The description of the festival for Saint Demetrios in Thessaloniki in the Timarion has long been used as a source for regional and liturgical history. It is in fact a literary rewriting of a festival at Delphi in Heliodoros’ Aithiopika. This paper demonstrates how the description of the Demetria represents a moment in Byzantine humanism as well as a reflection on the process of literary composition itself. An explanation is also proposed here for why Heliodoros’ festival at Delphi in particular, out of all descriptions of festivals in ancient literature, appealed to the author of the Timarion.

The frame narrative of the Timarion, the so-called ‘Lucianic satire’ of the twelfth century, begins with the title character's description of his journey from Constantinople to Thessaloniki in order to attend the feast of Demetrios, the city's renowned patron saint and protector.Footnote ¹ To summarize Timarion's pilgrimage to the Demetria:Footnote ² while waiting for the πανήγυρις to begin, he goes on a hunting expedition with family friends in the Axios river valley, which affords him the opportunity to launch into an excursus on the river's geography and idiosyncrasies. Returning to the Demetria, he gives a catalogue of the merchants who have come from around the world to trade at its fair. He climbs a hill to get a better view, and describes the two parallel lines of booths stretching off into the distance, with small lines jutting out at angles to give the fair the impression of a centipede. Besides the merchants themselves he notes a variety of animals that have accompanied them. He then returns to the church, describes the triple vigil attended by two choirs and a presiding archbishop and conducted by torchlight. He describes the arrival at dawn of the local governor, and devotes an extended ekphrasis to the governor's entourage as well as the governor's own appearance and pedigree. The governor bids the archbishop begin the service, which features not only a choir of monks but also two antiphonal choirs of nuns. The service concludes, and Timarion departs with the rest of the crowd and returns to his lodgings.

To this day the Demetria occupies a special place in the calendar of Thessaloniki as a πανηγύρι of local and regional importance, and from ‘Timarion’s’ testimony it certainly seems to have been so already in the twelfth century. The description of the saint's feast day and its attendant fair with its booths, merchants, and pilgrims from across the world has long been treated, with notable exceptions, as an historical source of the first order for students of liturgy as well as Byzantine and Balkan cultural and economic historians, not to mention specialists in the patria of Thessaloniki itself.Footnote ³ However, though the individual details of the Timarion's description of the fair and liturgy have proved useful in reconstructing the historical Demetria, the passage as a discrete literary unit has not received sustained analysis.

A similar lag could, until recently, be seen in scholarship on the colourful description of a local governor who makes a grand entrance at the saint's service. Attempts to identify this official spawned a frenzy of prosopographical detective work, which ultimately led to some degree of scholarly consensus pointing towards Andronikos Palaiologos, the son of Georgios Palaiologos and Anna Doukaina.Footnote ⁴ While this debate was still in its earlier stages, Margaret Alexiou advocated approaching this passage in particular, with its depiction of a local official and his entourage, as well as the text as a whole, with more literary questions in mind.Footnote ⁵ More recent studies, especially those of Anthony Kaldellis and Dimitris Krallis, have continued this literary approach to show how the frame narrative and Timarion's description of the Demetria can be used to improve our understanding of the methods and targets of satire in Timarion's journey to the underworld.Footnote ⁶ Kaldellis has shown, by bringing out the force behind the frame narrative's allusions to Homer and tragedy, that it is a grave mistake to assume that this is an author who worked ‘from anthologies’ and who dropped classical tags mindlessly without possessing the skill required in order to use them to import meaning from the source text.Footnote ⁷ From the studies of Kaldellis and Krallis it becomes clear that the author of the Timarion was clearly in control of his material.

