or support from Vanderbilt. In fact, he has been criticized in the histories of Vanderbilt for focusing on Roman law at the expense of more exciting literary topics. Moreover, the unsung accomplishments of the women who assisted him deserve our attention today as well. The great irony lies in the fact that women who normally might not even have been admitted to Vanderbilt were closely involved in one of the most important scholarly projects to have ever come out of an American institution, marked by its rather late acceptance of women and minorities in more equitable proportions in the 1960s and 1970s.

SESSION XII
Literature and Performance

Chair: George Majeska (University of Maryland)

Identity in Rhythmic Meter between Ancient Greek Poetry
and Byzantine Hymnology<

Nick Giannoukakis, University of Pittsburgh (Independent Scholar)

Byzantine hymnology consists of two elements: music and poetry. As early as the 2^nd century C.E., a co-evolution occurred demonstrating increased complexity in musical structure but more poignantly, in poetic structure and composition. This evolution, from the poetic standpoint continued well into the 16^th century. Despite some significant changes, the hymnographic structure that remained unchanged from the 7-8^th century onward was the Canon. Generally-described as a poem consisting of a number of odes each bound together by a unifying theme, each ode of a Canon was musically and rhythmically modelled after a melodic and poetic prototype called a prologos. In the case of the Canon, the eirmos. A study of the rhythmic meter of the eirmos hymns of Byzantine hymnography will reveal a remarkable identity between them and the rhythm and meter of ancient Hellenic poetry.

This essay will demonstrate that a number of prominent eirmos hymns that are regularly encountered during the ecclesiastical year in the original ecclesiastical Greek texts are identical in rhythm and meter to passages from the works of Euripides and Homer.

While the exact reason(s) for this practice by the Byzantine hymnographers including St. John of Damascus is/are not evidently clear, the era in which the first such hymns first appeared suggests that the practice may have been one of several methods to attract non-Christians of the late Roman Empire and early Byzantium with the objective of their full conversion to Christianity.

Liturgical Performance and the Formation of Christian Identity
in the Age of Justinian

Derek Krueger (University of North Carolina at Greensboro)

The performance of ritualized religious activities contributed to the formation of Christian lay identity as sixth-century Christians engaged in asceticism, veneration of saints, festal vigils, liturgy, and pilgrimage. In addition to the better-known synthesis of an imperial Christianity, expressed grandly in architecture, art, and church plate, the age of Justinian saw the expansion of many popular forms of pious practice. In contrast to the conscious novelty of fourth‑century piety, the sixth century saw the routinization of Christian practice as a feature of Byzantine culture.

The category of performance as theorized by Pierre Bourdieu and Catherine Bell affords insight into how popular liturgical practices employed biblical typology to articulate and maintain norms for Christian self-understanding. The festal hymns of Romanos the Melodist in particular demonstrate how the emerging office of the night vigil provided opportunities for Christians to enter into the drama of the liturgical calendar. Romanos employed dialogues between Jesus and various biblical interlocutors to frame idealized relationships between Christians and Christ, inserting the community into the biblical narrative. His dialectical method is especially apparent in the hymns dedicated to Holy Week.

Moving beyond older religious-studies models that stress the correspondence between myth and ritual, performance-studies approaches allow emphasis to fall on the ways in which these mythic ritualizations effect the production of Christian modes of being, cuing appropriate emotions and habits in response to the dramatization and rehearsal of the Christian story.

In order to place the achievements of Romanos' methods in larger context, one earlier and one later text are considered. The earlier sixth-century mystical reflections of the author know as Dionysius the Areopagite (before 513), advance an understanding of baptismal ritual as a reenactment of the baptism of Christ. The evidence of the Ecclesiastical Hierarchy demonstrates an indigenous, early Byzantine theory of ritual performance which stresses liturgy as mimesis of biblical narrative. The patriarch Eutychius probably introduced the antiphon usually known to liturgical historians by its Latin name, Cenae tuae, to the liturgy for Holy Thursday in the 570s. Here congregants were encouraged to approach the eucharistic table by inserting themselves into the biblical narrative by taking the part of the thief, rather than Judas. This typological self-positioning employs performance as a technology through which Christians might conform themselves to appropriate biblical models.

Picturing the Process of Writing: The Virgin as the ÎMuse' of Poetic Inspiration

Bissera V. Pentcheva (Columbia University)

The apse mosaic in Hagia Sophia featuring the enthroned Virgin and Child has traditionally been viewed as a symbol of authority linked to the Church. In addition to power, the representation reveals the perception of Mary as the throne of wisdom depicted in the sacred space dedicated to Holy Wisdom. The apse mosaic thus offers a visual manifestation of the process of creation and writing, related to birthing, where the ineffable divine wisdom acquires a material form in the shape of the Child. The enthroned Virgin and Christ can be read as a visual symbol of poetic inspiration. This perception of the image most likely gained further prominence when the new center of learning, the Cathedral School, was established in Hagia Sophia in the twelfth century. In addition to the apse mosaic, many other representations of the Virgin and Child were viewed in a similar way as markers of the process of artistic creation through the body of Mary giving birth to the Logos. The perception of writing as an act of birthing suggests a parallel to the construction of female rhetorical gender manifested in the work of Michael Psellos. By focusing on representations of the Virgin and Child in mosaics, frescoes, miniatures, and ivories in Constantinople from the eleventh to the twelfth centuries, this paper will explore how Mary came to be perceived as the Îmuse' of poetic inspiration, triggering the process of writing.

