In April 1889 a deputation of Cypriots, headed by the Archbishop Sophronios and consisting of eminent citizens of the island, was received in London by the Colonial Office. Their purpose had been to recount the general state of affairs in the island after almost twelve years of British rule. The picture was gloomy: despite the hopes which the Cypriots naturally indulged in and which many Englishmen cherished of improving the material prosperity and moral constitution of the people, the island was going ‘to certain ruin’. In the words of the Colonial Secretary, Lord Knutsford, ‘[t]he principal demands of the Memorial and of the Deputation are based upon a deterioration in the economical condition of Cyprus which is supposed to have taken place since the British occupation. In the opinion of the Deputation that condition is appreciably worse than under the Turkish administration, and is likely to end in the final ruin of the community’.The deputation informed the Secretary that the ‘loyal and peaceful inhabitants of the Island gratefully hope to be able to follow the steps of progress and civilisation of the other inhabitants of the vast British Empire’.The population of the island, financially drained and in a state of great misery, trusted that Britain would have promoted decisively political reforms consistent with European civilisation and liberty, and that prompt efforts would be accordingly made to develop the resources of the island. Given the prospects then opened their hopes did not appear irrational. Britain aspired to put into action essential reforms in Asiatic Turkey, and Cyprus could have been held up as a practical example of the kind of justice and administration which all the Turkish provinces required.

Despite the efforts of the Emperor Maurice (582–602) to relieve Avar and Slav pressure on the Lower Danube region, Byzantium finally lost control over this area at the very end of the 6th Century (or perhaps at the start of the 7th Century). There is no evidence — literary, numismatic or otherwise — which suggests that imperial authority was re-imposed until after the defeat of Sviatoslav and the Rus’ by John I Tzimiskes (969–76) towards the end of the tenth century.

The importance of Martinus Crusius’s collection of Greek chapbooks for our knowledge of 16th century vernacular Greek literature can hardly be over-emphasised. Most copies of his collection are either extremely rare or even unique. Valuable and often unique is also the information about the texts and their authors, which Crusius collected and published in his Turcograecia (Basel 1584) or elsewhere.

This paper is aimed at provoking the imagination of its readers rather than at giving any final settlement to a topos explored already in numerous Cyrillo-Methodian studies. The problems discussed here are related to the Byzantine Balkan policy as a background to Constantine’s mission to the Khazars. It seems to me that the Moravian mission of SS Cyril and Methodius came as an outgrowth of Constantine’s mission to the steppes. Moravia, Bulgaria and the Pontic steppes seem in many respects different parts of the one domain of the Byzantine ‘Northern policy’

In the period after Iconoclasm, a Byzantine church was a framework for a complex, multi-level programme of figural decoration in mosaic or fresco. The architectural form of the building was abstract, but it was given meaning through its decorative programme. The selection and placement of images would have interacted with the services celebrated in the church to emphasise the message of the liturgy and to express the order within the Christian cosmos. It is therefore not surprising, although not often noted, that the standard, Middle Byzantine church types were developed simultaneously with a relatively standardised programme of interior decoration.

Angelic epiphany was understood from the earliest period to be a dissimulating manifestation; it was tailored to the person receiving and in no way corresponded to the real nature or form of the angelic being. The difficulty of apprehension and identification of such epiphanies is attested in scripture and re-asserted with each appearance thereafter. In the face of these difficulties, questions arose early over the appropriate means to understand and commemorate angelic epiphany. Both sides during the Iconoclastic controversy (720s-787, 815–843) manifested a suspicion of artistic imagination in describing angelic revelation. The insuperable difficulties of perceiving angels only increased the blind distance in which artistic imagination must work; therefore, both sides repudiated artistic imagination in the process of describing angels.

Michalis Ganas is both a highly individual talent and, as I hope to show here with respect to an inevitably small selection of key poems, a highly traditional one. He is, moreover, peculiarly self-conscious about the implications of such a view as Eliot’s for the responsibilities of the poet. The consciousness of tradition in Ganas’ work may be seen as taking three forms.

The sixth-century wars between Sasanid Persia and the Eastern Roman Empire have been the object of many studies, including the archaeology of fortified sites. There has not been, however, a detailed treatment of the social, economic, and cultural impact of this chronic warfare on the villages of rural Syria. The problem is partly one of source materials. Except the chronicle of Joshua the Stylite, Procopius’ account of the war of 540–544, and certain hagiographic texts, the literary sources are lacking precise detail about rural conditions, and even these sources tend to concentrate on the fate of the larger cities. A remedy exists for this in the interpretation of the numerous dated inscriptions at the sixth-century sites of northern Syria. It is often possible, with the correct synthesis of local materials, to arrive at significant generalisations about the impact of war on the countryside. The discussion that follows will examine the epigraphy of Syria I and II with a view to understanding the social, economic, demographic and cultural consequences of endemic warfare in the period between the end of the Persian War of Anastasius (502–506) and the Persian War of 604–628. It is hoped that this analysis will facilitate a new and structured reading of the literary sources, all of it directed to the problem of war and society in the Near East on the eve of the Islamic conquest.

According to the closely related accounts in De administrando imperio and in Theophanes Continuatus, the creation of a thema in Cherson was instigated by a report submitted to the emperor Theophilos by the spatharokandidatos Petronas Kamateros upon his return from a mission to Sarkel. Thus the dates of Petronas’ mission determine the chronology of the creation of the thema.

The three strange poems in English which constitute the section ‘Foreign Language Verse’ in Cavafy’s Unpublished Poems present problems of authorship, interpretation and preservation. Who wrote them? What are they about? Why did Cavafy, who destroyed so much, trouble to keep them? The purpose of the present note is to provide plausible, if not definitive, answers to these three questions. The poems under discussion are, ‘Leaving Therápia’, ‘Darkness and Shadows’ and the untitled poem that begins, ‘More happy thou, performing Member’.

The prose fiction of the ancient world is the oldest that we possess, and historically marks the founding of the literary genre which, by some indicators at least, has outstripped all others in the European-derived ‘Western’ culture of the last two centuries. Yet even the recent upsurge of interest in the subject, and corresponding upwardly mobile evaluations of it on the part of classical scholars, has focussed on the ancient novel not as a beginning but as an end. In the eyes of the dwindling number of specialists who can read and evaluate these texts in the original languages, the novel makes a very late appearance on the scene. In aesthetic terms it frequently demands some degree of apology; its greatest and most productive feature of interest in recent years has been its very self-conscious belatedness, inscribed on every page of its texts in the blatant, comic, and often extremely subtle, re-use of older, culturally sanctioned material. The ancient novel is like those buildings of the late antique city in which the spolia of an earlier epoch are artfully put to new use. The ancient novel, precursor of so much that came later, has by its very nature little that is conspicuously originary about it. It wears its borrowings on its sleeve, proudly; and enough survives of the culture from which it borrowed that the classicist, exactly like his late antique and Byzantine predecessors, can have fun identifying them.

Silks gave visible form to Byzantium’s political culture and, being light to carry, could circulate widely. Many of the garments issued to recipients of offices and titles were made of silk and the Book of the Eparch takes for granted the close connection between imperial prerogatives, silken vestments of various shades of purple and restrictions on foreigners’ access to them. Through whetting appetites for silks and maintaining a monopoly over the finest quality products, the emperor could hope to arouse in his own subjects and foreigners alike the desire to gain them through some form of ‘service’. These products simultaneously expressed his wealth, superior knowledge and — by the symbols on them — the antiquity and unsurpassable legitimacy of his rule.