“No one can escape God”. A filicidal beneficial tale from early Byzantium (original) (raw)
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Dumbarton Oaks Papers , 2020
This article argues that the Georgian Life of the Virgin Mary was not translated from a supposedly lost Greek Life (whether by Maximοs the Confessor or not), but from the Life of the Virgin written by John Geometres in the tenth century. Recent debates about the Georgian Life’s provenance have been based on unfounded assumptions that have never been critically examined. In these debates, the literary profiles of John Geometres and Euthymiοs the Athonite (the Georgian translator) have largely been ignored, and this article examines them in detail. Contrary to scholarly opinion, the Life of the Virgin by Geometres is not a copy of an allegedly lost original, but an original composition consistent with the literary style and skill displayed in the rest of Geometres’ writings. Moreover, Euthymiοs’s background, resources, literary and translation practices show that the Georgian Life can only be understood as a Euthymian version of Geometres’ text. In his working methods, Euthymios was almost certainly inspired by the metaphrastic practices of his age. The article demonstrates how convergent Geometres’, Symeon Metaphrastes’ and Euthymios’s lives and intellectual communities were—they may literally have known or at least met one another. Finally, a comparative analysis of the two Lives demonstrates that various problems raised by scholars can now be readily resolved. Eliminating a precursor to Geometres’ Life not only opens the Life up to the objective scrutiny that its literary mastery deserves, but it also removes a major obstacle to our understanding of the evolution of Byzantine devotion to the Virgin.
M. P. Futre Pinheiro, J. Perkins, R. Pervo (eds.), The Ancient Novel and the Early Christian and Jewish Narrative: Fictional Intersections, pp. 139-152., 2013
Since the early twentieth century, scholars have noted that the Christian Apocryphal Acts bear a striking thematic and narrative resemblance to the ancient Greek novels. 2 The pervasive similarities and parallels between the two are not surprising given that not only do both feature the same geographic and cultural context -the late antique Hellenic world -but also that both corpora reveal as well as examine the social concerns of the period for a particular audience: the novel for urban élites, and the Apocrypha for the emerging Christians. 3 Both were often presumed to have had a predominantly female readership due to the unprecedented role women play in their narratives. 4 It is generally assumed that the Apocryphal Acts were most probably influenced by the ancient Greek novel, since the writers of these (later) Christian texts appear to have adopted and applied novelistic topoi and themes, as well as rhetorical techniques. 5 Recent scholarship on the intersec------1 I would like to thank Froma Zeitlin for reading and commenting on an earlier version of this paper. I am also grateful to Scott F. Johnson as well as to the audience present at the 'Ancient Novel and Early Christian Narrative: Intersections' panel at ICAN IV. 2 Von Dobschütz 1902 emphasizes that the resemblances between the Apocryphal Acts and the novel are 'quite apparent', especially 'in the accounts of threatened chastity and its preservation'.
One of the typical adventure patterns of the Greek love novel is the narrow escape of the virgin protagonist from the sacrificial altar in a foreign land, a pattern similar to Euripides' Iphigenia among the Taurians. Although scholars have pointed out the overall influence of Euripides' drama, there has been little effort to explore the structural resemblance of the play's plot to the novel. Heliodorus' Aethiopica is a keystone in the reception of the Iphigenia because it assimilates non-Euripidean versions of the 'Der Tod und das Mädchen' motif that are found in his predecessors, and stages a consciously Euripidean reworking of both Iphigeniai, while challenging the reader to navigate through drama and novel towards an appreciation of the Heliodoran hoch-variation of the myth.
This essay explores the impact of Greco-Roman erotic narrative on Rabbinic literature. Two specific cases of influence are explored. The first treats the influence of a specific character type and plot convention derived from the Greco-Roman novel-the beautiful but innocent and sexually chaste protagonist who is sexually tormented-on the construction of martyrological narratives in Rabbinic literature that also use the erotic ordeal as their central focus. The second analyzes a Rabbinic midrash of Deuteronomy 21:10-14 (the laws dealing with the beautiful woman taken captive in war) that is based on a kind of implied narrative derived as well-so this article argues-from Greco-Roman erotic narratives of the kind found in Parthenius' Peri Erotikon Pathematon. Indeed, not only is the midrash based on the conventions of this erotic narrative; the Rabbis may also have used the erotic narrative as a kind of foundational myth upon which they represented their own relationship to the pagan world in which they lived.
