Imperial Greek Research Articles

Beyond the Second Sophistic: Adventures in Greek Postclassicism by Tim Whitmarsh

BOOK REVIEWS Beyond the Second Sophistic: Adventures in Greek Postclassicism. By TIM WHITMARSH. Berkeleyand LosAngeles: UniversityofCalifornia Press, 2013. Pp. xiii +278. Hardcover, $49.95. ISBN 978-0-520-27681-9. hitmarsh’s Goodwin Award-winning “Adventures” lives up to its title: itisindeedasafariintosomewildandwoollyterritory,includingforays intosomeoftheleastcanonicaltextsinanacademicfield—Classics— oftenobsessedwith canonicity.Even the first paragraph includes a shot acrossthe bow: for Whitmarsh, the notion of postclassicism requires us to “rethink classicist categories inherited from the nineteenth century” (1). Thus what might seem a book geared towards contemporary reception—“beyond” in terms of chronology —is really “beyond” in terms of ideology: how (and why) we’ve structured periods of the ancient world so that they seem to flow ineluctably from the previous to the next. For Whitmarsh, one consequence of this sort of macronarrative is a marginalization (almostliteral,here)ofalternativevoicesandliteratures:Jews,Christians, Egyptians, and “bad” (or to put it more economically, under-valued) poets. Indeed , Whitmarsh sees in poetry a more valuable entrance to politics than even prose:inpoetry,thehoarytropesof“antiquity”areredeployedtocunningeffectas poetsrenegotiate, though “traditional” verse, their power and privilege under new regimes. One value—though not necessarily the value—of studying the so-called Second Sophistic is thus to upend previously established “hierarchies of cultural value” (6) and to rethink how we periodize antiquityinto neatcategories and into more(orless!)privilegedauthors.Whitmarshasksus,rather,tosuspendinherited prejudicesand to investigate,with fresh eyes, these upstart artistsof 50 to 300 CE. Of the fifteen essays that comprise the volume, ten are previously published (and here revised), but all contribute to Whitmarsh’s overarching aim: to treat SecondSophisticthinkersasphilosophersofacontestedpastandanuncertainfuture . The book itself is divided into three general arcs: on fiction and fictionality (particularly as touching upon Greek prose); on the cultural significance of both prose and poetry in changed political circumstances; and, in “Beyond the Second W 236 BOOK REVIEWS Sophistic,” on the cultural poetics of Ezekiel’s Exagoge and on specifically Jewish receptionsofprevious Greek literature. Whitmarsh’stourthroughfictionalitybeginswith“TheInventionofFiction,” a sustained critique of teleological accounts of the Imperial Greek novel. (Teleologyisoften thewhipping-boyofthisstudy.)Whitmarsh particularlytargetsnarratives that privilege the importance of Hellenistic fiction over later Roman cultural considerations and which likewise over-emphasize the Greek-ness of the novel at the expense of non-Greek influences. Subsequent chapters variously examine the consequences of Whitmarsh’s will-to-demolish, including a reconsideration of the narrative worlds of the socalled “Romances”(chapter2);theinterplayoftheology,historicity,andfictionality in EuhemerusofMessene’sSacred Inscription (chapter 3);and complementary accountsof the literary“I” and Lucius’ Ass (chapters 4 and 5). (This last featuresa terrific précis of actor and auctor, adapted from Winkler’s ground-breaking narratological study of Apuleius (81–82)). Devotés of now-popular Philostratus will want to consult Whitmarsh’s chapter on Heroicus, which interweaves considerations of cultural identity with geography, genre (i.e. the mise en scene is “superpastoral ” (108)),and, ofcourse, fictionality. Whitmarsh’smiddlesection,“PoetryandProse,”examinestheinterplayofall things Greek and Roman, and his insightful, incisive chapter nine, on the Greek epigram,isamodelofitstype.Atfirstitseemstobetravelingalongwell-wornpaths in its analysis of epigram as an essential component of the Roman system of patronage : poetry as potlatch. But it is a virtue of Whitmarsh’s scholarship that he states exactly what he’s arguing against, in this case both (1) a Bundy-influenced interpretationin whicheveryaspectofa poem contributesto the praiseof the laudandusand (2)deconstructiveinterpretations(à la Newlands)thatemphasizerather the elements of covert criticism (148).1 For Whitmarsh, both schools of interpretation ultimately flatten the complexity of Greek epigram, which triangulates as well the element of the consuming Greco-Roman public. In this way, it is (paradoxically) a public display of private gift-giving and thus a commentary on the relationship between Greek artists and Roman colonizers: who is really “gifting ”culture towhom? Epigramsforclose-readingincludeAntipater2,Crinagoras 24, and the extremely weird Diodorus 1 (with its odd description of the “city of 1 Specifically cited in this context is Carole Newlands, Statius' Silvae and the Poetics of Empire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. BOOK REVIEWS 237 Remus”); the chapter thus exemplifies Whitmarsh’s style, which ricochets betweencomplextheoreticalconstructsanddetailedreadingsofindividualpassages . The final arc of the study, on Ezekiel’s Exagoge, and on Jewish writers grappling with Greek myth, makes good on the author’s promise to consider Greek literaryhistoryfromneglectedviewpoints;inparticular,Whitmarsh’sexamination of the fragmentary Hellenistic Greek...