A Few Remarks On The Definition Of Byzantine Theatre

Przemyslaw Marciniak (University of Silesia, Poland)

In my paper I focus on those issues regarding Byzantine theatre that we have not yet found satisfactory answers for and are to be rethought. Therefore, I discuss the following issues öproblems of the definition of Byzantine religious and profane theatre.

As to the first issue there is no doubt that we can identify some para-theatrical forms in Byzantium or at least texts that seem to have dramatic elements. The situation is slightly different for the eve of the fall of Constantinople since we have a few testimonies showing that some sort of liturgical drama might have been performed in Haghia Sophia. The most significant and the only non-liturgical dramatic text that might have been staged, in a way that we used to perceive as common, comes from Cyprus and is rather exceptio than regula. Regrettably the general picture of Byzantine theatre is diversified and, for the most part, unclear.

In my view, misunderstanding comes from lack of clear definition of what religious drama and theatre in Byzantium might be. Students of Byzantine theatre use terms designed to describe Western theatrical activities often forgetting that these definitions vary considerably among themselves (cf. the debate on impersonation and radically different opinions of K. Young and O.B. Hardison) not to mention that they cannot be, in my opinion, used to depict the Byzantine realm.

I endeavor, therefore, to demonstrate that one has to propose a new definition of Byzantine theatre, especially a liturgical one. My main assumption is that an impersonation is not the distinctive feature of Byzantine liturgical theatre, which can be inferred from passages in Libanios, Chrysostomos, and Eustathios of Thessalonika. Therefore I would assume that in some cases liturgy or its part may become a theatre in its primary sense ö a spectacle. Since a performance is acted in Church and for liturgical purposes, it might be described as liturgical theatre.

I am also convinced that we can find traces of Byzantine profane theatre, however very remote from Western ideas of what theatre is. We can state, without any doubt, that Byzantine culture was deeply theatrical, even Byzantines themselves gave proof of such judgement (cf. Leo the Deacon, History, IV,61,44, PG vol.117). Therefore, it seems that we could put an equal sign between various kind of performances, i.e. festivals, imperial ceremonies etc, and theatre.

There is also no doubt that the literary circles, so-called theatra, fulfilled the task of a theatre. Moreover, it might be possible that dramatic texts like Katomyomachia, in my opinion an attempt to vie with an ancient theatre, were intended to be read in these gatherings. I would, therefore, draw a line between a theatre for masses and elitist theatre for Byzantine intelligentsia.

In conclusion, it has to be said that Byzantium possessed theatre; however, like many other things, even its idea had been transformed during the Byzantine period.

SESSION XIII

Amorium Excavations

Chair: Christopher Lightfoot (Amorium Excavations Project;
The Metropolitan Museum of Art)

The Byzantine Stone-Mason at Work:
New Evidence from the Lower City Church at Amorium

Eric A. Ivison (Amorium Excavations Project, Turkey/College of Staten Island, CUNY)

Excavations since 1990 have revealed the remains of a major ecclesiastical complex in the Lower City of Amorium. Following a disastrous fire, the church was reconstructed as a domed basilica, lavishly decorated with wall paintings, vault mosaics, and an opus sectile pavement. Fragments of an inscribed epistyle from the templon record that a bishop acted as patron of this new church, which was apparently dedicated to a "Prophet of Christ".

Historical, archaeological, and comparative evidence suggests that the reconstruction probably took place between c. 850-950, and on-going studies may well narrow this provisional dating. To date, nearly 200 fragments have been recovered from a major sculptural program specially commissioned for the new church. These include architectural pieces, such as string courses, cornices, and re-worked column capitals, and the liturgical furnishings of the templon and ambo, which can be reconstructed on their preserved foundations. Unlike most middle Byzantine sculptures, the carved surfaces of the Amorium stones survive in almost pristine condition, thus preserving rare evidence of the techniques employed in their production. Beyond presenting the Amorium sculptures to a wider audience, this paper therefore seeks to reconstruct how middle Byzantine stone-masons went about their work.

The Amorium evidence demonstrates that the stone-masons worked on stones in successive stages, and that they had at least an elementary training in arithmetic and geometry. Furthermore, the preservation of individual chisel strokes shows that, like painters and mosaicists, the Amorium masons worked freely within and around a preparatory outline. The evolutionary nature of this creative process is also demonstrated by evidence of adaption and alteration in the carving. These techniques created crisp, shallow carving and heavily textured surfaces, but this was not intended as the final effect. The exceptional survival of painted polychromy has revealed that most, if not all, of the sculptures were once painted, thus integrating sculptured surfaces into the mural decoration.

The scale of the sculptural program of the Lower City Church suggests a team of stonemasons rather than a single craftsman. It also seems likely that these masons worked as part of teams of technitai contracted to reconstruct the Lower City Church. The discovery of waste chips from marble working used as packing under the new pavements demonstrates that the sculptures were carved on site during construction. The unity of design and technique would further suggest that the masons worked within a common tradition and a master plan. At present, one can only speculate whether they were local craftsmen or were brought from further afield, but stylistic links with other sites demonstrate that the bishop who commissioned the reconstruction work sought to provide Amorium with a church that emulated the grander ecclesiastical edifices of the empire.

The Mural Decoration of the Lower City Church at Amorium

Johanna Witte-Orr (Amorium Excavations Project, Turk