Byzantine Studies Conference Archives

Thirtieth Annual Byzantine Studies Conference
October 28-31, 2004 The Walters Art Museum and The Johns Hopkins University Baltimore, Maryland

Abstracts of Papers

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Session I: Icons

Chair: Annemarie Weyl Carr, Southern Methodist University

Charles Barber, University of Notre Dame
Living Painting, or the Limits of Painting? Glancing at Icons with Michael Psellos

Edmund Ryder, New York University
Reception and Re-interpretation: Portative Mosaic Icons in Western Europe

Gary Vikan, The Walters Art Museum
Byzantine and Russian Icon Painting circa 1400: A Case Study in the Walters Art Museum

Elena Boeck, DePaul University
The Emergence o f a New Icon Type: The Compendium Icon of the Virgin in Early Modern Russia

Session II: Heresies and Controversies

Chair: Tia Kolbaba, Rutgers University

Patrick Gray, York University, Toronto
Eutyches and Christology: The Fight to Own Cyril

George Bevan, University of Toronto
Eutyches and the Ecclesiastical Policy of Theodosius II

Dana-luliana Viezure, University of Toronto
The `Unus de Trinitate' Controversy: A Historical Reconsideration of its Origins

Young Kim, University of Michigan
The Heresiarch as Unholy Man: The `Panarion' of Epiphanius of Cyprus as Collective Biography

Session III: Word and Image

Chair: Ida Sinkevic, Lafayette College

Alice Christ, University of Kentucky
Christ's Magic Wand

Gretchen Kreahling McKay, McDaniel College
Images as Exegesis: The Ancient of Days and the Gospel of John

Kathleen Maxwell, Santa Clara University
Paris, Bibliotheque Nationale de France, Codex Grec 54 and Princeton, University Library, Codex Garrett 3: A Copy/Model Relationship for Their Greek Gospel Texts?

Session IV: Warfare

Chair: John Birkenmeier, Independent Scholar

Scott Moore, Indiana University of Pennsylvania
The Development o f the Byzantine Dromon

Paul Stephenson, University of Wisconsin, Madison and Dumbarton Oaks
The Sacralization of Warfare in Late Tenth-Century Byzantium: Some Comments on Neglected Texts

John Duffy, Harvard University
Nothing to Do with History? Proclus the Philosopher and a Weapon o f Mass Destruction

Session V: Rural Life

Chair: Leonora Neville, Catholic University of America

Rangar Cline, Pennsylvania State University
Christian Authority and Angel Veneration: The Synod o f Laodicaea and the Prohibition of Extra-Ecclesiastical Angel Invocation

Kostis Kourelis, Clemson University
Fabrics and Rubble Walls: The Archaeology of Danielis' Gifts

Linda Honey, University of Calgary
Thekla: Christian Exemplar or Feminist Prototype?

Sharon Gerstel, University of Maryland, College Park
Rural Nuns in Late Byzantium

Session VI: Early Christian and Early Byzantine Wall and Vault Mosaics

Chair: Stephen Zwirn, Dumbarton Oaks

Gillian Mackie, University of Victoria
Meaningful Transitions: The Iconographic Adornment of Entry and Exit Portals

Anne Terry, Independent Scholar
Mosaic Artistry in Sixth-Century Parentium Warren Woodfin, University of Pennsylvania Textiles and Costume in the Apse Mosaics of the Basilica Eufrasiana at Porec

Eunice Dauterman Maguire and Henry Maguire, The Johns Hopkins University
The Costume of John the Baptist in the Mosaics at Porec

Session VII: Perceptions of Byzantium, Within and Without

Chair: Ellen Schwartz, Eastern Michigan University

Lynn Jones, Independent Scholar
Radegund of Poitiers and Relics of the True Cross

Denis Sullivan, University of Maryland, College Park
Siege Warfare, Nikephoros 11 Phokas, and the Acquisition of Relics

Thomas Dale, University of Wisconsin, Madison
Origins, Functions, and Meaning of the `Pulpits' of San Marco in Venice

Session VIII: Landscape I

Chair: Cecile Morrisson, CNRS-College de France and Dumbarton Oaks

Vessela Anguelova, Pennsylvania State University
Landscape and Eremitic Life in the Dormition of St. Ephrem the Syrian from the Narthex of St. Nicholas Anapausas, Meteora

Svetlana Popovic, Prince George's Community College
Monastery and Healing Waters: The St. Nicholas Monastery (1330s) at Banja

Elisaveta Todorova, University of Cincinnati
Trade and Mapping o f the Byzantine Coasts between the Thirteenth and Sixteenth Centuries

Session IX: Monasticism

Chair: Asin Kirin, University of Georgia

Monica Hirschbichler, University of Maryland, College Park
Contemplating Death: The Murals o f the Canon for the Dying in the Pyrgos o f St. George at Chilandar Monastery

Stephanie Payne, University of Texas
The Freer `Heavenly Ladder' Folia: A Visual How-To Guide for Monks

Nikolas Bakirtzis, Princeton University
The Buttressed Tower at Hagios Vasdeios near Thessaloniki

Debra Foran, Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, Toronto
The Monastic Communities o f Mount Nebo

Session X: Late Antiquity

Chair: David Olster, University of Kentucky

Ralph Mathison, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
The Theory and Practice of Citizenship in the Later Roman Empire

Irfan Shahid, Georgetown University and Dumbarton Oaks
Constantine and Christianity Revisited: The Persian Dimension

Delphine Renaut, Ecole Normale Superieure, Paris
Performing Late Antique Ekphrasis: The Example of the School of Gaza

Caroline Downing, State University of New York College, Potsdam
The Decorative Program of the Early Basilica at Stobi, Macedonia

Session XI: Landscape II

Chair: Martha Vinson, Indiana University

Elizabeth Fisher, George Washington University
Hagiography in a Landscape: Psellos and Symeon the Metaphrast

Günder Varinlioglu, University of Pennsylvania
The Rural Landscape and Built Environment at the End of Antiquity: Limestone Villages of Southeastern lsauria

William Caraher, Independent Scholar
A Hagiographic Landscape of the Peloponnesus: The Case of St. Theodore o f Kythera

Michael Milojevic, University of Auckland, New Zealand
Looking Around Athos: A Documentary QTVR Spherical Panorama Project at Hilandar Monastery

Session XII: Representing Byzantium

Chair: Sarolta Takacs, Rutgers University

Gerasimos Pagoulatos, Byzantine and Christian Museum, Athens
The New Byzantine and Christian Museum of Athens, Greece: A Modern Approach to an Old Museum

Boris Todorov, University of California, Los Angeles
Choosing From Among One's Ancestors: Christian Rulers of Bulgaria and Their Pagan Predecessors

Dimitrios Krallis, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
Encomium or Praxis? The Search for Michael Atteleiates' Historical Methodology

Ljubomir Milanovic, Rutgers University
Reconsidering the Significance of the Esphigmenou Chrysobull

Session XIII: The Thesaurus Linguae Graecae: Digital Research Tools and the Study of Byzantium

Introduction by session organizer: Maria Pantelia

The Thesaurus Linguae Graecae: An Overview

Panel Speakers: John Duffy, Alice-Mary Talbot, Gregory Smith, Denis Sullivan

Session XIV: Egypt and Ethiopia

Chair: Derek Krueger, University of North Carolina, Greensboro

Marilyn Heldman, University of Missouri, St. Louis
Shepherds with Gifts o f Sheep in Ethiopian Miniatures o f the Nativity

Elizabeth Bolman, Temple University
Late Antique Wall Paintings in the Red Monastery (Deir Anba Bishoi), Sohag, Egypt

Glenn Peers, University of Texas, Austin
The al-Muallaqa Lintel in its Eighth-Century Context

Session XV: The Verbal and the Visual

Chair: Robert Nelson, University of Chicago

Christina Maranci, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee
Movement and Sound: Architecture and Epigraphy in Armenia

Georgi Parpulov, The J. Paul Getty Museum
The Scribes and Painters of Eight Byzantine Psalters

Amy Papalexandrou, University of Texas, Austin
Early Christian Burial Practices on Cyprus: New Evidence from Polis

Session XVI: Meaning and Architecture

Chair: Paul Halsall, University of North Florida

Walter Hanak, Shepherd University
The History and Architecture o f the Church o f Saint Theodosia.

Marios Phillipides, University of Massachusetts, Amherst
Santa Theodosia or Gul Camii? The Controversy Surrounding a Famous Structure

Ann-Marie Yasin, Northwestern University
Martyr's Tomb Monumentalized? Questioning Interpretative Models at Salona

Session XVII: Byzantium and the West

Chair: Rebecca Corrie, Bates College

Deanna Forsman, North Hennepin Community College
An Early Volte-Face of the Papacy? The Role o f the Merovingians in the Three Chapters Dispute

Pierre MacKay, University of Washington
St. Mary of the Dominicans: The Monastery Church of the Fratres Praedicatores in Negropont

Diana Wright, New School University
Was William o f Moerbeke an Angevin Agent?

Session XVIII: Love, Eroticism, and Friendship

Chair: Patrick Viscuso, Independent Scholar

Cristina Stancioiu Toma, University of Maryland, College Park
Rhodian Portrait Ceramics: Objects of Trade and Gift Exchange '

Stratis Papaioannou, Catholic University of America
The Love-Letters of Byzantium: Friendship in Byzantine Epistolography Between the Tenth and Twelfth Centuries

Mati Meyer, Hebrew University, Jerusalem
The Female Nude in Byzantine Art

Dayna Kalleres, Stanford University
Sexual Seduction and Gender Ambiguity-Pelagia as Holy Woman Prior to Pelagius

Session XIX: Byzantine Architecture

Chair: Linda Safran, University of Toronto

Lioba Theis, Der Universitat Bonn
Where was the Church of Hagios Mokios? Remarks on Some Accidental Findings in Istanbul

Franz Bauer, DAI, Istanbul, and Holger Klein, The Cleveland Museum of Art
New Work at the Church of Hagia Sophia in Vize (Biziye)

Jelena Trkulja, Princeton University
Rose Window: A Feature o f Byzantine Architecture?

Marina Mihaljevic, Princeton University
Some Notes on Middle Byzantine Churches of Atrophied Greek-Cross Plan

SESSION I: ICONS

Chair: Annemarie Weyl Carr, Southern Methodist University

Living Painting, or the Limits of Painting? Glancing at Icons with Michael Psellos

Charles Barber (University of Notre Dame)

This paper focuses on two texts by Michael Psellos, his Discourse on the Crucifixion and his Discourse on the Miracle that Happens at the Blachernae. These have been key texts in defining Psellos's contribution to Byzantine aesthetics and to our understanding of certain key icons and icon types in the eleventh and twelfth century: for example, the concept of "living painting" or the appearance of the icon in the Blachernae that performed the "usual" miracle. In this paper, I will question whether we can use these texts to probe the stylistic and iconographic questions for which they have been used. Instead, I will argue that Psellos is proposing a reading of icons that is very much shaped by his specific use of Neoplatonic sources and that was profoundly informed by Christian notions of the icon. It will be shown that Psellos sought an authentic presence in painting that could only be obtained by occasional and extraordinary interventions that originate beyond the horizon of human perception and skills.

Reception and Re-interpretation: Portative Mosaic Icons in Western Europe

Edmund C. Ryder (New York University)

In the aftermath of the fall of Constantinople, the tempo of Byzantine works of art entering western European courts intensified. The baggage of aristocratic refugees such as Cardinal Bessarion, Anna Notaras and Thomas Palaiologos contained numerous icons, reliquaries and manuscripts. These objects occasionally served as a form of precious capital, offered in exchange for honors, or more prosaically a pension. As these items entered various private collections and church treasuries, they served as tangible reminders of the glories of the defunct Eastern Roman Empire.

The portative mosaic icon is a unique category of object that emerges from obscurity at this time. Mosaic icons were among the rarest output of Byzantine artists, and primarily served as private devotional panels. Their appearance is extremely painterly, and only upon close scrutiny can one make out the presence of the tesserae, formed of various semi-precious stones, terracotta, gilded copper or silver. Avidly sought by collectors, the testaments of Pope Paul II and Lorenzo de Medici note multiple examples present among their personal effects. It is ironic that we only learn about mosaic icons once they have arrived in the west, as Byzantine sources such as typika are predominantly silent on the subject.