Character and Convention in the Letters of Eusebius’ Ecclesiastical History

Letters inserted into Eusebius’ Ecclesiastical History can be interpreted fruitfully within the context of the usage of embedded letters in imperial Greek literature. Elite Greek narrative texts regularly attributed letters to famous Greeks of the past in order to model elite convention and to reveal heroic character. Similarly, Eusebius’ subtle and manipulative reproduction of letters by past Christians foregrounds these Christians as exemplars of proper ecclesiastical conduct. Eusebius’ letters represent wide communication, harmonious resolution of differences, and conformity to past Christians’ conduct as essential to Christian identity, particularly in his narratives of the paschal and rebaptism controversies. Eusebius presented epistolary conventions so as to render Christian character acceptable to elite Greek-speaking audiences.

New Epigrams of Palladas: A Fragmentary Papyrus Codex (P.CtYBR inv. 4000) by Kevin W. Wilkinson

370 PHOENIX Sophistic, such as the Alexander Romance (Chapter Six). Most intriguing of all in this section is the eighth chapter on art and text (or “pictorialism,” 123), the underlying importance of ecphrasis behind the novels’ fictionality (above all Achilles Tatius), and the androcentric viewing of parturition as analogous to literary reproduction and mimesis. Whitmarsh does a great service to imperial Greek studies in Part Two by dissenting from the communis opinio that poetic production largely dwindled in the face of energetic prose writings, but by asserting too that the dichotomy between prose and poetic creativity , without cross-over and as separate literary classifications, is unhelpful and unreflective of the nature of this prosopography. He ranges across a broad spectrum of texts, from Mesomedes (Chapter Ten) to Lucian’s paratragedies (Chapter Eleven). The third part of the book, and the shortest, makes the furthest forays beyond the Second Sophistic into Semitic texts which appropriated the very Greek paradigms of literary identities usually reserved only for imperial Greek literature (as discussed in Chapter Thirteen, on Ezekiel’s Exagoge). He also expertly unpicks the significance of the Solymoi in Greek (especially) epic, and analyses the Homeric intertextuality in Theodotus’ epic of the second century c.e. “One of the many reasons why we need to travel ‘beyond the Second Sophistic’ lies . . . in the excessive Hellenocentrism underpinning it” (211). The Second Sophistic, as a notion, as a term, and the texts which traditionally belong to the early imperial period, have been subject to a great deal of modern, academic mythology. Whitmarsh has successfully exploded the Rohdean assumptions about national identity, inheritance, and anxieties, has broadened the canon of texts to show that it is not all about being Greek under Rome, and, at the same time, has treated his readers to cogent analysis of a number of imperial texts Lucianic and novelistic, but non-traditional and understudied works too. This collection of essays is a treasure-house of insights, shaped within a sometimes polemical template which will surely shift the discourse and the future of scholarship on imperial Greek literature. University of Edinburgh Calum A. Maciver New Epigrams of Palladas: A Fragmentary Papyrus Codex (P.CtYBR inv. 4000). By Kevin W. Wilkinson. Durham: American Society of Papyrologists (American Studies in Papyrology 52). 2012. Pp. xi, 214, 12 plates. One of the most exciting aspects of papyrology is that every now and again papyri turn up with previously unknown literary works, such as most recently the fragment containing two new poems by Sappho.1 The volume under review is the much anticipated edition by K. Wilkinson of about sixty new epigrams of the fourth-century a.d. epigrammatist Palladas.2 This may seem substantial, but as the subtitle of the book indicates the poems are preserved only in fragments. They nevertheless are an extremely important addition to the approximately 150 epigrams by this late antique author already known from the Greek Anthology. The fragments, of unknown provenance, were acquired by the Beinecke Library at Yale University from an antiquities dealer in 1996. As set out in the Preface, various 1 D. Obbink, “Two New Poems by Sappho,” ZPE 189 (2014) 32–49. 2 The edition was announced first in K. W. Wilkinson, “Palladas and the Age of Constantine,” JRS 99 (2009) 36–60, at 42. BOOK REVIEWS/COMPTES RENDUS 371 people worked on them until they were eventually handed to Wilkinson to prepare for publication. This situation is reflected in the Introduction, which contains contributions by B. Babcock on the reconstruction of the codex, R. Duttenhöfer on the palaeography and A. Watanabe on the metre, though the rest of the introduction, the text and commentary , and the overall redaction of the book are by Wilkinson. In the first section of the Introduction, Babcock discusses the rationale behind the adopted reconstruction of the codex, in particular the order of the six bifolia that survive. Duttenhöfer then continues with an important discussion of the hand, which is remarkable for its documentary tendencies and can therefore be compared with a large number of parallels. As a result, she assigns it to the “relatively secure parameters” of ca 280–340. After a short section on orthography...

Local Knowledge and Microidentities in the Imperial Greek World

Local Knowledge and Microidentities in the Imperial Greek World

L’Homosexualité féminine dans l’Antiquité grecque et romaine by Sandra Boehringer (review)