The aim of the present paper is to build on the work of Alexiou, Krallis, and Kaldellis, in showing that what we could call literary concerns were in fact at the forefront of the anonymous author's method of composition when producing his account of the Demetria. Details of the realia of economic and religious life in twelfth-century Thessaloniki must be considered within the author's larger structural goal in these passages. That is because his description of the feast of Demetrios is constructed so as to emulate one of the most famously elaborate festival descriptions in Greek literature: the theoria to Delphi led by Theagenes the Thessalian, the hero of Heliodoros’ novel the Aithiopika.Footnote ⁸ In what follows I show how almost all of the details of Timarion's account of the Demetria – from the festival procession to the appearance of the local governor to the arrangement of choirs – answer to corresponding passages of the festival at Delphi, witnessed and recounted by Kalasiris, one of the novel's main characters and internal narrators. Finally, I put forward a theory as to why this particular festival – out of all the depictions of festivals in ancient literature – appealed to the author of the Timarion.Footnote ⁹

Heliodoros’ novel was a popular text in Byzantium, and commentators on the Timarion in particular have noticed several passages in which the author betrays his knowledge of the novelist.Footnote ¹⁰ Vlachakos’ modern Greek translation and commentary on the Timarion notes five instances where the author seems particularly indebted to Heliodoros.Footnote ¹¹ In fact all the passages in question are from the description of the festival at Delphi, and closer inspection reveals that they are incorporated within the author's larger project of literary mimesis of the scene from Heliodoros.Footnote ¹² In fact, this allusive engagement with an earlier depiction of a festival in literature has a twelfth-century parallel: P. Agapitos has shown how Niketas Eugeneianos’ ekphrasis of the festival for Dionysos at the beginning of Drosilla and Charikles reworks the description of the garden of Dionysophanes, the local landlord, in Book 4 of Longus’ Daphnis and Chloe.Footnote ¹³ Longus’ garden ekphrasis is internally motivated by the imminent arrival of Dionysophanes, who comes to attend the harvest festivities and join in sacrifice to the gods of the countryside, including Dionysos himself (4.13.3). Thus the twelfth-century novelist engages in what one might call mimetic reconstitution of a thematically related festival by his second-century predecessor. One might also add that Niketas’ teacher Theodore Prodromos – whose novel Rhodanthe and Dosikles served as the immediate inspiration for Niketas’ own workFootnote ¹⁴ – has featured among the proposed candidates for the authorship of the Timarion.

We begin with the structure of the narrative itself. Timarion tells his tale to his fellow Constantinopolitan Kydion, whose frequent interjections to prod the former into expanding upon his tale allow him to be characterized as an ‘insatiable’ listener: ‘Ἀβάλε σοι τῆς ἀπληστίας, ὦ φίλε Κυδίων· ἀκόρεστος ἄρα εἶ διηγημάτων καὶ ἀκουσμάτων ἀλλοδαπῶν,’ (‘Oh for your greediness, Kydion my friend! You are it seems insatiable in your appetite for stories and tales of other places’).Footnote ¹⁵ As Vlachakos notes, this echoes a phrase in Heliodoros.Footnote ¹⁶ In fact, the scenario is exactly parallel: the Egyptian priest Kalasiris is recounting his sojourn at Delphi to Knemon, an Athenian who keeps interrupting Kalasiris to ask for greater detail:

Like Kalasiris and Knemon, with his ‘insatiable appetite for tales’, Timarion and his insatiable listener Kydion will have to stay up all night for the former to complete his story: ‘Δέδοικα, φίλε Κυδίων, εἴ σοι πειθοίμην, ὡς καὶ διανυκτερεῦσαι συμπεσεῖται ἡμῖν κατὰ τὴν σὴν γνώμην διασκευάζουσι τὴν διήγησιν,’ (‘I fear, dear Kydion, if I should obey you, that it will fall to us to pass the night in constructing our story in accordance with your wishes’).Footnote ¹⁷ Besides the νυκτερεύω compound and the word διήγησις instead of διηγήματα, Timarion's use of συμπεσεῖται to mean ‘to happen to, befall’ (cf. Heliodoros’ ἐγγίνοιτο) governing the dative pronoun ἡμῖν points to the conclusion that the tale-telling session between Kalasiris and Knemon was our author's model.