Although a `history' is frequently attached to mosaic icons, in a number of cases the information is totally incorrect. For example, a hitherto unpublished fourteenth-century example depicting the

Virgin Eleousa, published by Helen Evans in the catalogue, Byzantium: Faith and Power (1261-1557), was claimed to have been the very icon that converted Saint Catherine of Alexandria during the fourth century.

This fantastic attribution is not an isolated example of such a creative `provenance' attached to a mosaic icon; at least three other examples bear equally spurious histories. This reveals a fascinating phenomenon, and ultimately leads to the question: did this perhaps occur as an intentional obfuscation that sought to distance these remarkable objects from the dissolving political entity under which they were created, or was there simply a lack of documentation to blame?

This presentation focuses on the evidence furnished by four portative mosaic icons; I argue that this form of misattribution was partially a conscious attempt to create a grander pedigree for such luxury objects at the time of their donation, and concomitantly a form of historical amnesia as well. The vivid memory of the some of the last Byzantine Emperors, wandering like so-many Flying Dutchman in search of western European aid against the Ottoman menace, may have contributed to this state of selective memory.

Byzantine and Russian Icon Painting circa 1400: A Case Study in The Walters Art Museum

Gary Vikan (The Walters Art Museum)

Nearly twenty years ago, upon my arrival at the Walters, I discovered in deep storage a superb Palaeologan Anastasis icon that had been overlooked since its purchase in Rome by Henry Walters in 1902. At my invitation, Thalia Gouma-Pedersen presented this icon at the 1985 BSC in Toronto in a joint paper with a Walters' conservator; the conservation perspective was deemed essential to Thalia's art-historical analysis because it was clear that the piece had undergone a thorough but sensitive restoration soon after it was painted. As for the dating, compelling comparisons were drawn with several icons at Meteora and Patmos, two of which bear portraits of the Byzantine princess Maria Angelina Komnena Dukaena Palaeologina, Despoina of Yannina (1359-1384). Thalia concluded her talk, and subsequent article in The Journal ofthe Walters Art Gallery (vol. 42/43 [1984/85]), with the hypothesis that the early restoration had taken place in Russia, where such a fine Byzantine icon would have been admired but not fully understood, and where the added ultramarine blues and vermilion reds, which seem so out of tune with the panel's more subtle "original" colors, would have been part of the local aesthetic. Perhaps, she concluded, the Walters Anastasis had been in the retinue of Sophia Palaeologina, who traveled to Moscow in 1472 to marry Ivan III - "a remote but attractive hypothesis."

It is amazing how close Thalia came, through her scholar's intuition and superb eye, in those dark Soviet days when so few of us had direct and comfortable access to Russian icons, scholars, and publications; indeed, she did this without illustrating a single Russian icon for comparison.

Since then, I have discovered two sibling icons still in Russia, a Raising of Lazarus in the State Russian Museum in St. Petersburg and a Crucifixion in the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow, which not only affiliate closely with the Walters Anastasis in their Palaeologan figure style and iconographic syntax, but also in size, condition, and provenance. But beyond that, they also show the same restorations. This is clear because the Crucifixion in Moscow is a near twin to the Patmos Crucifixion that Thalia had already linked to the group around the Walters' panel-except that the latter lacks the Russian restorations and thus can act as a "control" for all three.

In addition, it can be shown that the Walters Anastasis was copied in Novgorod, very likely before the end of the fourteenth century, and, more generally, exercised a strong influence on Anastasis iconography in northern Russian icon painting in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, which makes it a revealing window onto the interrelationship of Byzantine and Russian icon painting at a critical moment and in a critical location.

The Emergence of a New Icon Type: The Compendium Icon of the Virgin in Early Modern Russia

Flena Boeck (DePaul University)

This paper examines the origin and diffusion of Russian icons containing multiple, miracle-working images of the Virgin. These compendium icons are unusual in their combination of numerous miniature-size images of miracle-working icons and frequent use of identifying labels under each individual image. These icons are distinguished by the fact that they "deviate" from many established assumptions about icons of the Virgin as large single-image panels, or as central and hieratic images in a panel. The compendium icons are neither fully modern, nor traditional, but like other invented traditions they use "ancient materials to construct invented traditions of novel type for quite novel purposes." From the surviving evidence on Byzantine and post-Byzantine Orthodox icon painting up to the eighteenth century, only one icon presents a potential parallel to the Russian compendium icons. It is an eleventh-century hexaptych measuring forty-three by thirty-six centimeters that is housed at St. Catherine's Monastery, Mount Sinai. The paper argues, however, that the compendium icons do not have a direct Byzantine prototype. Instead, they represent a new type of icon that appeared in early modern Russian when traditional imagery began to be challenged by Western engravings on paper. The Russian church asserted that only icons in the traditional style, on wooden panels, featuring traditional iconography were suitable for veneration, but innovations were nonetheless embraced in popular devotion. Drawing upon engravings, catalogues of sacred topography, early modern modes of collecting and display, and counter-reformation compilations in defense of traditional religious imagery, the compendium icon synthesized traditional Marian devotion and modern constructions of national identity. The paper concludes with a discussion of how compendium icons of the Virgin made a gradual but steady progress from small, humble collections of engravings produced on the fringes of society to full incorporation into the official ideology of the Russian state.

SESSION II: HERESIES AND CONTROVERSIES

Chair: Tia Kolbaba, Rutgers University

Eutyches and Christology: The Fight to Own Cyril

PatrickT R. Gray (York University, Toronto)

Eutyches has suffered a sad fate: he is seen as the prototypical "mixophysite," as the front man for an improbable plot, or simply as "muddleheaded." A more serious historical assessment is required.

Two curious theological charges were laid against Eutyches at his trial: that he taught that the body of Christ came down from heaven, and that he mixed or confused Christ's natures. The astonishingly unnoticed fact is that Cyril, in concluding his Laetentur coeli letter of 433, says that these very charges were laid against him, evidently by a faction within the Antiochenes not content with the proposed Union. The letters to Succensus from the succeeding period show that-even as Cyril developed a distinctive understanding of "one incarnate nature" and "out of two natures" to explain to his own partisans, who thought he had betrayed the faith, exactly how he wanted to understand natures-he continued to respond to similar aporiae posed by Antiochenes out to discredit his Christology.

The charge of mixing or confusing the natures in Christ makes complete sense in that context. The method was to discredit Cyril's Christology, vulnerable as it was in its language to charges of inconsistency re "nature", as having bizarre implications, such as that the natures must have been mixed together after the union. The other-that Christ's body must have come down from heaven-probably took advantage of Cyril's enthusiasm for the Christological implications of Eucharistic piety based on John's "the bread that came down from heaven." The point was to discredit Cyril's Christology in general, and, as things progressed, to derail Cyril's post-433 articulation of it in one-nature language. Cyril laughed off the charge about Christ's heavenly body, and mounted logical if dense arguments against the charge of mixing natures.

That identical charges were laid against Eutyches shows that he was targeted as a representative of the Cyrillian Christology. With Cyril dead, a resurgent Antiochene campaign put some of the same aporiae posed against Cyril to Eutyches, both before and during his trial, but this time with much greater success. Unable to reproduce Cyril's arguments unless he had them written out, Eutyches was denied the right to quote from a document. The campaign to discredit the Antiochene-unfriendly Cyril of before and especially after 433 had found its exemplary victim.

That the trial of Eutyches was not just about discrediting one Cyril, but also about establishing another, is dramatically illustrated by another astonishing fact: Eutyches-Eutyches, the well-known Cyrillian-was also charged with not being true to the authoritative teaching of Cyril. What his accusers meant, it turned out, was that he was not true to the two "synodical" letters of Cyril, i.e., the Second Letter to Nestorius (in which Cyril had casually affirmed that Christ's two natures were not destroyed by the union) and, of course, the Laetentur coeli. The only safe Cyril to stand with, they were attempting to demonstrate, was "their" Cyril.

Eutyches and the Ecclesiastical Policy of Theodosius II

George A. Bevan (University of Toronto)

After more than a decade of relative quiet in the Eastern Church following the Peace of 433, the emperor Theodosius began to intervene in the diocese of Oriens. In 448, Theodoret of Cyrus, the leading Antiochene theologian, was confined to his see; the writings of Nestorius were again consigned to the fire; and Nestorius' friend Irenaeus of Tyre was deposed by decree. This flurry of activity was symptomatic of the Peace's failure, but if it were to fall into abeyance, then the schism that followed the Council of Ephesus would be reopened. Thus, from the emperor's perspective, either a new standard of orthodoxy was required to root out the recrudescent Nestorianism of Theodoret and his followers, or the existing Symbol would have to be strengthened to function as an effective test of orthodoxy.

The present paper argues that the trial of Eutyches before the Home Synod of Constantinople in November of 448 was the product of the latter imperial strategy. By the prosecution of the archimandrite Eutyches, an outsider in the monastic establishment of the capital, the Symbol could be read into the acta of the Synod, and thus ensconced as a canonical document. Despite his feigned reluctance to entertain Eusebius of Dorylaeum's charges against Eutyches, Flavian of Constantinople granted every petition presented by Eusebius. He was to grant virtual immunity to Eusebius from subsequent prosecution as a false accuser, even if Eutyches were found to be orthodox at the Synod. It was later shown that Flavian had even written out Eutyches' condemnation before the archimandrite's appearance before the synod.

The instructions Flavian and Eusebius received from the emperor are unknown, but the complicity of the imperial representative, the patrician Florentius, at the Synod indicates that the emperor must have assented to the Synod's direction. The gloss given the symbol by Flavian and Basil of Seleucia-that Christ was "out of" and "in two natures"-ultimately met with imperial opprobrium, however, when the conservative Cyrillians, led by Dioscorus of Alexandria, properly pointed out its novelty. With the Symbol of Reunion compromised as dyophysite in the eyes of many, the emperor was forced to fall back on the "one nature" formula that could find ample support in Cyril's writings.

Eduard Schwartz's account of this affair ("Der Prozess des Eutyches," Sitzungsbefchte der Bayefschen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Philosophisch-historische Abteilung, 1929) styled the emperor as a monophysite at heart, who had engineered the condemnation of Eutyches so as to create a suitable pretext for a general council the following year to enforce the "one nature" across the East. Thus, Florentius served as an agent provocateur in a conspiracy to incriminate Flavian, Eusebius and other "Nestorians". This cannot stand as an adequate explanation, I believe, for Schwartz ascribes a sort of prescience to the emperor in ecclesiastical matters that is in no way supported by the evidence.

The Unus de Trinitate Controversy: A Historical Reconsideration of its Origins

Dana-luliana Viezure (University of Toronto)

The beginning of the sixth century witnessed the first manifestations of a new attitude towards the Council of Chalcedon, one which would develop significantly and become pre-eminent in the following decades, and which would reach its acme at the Fifth Ecumenical Council in Constantinople in 553. The attitude in question went

beyond the fifth-century pro- or anti- Chalcedonian stances: asserting the orthodoxy of Chalcedon, its purveyors pointed to the fact that further explanation and interpretation was needed in order to reveal and protect the Council against heretical misappropriations. Though its historical occurrences resist generalization, this Christological standpoint was referred to in twentieth-century scholarship by means of the ad hoc term of Neo-Chalcedonianism.

In 518, a group of monks carne from Scythia Minor to Constantinople, arguing that the phrase Unus de Trinitate passus est carne be added to the Chalcedonian formula of faith in order to protect the latter's orthodoxy against misuse by the Nestorians. The subsequent disputes over the orthodoxy of the formula in which the Scythians engaged, first in Constantinople and then in Rome, were ft, both historically and doctrinally, into the Neo-Chalcedonian framework. While the doctrinal implications of this problematic contextualization have received some treatment in recent scholarship, the specific historical circumstances of the controversy have hitherto not been given due consideration.

A biased assessment of the previous occurrences of the Unus de Trinitate passus est carne formula provided a basis for placing the origins of the 518-520 controversy in the Constantinopolitan Christological tradition, to which the Scythian monks were assumedly direct heirs. The primary contention of my paper is that the aforementioned line of argument-of which Aloys Grillmeier gave the most articulate formulation-while allowing a coherent historical reconstruction of both the Constantinopolitan and the Roman phases of the controversy, leaves out (whenever it does not go against) relevant primary-source material.