Reviewed by: L’Homosexualité féminine dans l’Antiquité grecque et romaine by Sandra Boehringer Kirk Ormand Sandra Boehringer. L’Homosexualité féminine dans l’Antiquité grecque et romaine. Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2007. 405 pp. Paper, €35.00. Until recently, I held several informed assumptions about sexuality in the ancient world: (a) that without exception the ancient Greeks and Romans did not define categories of sexual activity by the sex of the object of desire (as in the modern categories of hetero- and homosexual); (b) that female homoerotic activity occupied roughly the same space of social value in ancient Greece as in ancient Rome; (c) that in so far as it could be discerned, female homoerotic activity was depicted in Greece and Rome according to the male pederastic model; (d) that no significant discourse existed about a form of female homoeroticism that was outside of the asymmetric norm defined by such a model; (e) that in keeping with the male pederastic model, women who were sexually attracted to other women were figured as gender deviants, and particularly as being masculine; and (f) that such women were regularly figured as having monstrously large clitorises which were thought—fantastically—to mimic an erect phallus. Thanks to Sandra Boehringer’s incisive study, I now believe every one of these assumptions to be wrong. Boehringer does three things remarkably well in this book. She argues for the presence of an ancient Greek and Roman discourse about female-female sexual behavior. She demonstrates convincingly that there was an understanding of such behavior that was entirely outside of discussions of hermaphroditism and/or women with unusual masculine traits. And finally, she traces shifts and developments in attitudes toward this idea of female homoeroticism with acute attention to the historical contexts of her literary, visual, and scientific sources. Unlike some other critics who have wanted to see a notion of modern “lesbianism” in the ancient world, moreover, Boehringer develops her arguments within a careful Foucauldian framework. As she says late in the book, “une catégorie n’a de valeur que dans un système, et le système de valeurs des Anciens n’est pas le nôtre” (362). Unlike that of Hallett and Brooten, then, Boehringer’s female homoeroticism is not a transhistorical essence that has been curiously interpreted by the Greeks and Romans. Rather, Boehringer sees a separate category of sexual behavior about which the Greeks and Romans wrote, often obliquely, sometimes disparagingly but, surprisingly, only very rarely with a suggestion that such behavior presented a problem. After laying out her theoretical approach, Boehringer proceeds chronologically, beginning with Greek lyric poetry, including sections on early Greek myth, Attic pottery, Greek comedy, Greek philosophy (esp. Plato and Aristotle), Hellenistic poetry, Augustan poetry (esp. Ovid), Roman satire and invective (Petronius, Martial, Juvenal), a brief section on scientific and astrological writings, and ending with an epilogue on late imperial Greek literature (Lucian). I will focus here on some of the readings that provide the most important challenges to current scholarship on ancient sexual practice. Boehringer’s reading of Sappho, which draws on the work of Winkler and [End Page 163] Stehle, is important for later developments in the book. She is careful to distinguish the “I” of the poem (sometimes, as in poem 1, the multiple Sapphos within the narrative frame) from the figure of Sappho the author (54). She then goes on to demonstrate that, contrary to the arguments of scholars in the middle of the last century, the language that the narrator uses to describe