Although Kazantzakis had a profound religious vision that may even be compatible in some ways with Christianity, he makes certain Christians extraordinarily angry. The most recent incident involved Martin Scorsese’s 1988 film of The Last Temptation. Rev. Bill Bright of the Campus Crusade for Christ offered to buy the master print of the film for $10,000,000 so that he could burn it. When the distributor refused and the film opened, a moviegoer attempting to see the picture in New York City had to run a gauntlet of Catholic monks on their knees praying for his soul and Protestant fundamentalists haranguing him about damnation, for which he would surely qualify if her merely entered the theatre. But this was only the most recent incident. In the 1950s the same novel, plus some pages of Kapetán Mihális, inspired the Greek Orthodox Church to prosecute Kazantzakis and attempt to excommunicate him. Kazantzakis responded: ‘You gave me your curse, holy Fathers. I give you a blessing: May your conscience be as clear as mine, and may you be as moral and religious as I am. The same novel was placed on the Vatican’s Index of Forbidden Books. And when it appeared in the United States in 1960, it moved Protestant fundamentalists in California to insist that it be removed from libraries — a tactic that turned the book into a best seller. But the Greek Orthodox Church’s opposition goes back much further. Bishop Athanasios of Syros, in a memorandum to the Church’s Synod in 1928, condemned Kazantzakis’ major philosophical work, Askitikì, plus some journalistic articles, as anti-religious, quoting — as did Bill Bright — isolated passages out of context, for example: ‘God … is not the kindly family-man we thought. He is cruel, he does not care about individuals.’ And when Kazantzakis dared in the same year in a public lecture in Athens to suggest that if we want to understand what faith is we should look to Russia rather than the Church, he was subpoenaed by the public prosecutor for insulting the state and disturbing civil tranquility.

Cavafy’s interest in Byzantium dates from a very early stage in his poetic career. In fact, the Byzantine empire appears to have been the first historical period to attract the self-styled ‘historian-poet’s’ attention. Some of Cavafy’s earliest historical poems and many of the poems of his maturity bear witness to this, and several of his early prose writings are also indicative of his keen interest in the period. In June 1882, shortly before and during his family’s temporary removal to Constantinople, Cavafy began to keep a journal called ‘Constantinopoliad. An Epic’. Ten years later, he wrote a newspaper article on the Byzantine poets, . The reason for Cavafy’s early and enduring interest in the Byzantine period, especially Middle and Late Byzantium, may well be connected with the fact that Cavafy had family roots in Constantinople. A second factor is that, for a Greek of the Diaspora, Late Antiquity, when the centre of Hellenism was no longer Athens, held a particular fascination. Cavafy was able, by means of Byzantium, to lay claim to an elevated genealogy, both for himself (as a descendant of the Phanariots) and for his poetry, as central to (through being descended from) the poetic tradition of Byzantine Egypt, rather than peripheral to the Modern Athenian School.

An author Edgar Allan Poe was initially introduced to the Greek public of the late nineteenth century by Roi’des, and soon became well-known through a series of translations in the contemporary press. ‘The Man of the Crowd’ (1840) appeared in a somewhat adapted translation in the journal Eστíα of 1890. Five years later, Michael Metsakes, who was familiar with Poe’s tales, published in the newspaper a short story which, despite its affinities to ‘The Man of the Crowd’, preserves a remarkable individuality. What rather brings these two texts together, otherwise products of two quite different cultures, is the awareness shared by their authors of the rise of a new era. Writing just before the Civil War, Poe experiences the tensions connected with the upsurge of Jacksonian democracy. The period witnessed an unprecedented increase in urban population following the transformation of the United States from an agricultural country into a commercial and industrial one. The American dream of freedom and justice had to come to terms with the fear of the mob, economic inequality, and man’s dependence on the machine. Sensitive to the new cultural situation which was beginning to emerge in his country, Poe deplores America’s increasing industrialisation and is preoccupied with the disintegration of personality it generates. Poe’s awareness of the new age is apparent in ‘The Man of the Crowd’, a text noticed by both Baudelaire and Walter Benjamin for its anticipation of modernity.