This paper is an attempt to re-con textual ize the origins of the Unus de Trinitate controversy. The sources provide solid ground to argue that the Scythian monks did not come to Constantinople out of a purely disputatious spirit: a serious Christological conflict appears to have affected Scythia Minor towards the end of the second decade of the sixth century. The monks, holding strong Cyrillian views (which, I argue, can be compellingly linked to the fifth-century Christological standings of the Scythian bishops) were stirred by a strongly dyophysite interpretation of Chalcedon put forth by some of the bishops from their province. Beyond its Christological substance, this regional conflict can be related to concrete matters of ecclesiastical politics, among which the redistribution of ecclesiastical power within the province at the beginning of the sixth century appears to have played a key role (it was in this period that several new bishoprics were instituted in Scythia beside that of Tomi, which had, until then, enjoyed undivided primacy for at least one century and a half).

The Heresiarch as Unholy Man: The Panarion of Epiphanius of Cyprus as Collective Biography

Young Kim (University of Michigan)

Epiphanius often includes biographical sketches of varying length about various heresiarchs in the Panarion. Prominent heretics such as Ongen, Mani, and Arius naturally receive the most attention and biographical detail,, but Epiphanius provides brief biographies of other prominent and more obscure heresiarchs. The tendency in modern scholarship when reading the Panarion is to utilize and study select portions of particular interest. But when considered as a whole, the biographies of heretics included by Epiphanius can be read collectively, which then allows the Panarion to be read as part of a literary genre prominent in late antiquity.

Collective biography was a special form of Greek biography that assembled together a collection of snapshots of the lives and deeds of a specific group of heroes or outstanding figures with the intention of promoting a particular way of life or a model of the ideal man. There was a proliferation of this type of biography in the fourth century by pagans and Christians, exemplified by such works as Eunapius' Lives of the Philosophers and Sophists and the anonymous History of the Monks in Egypt. Pagans and Christians of differing theological convictions wrote collective biographies, each revering those men whom they perceived to be virtuous or meritorious. Palladius also wrote a type of collective biography in his Lausiac History and includes various Ongenist monks, praising them for their asceticism and devotion to the monastic life, while Eunapius honors in particular the Neoplatonist successors of lamblichus. However, Epiphanius' version of collective biography entails a significant twist. Rather than presenting for his readers examples of men who ought to be emulated, Epiphanius instead presents biographical sketches of men whose beliefs and practices were to be shunned and despised. In other words, the Panarion contains a collection of biographies of anti-heroes or unholy men, and it offers the reader a model for the life that ought not to be lived.

Information on a Heresiarch's origins, including family back­ground, geography, and experiences as a youth, was important to Epiphanius' portrayals of heresiarchs, as were certain physical characteristics. Many heretics are portrayed as being orthodox Christians at some point in their lives, and Epiphanius often includes certain positive characteristics about heresiarchs that I will argue was a means for him to "set-up" his biographical sketches. Epiphanius regularly emphasizes education, which was the most common cause for the demise of a Christian for Epiphanius. The rejection of classical culture is a common theme throughout the Panarion and was a deep personal conviction for Epiphanius. He believed the degeneration of sin, the rise of classical culture, and the emergence of heresy all developed historically in parallel. Thus education in the Greek tradition was equated with sin and heresy. Other biographical elements are highlighted in the biographical sketches of the Panarion, which I argue are further reflections of Epiphanius' own convictions and beliefs. Thus the Panarion can be read as a collective biography in which Epiphanius' paradigms for the anti-hero emerge and serve to warn and admonish his readers against the dangers of heresy.

SESSION III WORD AND IMAGE

Chair: Ida Sinkevic, Lafayette College

Christ's Magic Wand

Alice Christ (University of Kentucky)

This paper takes up problems raised by Thomas Mathews in his provocative reinterpretation of Early Christian Art, The Clash of the Gods, particularly in chapter three, "The Magician." Here, he describes the early Christian iconography of the Miracles of Christ as a visual propaganda claim by Christianity to own the best magic. The chapter rightly points out recent scholarship's relative neglect of the Miracles iconography, due in part to the domination of analyses in the vein of "imperialization of Christian Art," which cannot be easily applied to the Miracles. However, another contributing factor must be the very novelty of the subject matter. As Mathews emphasizes, there is little precedent in pre-Christian art for scenes of bestowal of supernatural cures, meals, or prophecies upon ordinary mortals, whether by gods, divine men, or magicians. The Christian Miracle images are not simple conversions of traditional classical precedents, even from the private sphere.

But if we are to understand their composition and the messages they carried to contemporary viewers, we must develop a finer sense for representation of modes of spiritual power than Mathews' invocation of magic allows. At one level, Mathews enlists the charged vocabulary of outsider religion, "magic" and "magician," to serve his polemical characterization of early Christian Christ as an anti-imperial, anti-establishment, populist, personal-liberator god. At another, he seems to mean no more than supernatural power, access to and control of supernatural effects, to which all religious systems in late antiquity did indeed make claims.  But, magic is still a bad thing in early Christian literature, as in classical literature in general, deceptive, fraudulent and false. If there is a Greco-Roman tradition that encouraged early Christian artists to represent a "magic wand" as the instrument of Christ's works and signs it is unlikely to be magic in the ancient sense of the word.

This paper studies the "magic wand" of Christ represented in catacomb painting and sarcophagus sculpture and analyzes its pictorial ancestry and cognates in order to derive more nuanced conceptions of the range of spiritual powers it may evoke for the image of Christ. Various staves and rods do figure in Greco-Roman imagery. While none of them are depicted as instrumental to miracles, some are more similar to the wand of Christ than others. What kind of character carries these? And so what kind of powers does a viewer of the third or early fourth century, practiced in such a local visual environment, expect it to represent? The visual similarities relate not to gods, not to the shepherd, not to the philosopher in general, but to Urania and the astronomers. It is a staff of cosmic mastery, an appropriate vehicle for miraculous power. Ultimately, the visual connections associate this power, especially to heal, with knowledge, especially of the Cosmos. In conclusion, this particularized evocation of traditional claims of True Philosophy is unexpectedly theological more than magical. This will have implications about third-century Christian attitudes to magic and its place in the Roman Empire.

Images as Exegesis: The Ancient of Days and the Gospel of John

Gretchen Kreahling McKay (McDaniel College)

The iconographic motif of the Ancient of Days, which is based on Daniel's vision as recorded in chapter seven of his prophetic book, is a relatively rare image in eleventh-century manuscripts; there are only ten recorded instances of the image. Although based exclusively on Daniel's vision, the figure does not illustrate the prophet's verses in any of the ten manuscripts in which it is utilized. Instead, the Ancient of Days accompanies a wide-range of texts, including selections from the Psalms and various New Testament books, most commonly the Gospel ofJohn. In four different eleventh-century manuscripts (Par. B.N. gr. 74; Par. B.N. gr. 64; Athos Dionysiou S87; Sinai 205), the Ancient of Days is employed to illustrate verses within the first eighteen lines ofJohn's narrative.

These eighteen verses deal with the relationship between the Father and the Son and raise complex issues upon which theologians have long reflected. John Chrysostom, in his fifteenth homily on the Gospel ofJohn, where he expounds on the relationship between Father and Son, specifically discusses the Ancient of Days. Chrysostom continues his examination of the aged figure in his commentary on Daniel and in the eleventh of his twelve sermons collectively entitled, On the Incomprehensible Nature of God.

Chrysostom is one of the few Eastern theologians to examine the Ancient of Days within the purview ofJohn's Gospel. Interestingly, Byzantine artists of the eleventh century also used the Ancient of Days in the context ofJohn's Gospel. The images mirror much of Chrysostom's exegesis; in fact, the miniatures themselves act as visual explanations, elucidating for the Byzantine reader the Gospel's multifaceted theological concepts. The use of this image in these four different eleventh-century manuscripts confirms that the planners of the manuscripts were aware of the multiple meanings inherent in the figure of the Ancient of Days and employed it in order to illustrate the complexities of john's Gospel.

Paris, Bibliotheque Nationale de France, Codex Grec 54 and Princeton, University Library, Codex Garrett 3: A Copy/Model Relationship for Their Greek Gospel Texts?

Kathleen Maxwell (Santa Clara University)

New Testament text critics and art historians both study Gospel manuscripts, but they often pursue their respective goals independently. I turned to New Testament textual criticism in an effort to learn more about Paris 54, a thirteenth-century, illustrated, Greek and Latin Gospel Book that contains no colophon indicating the circumstances of its commission.     I wondered if Paris 54's text had attracted the attention of New Testament textual critics and, if so, did their research shed any light on Paris 54's origins? I especially sought clarification concerning the relationship of Paris 54 and another thirteenth-century illustrated Gospel Book: Mt. Athos, Iviron, Codex S. These manuscripts have long been linked by art historians and I wanted to know if their texts were closely related as well.

A review of New Testament textual criticism reveals that Paris 54's Greek Gospel text is not idiosyncratic, but a member of a small subgroup of manuscripts of the Byzantine text type that was isolated initially by Hermann von Soden in 1911, and later confirmed by E. C. Colwell. Membership in this group has been reaffirmed more recently by those employing the Claremont Profile Method, as well as by Kurt Aland's "test passages" method, the results of which were published in a series of volumes in the late 1990s.     Moreover, in 1982, Frederik Wisse actually named a small group of Gospel manuscripts after Paris 54 (Group 16). More important, Wisse paired Paris 54's Greek text with that of Princeton, Garrett 3, a Greek manuscript dated to 1136 that otherwise appears unrelated to Paris 54 in its script and decoration. The proximity of these two manuscripts' Greek texts was also confirmed more recently by the Alands.

Iviron 5's text, however, has never been mentioned by text scholars in conjunction with Paris 54. In fact, very few text critics have had access to Iviron S. I discovered that microfilm copies of this manuscript are still not available in the major New Testament microfilm repositories and, consequently, Iviron 5 is not included in the extensive comparative studies conducted by the Alands or those employing the Claremont Profile Method.

In my presentation, I will share the results of my collations of the Matthean texts of Paris 54, Iviron 5, and Princeton, Garrett 3. I will demonstrate that notwithstanding their divergent dates and formats that Paris 54 and Princeton, Garrett 3 share a number of textual aberrations not found in the other Greek Gospel manuscripts to which they have been linked by text scholars. Moreover, I have discerned that a small cross executed in red ink is found in Princeton, Garrett 3's text in a number of places that correspond exactly to the locations of the narrative miniatures interspersed in Paris 54's text. That is, these crosses have been inserted into Princeton, Garrett 3's text even in the middle of a verse when that location serves as the break point for a miniature in Paris 54's text. I will propose that these crosses may have served as visual cues for the head scribe of Paris 54 to remind him to leave space for miniatures in his manuscript as he copied from Princeton, Garrett 3's text. The presence of these crosses together with the textual evidence may suggest that Princeton, Garrett 3, itself served as the textual model for the head scribe of Paris 54's Greek text.

SESSION IV WARFARE

Chair: John Birkenmeier, Independent Scholar

The Development of the Byzantine Dromon

R. Scott Moore (Indiana University of Pennsylvania)

One area of study that has not received the attention it deserves is that of the Byzantine navy. This is unfortunate since the navy played an important role in the history of this era. From the time of Justinian's ascension to the Byzantine throne in 527 until the Crusades, the Byzantine navy was an important element in the defense of the Byzantine Empire. This change in importance from its earlier state of neglect during the later Roman Empire was directly linked to technological and strategic innovations introduced by the Byzantines. Examining the naval activity during this period, in particular focusing on the actions ofjustinian and Heraclius, it becomes evident that the Byzantine navy adopted new technological and strategic innovations in order to combat specific external threats such as the Vandals, Arabs and organized piracy. The most important of these innovations was the development of the dromons, decked warships that relied more on speed than weight. The dromons were designed for a specific purpose since they were needed to combat a different type of enemy from that of their Roman predecessors. By the beginning of the fifth century, the enemy had changed and become smaller, faster, and less organized. The primary focus of naval combat switched from ramming and sinking opposing ships to capturing them by boarding actions. A vessel was needed that could catch these smaller vessels and still be powerful enough to fight in large scale naval battles against organized opponents, such as the Arabs. With its simpler design and construction, the dromon offered a cost effective solution that became the prototype for future Mediterranean galleys. A careful examination of ancient sources, such as Procopius and treatises on naval warfare From the reign of Leo VI, in conjunction with the application of archeological evidence from Byzantine shipwrecks allows the modern scholar to recreate the dromons and better understand the way Byzantine emperors utilized these vessels for the defense of the empire.

