This study explores the language of the Histories of Agathias Scholasticus, the sixth-century poet and historian. Through two case studies – the syntagm πλὴν ἀλλά and the optative future – and their synchronic and diachronic contexts, it argues that Agathias’ classicizing prose should not be seen as a flawed version of Classical Greek. Rather, his usage reveals a stylistic negotiation between inherited literary models and contemporary linguistic developments. Agathias’ case demonstrates how the choices of individual authors – often hidden behind modern labels like ‘linguistic classicism’ or ‘highbrow literature’ – illustrate the evolution of high-register Byzantine Greek and challenge previous assumptions about its rigidity.

This article analyses selected hymns of Romanos the Melodist (c. 485–562) with a special focus on who speaks and who listens. Romanos uses apostrophes to address biblical characters, the triune God, the Mother of God, and saints. Did they listen? In rare cases, characters respond – for instance, the eternal villain Hades, whom Romanos interrogates about Christ’s descent to the Underworld. At other times, the biblical characters seem to address the congregation from the storyworld. Examples such as these are analysed through the lens of modern narratology.

This article presents the first sustained narratological analysis of the embedded stories in Nikephoros Bryennios’ Material for History. It argues that pleasure in storytelling was a valued feature of Byzantine historiography and that Bryennios’ anecdotes derive their appeal from four interrelated features: eventfulness, tellability, narrativity, and immersion. The article further contends that, by mimicking oral storytelling through rhetorical questions, direct speech, and vivid sensory detail, Bryennios crafts narratives suited to performative settings while preserving a sense of authenticity. It concludes by proposing narratological criteria for identifying and analysing anecdotes across Byzantine historiography and reassessing the role of pleasure in historical writing.

In the early seventeenth century, the Greek Jesuit Hermodorus Rhegius (1579–1655) compiled a collection of Greek proverbs which constitutes important evidence for early modern Greek language and culture. Little is known about Hermodorus aside from his pastoral and educational work across the Aegean islands, primarily on Chios. For over two centuries, his proverbs were known mainly through the work of Charles Du Cange, who cited twenty-seven of them. The early twentieth century, however, saw three additional proverbs uncovered in a manuscript in the National Library of France (Français 9467), and a recent discovery in the Médiathèque d’Orléans (MS 0422) has added ninety more. This article revisits Hermodorus’ legacy in light of this new evidence and presents an edition of all 120 proverbs attributed to his collection, thereby enlarging the corpus fourfold. Tracing the collection’s textual history for the first time, this study also reveals a small network of scholars in early modern France with a keen interest in Greek proverbs.

In a series of related accounts, sources of the ninth and tenth centuries allege that the final iconoclast patriarch, John the Grammarian, wounded himself with a knife once the restoration of the icons was imminent, either in a failed suicide attempt or to defame his iconodule adversaries. However, the accounts are inconsistent, contradictory, and acknowledge that contemporary rumour claimed that John had been attacked. This article examines these accounts, concluding that John’s wounds were likely not self-inflicted, and, while regime actors were conceivably responsible, a definitive conclusion is elusive.

Medieval Roman frontier management remains understudied, and only rarely have digital humanities methods been applied to it. This article examines a moment in Roman–Fatimid imperial competition in Syria in the early 1030s by using Geographic Information Systems (GIS) analysis. The Syrian Coastal Mountains south of Antioch were the location of a failed Roman attempt to establish Naṣr ibn Musharraf as a client. As relations broke down, he sought Fatimid support. The brief ensuing conflict is revelatory of long-term patterns in frontier management, while spatial analysis within a GIS framework provides insight into the role of geomorphology in how these events unfolded.

This article offers the first detailed study of a manuscript preserving notes from the Modern Greek course held in 1801-2 by Jean-Baptiste-Gaspard d'Ansse de Villoison in Paris. The notebook was kept by Karl Benedikt Hase, later Professor of Modern Greek at the French École de langues orientales vivantes, during his attendance of Villoison's course as a student. The article sketches first the historical context of the notebook, before an analysis of its contents, and finally a comparison with Hase's later published work on the primary text at its core, Amiras’ Greek translation of Costin's History of Moldavia.

Analysing the imageries prevalent among the citizens of the young Turkish Republic in the post-Catastrophe Smyrna/Izmir, this article aims to shed light on the reflections of the destruction, forced migration, and economic provincialization of the ethnically-cleansed city. Aside from regular newspaper reports, travelogues and other popular literature accounts produced by local Muslims also recounted the haunting character of the ravaged region. The common word ‘loss’ in these post-Catastrophe narratives indicates what is apprehended by the imagery and discourse of mourning, trauma, sadness, and nostalgia from the victors’ perspective.

