Arethas (c.860-c.939), archbishop of Caesarea, is one of the most important figures in the flowering of literary culture in late 9th- and early 10th-century Byzantium. To date, most scholarship has focused on Arethas’s role in preserving works of classical Greek thought. Yet, Arethas also played a critical role in the transmission and reception of Greek…
The great task of preparing a compilation of law was commissioned by Justinian to a group of law professors (antecessores), among others. The same men gave lectures to law students, while their teaching was fragmentarily transmitted in the form eventually preserved as the so-called old scholia to the Basilica. It is therefore reasonable to assume…
With the ‘performative’ and ‘oralist’ turns of recent years, we are taking the live performance of Byzantine texts more seriously—and we are beginning to explore the status of our manuscripts as guidelines for live performance, punctuation and all. What we lack, of course, is the sense of how these manuscripts were realized in their original…