Moreover, Knemon's eagerness to experience vicariously the panegyris leads Kalasiris to exclaim that the former wants to become an actual theoros or spectator/pilgrim himself. After Knemon complains that Kalasiris, in leaving out details, has not made him a theates (ἐμὲ γοῦν οὔπω θεατὴν ὁ σὸς ἐπέστησε λόγος 3.1.2), Kalasiris responds:

This precisely echoes Timarion's description of how he wanted to be a theates of the merchants’ fair that was taking place around the church and the liturgical ceremonies themselves:

We see how Timarion's ἐβουλόμην ὅλου γενέσθαι τοῦ θεάτρου. . .θεατής reproduces all the constituent elements of Kalasiris’ ἐκ παρόδου θεωρὸς γενέσθαι βεβούλησαι, even picking up on and preserving the theatre metaphor of Kalasiris’ ἐκ παρόδου. Moreover, it might also be the case that one reason Timarion was given a Cappadocian background was for external considerations which again can be traced to Heliodoros: just as Knemon's Athenian origins (σὺ μὲν Ἀττικὸς ὢν 3.1.2) are invoked in this same passage as a reason for his spectacle-mania, so too Timarion seems to have been provided with a provincial identity partly in order to justify his curiosity in wanting to see the entire spectacle of the Demetria. Thus for the framing narrative his Cappadocian background serves to deepen the set of structural parallels with the dialogue between Kalasiris and Knemon. However, as Beaton and Krallis have shown, there are other possible motivations for Timarion's Cappadocian identity, which will take on greater importance during the scenes in Hades.Footnote ¹⁸

The parallels between the structures of the two narratives continue. Throughout his tale, Kalasiris is able to supplement his account of the theoria at Delphi with details he learned from Charikles, a character he meets there (who turns out to be the adoptive father of the novel's heroine) and who supplies him with background information regarding the festival participants. Like Kalasiris, Timarion is able to flesh out his story with information he learns from his fellow spectators.Footnote ¹⁹

After describing at length the merchants’ fair surrounding the festival, Timarion again describes himself as an eager theoros, and begins to describe the saint's service itself (165 ff.). Here he refers to the archpriest anachronistically as an ἀρχιθέωρος (170). Now this term originally meant ‘the chief of a θεωρία or sacred embassy,’Footnote ²⁰ and a TLG search reveals that its extremely rare use in Byzantine sources is confined to lexica, scholia, and this passage in the Timarion. It seems that our author's application of this term here in a Christian context was in fact motivated by its prominent use by Heliodoros to refer to the leader of the Thessalian festival delegation.Footnote ²¹ Moreover, Timarion's frequent use of the word θεωρία to refer to the saint's service itself seems to have been inspired by the same source.Footnote ²²

Timarion resumes his description of the ceremony with an epic tag: Ἦμος δ’ ἠριγένεια φάνη ῥοδοδάκτυλος Ἠώς’, Ὅμηρος ἂν εἶπεν (‘“When Dawn, the rosy-fingered child of the morning, appeared,” as Homer would say,’ 174–175 = Iliad 1.447). As Vlachakos notes, this Homeric verse is also quoted by Heliodoros.Footnote ²³ In fact, once again the passage in question is from Kalasiris’ description of the festive ceremonies at Delphi (3.4.1), and the line is used to describe precisely parallel events in the respective liturgies: Timarion uses it to hail the grand entrance at the church of the local governor (ὁ τῆς χώρας ἡγεμὼν ἐπὶ τὸν νεὼν παραγίνεται 175), while in Heliodoros it marks the arrival of the heroine Charikleia at the festival as she leaves the temple of Artemis (ἐπεὶ δὲ τοῦ νεὼ τῆς Ἀρτέμιδος ἐξήλασεν ἡ καλὴ καὶ σοφὴ Χαρίκλεια 3.4.1).