The Sacralization of Warfare in Late Tenth-Century Byzantium: Some Comments on Neglected Texts

Paul Stephenson (University of Wisconsin, Madison and Dumbarton Oaks)

The Byzantine emperor Nikephoros II (963-9) is revered for advancing the frontiers of the East Roman empire after three centuries of retrenchment. His very name means "bringer of victory," but his preferred nickname was "Pale death of the Saracens." The manner of his execution ensured Nikephoros entered the pantheon of Christian martyrs, but this status was denied the soldiers who fought and died in his armies. Early in his reign, Nikephoros had demanded a review of Orthodox canons relating to death in battle, so that "those who fell in battle be honored equally with the holy martyrs and be celebrated with hymns and feast days." But the synod ruled against him thus: "How is it possible to number with the martyrs those who fell in battle, whom Basil the Great excluded from the sanctified elements for three years since their hands were unclean?" This canon had never been enforced, and there was evidently concern that Christian troops should enjoy the same spiritual incentives and rewards as their foes, the jihad fighters of the emirates that emerged at the fringes of the disintegrating Abbasid Caliphate.

The topic of "holy war" in Byzantium has been discussed heatedly in recent scholarship. The Orthodox Church, it has been maintained by a majority, consistently rejected calls to offer spiritual rewards to soldiers, while recognizing the necessity of defending the Christian empire. The decision against Nikephoros is always cited, but it would appear that Nikephoros' troops continued to believe that they fought and died as soldiers of Christ. Warfare was increasingly sacralized, and my recent research has focused on a dossier of neglected texts that deepens our understanding of this process, particularly with regard to the treatment of those who died in battle or as prisoners-of-war. One text is a narrative fragment (un)attributed to the so-called Scriptor Incertus (ed. Dujcev, TM 1965), which describes a massacre of Byzantine troops perpetrated by the Bulgarians in 811, but which in its current form was produced, I maintain, during the reign of Nikephoros Phokas. By my interpretation, this text suggests that Byzantine troops killed in battle were being commemorated (erroneously) as martyrs. Similarly, a hymn (ed. Detorakis & Mossay, Le Mus6on [1988]), preserved in a unique tenth-century document at St. Catherine's Monastery on Mt. Sinai, brings us remarkably close-far closer than the ruling of the synod would allow-to the notion that soldiers who die in battle, fighting for Christ, should enter the kingdom of heaven. From this, one might make a fairly obvious observation, but one which, to my knowledge, has not been made before. Perhaps the calls for those who died in battle to be accorded a spiritual reward were a practical consideration, and not motivated purely by knowledge of Muslim practices. That is to say, if within the Byzantine tradition, those who were captured and died subsequently might receive the martyr's crown, or indeed be ransomed, what incentive was there to fight on rather than surrender? From a military perspective-and above all else, Nikephoros Phokas was a general-it may have seemed imperative to secure rights for those who fought on, that were equal to those accorded to troops who surrendered.

Nothing to Do with History? Proclus the Philosopher and a Weapon of Mass Destruction

John Duffy (Harvard University)

In an account of the final stages of the protracted revolt by Vitalian (513-515) against Emperor Anastasius I, John Malalas treats the readers of his chronicle to a dramatic series of events (complete with snatches of dialogue) that lead to the utter rout of the rebels and the salvation of the Byzantine capital. Holding center stage in the story is an outside expert brought in by an exasperated emperor who has run out of ideas on how to deal with the crisis. The expert, in the words of Malalas, is "the philosopher Proclus of Athens, a famous man." This Proclus wastes no time, for in response to the emperor's desperate plea ("philosopher, what am I to do with this dog?"), he orders a large supply of natural sulphur to be ground to powder and issues instructions for its use. After fleets meet at the third hour of the day and the powder is deployed, the promised effect takes place; all the rebel ships burst into flames and sink to the bottom of the Bosphorus.

The reactions of scholars to this report, as a piece of history, have been brief, consistent, and understandable. Representative views are those ofJ. B. Bury, who comments that the Athenian man of science is "not to be confounded with the famous Neoplatonist who had died in 485," and the editor of the Prosopography of the Later Roman Empire, who assigns a separate entry to a Proclus, philosopher, "possibly a native of Athens; ... in 515 he contributed to the naval defeat of Vitalianus outside Constantinople." Obviously, the chronological element has been a significant factor in determining the profile of the philosopher-scientist.

But does the episode of the emperor and the philosopher deserve to be treated as the account of an actual event? Is it not strange that Malalas is the only independent source for such a noteworthy development in naval warfare, a prototype of "Greek Fire"? How plausible is it that there were two famous philosophers from Athens called Proclus, whose lifetimes practically touch, and yet one of them is entirely lost to history outside of this unique chronicle entry? And what are we to think when Malalas informs us that the same emperor Anastasius, confronted with an ominous vision in his sleep, summoned Proclus, as this particular expert does not get as much modern press as the weapons inventor, though he too manages to be profiled in the PLRE.

Perhaps it is time to consider the possibility that we are dealing here with legends that are built around the renowned Neoplatonist Proclus (410-485). This paper makes this case and introduces new textual evidence that puts a different light on the "chronological displacement".

SESSION V RURAL LIFE

Chair: Leonora Neville, Catholic University of America

Christian Authority and Angel Veneration: The Synod of Laodicaea and the Prohibition of Extra-Ecclesiastical Angel Invocation

Rangar H. Cline (Pennsylvania State University)

Through a comparison of epigraphic evidence with literary texts, this paper examines the process by which the Christian church in south-western Anatolia attempted to bring rituals of angel veneration under clerical authority in the fourth and fifth centuries. The study's examination of epigraphic material is the result of field research in Turkey and Greece, as well as museum research in the Cabinet des Medailles et Antiquate at the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris.

Theodoret of Cyrrhus, in his mid-fifth-century commentary on Colossians 2:18, remarked that the "disease" of angel veneration remained for many years in the territories of Phrygia and Pisidia, citing the Synod of Laodicaea's (ca. 360) ban on angel invocation (Canon 35), and the contemporary existence of shrines of St. Michael as proof of this. However, Theodoret's comments overlook the process (revealed in Laodicaea's ban on angel invocation) of establishing Christian authority over a potentially heterodox ritual. Additionally, the appearance of shrines and churches of Michael in fifth-century Phrygia, cited by Theodoret as demonstrating the tenacity of the "disease" of angel veneration in the region, in fact reveals the manner^- in which the cult of angels was brought within the walls of the church and under church authority. This paper focuses on Canon 35 of the Synod of Laodicaea, which does not simply ban "praying to angels" as Theodoret states, but stipulates that Christians should not, "depart from the church, invoke angels, and hold assemblies."

To demonstrate the forms of angel invocation the fourth­century church confronted, the paper examines invocations of angels inscribed on stones, amulets, and lamellae. Previous analyses of Canon 35 of the Synod of Laodicaea have generally followed Theodoret's comments and have failed to note that the synod prohibited angel invocation apart from the church but did not prohibit angel invocation entirely. I argue that the synod was attempting to establish church authority over angel invocation by preventing Christians from invoking angels apart from the church and clerical supervision. Numerous inscriptions, as well as literary sources, testify to the popularity of angel invocation as a means for securing access to a high divinity. The synod's ban on angel invocation was thus an attempt to bring within the control of the church a religious practice that, if practiced outside of the church, could rival the church's authority over intermediation and access to the divine. I conclude by suggesting that, contrary to the view of Theodoret and some contemporary scholars, the appearance of shrines and basilicas dedicated to Michael represents not the failure of Laodicaea, but a further stage in the process by which the potentially heterodox cult of angels was brought within the walls of the church, where clerical supervision could insure its orthodoxy.

Fabrics and Rubble Walls: The Archaeology of Danielis' Gifts

Kostis Kourelis (Clemson University)

In the Life of Basil I, Theophanes Continuatus describes the relationship between the Emperor and Danielis, a widow from the Peloponnese. Around 850, Basil lodged in Patras where a local monk prophesized his ascent to the throne. Danielis, a provincial landowner, sought honors and spiritual favors that would ensure future privileges such as the appointment of her son as protospatharios. While Basil and his son, Leo VI, were emperors, Danielis sent gifts to Constantinople and even visited herself. Basil's Life pays great attention to Danielis' rich array of gifts-most notably the locally produced linen and woolen fabrics. Theophanes Continuatus' story is interesting not only because of the puzzling identity of the widow, but also because of Danielis' economic power, controlling, "not a small part of the Peloponnese as her personal property." The existence of powerful landowners at this period is unattested and therefore problematic. Patras had only recently returned into the sphere of Byzantine authority following the 805 suppression of a Slavic revolt. During the ninth century, the western Peloponnese witnessed imperial colonization and the elevation of Patras into the status of Episcopal seat equal to Corinth. Thus the biographer's attention to Basil's visit signals a new historical interest in the region. Whether expressing an actual personage or acting as a mouthpiece for tenth-century aristocratic biases, the story of Danielis could be dismissed as a product of apocryphal imagination, not foreign to the chronicle genre. Less interested in the real existence of Danielis or in the debates over the origin of her wealth, this paper investigates the contents of the widow's property as expressed in the detailed descriptions of her gifts. Recent archaeology has documented economic vitality in the hinterland of Patras, including evidence for mountainous settlements engaged in mixed agricultural and pastoral activities. Highly biased by the textual coverage of silk, the study of Byzantine fabric manufacture has been dominated by a lens centered in urban industries. Wool and linen, fabrics of lesser status, incorporated dispersed rural modes of production. Archaeological and ethnographic research is here used to enlighten

Danielis' fabrics and the implications of their production for the revival of the rural hinterland Patras.

Byzantine chronicles are notoriously problematic as historical sources and continue to be misread at face value by topographers. Supplemented by archaeological and ethnographic evidence, Byzantine chronicles can be made more specifically useful. The fiction of Danielis, for example, can be woven into a multi-disciplinary context of regional material history. The chronicle, a semi-historical genre otherwise useless in the study of rural landscapes, can be trusted in exaggerating imperial ideologies of re-conquest. Fabric production has played an ideological role in the documents of both the Roman and Frankish Peloponnese. Situating the text of Theophanes Continuatus within the literary context of its preceding and subsequent periods while testing its literal implications against archaeological evidence, presents a case study in the interpretive complexities of rural archaeology.

Thelda: Christian Exemplar or Feminist Prototype?

Linda Honey (University of Calgary)

Thekla, a virgin saint thought to have been a contemporary of St. Paul, was revered by the early, Byzantine, and Medieval Church, yet is championed by feminist scholars as a prototype for women's empowerment. Thekla's choices and actions are regarded by many scholars as having challenged the boundaries of gender and sexuality and as having secured women's equality with men in the early Church. Thekla's tonsure and "permanent transvestism" are cited as hallmarks of her androgyny in her bid to rise above the limitations of her sex.

Three ancient texts relate the details of her life: The Acts of Paul and Thekla, her Vita, and The Miracles. The first two describe Thekla's conversion as a young woman, while the third details the remainder of her life and the miracles accorded to her. This fifth-century Greek text, a forty-six miracle corpus by Pseudo-Basil, has not previously been available in English and, therefore, has remained relatively unexamined. During my doctoral studies, I have translated the complete text from the original Greek (PG 85 col. 278-314) into English.

As presented in The Miracles, Thekla is hardly contemplative, separate, or secluded; instead, she is pro-active and powerful. Contrary to the injunctions of the patristic fathers that virgins remain at home, Thekla's activities were wide-ranging. Virgins were to restrict their reading to Biblical texts; Thekla was a "lover of literature and the Muses" and particularly solicitous to those who framed their supplications to her with classical quotation, preferably Homeric.

