These notes are intended as both compliment and complement to the recent and admirable paper of L.G. Westerink. Leo as scientist and scholar has received his due in modern times, whereas his contribution to the Byzantine epigram tends to be belittled or ignored. Thus Hunger leaves him out of his survey of the genre, even whilst acknowledging the epigrammatic attacks upon him by his own pupil Constantine the Sicilian, whilst Trypanis can do no better than ‘He composed a number of epigrams, mainly on the mathematical, astronomical, and philosophical books he had acquired; among them there is also one strange and apparently improper epigram addressed to his mother’.

The imperial panels at San Vitale, Ravenna play a prominent role in Byzantine art history. These mosaics have engendered a lengthy bibliography, much of it dedicated to interpreting the possible connotations of these works. There has been debate over the nature of the ceremonial depicted, over the relationship of these panels to the rest of the programme of decoration within the church and over the representation of imperial power. This paper will argue that a consideration of gender, as represented in these panels, can add to our understanding of these important works of art and the social climate which produced them.

The ambition to control Syria had always been among the serious temptations of Emperor Nikephoros Phokas (963–969). In the last year of his reign and specifically on October 28th, 969 A.D. two of his generals, Michael Bourtzes and Peter Phokas (the Stratopedarch), at last succeeded in capturing the great city of Antioch. For the first time in three centuries Byzantium reestablished its authority in Northern Syria, and soon Antioch became a seat of a doux whose responsibility was to guard the southeastern flank of the Empire. Like both the doux of Mesopotamia and that of Chaldia, the doux of Antioch had to supervise the small themes in the new Byzantine territories which came under his jurisdiction.

Tales of love and romance, although love stories were regarded of less account than other literary themes, had always been a part of the literature of ancient Greece:

A colloquium under the above title was held in Oxford on May 12–13, 1989, under the auspices of the British association of university teachers of Modern Greek studies known as SCOMGIU (Standing Committee on Modern Greek in the Universities). The following articles represent a selection of the papers given at this colloquium, some printed with minimal alterations (thus preserving some traces of their oral performance) and others extensively rewritten.

‘A challenging start to the Colloquium’ was what the organiser asked for, in the form of a critique of one of its key terms. This is what this paper endeavours to supply. I suspect it has turned out not quite as provocative as the title sounds, but it does attempt to provide some critical assessment of, and background to, the much-discussed concept of ‘orality’, presented from the viewpoint of an anthropologist long interested in the study of oral literature and poetry. Most of the discussion will be in general terms, but I will illustrate my points from time to time by examples from my own fieldwork in West Africa.

Against reification: what is a context?

This paper provides me with an opportunity to suggest why the study of orality and literacy/literality in modern Greece has some theoretical as well as purely descriptive or local significance. For social anthropology, comparison between societies and cultures is a central task. While the study of modern Greek culture displays a remarkably persistent level of methodological introversion, its singular characteristics are very germane to the comparativist perspective. In part, this is due to the peculiar political circumstances that make the ancient forebears of the Greeks so much a part of current debates about the status of the modern culture.

The starting point for this paper is the belief that orality has to be understood in a wider sense than is given to the term bv the oral-formulaic theory of Milman Parry and Albert Lord. This is the more important when the field of study is medieval or modern Greece, societies far removed from what Walter Ong (1982: 31–75) has termed the ‘primary orality’ of a culture from which writing is absent. The oral formulaic theory, although excellent as a tool for the analysis of materials actually transcribed from oral performance, has come to be seen in the last fifteen years or so as an unwieldy and often unreliable yardstick for assessing the interaction of oral and written types of discourse. The insistence of the theory that for a text to be considered oral, the three processes of composition, performance and transmission should be simultaneous, imposes a definition of orality which is unjustifiably restrictive, and despite the well-intentioned efforts of Albert Lord and others to address the problem of the ‘transitional’ text, the method of analysis developed through close study of one particular oral tradition in Yugoslavia has proved disappointingly inflexible in its attempt to account for texts which are neither, according to its own definitions, truly oral nor fully literary (cf. Beaton 1987).