Timarion then continues with the arrival of the local governor and his entourage, and his engagement with Heliodoros becomes even clearer. The horses of the governor's cavalry escort are said to appreciate their own brilliant spectacle:

Here our author responds with variatio to the corresponding passage in Heliodoros which features the arrival of the Thessalian cavalry ahead of their captain Theagenes:

Processing together with the governor's cavalry escort is a mass of folk from the city and countryside, who receive short shrift from the narrator compared to the picked men of the cavalry themselves:

Here Timarion has adapted several details from Kalasiris’ description of the hecatomb of oxen brought by the Thessalian delegation.

Here echoes of the oxen in the fullness of their prime, along with their rustic attendants, have found their way into Timarion's description of the governor's procession, with its mass of spectators from the countryside and city as well as the governor's lusty cavalrymen themselves.

Before proceeding with a physical description of the governor, Timarion relates a history (or ἀρχαιολογίαν as he calls it) of the governor's ancestry which he learned, characteristically, from one of the bystanders.Footnote ²⁴ This section parallels, in both general conception and detail, Kalasiris’ description of the heroic ancestry of the Thessalian delegation, which he in turn learned from Charikles, his fellow spectator.Footnote ²⁵

This mimesis is extended to the level of individual words: Timarion describes the illustrious lineage of the governor's paternal grandfather: ὅ τε γὰρ ἐκ πατρὸς πάππος αὐτῷ τὰ πρῶτα φέρων τῶν ἐν τῇ μεγάλῃ Φρυγίᾳ πρώτων (‘For his grandfather on his father's side had the first of the first in Great Phrygia’ 212–213). A few lines later he uses a similar phrase to describe the woman his father won as ‘the meed of his soldierly valour’: τὰ πρῶτα κἀκείνην τῶν πρωτίστων γενῶν φερομένην (‘she too had the best of the first families’ 219–220). These phrases themselves as well as their very redundancy seem to derive from a similar expression in the account Kalasiris receives of Theagenes’ noble ancestry. He boasts to descend not only from Achilles but also from Patroclus: ὃς καὶ Ἀχιλλεῖ συνεστράτευσεν ἐν πρώτοις ἐπὶ Ἴλιον καὶ τῆς πρώτης τῶν Μυρμιδόνων διὰ τὸ συγγενὲς ἐξῆρχε μοίρας (‘who also fought with Achilles among the first men at Troy and who led the first division of the Mymidons on account of his kinship with him’ 2.34.6).

In his account of the governor's noble background, Timarion describes how his paternal grandfather's exploits inspired ‘old tales’ (παλαιοὶ λόγοι) which in turn gave him his name.Footnote ²⁶ Here Timarion hints etymologically at the governor's Palaiologan ancestry, which he avoids mentioning explicitly. The author's etymological pun seems to be an attempt by the author to ‘cap’ Heliodoros’ word play on the ‘properly Hellenic’ roots of the Thessalian delegation: at 2.34.2 Charikles describes to Kalasiris the ancestry of the Thessalian delegation:

The Ainians can be called ‘properly Hellenic’ because they claim descent directly from Hellen himself, who gave his name at first to Thessalians and then to the entire Hellenic race. That the author of the Timarion is responding to this passage in particular with an etymology of his own on the origin of the Palaiologan name is further suggested by the fact that he later uses Heliodoros’ very phrase ‘properly Hellenic’ (ἀκριβῶς Ἕλλην) when he sees Aiakos in Hades to refer to his origins in ‘old’ Hellas, which he specifies further as Thessaly.Footnote ²⁷

Finally, I suggest that the Heliodoros connection explains, in Timarion's history of the governor's ancestry, his use at 222–223 of the epithet Aineianes (τῶν Αἰνειάνων), as in ‘descendants of Aeneas,’ to refer to Italians, a word so rare as to be almost a hapax.Footnote ²⁸ This seems in fact to be a veiled allusion to Theagenes’ delegation, who are Ainianes (Αἰνιᾶνες) in origin – a point of history which Kalasiris’ informant expands upon at some length while repeating the name several times. Though a relatively obscure Thessalian race, Ainianes appear in surviving texts exponentially more often than Aineianes. The author of the Timarion manages to work in a reference to Theagenes’ compatriots, albeit obliquely, while seeming to describe the Italian branch of the governor's family.