The Miracles provide a detailed description of the mixed-gender community that focused on the worship of this sainted miracle worker. According to Pseudo-Basil, Thekla served a heterogeneous, multicultural clientele and was concerned principally, but not exclusively, with the lower classes. Her temenos was a popular pilgrimage site that flourished from the early years of the Church through the fifth century near Seleucia of Isauia, at present-day Meriamlik, Turkey. It stands alone as a late-antique Christian community in which both female and male were significantly contributing members. Women's activities as evidenced in the text included supervising, reading, and commercial enterprise. The miracle discourse itself reflects language true to that which women might have used. The Miracles provide new information about the deaconess Marthana who functioned in a supervisory capacity at the temenos, and is the only person the fourth-century pilgrim, Egeria, recorded by name in her travel journal. While most classical

texts reveal little in regard to the lived experience of women, this text serves as an important source for reconstructing the social reality of women in a provincial town in Asia Minor in late antiquity.

This paper provides an overview of the cult of St. Thekla, addresses the dichotomy between Thekla the Virgin Saint and Warrior Goddess, and finally questions the appropriateness of Thekla as patroness saint for feminist scholars by providing significant information from the previously unexamined text. Not only are the findings of great interest from a historical perspective but they also have wide-ranging practical application for issues of gender and women's roles today.

Rural Nuns in Late Byzantium

Sharon E. J. Gerstel (University of Maryland, College Park)

Research on the topic of nuns in the Late Byzantine period has focused exclusively on women cloistered in or associated with urban monasteries, particularly in Constantinople. A wide range of sources, from monastic foundation documents to funerary effigies in stone and paint, enables us to draw a fairly accurate image of the urban nun's spiritual life, to construct her architectural setting, and to view an idealized portrait of her physical appearance. The nature of the sources, often associated with the elite, prejudices the urban nun over her rural counterparts. Indeed, written information about rural nuns is practically non-existent. Some evidence survives, however, in painted churches of the Byzantine countryside. Taken together with rare mentions in written sources, a picture of the rural nun begins to emerge.

Written evidence demonstrates that nuns possessed property in late Byzantine villages. The Acts of Mount Athos, for example, provides the names of nuns who were involved in land transactions in villages near the Holy Mountain and even further a field. A praktikon of 1264 that records properties on the island of Kephalonia mentions a field belonging to the nun Mastrangelena. To what degree these nuns actively engaged in negotiations over their lands remains an open question.

Painted evidence records the names of nuns in inscriptions within village churches, both as individual donors and as members of extended families thatjoined in communal sponsorship. Frequently, the names of nuns are listed together with those of their children. in several cases, the names of nuns are recorded in hermitages in isolated parts of the Byzantine countryside. It is possible that nuns or their surrogates made pilgrimages to these sites, recording their visits in brief supplicatory inscriptions. A number of churches also preserve portraits of nuns who were instrumental in the construction and decoration of modest buildings. The analysis of the names of village nuns reveals that even in the countryside the practice of adopting monastic names follows the same pattern observed for urban convents. Like their sisters in Byzantine cities, many rural nuns took the habit when they became widows.

The large number of inscriptions and portraits of nuns in rural churches suggests that female monasteries were fairly common in the Byzantine countryside, although few physical remains have been identified to date. Equally possible, though less easy to prove, is that some women took vows following the deaths of their spouses and remained in the village. Similar practices have been identified in the late medieval West, but have not yet been detected in Byzantium. This information supplements our picture of Byzantine monasticism in the last centuries of imperial rule and suggests that female monasticism was not principally an urban phenomenon. The combination of painted and written sources provides new evidence and suggests different avenues for approaching the topic of Byzantine monasticism.

SESSION VI: EARLY CHRISTIAN AND EARLY BYZANTINE WALL AND VAULT MOSAICS

Chair: Stephen Zwirn, Dumbarton Oaks

Meaningful Transitions: The Iconographic Adornment of Entry and Exit Portals

Gillian Mackie (University of Victoria)

The mosaics on the inner facades of early Christian and early medieval chapel doorways in Italy are characterized by the message they convey to those who leave the sacred space of the interior.

These messages vary according to the purpose for which the individual chapel was built, whether as burial chapel, a martyr shrine or to serve an Episcopal palace, as at Ravenna. They are essentially of a private nature, read and interpreted only by the restricted clientele who had access to the chapel interior. So we find images of paradise, ofjudgment, or of the militant church placed above the exit door to mark the liminal threshold with the mundane world that was to be crossed by those using the portal.

By contrast, messages above the lintels of entry doorways are addressed to a different audience, both broader and more random, made up of those who planned to enter as well as passer-bys. The panels on the outer facades of burial chapels declare the faith of the occupant, and may line up the deceased person's sponsors among the saints, as at the san Zeno chapel at Santa Prassede, Rome. Here, both an entry and an exit panel exist. To pass into the chapel, one entered beneath an archway containing an antique jar of relics of the titular saint, which was surmounted by an image of the Virgin Mary and her Child, with the Roman virgin martyrs arrayed on

either side. The worshipper in the church, viewing the chapel facade, would obtain the powerful message of intercession on behalf of the privileged deceased person; the person entering would be made aware of the sponsorship of the sanctified space within and its occupant. Finally, he would exit under a depiction of the empty throne prepared for Christ at his coming again in judgment.

The broader issue of decorations above the gates of cities and palaces is epitomized by the lost decoration of the Chalke at Constantinople, the ceremonial entry-way of the imperial palace. This is known from the description of Eusebius in his De vita constantini. It is brought to life, however, by the mosaic of Sant'Appolinare Nuovo in Ravenna, the palace church of the gothic king, Theodoric the Great. Ravenna's city gate is shown beside the king's palace, complete with a lunette mosaic above its entry-way. Cyril Mango has suggested that this enigmatic mosaic is a copy of the Chalke decoration, which featured Constantine and his sons treading upon a serpent. If so, the messages are the same in both locations: the thresholds of both palace and city are defended by the ruler in the name of Christ.

Mosaic Artistry in Sixth-Century Parentium

Anne Terry (Independent Scholar)

The splendid wall mosaics of the Eufrasiana (Porec, Croatia, ancient Parentium), originally made in the mid-sixth century, were restored in the nineteenth century. Study of these mosaics has had the twin good fortune of access both to the nineteenth-century restoration documents and to the mosaics themselves, in three campaigns on scaffolding (1997, 1999, 2000; in collaboration with Henry Maguire). While we have the names of the restorers, and even their written reports, the artists and artisans who created the original mosaic remain unknown. Nor, in fact, is much known about wall mosaic production in general. For a clearer picture of how the sixth-century artists went about their tasks, we must turn to the mosaics themselves. Close analysis of the minutiae of tesserae, setting beds, and setting patterns offers unexpected insights into the methods and concerns of the original mosaicists and the processes by which they accomplished their artistry.

Tesselation of walls, even on the small scale of the Eufrasiana, was complex, involving designs, supplies, wall preparation, and setting. Time permits analysis of only a few of the ways in which close study sheds light on facets of mosaic production. This discussion centers on the making of the mosaics, rather than on the viewing of mosaics. To the degree possible, it follows the sequence of production, from design issues and materials, to workshop practices, to techniques used by individual artists.

Axiality and centrality are typical design features in mosaics; here we look at how those dictates affected a number of decisions, including choices about materials. What is known about preliminary drawings for wall mosaics indicates a range of practices, from sketches directly on a wall or lower layer of plaster, to rather detailed painting on the finer layers of plaster. The Eufrasiana preserves evidence of under drawings, most often in red ochre, but also using turquoise, gray, yellow ochre, and purple. Additionally, faces and necks were often given a solid pink wash before setting the cubes. The tesserae consist mainly of glass in many hues, but also of marble, mother of pearl, a slate-like stone, limestone, and yellow and red brick. Artists used considerable skill in employing these materials hierarchically, both on the basis of their cost and their visual properties. In terms of a division of labor in setting the cubes, the artists at Porec generally followed a vertical division of the space into two, beginning in the center and working out toward

the ends. However, distinctions in materials and techniques demonstrate variations to this practice. The mosaics preserve a repertoire of techniques, including methods of modeling by setting patterns, and the use of formulae in facial types. Finally, it would appear that qualities of color and luminosity factored in artistic decisions, as is suggested by techniques of modeling and the versatility of certain materials.

Textiles and Costume in the Apse Mosaics of the Basilica Eufrasiana at Poree

Warren T Woodfin (University of Pennsylvania)

The depictions of costume in the apse mosaics of the Basilica Eufrasiana at Poree are important to art history for several reasons. First, with the paucity of labeling inscriptions in the mosaics, the costumes serve to identify the individuals portrayed. Second, they bear witness to a critical period in the development of liturgical vesture as a system distinct from lay dress. Finally, examination of the costume of the mosaics in conjunction with comparative visual material, particularly the nearly contemporary mosaics of Ravenna, yields further insight into the programmatic content of the apse composition as a whole. In particular, costume helps to unpack the blending of public and private religious concerns in the mosaics, which appear to mount a defense both of Bishop Eufrasius' morality and of his orthodoxy.

The recent study of the fabric of the mosaics by Anne Terry and Henry Maguire has confirmed the authenticity of several distinctive features in the dress of the figures.     Long under a veil of suspicion because of nineteenth-century interventions, close examination of the tesserae and setting beds of the mosaics have revealed that each iconographically significant element of the costumes can be attributed to the sixth century. These include the unique depiction of a transparent blue veil worn by the Virgin in the Annunciation scene, which may reference textile metaphors for the incarnation in contemporary theology, as well as the priestly garb of Zacharias, father of john the Baptist, which is of considerable interest as containing the first representation of the tephelin in Western art. Terry and Maguire's analysis makes it possible to introduce the Porec mosaics as evidence for the development of costume and its depiction in the sixth century and, further, to discuss its meaning in the context of the larger program.

Costume plays a particular role in emphasizing the focus on the family-the family of Eufrasius in particular-in the Porec mosaics. The family group of Bishop Eufrasius, his brother the archdeacon Claudius, and his nephew and namesake Eufrasius is critical to any reading of the mosaics. A close examination of their costume reveals that their liturgical garb reinforces the picture of familial solidarity already present in the inscriptions and pose of the figures. Among the biblical depictions in the apse, there is a particularly striking contrast between Mary's regal attire in the scene of the Annunciation and the quotidian dress she shares with her cousin Elizabeth in the Visitation on the opposite wall. The contrast of costumes embodies a concern with the relationship between Christ's divinity and humanity in his incarnation, while the "realistic" aspects of the Visitation shows the embrace of familial bonds among holy figures and among the patron and his retinue.

The Costume of John the Baptist in the Mosaics at Porec Henry Maguire and Eunice

Dauterman Maguire (The Johns Hopkins University)

This presentation falls into two halves. The first is archaeological in nature, discussing the empirical evidence for the identification and costuming of a problematic figure in the mosaic decoration of the mid-sixth-century cathedral of Eufrasius at Porec. The figure in question stands on the inner face of the right-hand pier between the windows in the apse. Although the depiction now bears the attributes ofJohn the Baptist, it was badly damaged over the centuries. By the late nineteenth century, when the mosaics in the basilica were thoroughly restored, the mosaic had been so extensively patched with plaster that observers were uncertain as to the correct identification of the figure. However, recent investigation of the mosaics from scaffolding demonstrates that, even though there has indeed been extensive restoration in this area, enough of the original fabric remains to assure the identification as John the Baptist, and to verify some (but not all) of the details of his costume and attributes. Thus, the spotted skin that the saint wears beneath his mantle is an original feature, while the top of the cross staff is completely new.

The second part of our paper takes the empirical information derived from a close observation of the tesserae as a point of departure for an essay in interpretation.            Instead of the camel skin described in the Gospels of Matthew and Mark, John the Baptist at Porec wears a skin that is clearly spotted, and thus similar to the spotted animal skin, or nebris, worn by Dionysos. Ancient writers, such as Nonnos (Dionysiaka, Book 7, line 343), described the nebris as spotted. In Late Antique textiles Dionysos is shown wearing the nebris over one shoulder, with its jagged edge making a diagonal line across his chest, in a manner similar to John the Baptist at Poree. John the Baptist wears a spotted skin of this kind, in a similar way, in the mosaic of the Baptism in the Arian Baptistery in Ravenna, where he also carries a staff with a curled top similar to the Bacchic pedum. The significance of these Bacchic overtones in the iconography of St. John will form the subject of the second half of our presentation.