The island of Crete, during the period of Venetian rule, developed a poetic tradition unparalleled anywhere else in the Greek-speaking world. In this paper we shall be concerned only with poetry in the vernacular, whether in a systematically cultivated form of the local dialect, or in a more universal kind of Greek which at times also admitted learned or ecclesiastical words or grammatical forms; verse written wholly in archaic Greek which would have been unintelligible to the uneducated is outside the scope of this paper. Necessarily we are dealing with written texts, both manuscript and printed. The evidence for such a tradition begins in or around the 1370s with the poems of Stefanos Sachlikis (the manuscripts are of later date): satire, verse autobiography and didactic poetry are the principal genres. The tradition continues until the capture of the island by the Turks, completed in 1669. The corpus of Cretan poetic texts is not large but it embraces a variety of genres, including religious, consolatory, erotic and narrative verse, and it includes a number of works of high poetic merit. From the 1580s drama is added to the genres cultivated and the period from then until 1669 marks the ‘zenith of Renaissance literature in Greece’ (L. Politis 1973:52).

What Milman Parry saw as his ‘historical method’ in Homeric criticism has paradoxically relieved students of the Greek folk song from the obligation to approach their subject of study from an exclusively genetic or ‘etymological’ — in a word, historical — viewpoint. Instead of having to search for — or rather to speculate about — the origins of Greek oral poetry in the mists of antiquity or to assess the extent to which a song can provide reliable historical evidence concerning past events, we are free to turn our attention, as scholars such as Roderick Beaton (1980) and Grigoris Sifakis (1988) have done, to a synchronic study of the folk-song tradition, concentrating as much on the rules that generate the songs as on the significance of actual samples collected in the field (or in the scholar’s study or the recording studio).

These statements were made by Sikelianos in a talk entitled “O which he delivered in 1938, and in which he postulates a historical progression from text to voice, rather than the reverse process. They are the statements of a literate poet writing in a literate age, but delighting, at the same time, in the ability of radio to ‘reassert the spell of orality’ (Havelock 1986: 31). They subvert the idea of literacy as progress and propose, in its place, an ideal of post-textual orality. The aim of this paper is to explore the relationship between such statements and the poetry of Sikelianos.

In the late nineteenth century in France, a division arose between two concepts of poetry: poetry as a distinct form of expression, and poetry as a distinct form of perception. In the former the musicality of the poem was a primary feature: in the latter the aural value of the text was relatively unimportant.

As I reported to the International Colloquium on Greek Palaeography and Codicology, Berlin and Wolfenbiittel, October, 1983, I have for some years been gathering the materials for a catalogue of the Greek manuscripts housed in the Mingana Collection of the Central Library of the Selly Oak Colleges, in the city of Birmingham, England. The intervening years, for personal and administrative reasons, have not seen the appearance of this intended catalogue, but this delay has not been altogether detrimental, for occasionally some additional information has come to light. This short note reports one such piece of information, which I consider should be given to colleagues without further delay.

On Christmas Day, 1988,1 received from Marc Deprez the draft of an article entitled Noël et Hanoucah, which threw some further light on the imagery used in the kontakion translated by me in BMGS 12. On p. 146 I referred to ‘a verbal reminiscence of the Feast of Booths’, where the poet writes: In celebrating the Word’s divine sojourn in the Body may we, the children of his Church, be thatched with luminous virtues worthy of his grace, and may we prove, by divine illumination, a worthy dwelling-place of knowledge... But I did not know why the Feast of Booths was especially relevant to the occasion of the kontakion, which was Christmas Day.

The need for the state to protect its fiscal revenues is presented in the tenth-century legislation as a significant factor underlying the efforts made by the imperial administration to check the growing power of its provincial magnates and to make it more difficult for them to extend their properties at the expense of weaker peasants. In practice the most effective way for the state to maintain its revenues was to ensure through the regular activities of its fiscal officials that peasants who owed tax-payments to the state were not brought under the control of powerful lay and ecclesiastical landowners.

In 1981 I noted that Byzantine literature has never had a good press, least of all from its own students. It was not hard to document this assertion.