her love affairs is the (usually euphemistic) language of physical pleasure typical of archaic Greek lyric (56–58). But what is particularly important about Sappho’s expressions of desire is that, “cet érôs n’est jamais décrit comme une différence stigmatisée par le monde extérieur et condamnée par la société.” Even more to the point, in a complex poem like 31 (φαίνεταί μοι), the speaker draws no distinction between the feeling of desire expressed by the speaker and the desire suggested to be felt by the young man in the poem who sits opposite the beloved. In fact, as Boehringer makes abundantly clear, no...

Book ReviewHomer between History and Fiction in Imperial Greek Literature. By Lawrence Kim. Greek Literature and Culture in the Roman World. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Pp. [xi] + 246.

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewBook Review Homer between History and Fiction in Imperial Greek Literature. By Lawrence Kim. Greek Literature and Culture in the Roman World. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Pp. [xi] + 246.Daniel S. RichterDaniel S. RichterUniversity of Southern California Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Classical Philology Volume 107, Number 3July 2012 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/665638 Views: 17Total views on this site For permission to reuse, contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

The Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Constantinople in the Midst of Politics: The Cold War, the Cyprus Question, and the Patriarchate, 1949-1959

The political developments that eventually resulted in the founding of the Turkish nation-state marked drastic changes in the status and strength of the Greek Orthodox patriarchate of Constantinople as an institution and of the patriarch(s) as its head. Following heated debates at the peace negotiations between the Turkish and the Allied delegations at Lausanne, at which the partriarchate's removal from its historical seat at Phanar in Istanbul was insistently advocated by the Turkish representatives, the patriarchate was finally given the right to retain its position on the condition of renouncing “all political and non-ecclesiastic attributes.”1 The rationale of the Turkish delegation's demand for the partiarchate's removal from Istanbul emanated from their perception of the patriarchate as a “fifth-column” that had acted to the detriment of the Turkish national interests in the past. According to this perception, which resurged from time to time in the following decades, the patriarchate and the Ottoman Empire's Greek Orthodox community had been engaged in disloyal activities against the state and had become an instrument of foreign intervention in the Ottoman-Turkish domestic affairs. Specifically, it was considered the “agent of Greek imperialism in Turkey.”2 Consequently, it was not surprising that the leadership of the new Turkish nation-state made absolutely sure that the Treaty of Lausanne (1923), the founding treaty of the Turkish nation-state, eliminated all the privileges that the patriarchate had enjoyed, especially those related to civil jurisdiction and secular functions. Thereafter, the patriarchate became a purely religious organization authorized only for religious and moral affairs of its adherents—the Turkish citizens of the Greek Orthodox religion—whose numbers decreased dramatically following the exchange of populations between Greece and Turkey,3 and the status of the patriarch(s) was restricted to spiritual affairs.4 Still, the patriarchate continued to be suspicious in the eyes of the Turkish statesmen, and accordingly, all its activities were put under surveillance.