SESSION VII: PERCEPTIONS OF BYZANTIUM, WITHIN AND WITHOUT

Chair: Ellen Schwartz, Eastern Michigan University

Perceptions of Byzantium: Radegund of Poitiers and Relics of the True Cross

Lynn Jones (Independent Scholar)

The site, circumstance, and agent of the discovery of the True Cross established Byzantine control of the relic. It was a Byzantine practice to distribute fragments of the Cross, often enclosed in Byzantine-produced reliquaries, to foreign rulers, dignitaries and religious officials.      Relics of the Cross were used in this fashion to reward orthodoxy, confirm the political legitimacy of the recipient, or promote one individual or dynasty over another. To what degree were Byzantine relics of the True Cross emblematic of, and identified with, Byzantium and Eastern Orthodoxy by their non­Byzantine recipients?

The differing fates that awaited these relics in their new settings make it clear that they did convey aspects of Byzantine identity. In some hands, the Byzantine origin of these relics was re-emphasized. In other instances, these objects were distanced from their Byzantine provenance and assigned new identities. In order to assess the play of identity that such relics set in motion it is important to document two types of processes: the forging of new written traditions and the modification and/or display of the relics' housing. In this paper I examine how the Byzantine identity of two Cross relics, conveyed through textual tradition and the display of Byzantine-produced reliquaries, met with different fates in Poitiers. While the two relics of the True Cross are separated by six centuries, both were associated with Radegund of Poitiers: queen, nun and saint. This paper employs a methodology that does not rely on analysis of style or the identification of a workshop, but examines the object firmly embedded in its cultural context, seen through the eyes of the users.

Siege Warfare, Nikephoros II Phokas, and the Acquisition of Relics

Denis Sullivan (University of Maryland, College Park)

One of the results of siege warfare in the mid-tenth century was the acquisition of relics. The most famous was the mandylion, the cloth with the imprint of Christ's face, taken from Edessa. Notably, the general who besieged Edessa, John Kourkouas, receives no credit in the sources. Notable also is the description (De imagine Edessena) of the mandylion's arrival into Constantinople on August 16, 944, which depicts it as virtually an imperial adventus, coming through the Golden Gate, venerated at Saint Sophia, and then placed on the Imperial throne. Within about 5 months of the arrival, Constantine I, the purported author of the description, became sole emperor. E. Patlagean has suggested he was formulating a theory of imperial authority, the indissoluble union between the emperor, the imperial .y, and Christ.

Nineteen years later Nikephoros II Phokas, also on August 16, entered Constantinople as emperor, following the same route as the mandylion. This paper examines Phokas' own acquisition of three relics, a piece of the mantle of John the Baptist, the Holy Blood of Christ, and the keramion, a terra-cotta image of Christ created by contact with the Mandylion.

John Skylitzes notes that in April 963 Phokas celebrated a triumph in which he displayed a piece of the mantle of John the Baptist taken from Aleppo. The triumphal context for the display of the relic is striking, linking Phokas' military success to the acquisition just months before he was proclaimed emperor. It may be contrasted with the receipt in 956 by Constantine VII of the hand ofjohn the Baptist, stolen from a church in Antioch and brought to Constantinople to the great astonishment of the emperor.

Leo the Deacon reports that Phokas brought to Constantinople the keramion found in Hierapolis and dedicated it in the Pharos chapel of the palace in a reliquary he had specially made for it. A homily edited by F Halkin reports the acquisition in more detail and as occurring together with the Holy Blood. This text gives a date of january 967 for its dedication in Constantinople and introduces the acquisition with a eulogy of Phokas' illustrious ancestry and military successes ("crushing the Hagarene dogs like the mud of the streets") in Crete, Cyprus, and from Cilicia to the Euphrates. Phokas is said to have personally brought one or both relics to the Blachernai church; they were subsequently transferred by "the leaders of the Great Church" (Saint Sophia), and then again-in two mss. versions-to the Church of All Saints-in one manuscript to "the church of the holy palace" (i.e. the Pharos chapel). A related fragment of text refers to Phokas personally bringing the Holy Blood to Constantinople and dedicating it in All Saints.

This paper explores the Emperor Nikephoros II Phokas' use of relics in his rise to and maintenance of power and the interplay of the specific relics in question with the acquisitions of Constantine VII and his theory of imperial authority.

Origins, Functions, and Meaning of the "Pulpits" of San Marco in Venice

Thomas F. A. Dale (University of Wisconsin, Madison)

The pulpits of San Marco in Venice comprise a series of spolia from Constantinople, including the transom slabs that Simonetta Minguzzi has convincingly attributed to the sixth century. While Minguzzi has argued that the Venetians sought to emulate the furnishings of the imperial churches in Constantinople in a general way, it is suggested in this paper that more direct connections can be established with Hagia Sophia. As the Venetians exercised control of the Great Church during the Latin occupation, and Byzantine sources after the restoration record that it had been stripped of its liturgical furnishings, it seems likely that the porphyry and verde antico transom slabs were stolen from there. From Paul the Silentiary, we know that the green marble was used for the original ambo and the transom slabs of the Solea. It would seem that the Venetians thus deployed the verde antico slabs in a way that reflected Byzantine usage. Whereas elsewhere in Italy the use of two separate ambos was common since the twelfth century, the north "pulpit" of San Marco, like the ambo in Hagia Sophia, was used for both epistle and gospel readings.

The porphyry material of the transom slabs used in the south "pulpit" or "bigonzo" may be associated with another distinctive interior furnishing of Hagia Sophia: the metatorion. The Book of Ceremonies of Constantine VII refers to the metatorion as an enclosure where the emperor would change his robes and from whence he would attend the Eucharist. According to Thomas Mathews, this structure, which would have been delimited by transom slabs, was located in the south aisle of Hagia Sophia at the east end where a series of post holes are still visible. Although he doesn't reconstruct its appearance, it may be argued that the enclosure would have comprised a series of porphyry panels resembling those of the solea. Again, the Venetians would have adapted this material appropriately. As Martino da Canal's chronicle and the Ritum Cerimoniale of San Marco confirm, the bigonzo was used as an elevated loge from whence for the Doge was acclaimed to the people upon his election, and from whence he attended the Mass on special occasions, much as the emperor did in Hagia Sophia.

The re-use of Byzantine spolia from Hagia Sophia coincides well with Otto Demus' notion of a thirteenth-century "renaissance" of Early Christian art in Venice. As Venetian chronicles of the time indicate, Venice was trying to justify its new-found status on the world stage in the wake of the Fourth Crusade. Already based on the Justinianic plan of the Apostoleion, the state church was now incorporating the very fabric of the imperial church and cathedral of Constantinople to provide a suitable setting for the display of sacred relics and icons from the East and to promote the Doge's role as "Dominator" of "one quarter and a half of the Roman Empire".

SESSION VIII LANDSCAPE I

Chair: Cecile Morrisson, CNRS-College de France and Dumbarton Oaks

Landscape and Eremitic Life in the Dormition of St. Ephrem the Syrian from the Narthex of St. Nicholas Anapausas, Meteora

Vessela Anguelova (Pennsylvania State University)

In 1527 the Cretan artist Theophanes Bathas (d. 1559) painted one of the first mural representations of the so-called "complex" Dormition of St. Ephrem the Syrian in the narthex of the katholikon of St_ Nicholas Anapausas at Meteora. Like its predecessors on panels, the painting includes a feature that is unusual for Dormition scenes in Byzantine holy images: a fully developed landscape of bare mountains pierced by caves and populated with wild animals. Scholars have studied the iconographic origins of the representation of nature in this type of Dormition, used for ascetic saints at least since the thirteenth century, particularly in comparison to the "Thebaid" cycle in Italian city-states. However, the overall significance of the natural setting for the Dormition of Ephrem and its importance within the program of St. Nicholas have not yet been fully appreciated.

In this paper I argue that the landscape in the Dormition in the katholikon of St. Nicholas highlights a common understanding about Ephrem's life, and connects the painting to other scenes represented in the narthex to create a positive message about monastic life. The saint's extensive guidelines to hermits for their spiritual pursuits shaped the misconception that he was a recluse. This misunderstanding must have influenced the iconography of his Dormition, especially the placing of his bier in the wilderness. The images of ascetics working and praying in their caves further associate the saint with eremitic virtues. This idealization of the eremitic life in the painting resonates with the attempts of the monastic community at St. Nicholas to re-establish itself after a century of Ottoman repression.

Tied to this message of affirmation of the monastic way of life are the scenes of Adam Naming the Animals and the Fall of Mankind. The wild landscape, which shelters the hermits in the Dormition, is likened to the natural setting in the representation of Adam and the animals in the panel just underneath. As if living in harmony with beasts, the monks share in the prelapsarian grace of Adam. The parallel between the two scenes is strengthened by their juxtaposition to a painting showing the Fall of Mankind on the church's outside wall.

It may be concluded that the landscape in the Dormition works on multiple levels: it celebrates Ehprem's life and work, aids in the creation of a didactic message for a reviving monastic community, and compares the monks to Adam

Monastery and Healing Waters: The St. Nicholas Monastery (1330s) at Banja

Svetlana Popovic (Prince George's Community College)

The monastery dedicated to St. Nicholas was located on the elevated plateau in the vicinity of the thermal springs at Ban' a, near modern Priboj in Serbia. According to the written sources, the monastery existed by the middle of the twelfth century but the name of its founder is not known. In 1219 the monastery became the episcopal see of the autocephalous Serbian Church. In the fourteenth century (1330s), the complex was enlarged and the church rebuilt by King Stefan Decanski as represented in the donor's portrait on the southern wall of the nave. Until recently, the only visible remains of the monastery settlement were the church and an adjacent southern chapel.

Extensive archaeological excavations (1980s to the present) revealed the remnants of the monastery enclosure wall and additional buildings, including a single-aisled church located to the north of the katholikon. Although recently attributed to the earliest phase of the complex, the physical presence of the oldest church on the site is still debatable. The complex of churches was centrally located, surrounded by the encircling wall. The main monastic church of cross-in-square type had a triple altar space on the east and a spacious narthex to the west, and was entered by an arcaded porch. Two domes, one over the naos and the other above the narthex, designated the overall vertical form of the building. The churches were built of local stone in a relatively crude building style. The katholikon facades revealed the remains of painted plaster imitating the polychromatic ashlar construction. The architectural plan and facade decoration represent the symbiosis of the Byzantine and Romanesque influences present in Serbia at the time. In the interior space, two layers of fresco decoration, from the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries, have been identified. A monumental fourteenth-century portrait of St. Nicholas adorned the south-eastern side of the eastern wall of naos. At some later date a chapel was adjacent to the south-western side of the main church. In this chapel, archaeology revealed a rich monastic treasury buried within its altar space. To the southwest of the church complex a vast monastery refectory was excavated. Planned as an elongated rectangle and built of local tuff stone, it was a monumental building, probably preceded by the portico. Along the enclosure, remnants of habitations and workshops have been revealed, and at its northern side the lower portion of one square tower. The monastery had two entrances, a main entrance located to the west of the church and the secondary within the eastern enclosure. Numerous burials, with rich epigraphic evidence, have been discovered in the monastery courtyard, and within the churches. The site revealed a complicated disposition of cultural layers from medieval times to the nineteenth century.

A significant and understudied feature of the complex is the mineral springs that were decisive in locating the monastery and the reason for its fame since the earliest times. The question of monastery donors is related also to its healing waters. The Slavic toponym Banja is related to the word "spa." According to epigraphic evidence and written sources, kings Stefan Decanski and, before him, Uros I were healed in the monastery. Later in the sixteenth century some bishops and metropolitans were cured there. The healing springs are still active. They are located in the immediate vicinity of the monastery at its north-eastern side. A canal with hot water runs through the monastery property along its northern enclosure. My supposition is that an additional courtyard enclosing the healing springs, hostel, and necessary buildings existed there. Remnants of stone walls and undefined foundations, visible at this northern side, reinforce this hypothesis, and remain to be examined by further archaeological excavation.

