In Byzantium, anger was more than a private emotion; it functioned as a strategic tool in the exercise of imperial authority. The present paper examines how anger was framed, evaluated, and functionalised within Byzantine discourses of power. Rather than focusing on spontaneous emotional outbursts, it highlights the performative and rhetorical staging of anger and its…
This paper investigates the representation and embodiment of compunction and repentance as experienced by penitent sinners within a selection of post-Byzantine katanyktic poems in political verse from Mount Athos, as edited by Gr.Th. Stathes in 1977. Through close textual analysis, the study aims to delineate the literary strategies employed in these hymns to articulate the…
This presentation explores the stance of meteorology as a cultural practice in Late Antiquity as it emerges from a 6th-century text: the De Ostentis by John Lydus. Meteorology in antiquity has recently received some attention (see Taub 2003), but the focus has almost always been on catastrophic events, rather than on ‘ordinary’ meteorology, and Late…
This paper presents selected findings from my doctoral research, which investigates the presence, function, and narrative role of emotions in Middle Byzantine historiographical texts (8th–10th centuries). While emotions—or pathe, as the Byzantines termed them—have long attracted attention in classical studies, the systematic study of how Byzantine authors, particularly historiographers, conceptualized and employed emotions remains a…
In some instances, reports from ecclesiastical courtrooms read like the final acts of a tragedy, with consequences – both in the temporal social realm and in the eternal spiritual domain – weighing heavily on the participants. The final judgment of the court is not the Last Judgment. Thus, the matter continues as an open-ended spiritual…
This paper examines examples of portable art illuminating the concept of poikilia: namely, the use of different materials and techniques within a single work of art. This was a device that contributed to the centrality of the iconographical expression in the artistic and religious production of Byzantium. Following most recent interpretations on the significance of…