We come then to the description of the governor himself. This is a highly-wrought passage with echoes of a variety of different texts, and it has been the focus of sustained literary analysis.Footnote ²⁹ Here we focus on two elements in particular that a) have a Heliodoros connection and b) hint indirectly but masterfully at the author's method of composition.

To begin with, Timarion cites a passage of Genesis to describe the beauty of the governor's eyes and teeth: χαροποιοὶ οἱ ὀφθαλμοὶ αὐτοῦ, ὡς ἀπὸ οἴνου, καὶ λευκοὶ οἱ ὀδόντες αὐτοῦ, ἢ γάλα (‘his eyes were gladdening, as if from wine, as his teeth were white as milk’).Footnote ³⁰ Here with the word χαροποιοί, Timarion is giving the falsa lectio of Septuagint manuscripts for χαροποί.Footnote ³¹ However, there seems to be an ulterior motive for citing this verse in particular, and that is the prominent use of the adjective χαροπός in the description of Theagenes’ appearance at 2.35.1: ὀφθαλμὸς οὔπω μὲν χαροπὸς χαροπώτερον (‘his eye was not over-fiercely fierce’). The author of the Timarion certainly knew this very passage of Heliodoros, as we shall see soon.

A few lines later Timarion describes the governor's hair:

Now, there are plenty of passages in ancient literature describing the artful ‘blending’ of colours like this, but there is one passage in particular in Heliodoros that, once we establish its connection with the governor here, also yields a reading of the Timarion passage that comments upon the character of its own composition. At 3.4.4 Kalasiris recounts how the heroine Charikleia makes a dramatic entrance at the festival, and in his description of her appearance he lingers over a device on her girdle, which features a pair of serpents:

Combine this with the description of Theagenes’ eyes from 2.35.1:

The two passages, the one describing Charikleia's girdle and the other Theagenes’ eyes, yield, when ‘blended’ together, the description of the governor's hair:

Here I have assigned numbers to the constituent motifs of the two passages. For example, the motifs of ‘blackness’ (1, 1b, 1c), ‘blondness’ (2) and ‘mixing’ (3) all pass from the description of the girdle into the description of the governor's hair. Motifs 4 and 5 comprise a pair of adjectives – ‘severe’ (σοβαρόν/αὐχμηρόν) and ‘unlovable’ (ἀνέραστον) – that pass from the description of Theagenes’ eyes (which are severe ‘yet not unlovable’) into the description of the governor's hair. There, the extreme of unleavened blackness is characterized as ‘rough and unlovely’, and here I think that Heliodoros’ σοβαρόν has become the comparable αὐχμηρόν in the Timarion. The mixed colours of the hair of the doux are modelled upon the language describing the mixing process used to design the girdle. Moreover, our author has ‘imitated’ the craft of the girdle by taking select phrases from its description and mixing them together with elements taken from the description of Theagenes’ eyes at 2.35. The passage demonstrates textually the very phenomenon it describes: as the hair colour of the doux is made more beautiful by combining male and female qualities (the rough, unlovable black and the womanish, unmanly blond), so Timarion has rendered his description of the governor all the more admirable by selecting and combining features from the descriptions of the hero and heroine of Heliodoros. The art of the girdle's craftsman is trumped by the art of the Timarion author himself, and the admiration that Timarion reports the spectators felt towards the governor gestures towards the admiration that we as readers are meant to feel towards his creator.