Homer between History and Fiction in Imperial Greek Literature by Lawrence Kim

Homer between History and Fiction in Imperial Greek Literature by Lawrence Kim

Local Knowledge and Microidentities in the Imperial Greek World by Tim Whitmarsh

BOOK REVIEWS/COMPTES RENDUS 207 The conclusion also presents some “alternative scenarios” in order to see whether or not Hannibal could have won if he had taken a different approach. It is always dangerous to engage in speculative history, since the actors in each case would have understood the course of action they pursued as the most logical at the time. Fronda’s analysis, however, indicates that the main alternative course of action, namely for Hannibal to have stayed in Etruria after the battle of Trasimene and create disloyalty among Rome’s Etruscan allies, would have created the same problems that he faced in the south: divided local elites and various inter-state conflicts would have made his eventual victory equally unlikely. On the other hand, Hannibal might have been more successful if he had managed to make his allies fight by themselves, independently from the main Carthaginian army, and given them a more active role in his overall strategy. Fronda never explores this possibility fully, although he does mention isolated Italian military activities. The book comes with fifteen maps, a welcome tool in studying the often confusing events; in short, it presents an insightful and simulating analysis of this crucial period and should be read by anyone who is interested in Rome’s growth towards Mediterranean hegemony. University of Nottingham Saskia Roselaar Local Knowledge and Microidentities in the Imperial Greek World. By Tim Whitmarsh. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2010. Pp. xiii, 228. “A people living in isolation on an island,” Tim Whitmarsh writes, “would not think of themselves as ‘local’ ” (2). Indeed, the idea of the local is only possible in the context of what Whitmarsh calls “supralocal perspectives” (2). It is an interesting observation and one that takes on additional cultural and political importance in imperial contexts. As Clifford Ando puts it in his contribution to the volume, “empires distinguish themselves in history, from nation states in quality, and from each other in degree in their success in managing and exploiting diversity” (18). Several of the essays in this volume attempt to grapple in some way with the dialectic of the local and the global (what Whitmarsh characterizes as the “relational nature of identity” [3]) in the early Roman empire. If there is a single question that runs throughout this collection (both implicitly and explicitly), it is this: how are we to understand expressions of local tradition or local identity in the face of ecumenical visions of a culturally and ethnically homogenous empire? At the outset, Whitmarsh locates both ancient and modern responses to this question along a continuum: at one end, Aelius Aristides’ vision of “political and cultural unity of the world under Rome” and on the other, a Pausanian “kaleidoscopic portrait of local cultures” (1). Ultimately, for most of these essays, the question is political; speaking of both the ancient and the modern worlds, Whitmarsh advances, “at least as a working hypothesis,” that consciousness of the nature of the local and its place within a larger whole develops in dialectic with ideas about the global (2). It is precisely periods of intense globalization, Whitmarsh suggests, that focus intention on the local. The best of these essays are challenging meditations on what Greg Woolf describes in an Afterword as the “cultural work” that must be done to model and explain the “ ‘difference yet connectedness’ of distinct communities” (191). Clifford Ando’s essay (like Whitmarsh’s Introduction and Woolf’s Afterword), is a provocative and sophisticated explication of methodological and evidentiary problems. In 208 PHOENIX particular, Ando offers a response to Whitmarsh’s introductory discussion of whether we ought to read expressions of localism as “sites of resistance,” powerful modes of “counteridentification ” (3) that somehow reflect a subaltern subjectivity. Ando addresses what he describes as (and I quote his very precise formulation) “the danger of viewing ancient (or other) societies from an uninterrogated liberal conception of social power [which] would frame as autonomous all supposedly non-instrumental cultural practices, including expressions of local or ethnic particularism, and read them as resistance” (23). Ando’s analysis is top-down: it focuses on the Roman contribution to the “manufacture and sustenance of diversity.” The focus here is squarely on how...