Trade and Mapping of the Byzantine Coasts between the Thirteenth and Sixteenth Centuries

Elisaveta Todorova (University of Cincinnati)

Neither geography, nor cartography were highly regarded in Byzantine culture. The subjects of the Byzantine Empire were not without the normal human sense of location, especially when traveling, nor did they lack the capacity to visualize places they had seen or had been, but only a few bothered to record geographical data in drawings or in any other form. Yet recent scholarship has retrieved bits and pieces of environment-related information from indirect sources which have permitted the mapping of unsuspected long-distance connections together with an extensive shipping and communication network in early Byzantium.

Lack of source material cannot provide answers to such important questions as the practical use of geographical knowledge in navigation. To mariners, location and destination were of crucial importance and although we know that through watching the sky they were able to navigate, this was certainly not the case for some (if not the majority) of those who ventured across the seas.

Greeks since classical antiquity were sailors and nature had blessed them with a good climate and relatively calm seas, as well as with numerous islands at a day's distance from one another; thus experienced navigators knew by heart where they were, where they were going, and where they could find water, food and shelter. Therefore, only beyond their own seas did ancient and Medieval Greek sailors need help.

But outsiders that penetrated Byzantine waters after the tenth century definitely needed assistance both for negotiating unfamiliar waters and for dealing with the accumulating geographical and navigational information necessary for a successful arrival in the ports of Byzantium. Yet it took Italian and other sailors about two centuries to get acquainted with the entire Mediterranean and to develop a structured commercial network. Luckily, this period coincided with the introduction of innovations like the compass, which gave birth to medieval nautical charts.

Western portulans and nautical charts of the thirteenth through the sixteenth centuries are astonishingly rich and precise; in addition to navigational particularities they focus on ports of call or commercial destinations, marking the ports in red and indicating ways for getting into them and the dangers to be avoided. On the basis of this evidence, this paper discusses the shifting interests of the major commercial intermediaries of the period in Byzantine and former Byzantine ports; it also addresses the question of why it was only after the fall of Byzantium that portulans and nautical charts were translated into Greek.

Plenary Session - Endangered Arts: What Can the BSC Do?

Organizer: Kathleen Maxwell, Santa Clara University Moderator: Alice-Mary Talbot, Dumbarton Oaks

This session was organized in response to the events of March 2004 in Kosovo when numerous Serbian Orthodox churches and monasteries were burned and/or destroyed by members of the local Albanian population. The historic use of cultural genocide by both Serbians and Albanians in the province of Kosovo will be explored in an effort to comprehend such acts. The following questions will be addressed. Why are cultural artifacts targeted by both sides in this conflict? What role do historic buildings play in the competing claims for sovereignty in Kosovo? What are governmental and non­governmental agencies doing to protect Kosovo's cultural heritage? What can the BSC do?

Representatives from a variety of international organizations active in Kosovo will be invited to share their perspectives.

Dr. Andrew Herscher, former Co-Head, Department of Culture, United Nations Mission in Kosovo, and Co-Director of the Kosovo Cultural Heritage Project, will provide an historic overview at the beginning of the session.

SESSION IX MONASTICISM

Chair: Asin Kirin, University of Georgia

Contemplating Death: The Murals of the Canon for the Dying in the Pyrgos of St. George at Chilandar Monastery

Monica Hirschbichler (University of Maryland, College Park)

In the middle of the thirteenth century, the Athonite monks of Chilandar Monastery commissioned the decoration of a parekklesion that was located on top of the monastery's oldest pyrgos, the tower of St. George. Of particular interest to the present study are the paintings in the ambulatory of this chapel. The program is composed of hagiographical scenes of the martyrdom of St. George and one of only two known monumental cycles illustrating the twelfth-century text of the Canon for Someone Who is in the Throes of Dying, attributed to Andrew of Crete. The choice of such rare subject matter as the canon for the dying, the combination of two seemingly unrelated narratives, as well as their placement in a tower chapel, invite further inquiry into the specific function of the program. Recently, Nancy Sevi~enko has linked the Chilandar images of the canon for the dying to the notion of monastic life as a "living death." Similarly, Svetlana Popovic has interpreted the paintings as forming part of an extensive eschatological program connected to the tower's proposed function as an ossuary. Building upon this, hereto unpublished work, the present study will examine the two pictorial cycles within the context of the monastic life at Chilandar as laid out in the monastery's typicon. The aim is to show that the paintings in the pyrgos of St. George fulfilled a particular role in the striving of the Chilandar monks towards salvation; a function that was promoted, if not made possible, by their placement within a monastic tower. The isolated setting and the funerary connotations of its supporting structure made the ambulatory of the tower chapel an appropriate location for the daily commemoration of the dead and the contemplation of one's own mortality. In their support of such meditations the murals were not passive decoration, but served as active agents in the quest for monastic perfection, be it on the communal level, or for the benefit of an individual who followed the path of asceticism in the relative seclusion of the pyrgos.

The Freer Heavenly Ladder Folia: A Visual How To Guide for Monks

Stephanie Payne (University of Texas)

In 1909, Charles Lang Freer purchased two folia from a lost Heavenly Ladder manuscript, dating between the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Today, these pages are part of the permanent collection at the Freer Gallery in Washington, D.C. The Heavenly Ladder was a monastic treatise written in the seventh century by john Climacus. It is comprised of thirty steps, or chapters, which outline a monastic way of life. Scholarly research concerning the treatise is limited, and even more rare is a discussion about the illumination of the Heavenly Ladder. The Freer folia have been addressed in only three publications, Charles R. Morey's East Christian Painting in the Freer Collection (New York, 1914), John R. Martin's monograph The Illustration of the Heavenly Ladder ofjohn Climacus (Princeton, 1954), and a short article in Apollo, "Byzantine Art as a Mirror of its Public" by Gary Vikan (1983). The intent of this paper is to demonstrate how the Freer folia aided monks in a devotional anabasis-a meditation or contemplative ascent allowing them to attain salvation.

Traditionally, art historians like John Martin study the evolutionary development of manuscript illuminations. This paper moves beyond that method and seeks to address why Heavenly Ladder manuscripts were illuminated during the eleventh and twelfth centuries. It was during this time that monastic life underwent a profound change from an anchoritic to a more cenobitic approach. As a result, it was believed that the traditional hermitic monastic life was not longer attainable. From translated typika, monastic inventories, and a consideration of the literacy levels of monks during these two centuries, it becomes clear how Heavenly Ladder manuscripts were used in monasteries. The Freer folia and illuminated manuscripts created visual representations of the treatise-a text that adhered to the original beliefs of an anchoritic approach to monasticism. While the external environment no longer allowed for this traditional monastic practice, the illustrations provided the opportunity to reflect, to visualize, and to contemplate the core values of the monastic life.

To better understand the use of Heavenly Ladder images as a model for monastic practice, it is valuable to study the Freer folia and how they compare to other Heavenly Ladder illustrations. The Freer pages include two of the most common Heavenly Ladder images: the author portrait, which serves to legitimize the treatise, and the `Heavenly Ladder' page, a visual narrative of the text. Both pages present a model for how monks could approach a meditation of the text through iconography and multivalent meanings. By theoretically reconstructing the manuscript, it can be seen that the two pages were strategically placed at the beginning and end of the manuscript. This organization further emphasized how to approach the treatise in a step-by-step, thoughtful manner. In this way, the Freer folia and their lost manuscript functioned as an illustrated and comprehensive how-to guide for monasticism.

The Buttressed Tower at Hagios Vasileios near Thessaloniki

Nikolas Bakirtzis (Princeton University)

At the outskirts of the village of Hagios Vasileios, located on the southern shore of the lake of Koroneia in northern Greece, a lone tower stands in obscurity. Although located in a strategic position at the western end of the Mygdonian Plateau and approximately twenty kilometers northeast of Thessaloniki, no textual reference has been preserved on the tower, identified today by the name of the present village. Adding to the mystery surrounding its identity and role; the architecture of the tower remains unpublished until today.

The tower has a rectangular plan with four characteristic buttresses projecting from all of its sides. Its domed roof and upper parts have collapsed, filling its interior with rubble. The elevated arched entrance to the tower is located at its northern side. There are no signs of windows or loopholes at the lower levels of the tower. At the top level, a big arched window articulates each of its western and eastern sides. The deteriorating southern side of the pyrgos preserves signs of two smaller arched windows.

The tower's typology belongs to a distinctive group of rectangular Byzantine towers with buttresses articulating all four facades of the buildings. Thirty-two examples of this type have been recorded thus far. The majority dates after the thirteenth century, while their typological origin is not yet clear. Their geographical distribution concentrates in the peninsula of Mount Athos and its immediate areas of economic activity and production, the Chalkidike and the valley of the river Strymon. Isolated examples of this tower type can also be found in the southern Balkans in Northern Greece, Serbia and Montenegro, and Bulgaria. Standing alone or as part of a bigger architectural complex, buttressed towers served a broad variety of functions and their role should be explained accordingly.

What was the role and use of the tower at Hagios Vasileios? Did it function as a defensive work protecting the rural population or was it a silo for agricultural production? Was it a watchtower or the sacred landmark of monastic property, in accordance to the New Testament parable of the vineyard? The tower at Hagios Vasileios represents a key example of the diversity of uses of fortifications, and of solitary towers in particular. Close to the town of Byzantine Langadas and having a commanding view of the Koroneia lake and the Via Egnatia, running along its northern shore, the tower controlled the western part of the Mygdonian Plateau. Archaeological data suggest its limited defensive capabilities and its use for storage purposes as a silo. The spacious, well-lit top storey of the tower was used for accommodation and maybe contained a chapel.

The architectural and archaeological study of the buttressed tower at Hagios Vasileios contributes significantly to our limited knowledge of Late Byzantine towers and their diverse roles and functions. Furthermore, it sheds more light on the history and the economy of the Mygdonian Plateau, a region of key importance to the Byzantine metropolis of Thessaloniki.

The Monastic Communities of Mount Nebo

Debra Foran (Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, Toronto)

The mountain known as Siyagha, the traditional name for the location of Moses' resting place, is one peak in the Mount Nebo ridge. From the fourth through the eighth centuries several monastic communities developed in and around this ridge, as well as at numerous sites throughout the diocese of Madaba. Mount Nebo was a popular stop on the pilgrimage route through central Transjordan, and a number of accounts from the fourth to the sixth century describe the monks of the region. The mosaic inscriptions from the area also contribute to our knowledge of the monastic presence by offering insights into the nature of the communities and their internal organization.

Archaeological investigation in the Mount Nebo region has uncovered approximately ten monasteries or monastic settlements. These establishments consist primarily of a church or chapel around which were built a series of rooms that functioned as domestic spaces for the community. The identification of hermitages also indicates the presence of ascetic monasticism in the region.

The examination of the available archaeological material allows the hierarchical relationships between these communities to be outlined. The large coenobium at Mount Nebo certainly served as the nucleus of the network, made up of monasteries of varying size and importance scattered throughout the region. Some of these satellite communities were established in close proximity to urban settlements, sometimes inside the village itself, while others were founded in uninhabited, hostile environments. Little is known of the relationship between these monasteries and the inhabitants of the region, but the placement of certain monasteries adjacent to or within secular settlements indicates that the monks must have had some manner of contact with the residents of the village.

The monasteries of Mount Nebo were not isolated units, functioning independently from one another. They were part of a larger framework, with each component interacting on different levels with the others. This framework did not operate in a vacuum. While certain members of the community preferred a solitary existence, others welcomed pilgrims from foreign lands and were active members of the society in which they lived.

SESSION X LATE ANTIQUITY

Chair: David Olster, University of Kentucky

The Theory and Practice of Citizenship in the Later Roman Empire

Ralph W. Mathisen (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign)

During the Roman Republic and the first few centuries of the Roman Empire, it was clear what being a civic Romanus meant. Roman citizenship was a well-defined legal status to which certain legal rights accrued. But after the issuance of the Antonine Constitution in 212, this changed. In criminal cases, legal distinctions that in the past had been based on citizenship status now were based on social status. And in civil matters, legal procedures were greatly simplified: ostensibly, nearly everyone was now covered by the same /us civilis.

This simple picture is complicated, however, by several problematic issues regarding the theory and practice of concepts of citizenship that continue to bedevil students of the later Roman and Byzantine empires.