Finally, we come to the celebration of the liturgy itself (273–279). Timarion describes how the presence in the audience of such distinguished personages as the governor inspired the participants to perform their roles with all the more care.Footnote ³² Among those participants are female singers who divide into two choirs to perform an antiphonal hymn:

As we might now expect, this passage responds to a moment in the celebration of the festival at Delphi, when at 3.2.1 the Thessalian maidens ‘divide into two choirs’ who carry different types of baskets:

After performing a dance – balancing their baskets on their heads and holding hands with one another – one of the two choruses ‘gives the key to the tune’ to the other, who in turn sing a hymn of praise to Thetis, Peleus, Achilles and Neoptolemos (3.2.2).

After the hymn, the service for Saint Demetrios is concluded: ἐπεὶ δὲ ἡ θεωρία καὶ τὰ τοῦ ἐναγισμοῦ συνετελέσθη σύμπαντα νόμιμα (‘when the service and all the rites of the offering were completed’ 279–281). The phrasing here is based on Kalasiris’ (unsuccessful) attempt to round off his narrative of the festival ceremonies prematurely (3.1.1): Ἐπεὶ δὲ ἡ πομπὴ καὶ ὁ σύμπας ἐναγισμὸς ἐτελέσθη (‘when the procession and the entire offering was concluded’). The lexical imitation is quite careful, from the opening ἐπεὶ δὲ and the verbs with the same root to the formulation that combines a similar first element (θεωρία and πομπή) with a reference to the ἐναγισμός.

After the service is complete Timarion joins the governor and the demos as they all return to their separate lodgings, as in Kalasiris’ narrative the demos of Delphi return to their homes after the final ceremonies.Footnote ³³

From then on, to widen our scope, Charikleia falls victim to love sickness which is misdiagnosed as a physical ailment (3.19); Kalasiris correctly identifies the true cause of her sickness and prepares her elopement with Theagenes. This elopement is arranged to make it seem that Theagenes and his Thessalian company have forcibly abducted Charikleia off into Locris, while in fact Theagenes and Charikleia use the diversion to make their escape (4.17–8). Their subsequent travels and misadventures will form the bulk of the novel's plot. In the same way, Timarion will fall victim to a fever that leads to his ‘misdiagnosis’ at the hands of psychopomps who lead his soul forcibly to Hades, thereby beginning the main plot of the novel.

Looking back to an earlier point in Timarion's narrative, we can suggest a literary motivation for his excursus on the Axios River – where it rises in mountains of Bulgaria, its course as it is fed by lesser streams, and its contributions to local agriculture (75–90). Timarion gives this excursus as he narrates how he went on a hunting trip to the Axios valley while waiting for the Demetria to begin. We can compare this to the long description of the nature of the Nile – including the eternally perplexing question of its source, as well as its idiosyncratic qualities and the benefits it offers mankind - that Kalasiris delivered to fellow spectators at Delphi before the beginning of the Thessalian theoria.Footnote ³⁴

We have then throughout these sections of the Timarion a thoroughgoing engagement with the festival described by Heliodoros, an engagement perhaps best characterized, as I mentioned above, by the concept of literary mimesis. Our author plays this game at a particularly high level: answering Heliodoros pun for etymological pun, slipping in a disguised allusion to the Thessalian's obscure homeland, and even managing to turn one of his allusive complexes into a meta-poetic nod to his own methods of composition. As described above, in the lines in question (259–264), he takes a passage about blended colours in Charikleia's girdle, blends it together with language from the description of Theagenes’ eyes, and from the mixture produces a description of the governor's hair; this description in turn proclaims the special beauty produced in the hair by the blending of different colours to which gender-coded qualities are attributed. There are worse metaphors that we could use to characterize our author's method of depicting the Demetria by mixing twelfth-century Christian realia together with features from Heliodoros’ festival.

There remains, finally, the question I pointed towards at the start. Why was our author drawn to this festival description in particular as a model for his Demetria?

