The city of Amida lay on the eastern frontier of the early Byzantine Empire, close to the Persian borders; physically and politically, it led a volatile existence. Its situation was thus a dominant factor in the growth of its ascetic tradition, for if the outlying lands did not offer a suitably peaceful life, the social and religious forces calling for an ascetic presence were intense. The early years of the fourth century found the territory of Amida already harbouring individuals of noteworthy ascetic practice, and it was not long before the city itself sheltered an increasing number of monastic communities in and around the urban arena. But the choice of urban rather than wilderness setting signified practical considerations and not social development. The devastation of Amida and its environs by the Persians in 359/60 stated the realities of Amida’s location: invasions were frequent and brutal. An isolated recluse was not exempt from danger unless utterly remote, and proximity to the shelter of fortified walls and communal protection was a simpler alternative.

On 15 August 1261 the emperor Michael VIII Palaiologos, born, raised, and crowned in ‘exile’ during the Latin occupation of Constantinople, entered the newly reconquered capital for the first time. Michael carefully planned the ceremonial surrounding his entrance into Constantinople, choosing as his day of entry the feast day of the Dormition of the Virgin, the City’s protectress, and giving her icon, known as the Hodegetria, a place of honour in the celebrations. The entire day’s programme was intended as a thanksgiving to God rather than a celebration of an imperial triumph. Preceded by the icon of the Hodegetria, the emperor walked through the Golden Gate, relinquishing his prerogative to ride in a quadriga through the gate which had received emperors returning triumphant from campaign.

In his famous chapter on Odysseus’ scar at the beginning of Mimesis, Erich Auerbach summarizes the stylistic contrast between the lavish detail and leisurely expansiveness of Homeric narrative on the one hand and the austerity of the Genesis story of Abraham and Isaac on the other.

The ‘Akritic cycle’ of Greek folk-songs consists of those texts in which scholars have found thematic resemblances to the epic poem of Digenes. The name Digenes itself has not been an essential criterion for the inclusion of a song in this category, although many of the songs do boast at least one seemingly Byzantine name; in a few cases, the name is that of Digenes, and other forms have been somewhat debatably claimed as corruptions of the latter. Like all learned taxonomies, the Akritic rubric involves a measure of distortion or oversimplification. True, the thematic resemblances exist, and are rarely likely to be the outcome of pure coincidence; but they can be matched against other, hardly less compelling similarities which violate the boundaries of the Akritic category.

For some centuries in Greece poetry had tended towards the vernacular, unlike prose, which had exclusively used the learned language. Early Cretan texts were written, as Professor Robert Browning puts it, ‘in the inherited amalgam of spoken Greek and flosculi from the learned tongue characteristic of the popular poetry of the late Byzantine period, with only occasional and unsystematic use of dialect features’. The poets Chortatzis and Kornaros, being chronologically late Cretans, largely did away with the learned characteristics and attempted to remain faithful to the forms of the Cretan dialect. The early nineteenth century poets, Vilaras from Epiros, Christopoulos from Macedonia, and Solomos from Zakynthos, tried to use a language not dissimilar to that of the folk songs and in many respects close to the spoken idiom of uneducated villagers — an idiom which presented phonological, morphological and lexical variations according to geographical location.

The objects of this inquiry are (a) to determine the extent to which Karyotakis employed elements of katharevousa in his poems, and (b) to define the character of those katharevousa elements in the context of Karyotakis’ use of modern Greek in general.

Although it has become generally accepted by critics that Constantine Cavafy (1863–1933) was influenced greatly by the Hellenistic epigram ‘in attitude, subject matter, and technique’, a close comparison of that poetic tradition and Cavafy’s poems reveals interesting differences as well as similarities. We know that Cavafy was familiar with Hellenistic literature and that he had a copy of J. W. Mackail’s Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology in his personal library. His reading, however, ‘was much more extensive than his library’. More significant than this is the evidence to be found in his poems, which range from an actual mention of ancient epigrams to obvious imitations of them. Cavafy’s poems for the most part, however, are quite original in their tone and erotic stance when compared directly to the Alexandrian epigrams.

Alexis Zorbas unwittingly displays a knowledge of the cinema when he says to the Boss, [‘Anything we couldn’t say with our mouths we said with our feet, our hands, our belly or with wild cries’.] Kazantzakis himself once said the same thing in a different way: ‘To succeed in transforming the abstract concepts into simple, clear images is my great aspiration’. These words – written to his future wife Eleni Samios and referring to the cinema’s influence on The Odyssey – are the starting point for the rest of Kazantzakis’ more complex theories on film, the distillation of the lessons he learned from motion pictures and later applied to his writing. But before continuing, we can create a helpful context for the author’s concern with film by supplying some historical background.

Resistance to enemy occupation has stood rather apart from the general history of the Second World War. Historians have been doubtful whether to treat it as a part of military and strategic history or a part of political and diplomatic history. Some have thought the less said about it the better, in any context. In the history of particular countries which suffered enemy occupation, the treatment of resistance has varied widely according to the outcome of the war. In some countries it has occupied a major place in their war-time history: Denmark and Yugoslavia, for quite different reasons, are important examples. In other occupied countries very little has been written about the occupation by professional historians: Greece is an outstanding example. Although Britain played a leading role in promoting resistance everywhere, the subject has not attracted many professional historians, other than those who had a personal engagement in it during the war.