Anthony Kaldellis

The Byzantine Role in the Making of the Corpus of Classical Greek Historiography: A Preliminary Investigation

The selective survival of the corpus of ancient Greek historiography was in large part due to Byzantine historical and religious interests, combined with the ancient valorization, on literary grounds, of the three Classical historians. Our corpus generally reflects the Byzantine interest in Roman history, especially regime-changes, and sacred history, especially the Hellenistic context of Jewish history. Selections from ancient historians dealing with those themes were, in some cases, circulating independently already from the tenth century. The Byzantines had little interest in Hellenistic or local histories. This paper concludes by examining two moments (or ‘indices’) of survival and selection, Photios’ Bibliotheke and the Constantinian Excerpta. Our corpus was largely in place by the time of the Excerpta, and the loss of some texts read by Photios may have been facilitated by the process of transliteration but was due to the same selective interests.

Byzantine Matters by Averil Cameron (review)

outrage. The chapter concludes by comparing this rivalry between Shenoute and Gesios (an “Egyptian Libanius” [105]) with Libanius’s opposition to local monastics in Syria. This comparison shows the elite’s general dislike of religious intolerance, as they would have characterized Shenoute’s “attack on a private house” (117); but López argues that it reveals equally that Shenoute’s defense was needed against pagans, Christians, and “above all the imperial government” (125). A short conclusion reviews, succinctly and clearly, the book’s main arguments that highlight the central strengths and contributions of this work. This is an important and valuable study. Two polemical stances that López assumes in the introduction, however, are dubious and risk undermining the book’s strengths. First, López seems to suggest that the disciplines of religious studies and history are unconnected, leading him to argue that scholarship on Shenoute today, while praiseworthy, is limited to “a purely religious perspective” (3). López is quite correct that much scholarship examines Shenoute’s role as a monastic leader and his opposition to traditional Egyptian religion; however, such work is relevant to López’s own objectives. His neglect of studies of monasticism, for example, leads him to claim that most Egyptian monks—except Shenoute— were “separate” from the world, a view that scholars, primarily James Goerhing, have largely debunked. So too López fails to connect Shenoute’s self-presentation as a prophet in the civic realm (24) with Shenoute’s similar rhetoric within his monastic texts. Second, I would disagree that Shenoute’s writings are more important as “historical sources” than for their “literary qualities” (13); there is no need (and no evidence, beyond the bare fact that Shenoute knew Greek) to presume that most of Shenoute’s Coptic texts would have originally been delivered (sermons) or written (letters) in Greek (13). Shenoute’s Coptic texts should be read as an important literary and linguistic corpus in their own right, rather than as quasi-translations from Greek. These criticisms aside, López’s work does, as he suggests, extend our understanding of Shenoute by providing a rich analysis of the economic conditions of both late antique Egypt and the Roman Empire as a whole.

Transliteration of Books

This article has no abstract. Keywords: manuscripts; history of the book and printing

Classical Scholarship In Twelfth-Century Byzantium

This chapter surveys what may justly be called classical scholarship in twelfth-century Byzantium, especially the commentaries on ancient texts. By discussing the different methods, goals, audiences, and ideological parameters of these largely neglected works, the chapter intends to situate the commentaries on Aristotles Nicomachean Ethics into a vibrant culture of scholarly production and consumption. But the very notion of classical scholarship in Byzantium calls for explanation and requires an ideological accounting. The chapter concludes that, classical scholarship flourished in twelfth-century Byzantium; it had a diverse and extensive social background; its constituent branches- grammar, rhetoric, philosophy, manuscript editions, etc.-were interconnected at all levels; and it was pursued by serious and intelligent scholars who had a sound knowledge of Greek history and literature. Keywords: Aristotles Nicomachean Ethics ; classical scholarship; twelfth-century Byzantium

Plague and the End of Antiquity: The Pandemic of 541–750, and: Justinian's Flea: Plague, Empire, and the Birth of Europe (review)

Walmsley presents the results of the excavation of an extraordinary eighth-century courtyard house at Pella, destroyed by a violent earthquake and thus containing a snapshot of Palestinian domestic life in 749 ce. These studies are the highlight of the book, but are somewhat marred by unreadable small plans. For anyone looking for an overview of the physical evidence for urban housing in Late Antiquity, this is a useful book indeed. The articles and attendant bibliography discuss or allude to the lion’s share of excavated material. A few papers—particularly in the fi nal, monographic section—are testament to the power of artifact assemblages and detailed stratigraphic analysis to excavate not just houses, but generations of domestic lives. Anyone looking for new, probing analyses of domestic space or its relationship with late antique society, however, is likely to be disappointed. The introduction provides only a superfi cial discussion of the major methodological issues involved in reconstituting “society” from its houses and almost every essay embraces, and indeed, as Ellis himself specifi cally advances, a purely “functionalist” approach to domestic architecture. In the great majority of the chapters, rooms are attributed according to function, something Roman archaeologists ceased to do over a decade ago as the multi-functionality of domestic space became apparent. Several authors claim or assume that late antique houses exhibit increasing segregation of functions (particularly dining and reception): this may very well be true, but these same authors’ a priori embrace of functionalist room typologies leaves the hypothesis almost wholly untested. The rhetorical, phenomenological, or gendered qualities of domestic space or space syntax analysis—all approaches to houses now fruitfully used in other fi elds—are hardly touched upon in this volume, and the relationship between physical remains and textually-derived social history is only superfi cially contemplated (evident even in the otherwise excellent bibliographic essays, where the “historical” sections are incomplete and out-of-date). In collecting together so much of the evidence for late antique housing between two covers, the volume has performed a great service; in failing to ponder more deeply on its methods and preconceptions, it has missed an opportunity.