We can find at least part of the answer in the purpose of the Thessalian delegation to Delphi. They have come to honour their kinsmen and local hero Neoptolemos, who has been adopted as a figure of cult also by the citizens of Delphi, where he is venerated as a hero and defender of the city. The reason that he receives such high honour at Delphi, left ambiguous by Kalasiris himself but alluded to in the hymn he repeats to Knemon, can be found in Pausanias:

The shade of the hero Neoptolemos/Pyrrhus – who had been unjustly murdered at Delphi by Orestes – appeared when Delphi was attacked by the Gauls in 279 BCE. As a cultic hero and defender of the city, Neoptolemos is a parallel to the martyr Demetrios, whose cult and fame exploded precisely in response to his role in defending Thessaloniki from a different set of barbarian invaders from the North: the Slavs and Avars.Footnote ³⁶ It was in this guise – as a bulwark of the city against foreign invaders – that Demetrios was most well-known throughout Byzantine history, even as he is to the present day. The author of the Timarion may have found in the Delphic celebrations honouring that city's heroic patron and defender a fitting analogue to the Demetria. Or perhaps he found in the literary depiction of the cult awarded to Neoptolemos a suitable rival against which to exercise his ingenuity in describing the Demetria. Or even, to follow-up on Krallis’ analysis of Timarion's shiftiness as a story-teller, our author may have found in Kalasiris a model for the talent for narrative deception with which he hoped to endow his own character.Footnote ³⁷

Regardless of the author's specific motivations for choosing the Delphic festival to emulate, we can at the very least hold up this passage as a particularly creative moment in the history of the Byzantine reception of the ancient novels. More tendentiously, we might use the author's methods – a mimetic reconstitution of a thematically related festival – to associate him more closely with the circle of Niketas Eugeneianos and Theodore Prodromos. Finally, almost every feature of the description of the Demetria – from the festival procession to the appearance and ancestry of the doux to the arrangement of choirs – can be seen to have an analogue in Heliodoros. We should therefore be more hesitant in approaching this section in the Timarion as a source for the social and liturgical history of Thessaloniki and the Demetria without allowing for the literary purpose served by the details of the festival description. The reading offered here means that the Timarion tells us less about twelfth-century Thessaloniki, but it also means that, as if in compensation, we learn something more about the cultural horizons of our author and his twelfth-century Constantinopolitan context.

The author weaves elements from Heliodoros’ Delphic festival into his depiction of the Demetria and his frame narrative. He seems to entertain the idea that the festival and liturgical office for Saint Demetrios as well as the celebrants themselves function more or less as cultural equivalents to their Delphic counterparts. If we assume that the author expected his audience to respond positively or at least to be entertained by his exploration of the overlap between ancient and Christian festival practice, then this attests to the Komnenian period's interest in the past as a ‘mirror’ to the present.Footnote ³⁸ We can go further and see the author's depiction of the Demetria as a gesture of tolerance extended to the culture of antiquity. As such it is of a piece with the favourable characterization of the two pagan judges of the underworld, Aiakos and Minos, whose tolerance towards other religions is noted by Timarion's guide and former teacher Theodore of Smyrna.Footnote ³⁹ Margaret Alexiou has found in the Timarion ‘an intellectual reassessment of the relative merits of antiquity and Byzantium’ in which antiquity wins out on a number of scores, including the tolerance it is considered to display to other cultures.Footnote ⁴⁰ We can see the Timarion itself as an attempt to redress that imbalance, and its lionization of the past as a plea for greater tolerance in the present. The author's depiction of the Demetria works in two directions. It treats the festivals of antiquity with the same cross-confessional sympathy that Timarion himself is glad to receive at the hands of the judicial tribunal in the underworld, which consists of two pagans and the emperor Theophilos, an iconoclast. It also suggests an understanding on the part of the author that some constants could be identified between contemporary orthodox practice and the religious customs of antiquity. In its use of Heliodoros’ Delphic festival, the depiction of the Demetria presents not only an interpretive challenge to the religious and social historian, but also a new point of inquiry to the student of Byzantine humanism.