The Journal of Ecclesiastical History
und Theophanes Graptoi. Presented as a model for the study of Byzantine hagiography, this analysis of texts concerning three learned monks from Palestine persecuted by the Iconoclast Emperor Theophilus (829-42) is deeply influenced by Paul Speck, who supervised it as a dissertation. Speck has established a distinctive method for evaluating Byzantine sources: pervasive scepticism based on exhaustive textual analysis of supposed inconsistencies or improbabilities that leads to rejecting what the sources say. Sometimes Speck's conjectures are persuasive, as when he added an extra year to the usurpation of Artavasdus (741-3); but often they are utterly arbitrary, as when he redated the Emperor Heraclius' second marriage from 613/14 to 622, unaware that Heraclius' second wife appears as empress on a coin dated to 615/16. Sode, like her teacher, rejects both bad and good sources to reach a mixture of sound and unsound conclusions about Michael Syncellus and the brothers Theodore and Theophanes. She begins by corroborating two arguments that had been made before without attracting much scholarly notice: Ernst von Dobschutz's demonstration of 1909 that the anonymous Life of Michael is an unreliable source with a fictional chronology, and the present reviewer's suggestion of 1979 that this Life is derived from Theophanes of Caesarea's Encomium of Theodore rather than the reverse. Sode's well-founded scepticism about the Life of Michael leads her to reject its dubious reports of some of Michael's otherwise unknown accomplishments: his role as teacher of Theodore and Theophanes, and as Syncellus (adviser) not just to the patriarch ofjerusalem but to the patriarch of Constantinople, Methodius (843-7). She also rejects the Life's uncorroborated statement that Michael was sent from Jerusalem to Rome to protest against the insertion of the filioque in the Creed; she argues that the filioque only became an issue between east and west during the patriarchate of Photius (858-67, 877-86), when the Life was presumably composed and its author wanted to borrow Michael's authority for the eastern position. This much is well-argued, mostly original and significant. But Sode goes too far in attacking the authenticity of a letter ascribed to Theodore himself in Symeon Metaphrastes' Life of Theodore, relating in detail how he and his brother had their faces tattooed with derogatory verses on Theophilus' orders (hence their epithet Graptoi, ' the inscribed'). She finds the verses recorded in the letter incompatible with their context, because they describe men who had their faces tattooed for committing unspecified crimes in Jerusalem and were sentenced to be deported there afterwards, whereas the brothers were tattooed for opposing Iconoclasm in Byzantium and were then imprisoned there. Sode's argument ignores poetic licence, Theophilus' hostility to the brothers, the fact that he considered
Byzantion. Revue Internationale des Études Byzantines, 2021
This article charts the extensive textual appropriations from the Ancient Greek novels of Heliodoros and Achilles Tatius in the Homilies of Philagathos of Cerami. By setting forth new textual evidence, it reveals the much deeper homiletic intertextual relationship with the ancient novels than hitherto ascertained. The analysis aims to portray a practice of reading entirely governed by scripture. It shows that the homilist exploited the novels for describing various scriptural stories, miracle events, for maxims and arythmological speculation. The analysis reveals that these appropriations are not incidental or mechanical, but discreetly triggered by literal clues and mirroring situations in the source texts that suggest connections with scriptural contexts. In addition, it pays attention to Philagathos’ allegorical treatise of Heliodoros’ Aethiopika and his epigram to the novel which provides a framework within which to assess the incorporation of novelistic material in the sermons.
Euripides' Alcestis: Narrative, Myth, and Religion
Preface together with the lesser known but clearly more readable and incisive study of the Homeric narrator by Scott Richardson (The Homeric Narrator, Nashville, 1990), not only opened up new vistas for the students of epic, but also paved the way for more groundbreaking research in the fields of Greek historiography, novelistic writing, and (surprisingly enough) drama. In recent years, however, the dynamism of narratology petered out for lack of new ideas and creative applications which aim to exploit the latest developments in literary theory in particular and in the humanities in general.