The Progymnasmata in Imperial Greek Education

The progymnasmata were graded prose compositional exercises, often begun under the grammarian and continued under the sophist or rhetor. They were preliminary to exercises in declamation. This paper examines their content and role in education in the Roman Empire. Considerable attention is paid to their discussion in theoretical treatises, almost entirely in Greek. Appreciation of these modes of discourse is important to the student of antiquity, not only because of their role in education, but also because they continued to surface in the writings of adults into whose heads they had been ingrained during their school days.

Persuasive Letters in the Ancient Novel

Much of the interest in the representation of letters in the ancient novel has considered the letter as a plot device particularly susceptible to tuche and hence characteristic of Bakhtin’s chronotope, the chance occurrences and disjunctions that give the novel its texture. Others have viewed the prominence of letters in these texts as evidence for the interest in psychology considered a hallmark of characterization within novelistic melodrama. In contrast, this paper contextualizes the novels’ fictional letters within the rhetorical literary culture of the Greek world of the Roman empire. Focusing on Chariton and Achilles Tatius, I argue that the novels represent letters as sophisticated texts that persuade their readers by stirring the passions through recognizable rhetorical tropes, especially vividness (enargeia, diatuposis or phantasia). Fictional letters thus provide a concrete and self-conscious connection between the novels and the rhetorical theory of the Second Sophistic, familiar from epideictic practices like declamation and reflected in the works of theorists like Aelius Theon, Longinus, Quintilian and Menander Rhetor. A brief consideration of Aelius Aristides’ well-known Letter to the Emperors seeking aid from Marcus Aurelius for Smyrna in the wake of a devastating earthquake sets the stage for my analysis. As Philostratus’ description of Marcus Aurelius’ reaction to the letter – groaning and wetting the letter with tears – in his Lives of the Sophists attests, Aristides’ written text succeeds in persuading the emperor by standing in for the impassioned epideictic performance recommended by the rhetorical theorists of the empire, above all by bringing the ruined city vividly before his eyes (cf. Ruth Webb 1995). Chariton and Achilles Tatius create a number of fictional letters designed to persuade and manipulate their readers by stirring the passions in the manner of Aristides’ letter. These texts are highly rhetorical, employing figures familiar from the orators’ art, among which the vividness (enargeia) plays a central role. Moreover, the novels provide detailed accounts of the reactions to these texts, which confirm both the intent of the letters and their success. In Achilles Tatius, for example, when Cleitophon receives a letter from Leucippe chastising him for remarrying while she suffered the indignities of servitude, Cleitophon responds to the letter’s vivid evocation of her suffering as follows: Then ... as if seeing her through the letters, I reread every word.... When I got to the part about the whips and tortures Sosthenes inflicted on her, I wept as if I were witnessing them myself, for reasoning set my mind’s eyes working on what the letter said and showed these spectacles as if they were playing out before me. (5.19)In Chariton, Mithridates advises Chaereas to seek a similar reaction from his beloved, who, like Cleitophon, has remarried, believing that her beloved is dead: I think it is a good idea for you first to make trial of your wife by a letter.... Write her a letter: let her grieve, let her rejoice, let her search for you, let her call for you.... Go and write! (4.4) After demonstrating the embeddedness in the rhetorical context of imperial Greek literary culture of these letters through close readings of their texts and the reactions to them, I conclude by suggesting that the rhetorical letter provides a model for the genre of the novel, itself a vivid prose work designed to stir the passions of its reader through various techniques of vivid narration and description.

