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.

Based upon a database of 7,390 lead seals that bear religious figural imagery in conjunction with the names and official titles of their owners, this paper investigates the contribution of lead seals to our understanding of the choice of various religious images as an expression of personal piety. The study examines the roles of homonymity, gender, family names and official titles in individuals’ selections of sacred images for their seals. Tables and figures display the numerical and statistical results that are compared to trends found in other media.

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.

The author reads an epigram by John Mauropous as an engagement with epic and biblical traditions. Critical studies of exile and return from different eras of the Greek literary tradition by Émile Benveniste, Gregory Nagy and Nancy Sultan are used to provide a theoretical approach to the tradition with which Mauropous engages. It is suggested that Mauropous’ wanderings in the territory of the xenos and return to the familiar world of the philos, and especially his personification of his home as a trophos (nurse), allude to Homer, and that epic language and motifs strengthen the poet’s assertion of selfhood and make ancient literary themes relevant to Mauropous’ life as a scholar and churchman.

Throughout the history of the Fatimid empire (909–1176/296–566), Byzantine sources support the idea that contact was kept to a minimum for trade. However, Arab historians reveal that in fact al-Mustansir engaged in correspondence, gift exchanges and embassies with several emperors. Descriptions of these mutual relations in the reign of al-Mustansir are a political mirror to the international effects of events such as the arrival of the Seljuk Turks, uprisings and civil war, and are also a fascinating insight into the diplomacy of Muslims and Christians banding together at a time of significant crisis for both.

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 focuses on two questions: the application of current historical linguistic methodologies to vernacular Medieval Greek in comparison to similar research in other medieval languages, and the notion of linguistic variation in Medieval Greek, in parallel with the possible methods for its fruitful investigation.

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.

This article makes some preliminary remarks on Seferis’ photography, focusing mainly on its poetics as an act of seeing. The main intention is to highlight the direct relationship between Seferis’ visual sensibility and his poetry. The article primarily discusses some technical features of Seferis’ photography. It then examines his photography as a visual diary and draws attention to those cases where it is obvious that photographs hide behind specific poems. Finally, the article discusses the differences between photography and poetry regarding their relation to time. In this context, the poem ‘Με τον τρόπο του Γ.Σ.’, which makes explicit reference to photography, is examined.

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.

The poetry of Nicolas Calas critically set out to challenge the poetics of Greekness. Although Calas is now acknowledged as an important avant-garde poet, his divergence from the (conservative) modernist search for a new Greekness was a significant transgression in the 1930s and contributed to his marginalized literary position. His comeback as a poet in the 1960s was likewise characterized by his critique of a new form of populist Greekness which he opposed in a series of sharp satires. This article will examine the nature of his challenge to Greekness and in this context also present two previously unpublished poems that further highlight the content of Calas’ critique.