This article examines On Correct Syntax, a grammatical treatise composed by Ioannes Glykys in the early fourteenth century. Although often regarded as a conventional grammatical handbook, the treatise places syntax at the centre of its linguistic theory. It argues that syntax provides the framework through which grammatical forms, case relations, and linguistic correctness are understood. By situating Glykys within the intellectual culture of the Palaiologan period and examining his engagement with Plato’s Cratylus, the article shows that his discussion of language in general and the cases in particular is organized around underlying social relations. On Correct Syntax thus emerges as an original contribution to Byzantine linguistic thought.

This paper will explore the relationship between Theophilos and the generation of the 1930s on the basis of two parameters. On the one hand, an attempt will be made to reconfigure the image of Theophilos as a ‘spontaneous’ bearer of an immaculate and uninterrupted national tradition; on the other, the paper will address the reasons that determined this interest in the ‘illiterate’ (even ‘lunatic’) painter from Lesbos. It will be argued that what impressed the young intellectuals of the 1930s generation was not only Theophilos’ ‘primitive’ visual idiom but his idiomatic modernist idiom, precisely because it found an echo in their own contradictions as bearers of European modernity.

This paper assesses the rhetorical and lyrical qualities of the Cretan translation of Guarini’s Pastor Fido as O Bistikos Voskos, by analysing passages that either deviate notably from the original or are the invention of the unknown Cretan poet. Comparison of the two dramatic works sheds light on the translator’s tendency to add or expand lyrical passages, thus giving more extended and emphatic poetic expression to the heroes’ emotions and thoughts.

‘The Generation of the Thirties’ is a term that has been widely applied to Greek artists active in the interwar years and their artistic production. This article argues that the term is misleading due to its conceptual ambiguity. By focusing on Greek artists in Paris during the 1920s, it contends that the concept of the network, describing a dynamic cluster of historical actors sharing common ideologies, aesthetic ideas and interests, elucidates the formation and evolution of artists’ styles, aesthetic ideas, professional interests and cultural identities in a more meaningful way.

Contemporary historiography of philosophy addresses the philosophy produced in Greek after the Fall of Constantinople and until the Modern Greek Enlightenment through two frameworks: that of post-Byzantine philosophy and that of Corydallism, preceded by a ‘pre-Corydallic’ and followed by a ‘post-Corydallic’ period. Despite their differences, both frameworks posit a continuity of this philosophy with Byzantine philosophy. I argue that the structure and contents of the treatises and handbooks of logic produced in the Heptanese and in Ottoman Greece during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries can by no means be accounted for with reference to Byzantine philosophy.

This article offers the first critical edition of and philological commentary on a previously unpublished prefatory text (Ἕτερον προοίμιον) transmitted under the name of Theophilos Korydalleus and found in over forty-five manuscripts of his Aristotelian Logic. It examines the status, content, and manuscript transmission of this brief philosophical treatise, which has hitherto been neglected in favour of the more extensive prologue printed in the 1729 edition. Drawing on new manuscript evidence, particularly a marginal scholion by Iakovos Argeios (Add MS 7143, British Library), the study argues that the Ἕτερον προοίμιον constitutes the authentic preface by Korydalleus himself, whereas the longer prologue should be attributed to his disciple and successor Ioannes Karyophylles. This attribution, if accepted, sheds light on the process of textual interpolation and ideological appropriation within the Patriarchal Academy of Constantinople during the late seventeenth century. The study situates the controversy over the two prologues within the broader intellectual and political conflict between the Korydallean tradition, represented by Karyophylles, and the faction aligned with Alexander Mavrokordatos. By highlighting the interplay between manuscript transmission, authorship, and institutional power, the article contributes to ongoing efforts to reassess the contours of post-Byzantine philosophical education and the editorial challenges posed by early modern Greek Aristotelianism.

This paper reconsiders the term ‘Generation of the Thirties’ in modern Greek art, arguing that the artists retrospectively grouped under this label emerged mainly after the Second World War and were united by a time-specific pursuit of ‘Greekness’. It examines how their synthesis of local tradition and European modernism reflected post-war quests for national identity and was shaped by Cold War cultural politics and mass media stereotypes. It traces the history of the term ‘Generation of the Thirties’ in art, explores its academic and curatorial consolidation in the late 1970s, and examines why it became attractive during the Metapolitefsi era.

This article examines the origins of the Greek welfare state through workers’ associations and mutual aid societies from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century. Moving beyond dominant historiography, it highlights self-organized solidarity in the emergence of early social protection. Drawing on legislative records, institutional documents, and quantitative data, it shows that mutual aid associations operated as proto-insurance institutions compensating for limited state capacity. This configuration is interpreted as regulatory liberalism, whereby the state supervised collective welfare without assuming full responsibility. The Law on Associations in 1914 marked a turning point by introducing oversight while preserving associational autonomy.