This book explores the nexus of art, personal piety, and self-representation in the last centuries of Byzantium. Spanning the period from around 1100 to around 1450, it focuses upon the evidence of verse inscriptions, or epigrams, on works of art. Epigrammatic poetry, Professor Drpic argues, constitutes a critical - if largely neglected - source for reconstructing aesthetic and socio-cultural discourses that informed the making, use, and perception of art in the Byzantine world. Bringing together art-historical and literary modes of analysis, the book examines epigrams and other related texts alongside an array of objects, including icons, reliquaries, ecclesiastical textiles, mosaics, and entire church buildings. By attending to such diverse topics as devotional self-fashioning, the aesthetics of adornment, sacred giving, and the erotics of the icon, this study offers a penetrating and highly original account of Byzantine art and its place in Byzantine society and religious life.

Epigram, Art, and Devotion in Later Byzantium

nouns, 53 Academy (Plato’s), 70, 108, 112, 118, 135, 360, 384, 386, 390 Academy (Isocrates’), 384, 386 Acanthus/Acanthians, 224 Achaean League, 274–275, 278, 280

A companion to Greek rhetoric

Morality is one of the fundamental structures of any society, enabling complex groups to form, negotiate their internal differences and persist through time. In the first book-length study of Roman popular morality, Dr Morgan argues that we can recover much of the moral thinking of people across the Empire. Her study draws on proverbs, fables, exemplary stories and gnomic quotations, to explore how morality worked as a system for Roman society as a whole and in individual lives. She examines the range of ideas and practices and their relative importance, as well as questions of authority and the relationship with high philosophy and the ethical vocabulary of documents and inscriptions. The Roman Empire incorporated numerous overlapping groups, whose ideas varied according to social status, geography, gender and many other factors. Nevertheless it could and did hold together as an ethical community, which was a significant factor in its socio-political success.

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Popular Morality in the Early Roman Empire

List of tables Preface Map of Egypt 1. Introduction: setting the scene 2. Structures of enkyklios paideia 3. Literature I: the writing on the wall, and elsewhere 4. Literature II: maxims and morals 5. Grammar and the power of language 6. Rhetoric: art and articulation 7. All in the mind: images of cognitive development Conclusion Appendix I: Egyptian roots of Hellenistic education Appendix II: index of papyri in school-hands Tables Bibliography Index of names General index.

Frames of mind : literate education in the Hellenistic and Roman worlds

Introduction Part I. The Professional Rhetor and Theory of Authorship: 1. The philosopher's rhetoric 2. The rhetor as creator: Psellos on Gregory of Nazianzos 3. The return of the poet: mimesis and the aesthetics of variation Part II. Self-Representation: 4. Aesthetic charm and urbane ethos 5. The statue's smile: discourses of Hellenism 6. Female voice: gender and emotion Conclusion: from rhetoric to literature Appendix: books and readers in the reception of Psellos.

Michael Psellos: Rhetoric and Authorship in Byzantium

magine a world in which prospective historians were required by their teachers first to write historical fiction (e.g., about trials for treason set during the American Revolutionary War), to invent stories in the sciencefiction genre of “alternate history” (e.g., what if Hitler had won World War II?), and to perform impersonations of historical characters for school plays and public festivals. What would be the effect of such a course of training on historians? Would they see this training as being in any way at odds with the project of writing history? If so, what would they do about it? And what about the reception of their writings by their contemporaries, many of whom would have completed the same course of instruction? Readers of historians who had been trained in this way might want some assurances that these writers had broken off their earlier dalliances with historical fiction, alternate history, and impersonations of Napoleon and Gandhi; had declared their serious intent “first, to do no historical harm”; and were now pursuing their vocation with minds clear of such juvenile pursuits. Or perhaps not. This analogy is intended to capture something of the foreignness of Greek rhetorical education, the common heritage of elite Greek males from the fourth century b.c.e. to the end of antiquity. After learning to read and write, boys went on to study Classical literature, compose a number of different exercises in prose called progymnasmata 2 (fable, narrative, anecdote, maxim, refutation, confirmation, commonplace, encomium, invective,

Learning Greek History in the Ancient Classroom: The Evidence of the Treatises on Progymnasmata

Ancient Greek and Roman compositional instruction, as evidenced in Greek handbooks on the progymnasmata and Quintilian9s Institutio Oratoria, included a strong moral component. The importance of moral pedagogy to ancient teachers and theorists is seen not only in the themes and contents of the exercises, but also in their sequencing and justification.

Better living through prose composition? Moral and compositional pedagogy in ancient Greek and Roman progymnasmata

Preface Abbreviations Introduction Part One. The Ancient Commentaries on Demosthenes 1. Form and Transmission 2. Sources, Agenda, and Readership 3. Didymus Part Two. Texts, Translations, and Notes 1. Commentary on Dem. 9--11 and 13 (P.Berol.inv. 9780) 2. Didymus Fragments in Harpocration 3. Lexicon to Dem. 23 (P.Berol.inv. 5008) 4. Commentary on Dem. 5 (P.Berol.inv. 21188) 5. Commentary on Dem. 22 (P.Stras.inv. 84) 6. Lexicon to Dem. 21 (P.Rain.inv. 7) Appendix: Rhetorical Prologue and Commentary on Dem. 21 (P.Lond.Lit. 179) Bibliography General Index Index Verborum Index Locorum

Interpreting a Classic: Demosthenes and His Ancient Commentators

Interpreting a classic

Abstract This article examines the anonymous progymnasmata in John Doxapatres' commentary on Aphthonius' Progymnasmata for evidence about their authorship, origin, and relations to other progymnasmata. These exercises include three chreias, a refutation and confirmation of the myth of Ganymedes, an encomium and invective of Agamemnon, a comparison of the grapevine and olive tree, and an ethopoeia on the deposition of the emperor Michael V Kalaphates. In addition to providing a formal rhetorical analysis of the exercises, the article offers further support for the view of R. F. Hock and E. N. O'Neil (The Chreia and Ancient Rhetoric: Classroom Exercises, 2002) that Doxapatres did not compose these exercises and that they all derive from a single collection. In an appendix, it argues that George Pachymeres, in his comparison of the olive tree and grapevine, used the anonymous comparison in Doxapatres and not the four parallel exercises by Ps.-Nicolaus.

Craig A. Gibson

Papers

Learning Greek History in the Ancient Classroom: The Evidence of the Treatises on Progymnasmata

Better living through prose composition? Moral and compositional pedagogy in ancient Greek and Roman progymnasmata

Interpreting a Classic: Demosthenes and His Ancient Commentators

Interpreting a classic

The anonymous progymnasmata in John Doxapatres' Homiliae in Aphthonium