The church of St. John the Forerunner in the district known as Oxeia in Constantinople was the centre of a major healing-cult in the sixth and seventh centuries. Beneath the high altar (MA 24, p. 33, 27), protected from the aisles by railings (27, p. 39, 14) and enclosed in a sarcophagus made of lead placed within a crypt, were laid the relics of St. Artemius (33, p. 50, 20, 36, 30-37, 1). On the right of the altar was the chapel of St. Febronia (22, p. 29, 11, 24, p. 33, 26-7 etc.). This martyr also featured prominently in the cult as she appears to have been a kind of assistant or stand-in for Artemius 24, p. 34, 27). Her assisting role was a very necessary one as it was to her that the saint entrusted the women who came begging to be cured. This is because Artemius was only invoked in Byzantium by those who were suffering from a particular category of afflictions, viz. hernias, varioceles and especially tumours affecting the genitalia. Our knowledge of this extraordinary healing-cult is based mainly on a collection of forty-five short accounts of miraculous cures Apart from about two exceptions, all the accounts of the miraculous cures of Artemius relate to this type of illness which the author describes very simply and unblushingly in a matter-of-fact manner which makes the Miracula an interesting and valuable source to historians of Byzantine medicine.

The assumption is often made – and even stated as fact – that in the Early Byzantine period, the rock of Golgotha in Jerusalem was surmounted by a memorial cross. Such an assumption ignores the manifold problems in establishing not only whether this cross actually existed, but if so, what kind of cross it was, at what date it was put there, and by whom, and whether it was a permanent fixture. This paper will examine contemporary evidence, both textual and iconographic, in an attempt to discover whether there is any basis for positing the existence of such a cross; and it will also refer briefly, where appropriate, to the arguments or claims of modern scholars.

This essay examines the means by which hagiographies attempt to describe the presence and appearances of the Archangel Michael. It deals with several hagiographies at some length in order to demonstrate the ways in which each text persuades its audience of the Archangel’s benign proximity. It examines, in particular, the hagiographies of the miracle at Chonae since the ‘pre-history’ of this cult is relatively clear and the shrine’s activities during the Byzantine period were widely acclaimed. This essay also discusses other hagiographies, namely of the sanctuary at Monte Gargano and of the shrine described by Michael Psellus (1018-1081?). In examining these texts, certain structural similarities become apparent: access to the Archangel is made difficult by his unique angelic nature and this difficulty led to textual strategies that make Michael more firmly entrenched in the texts’ levels of narrative. The hagiographies reveal Michael’s elusive elemental force active in a landscape, and work to bind the Archangel — notionally at least — to places in order to strengthen expectation of devotional return.

Since the beginning of the 1970s the women’s/feminist theatre has gained a dominant position on the European and the American stage. Women have stormed the postmodern stage either as solo dramatists and artists or as collaborative teams, forging a new female theatre language and training audiences to new ways of theatre reception. The publication of Lizbeth Goodman’s Contemporary Feminist Theatres: To Each Her Own (Routledge, 1993), one in a long series of recent studies on women’s theatre, already heralded an advanced epoch of a polyvocal feminist theatre embracing a multiplicity of female differences along the paradigms of gender, race, sexuality and ethnicity. Within the dynamic spectrum of development and inter-cultural exchange that ensued in the field of women’s theatre the Greek women’s contribution is faceless and anaemic. The situation is both distressing and calling for systematic research, especially since the scanty sociological studies concerning the position of women in contemporary Greece are inadequate in throwing full light on such a complicated problem. In 1992 Savas Patsalidis made the first serious attempt to analyse the foetal state of women’s theatre in Greece in his article ‘Greek Female (Feminist?) Theatre: A Preliminary Approach’, published in the Greek journal Utopia (4, Nov.-Dec. 1992, 105-38). My own interest in the issue in my capacity as a feminist and drama critic springs from my long-standing research in British women’s theatre and my understandable comparative inquiry, as a Greek national, into the causes that might have led to the striking absence of an analogous phenomenon in my native country. I have deliberately used the word immaterial in the title of this paper in order to suggest, on the one hand, the relative lack of a distinct theatre discourse of women as speaking subjects and moving bodies on stage, inscribing female experience and female desire, and, on the other hand, the unimportance, in terms of power, of women theatre practitioners as still very few of them hold key positions in theatre institutions and the theatre industry.

