The development of the senate of Constantinople as an imperial senate, on a par with the senate of Rome, has been attributed to Constantius II to the exclusion of Constantine and dated to 357. The present paper argues that the evidence for this dating is fundamentally flawed and that the decisive change came at the outset of the reign of Constantius II, while developments under Constantine foreshadowed it in significant respects. Conclusions are also drawn about what the evidence reveals of relations between Hellenic gentry and imperial rule in the fourth century.

Dragons were a well-established feature of the Byzantine supernatural imagination, and certain conventions governed their behaviour as described in hagiography. The textual traditions associated with Ss Perpetua, Marina of Antioch and Elisabeth the Miracle-Worker illustrate the changing role of the creatures from late antiquity through the middle Byzantine period. Although early works portray them as minor nuisances, compilations of the ninth century and later give them a new prominence, hinting at an editorial fascination with dragons which acted in a similar manner on otherwise unrelated texts.

This article suggests that the history of Nikephoros Bryennios draws on a now lost text that told the history of the 1070s from the perspective of the caesar John Doukas. Changes in perspective, narrative style, and vocabulary in the sections dealing predominantly with John suggest that Bryennios was incorporating portions of a written text rather than orally preserved stories. These stylistic arguments are not definitive but, especially in light of the way the author freely included portions of Psellos’ and Skylitzes’ histories, they lead to the supposition that Bryennios also used a text about John Doukas that no longer survives.

The confiscation of monastic properties ordered by Selim II in 1568 served as a catalyst precipitating a process of negotiation and mutual accommodation between the centre – represented by the sultan and his jurisconsult- and the periphery articulated by the monks. Even in formulaic imperial orders, it is apparent that the monastic communities successfully negotiated the terms for the normalisation of the affair, whereas the jurisconsult accommodated the Porte’s interests to the local society’s needs. On the local level, the judge functioned as a mediator, addressing the monks’ requirements, even if he had to transgress a number of Islamic rules and imperial orders. Thus, this case study illustrates the gradual transformation of a polity in dialogue with local communities.

This article recognizes diglossia as a key phenomenon for the interpretation of the existence of different registers in the late Byzantine period (twelfth-fifteenth centuries). The main characteristics of Byzantine diglossia are outlined and associated with language production during this period. Learned and vernacular registers are approached as extreme poles of a linguistic continuum and linguistic variation as a defining characteristic of a diglossic speech community.

It has been argued that ‘The Last Day’, written during the Metaxas dictatorship and while the Second World War was looming on the horizon, constitutes Seferis’ answer to the exhausted model of the ‘national poet’. The aim of this article is to examine in detail the poem’s allusions to ancient war texts, in order to deal with what stood at the heart of this answer, namely the key concept of the ‘historical poet’. Of prime importance will be issues of language and gender raised by the poem, as well as the historical context of its writing and reception.