First of all, terminology. One encounters in the late Roman sources many different ways of defining a cives. Along with being a "Roman" citizen, one also could be described as a "citizen" of a city (like Ephesus), of a region (like Gaul or Spain), of an ethnic group (like the Franks), or even of some metaphorical body (like heaven, or the "City of God"). It is easy for unwary modern readers to confuse these varied manifestations of citizenship with each another, nor can one presume that all references to "citizens" mean "Roman" citizens. Concomitantly, anyone who did not belong to any of these citizen categories was ipso facto a peregrinus with regard to it.

Second, after the promulgation of the Antonine Constitution, the Roman Empire continued to assimilate large numbers of foreign peregrini. What was the legal status of barbarian newcomers? At what point did they qualify as "Roman citizens."? Was it assumed, by default, that everyone permanently settled on Roman territory was covered by ius ovilis? If not, what law covered non-citizens? It is very unclear what the process was, if any, whereby non-citizens became Roman citizens after AD 212.

On the one hand, there certainly were distinctions in late-Roman law between "Romans" and "barbarians," but, on the other, the holding of Roman "citizenship" became disconnected from one's ability to participate in Roman life and the Roman state. Foreigners, even if not "citizens," could partake in aspects of Roman civil law involving things like inheritances, tutelage, and witnessing; they could also be army generals and even consuls.

This paper will consider the issue, virtually ignored in the scholarship, of the legal concept of what it meant to be a civis in the later Roman and early Byzantine Empires. It will be suggested that geographical origin-concrete, implied, or metaphorical- assumed a much greater significance as a determinant of citizenship status, and that classical concepts of Roman citizenship status became something of an umbrella under which many different concepts of citizenship could be accommodated.

Constantine and Christianity Revisited: The Persian Dimension

Irfan Shahid (Georgetown University)

Despite the torrent of studies on the theme of "Constantine and Christianity," not much of anything has been written on Manichaeism as an element or factor in Constantine's Christianity.

F. Dolger's article, "Konstantin der Grosse and der Manichaismus: Sonne and Christus in Manichaismus," Antike and Christentum, pp. 301-304, appeared as long ago as 1931 and it dealt only with theology.

The formative years of Constantine were spent in the Orient and at the Eastern Front with Galerius and Diocletian, during which he witnessed the Roman defeat of Galerius in 297, during a century that was full of disasters for Roman arms. Constantine was still with Diocletian in Nicomedia when the latter in 302 issued his edict against the Manichaeans, whom he considered a Fifth Column within the empire working for Persia.  In the following year, he issued the first of his four edicts against the Christians and launched the famous persecutions.

It is impossible to believe that when Constantine left Diocletian in 305 he did not have on his mind the two main problems that then faced Rome: namely, Persia and religion, especially its politicization. The Persian problem was not a new one; what was new was the involvement of religion in the state and its employment as an instrument of policy.     Manichaesim had allied itself for a short time with the Persian state whose aggressive king Shapur had declared himself king of Iran and Non-Iran. What is more, Manichaesim had "annexed" much Christian doctrine and Mani called himself the Apostle of Christ.

In 313, Constantine addressed himself to one of the two problems; he "converted" and won the battle of the Milvian Bridge. What is relevant in this controversial conversion is his perception of Christianity as an instrument enlisted in the service of the state to which his experiences in the Orient provided a meaningful background. This is reflected in the way he militarized it; the Christogram appeared on his military labarum and on the shields of his legionaries.

In 337, he addressed the second problem. The war against Persia, which was unprovoked, and which he now intended to solve under the banner of Christianity, and this further corroborated the view of the importance of that experience in the Orient, which led him to conceive of religion as the handmaid of the imperiam and the instrument of victory.     It had been successfully applied internally in his domestic wars and was now to be used against the power to which he owed his perception of religion-a politicized one in the service of the state.

Constantine's conversion revolutionized Roman history and that of Christianity itself. The Manichaen-Persian factor in his percep­tion of Christianity imparts a new dimension to the importance of the religion that so deeply penetrated the Roman Occident that it held captive in its doctrines for a good nine years, no less a giant, spirituality and intellectually, than Augustine of Hippo.

Performing Late Antique Ekphrasis: The Example of the School of Gaza

Delphine Renaut (Ecole Normale Superieure, Paris)

The orators of the School of Gaza paid particular attention to the genre of the ekphrasis, or rhetorical description, by renewing its practice at the turn of the fifth century. They established this strictly codified progymnasma, or preparatory rhetorical exercise, beyond the limits of the schoolroom. Since they formed neither a narrowly defined academic circle nor an intellectual society, the orators of Gaza used the declamation of their ekphrasis as a way of participating in the social and cultural context of a prosperous city: Gaza "philomousos", as a foreigner attending one of its splendid festivals described it.

Talking of performance in this context implies a subtle triangular relationship, which Finds its acme in a redefinition of these texts as "real ekphrasis", the opposition to a tradition of "fictive" ones. The First element of this dynamism is the work of art, the "real" subject of the description. The second is the social relationship that develops between the world of the school and the "real" world, the one of the notables of the city. Moved by the double desire to embellish their city and to be praised in return for their generous contribution, they command both the works of art and the correspondent encomiastic descriptions. The third pole of this tension is the ag6n between two media of art, the visual space of the painter and the rhythmic time of the orator. Both competing for the good of their city and for the glory of its euergetes, they confront each other in rhetorical contests. Finally it is fundamental to emphasize that the texts themselves give very precise indications of the conditions of their own performance; in particular the ekphrasis of Gaza appear to be strongly connected with a festival of roses, the one of the "laughing Aphrodite of the Spring", as described by John of Gaza in his Description of the Cosmic Board.

The method used here is to combine textual and archaeological evidence that converge on the same interpretations, sometimes in very striking ways. For instance, some distinctive features of the "mosaic of Hippolytus" found in the basernent of the Church of the Virgin at Madaba show an unmistakably strong connection to the Description of a painting located in the city of Gaza by Procopius of Gaza. This double approach yields here particularly fruitful results. Restoring to these ekphrasis their dignity of autonomous, efficient discourse historically performed allows a reinterpretation of the complementary relationship between literature and art history for a global perspective on rich and inspiring material.

The Decorative Program of the Early Basilica at Stobi, Macedonia

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

Buried beneath the ruins of the fifth-century Basilica on the Terrace at Stobi, Macedonia, are the exceptionally well-preserved remains of a basilica dated to the late fourth century. The basilica was discovered in 1973 by the joint Yugoslav-American Stobi Excavation Project, and is now known as the Early Basilica. In that year, and in subsequent excavations by the project, it became clear that the state of preservation of the interior decoration of the basilica was unusually good: some walls were preserved over three meters high, with painted decoration intact, though faded; floor mosaics were very well preserved, and most unusually, large amounts of ceiling painting fragments were found where they fell, allowing reconstruction of the entire ceiling design.

After the Stobi Excavation Project concluded its on-site work in 1981, Macedonian excavators continued to excavate the Basilica, revealing further wall paintings and mosaic floors. In fact, so much has now been recovered that it is no exaggeration to say that this basilica is one of the best preserved fourth-century churches yet discovered. What is more, this state of preservation provides an opportunity to present an interpretation of the iconographic program of the building as a whole.

On the side walls of the Early Basilica were painted designs in imitation of opus sectile panels. On a panel to the left of the apse was preserved the lower half of a figure flanked by two sheep, which probably represents the Good Shepherd. On a rear wall of the church was a most enigmatic painting depicting rodents within twisting vines. The reconstructed ceiling of the aisles consisted of a long floral wreath that ran next to the wall and in the interior a series of painted coffers, with four different designs, including one with an illusionistic three-dimensional box motif. Above the nave colonnade, on a black background, was another continuous wreath and other floral designs. In the mosaic floor, designs consisted of patterns, including one with illusionistic boxes echoing those found in the ceiling painting. Two inscriptions were also found in the mosaics.

It seems likely that the Early Basilica was dedicated to Christ himself, as was common in this early period. This view is supported by the discovery of the Good Shepherd painting. The presence of the wreath, I believe, symbolizes the victory of Christ over death, and that is why the wreath encompasses the entire building, running around the outside of the aisle ceiling. This symbolism is frequently found in tomb paintings of the time, indicating the hope for eternal life of the deceased; numerous examples have been found in fourth-century tombs in Thessalonike. The coffer design, with a background of small white circles on a deep black background is probably meant as a representation of the starry sky, as found in the Mausoleum of Galla Placidia at Ravenna.

The meaning of the entire program can therefore be taken to represent the victory of Christ over death. Support for this interpretation was found by Macedonian excavators in one of the mosaic inscriptions. The Greek inscription refers to the victory of Christ over death. Seldom does such corroboration occur in this kind of research.

SESSION XI LANDSCAPE II

Chair: Martha Vinson, Indiana University

Hagiography in a Landscape: Psellos and Symeon the Metaphrast

Elizabeth Fisher (George Washington University)

Although numerous literary genres engaged Psellos during his long and prolific literary career, he showed little interest in hagiography. The Teubner hagiographical volume contains only a single example of hagiography in the traditional sense, The Life and Experiences ofSt. Auxentios on the Mountain. In this life, Psellos follows accepted practice in presenting the biography of an historical person notable for Christian conduct and worthy of veneration, while also adhering to the standards of refined hagiographical writing which he himself articulated in his Encomion of Symeon the Metaphrast. Psellos admired Symeon's accuracy regarding sources, his rhetorical polish, his philosophical sophistication, and his skill in describing place to inform and delight. The last feature provides a touchstone for assessing Psello's performance as a practitioner of the hagiographical genre that Symeon so profoundly affected.

In composing his Life ofSt. Auxentios, Psellos followed a single source closely, an anonymous late fifth-century narrative produced shortly after Auxentio's death and not revised by Symeon the Metaphrast (Migne, PG 114, cots. 1375-1436). Place is prominently associated with Auxentios in Psellos' source, in his own adaptation of that source, and even in the artistic tradition (cf. Menolgion of Basil II, February 14). This study examines Psellos' portrayal of Auxentios by comparing how Psellos and his source treat Mount Skopas in Bithynia, which is associated with the saint both in artistic tradition and in the title of Psellos' biography.

Psellos betrays a very casual attitude towards the detailed and accurate designation of the specific sites and regions provided in his source. Mentioning the place provides Psellos with an opportunity to describe a vivid scene, to emphasize the narrative through symbols, to incorporate philosophical reflection, or to note contemporary facts about a locale. Most remarkably, Psellos directly contradicts his source by placing Auxentios at the council of Chalcedon as a fiery participant, thus dramatizing the saint's crucial role in defeating the Nestorian heresy.

In spite of his admiration for Symeon the Metaphrast, Psellos the rhetorician cannot bear to conform in his use of place to the standard established by Symeon requiring the hagiographer to follow his source faithfully. For Psellos, place is an elastic feature of narrative that may be manipulated to achieve artistic effect; it is a literary device serving rhetoric effect rather than historical accuracy. Psellos the rhetorician dominates Psellos the hagiographer.

The Rural Landscape and Built Environment at the End of Antiquity: Limestone Villages of Southeastern Isauria

Gander Varinlioglu (University of Pennsylvania)

The end of antiquity in the Eastern Mediterranean has been largely misinterpreted based on ancient texts that portray a general state of urban decline. In fact, the archaeological evidence points to a flourishing countryside and a boom in the number of settlements in the hinterlands of major cities. The rural landscape of southeastern Isauria in southern Turkey contains particularly rich material evidence for the study of this phenomenon. This mountainous limestone region is dotted with the unique remains of ancient settlements preserved to a remarkable degree and providing solid evidence for a prosperous and active life at the end of antiquity. These settlements include several dozens houses, churches, cisterns, paved streets, cemeteries, oil and wine production places, and grain processing centers. They are examples of the native constructional traditions of the Isaurian builders, renowned in late fifth and sixth centuries across the Byzantine Empire as master builders.

My paper investigates the nature of human habitat and the character of the built environment in late antique Isauria, based on two seasons of archaeological surveys, focusing on architectural remains of two ancient settlements (namely, lpkkale and Karakabakf, known only by their modern Turkish names) and their relationship with their territory. These settlements are located in the immediate hinterland of the administrative capital, Seleucia on the Calycadnus River, and the international pilgrimage center of St.Thecla, as well as the international harbors at Corasium and Corycus. In challenging the theory of decline of the ancient world constructed by traditional hist