Since the mid-1960s a large number of innovations has affected printing and publishing throughout the world. At the heart of what is now widely acknowledged as a technological revolution was the switch to photo-composition and offset lithography from ‘hot-metal’ techniques. Two principal developments may be identified — the shift from molten metal to photography pioneered in the USA, and the introduction of electronic—based processes of production and transmission (Moran, 1974: 147-261, 309-19; Clair, 1976; Marshall, 1983; Guy and Haywood, 1985). The early photo-setters were costly and were restricted to a relatively small number of sizes and typefaces. Origination remained fragmented and still had to be divided-up into a series of distinct tasks notably keyboarding, photo-typesetting, page paste-up, photographic work and final plate-making. Because of this constraint the take-up of electronic typesetting, particularly in small and medium-size printing firms, was slow. However, the arrival of micro-electronic chips paved the way for cheaper and more dependable photo-typesetting systems. Digitalisation of information enables a unification of the origination process and allows an author to prepare high quality graphics and sophisticated art work.

The attitude of the early church to war and military service is a subject which has long exercised the attention of many scholars, and doubtlessly this will continue to be the case. There are those who hold a pacifist viewpoint and argue that originally the early Christians completely rejected military service, and there are others who are opposed to this viewpoint. However, all agree on one issue, that there is far less early material on this subject than one would initially prefer. Thus, both sides have felt the need to utilise sources and materials which would otherwise lie neglected, the hagiographical accounts of the early military martyrs in particular. Debate has now centred upon a relatively small number of texts, those which have traditionally been accepted as the genuine acts of authentic military martyrs, to which ever increasing attention has been paid. Unfortunately, concentration upon these texts in particular seems to have led to a neglect of texts which are of great interest in their own right. This was inevitable given that the accounts of the military martyrs have normally been examined only as to their suitability for use as weapons in the ongoing polemic concerning the ‘true’ attitude of the early church to war. Seldom has the development of the cult of military martyrs been regarded as a historical phenomenon worthy of study in itself. Thus, it is the purpose of this note to begin to rectify this situation by drawing attention to the neglected acts of a military martyr, Varus, who allegedly suffered death in Egypt during the reign of Galerius Maximianus (305-311).

The Russian scholar V.A. Smetanin, whose work during the 1970s and 1980s dealt exclusively with Byzantine epistolography, would clearly like to think of himself as an ‘epistolologist’, occupied in the specialised field of Byzantine ‘epistolology’. Epistolology is an auxiliary discipline within history, according to Smetanin, which encompasses both theoretical and practical concerns. Its theoretical interests are to work out methods for, (a) drawing boundaries between letters and other historical documents, (b) dating letters on the basis of their epistolological markings (epistolologicheskich priznakov), and (c) understanding the introduction and assimilation of correspondence into learned discourse. On its practical side, epistolology aims to solve problems of, (a) the immediate components (nepocredstvennoe vychlenenie) of correspondence, (b) its architectonics, and finally (c), the introduction and assimilation of the epistolographic legacy into learned discourse. Smetanin opens a middle road within epistolology, too, in effect a series of ‘steps’ (stupenich) which converge on both theory and practice. Thus the so-called takes in the question of the distinguishing features of epistolography, works out its manner or conduct and (c) studies its function or use.

The publication of David Olster’s book, Roman Defeat, Christian Response and the Literary Construction of the Jew (Philadelphia 1994) marks a further stage in the recent tendency to draw attention to the role played by Jews in the events of the early seventh century. As several other scholars have done, Olster draws attention to what seems to have been a heightened awareness of Jews and Judaism by the Christian majority in Byzantium in this period and during the next century or so. A number of contemporary examples survive of the Christian anti-Jewish literary dialogue form familiar in Greek since the second century AD; what is perhaps even more striking, anti-Jewish comments and whole passages on this topic also feature in many other kinds of writing in the period, even when they have no obvious relevance to the topic. Iconophile texts are pervaded by such material, in particular the Acts of the Second Council of Nicaea in AD 787, and Jewish subject matter also appears in visual art. This review combines comments on Olster’s book with a wider consideration of the topic itself and of other recent publications touching on it; it also asks why the subject became so pressing to contemporary Christians, and makes some suggestions about the interpretation of the relevant material.