Wole Soyinka y Eurípides: una tumultosa celebración de la vida

This essay explores Soyinka’s social, political and cultural concerns taking as point of departure his exploration of the role of myth in Yoruba culture and its repercussions in contemporary Nigerian society. In his rewriting of Euripides’ best known tragedy, Bacchae, Soyinka reflects on the impact of the colonial process and on the role of modernday dictatorship in many Third-World countries. Interestingly called The Bacchae of Euripides. A Communion Rite, Soyinka’s play takes the effects of intertextuality to the extreme, not only by taking the Greek tragedy as hypotext, but by relating Euripides’ subversive criticism of Greek imperialism to his own denunciation of colonization and tyranny. Because of its radical use of imagery —such as the fact that the blood which emanates from Pentheus’ head at the end of the play becomes wine and everybody drinks from it—the play was not well received in London in the 1970s, but has been recognized as one of Soyinka’s masterpieces after that.

Turkish Cypriots - A People Unfairly Treated And Isolated by the International Community

The struggles of the Turkish people of Cyprus for their existence and human rights began immediately after the signing of the Cyprus Agreement, on 4 June 1878, between the Ottoman State and England (Britain), giving the latter the right to occupy Cyprus provisionally. These struggles accelerated following attempts by the Greek Cypriots, pampered by the British, to aspire for enosis (union with Greece), and reached the zenith after the establishment of the Republic of Cyprus in 1960. The Greek Cypriots, who believed that the establishment of the Republic of Cyprus was provisional, and dreamt of the Megali Idea (Great Ideal), in the fulfilment of Greek imperialism, prepared various secret plans and plots in order to cow down, and eliminate the Turkish Cypriots, which they began to implement in 1964. However, there were splits and divisions among them, which led to the Sampson coup d'etat in 1974. However, there were splits and divisions among them, which led to the Sampson coup d'etat in 1974, thereby causing Turkey to intervene, as one of the guarantor powers, in order to protect the Turkish Cypriots against the Greek-Cypriot plans to exterminate them. However, Western states and organisations, and particularly the European Union (EU), which admire, and are under the influence of, ancient Hellenes continued, and still continue, to recognise the government of South Cyprus as the 'legal government' of the whole island and refuse to recognise the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus. As a result, the Turkish Cypriots have been subjected to isolation, unfairly and contrary to the principles of justice. In this monograph I shall try to reveal as to how and why the EU decided, with the pressure of Greece, to admit South Cyprus to membership contrary to the principles of fairness, justice and legality.

Libanius' Social Networks: Understanding the Social Structure of the Later Roman Empire

Our understanding of the later Roman empire is often posed in terms of an opposition between the imperial centre and the periphery of Greek cities, between the imperial bureaucracy and civic elites. These opposed positions are seen as bounded aggregates, discrete categories and tightly bound groups that make up the social structure of the Roman empire. Network theory, however, provides us with an alternative approach for understanding social relations, one in which individual ties and relationships are the most important factor. This paper explores the social networks of the orator Libanius to show that the ‘bounded aggregates’ of imperial centre and Greek civic elite may not have been as central as we often think they were to the later Roman empire. [They] try to avoid imposing assumptions about the boundaries of aggregates. They do not assume that analysis can proceed on the basis of a few discrete categories such as proletariat and bourgeoisie or core and periphery. They do not assume that tightly bound groups are the fundamental building blocks of large-scale social systems... it is the network members’ crosscutting membership in multiple social circles that weave together social systems.1

The Armenian Episcopacy in Mamluk Jerusalem in the Aftermath of the Council of Sis (1307)

From the earliest days of Christianity in Armenia, Jerusalem was an important centre of pilgrimage, culture, and faith. An Armenian hierarchy free from the authority of the Imperial Greek church had existed in Jerusalem possibly from the time of Justinian and an Armenian episcopacy from the time of the Arab conquests. According to Armenian tradition, first recorded in M. Č‘amč‘ian's History of the Armenians, in 1311 Bishop Sargis of Jerusalem (sed. 1281–1313) dramatically changed the nature of that office, when he declared himself and his entire charge independent of both the spiritual overlordship of the Catholicossate of Sis and the political protection of the Armenian kingdom founded in Cilicia. The catalyst for the rupture was the Cilician Church's decision in favour of union with Rome taken with the encouragement of the Armenian monarchy at the Council of Sis in 1307. According to Č‘amč‘ian, Bishop Sargis, rejecting the Armenian kingdom's demands of obedience, turned to the Mamluk Sultan of Egypt and received from him an edict declaring that henceforth the Armenian bishop of Jerusalem would be able to exercise full Patriarchal rights, namely, the ability to appoint bishops and to use the red patriarchal seal to ratify documents.

Ἀρχαιότης et εὐγένεια. Le thème des origines dans les cités d’Asie Mineure à l’époque impériale

Abstract.– The aim of this paper is to throw some light on the complexity of the concept of origins in the imperial Greek world. Claims of eugeneia (noble origins), which often involve a filiation with old Greece, received an official approval by the Roman power, through the creation of Hadrian’s Panhellenion. In some cases, these claims can be analysed as a strategy of compensation, justified by an unsatisfactory position within the cities hierarchy. But the notion of arche can also be used to stress a non-Greek, native identity, which is therefore compared to Greek origins as a source of prestige. In other cases again, the same notion would be a Greek way of thinking Roman rule : the moment of a great favour obtained from Rome is defined as a new beginning in the history of the city.

Classicism and Romanitas in Plutarch's De Alexandri Fortuna Aut Virtute

It is in the very nature of classicizing texts to promote an idea of the "Greek" as objective and unchanging over the centuries. Using the example of Plutarch's DeAlexandriFortunaautVirtute, a set of epideictic speeches in which Alexander the Great appears as a philosopher who civilizes barbarians, this paper attempts to look beneath the pro-Hellenic veneer of imperial Greek writing by considering ways in which it can mask a sympathy with "Roman" ideas—that is, ideas that are typically by this time either credited to Romans (whether or not originally inspired by Greek ideas) or used to describe Romans in non-classicizing contexts.

V. The Second Sophistic and Imperial Greek Literature

This book has focused so far upon the extraordinary popularity of epideictic oratory in the first three centuries of the Roman empire, the ‘Second Sophistic’ in Philostratus’ sense (notwithstanding its distant roots in the fourth century BCE). We have seen that these declamations were performance pieces, and that issues of identity were explored through the observation of the sophist’s body; that language and style were heavily theorized, but also highly experimental; and that the interpretation of these ingenious, mobile texts demands considerable resourcefulness and attentiveness. What I want to explore in this final chapter is the points of intersection between these aspects of sophistic literature and the wider literary culture of Roman Greece. I shall focus particularly on two areas, which are central to both oratorical declamation and wider literary culture: ‘the self and exotic narrative.

The Ara Pacis Augustae and the Imagery of Abundance in Later Greek and Early Roman Imperial Art

The Ara Pacis Augustae and the Imagery of Abundance in Later Greek and Early Roman Imperial Art

A Paradigm for the Analysis of Paradigms: The Rhetorical Exemplum in Ancient and Imperial Greek Theory

Abstract: This article describes the paradeigrrm / exemplum from a historical point of view, as it is treated in (primarily Greek) rhetorical theories from Aristotle up to the sixth century AD. The description focuses on four main features of the paradigm: its functions (argument or ornament), the modes of reasoning implied in its use (analogical or inductive), its subject matter, and its literary form. The elassifieation of these aspeets is meant to serve as a hermeneutic model for the rhetorical analysis of the use of exempla in late antique and Byzantine authors or texts. Although the contribution of this paper is largely theoretical and methodological, it also offers some guiding questions for such an analysis and suggests how this analysis can be complemented by a semantic approach to the exempla: the questions of how they function and what they mean are inextricably linked.