The fourth chapter analyses what scholars have called ‘symbolic’ or ‘heavenly’ coronations in Byzantium. With the expansion of Christianity throughout the Mediterranean, self-coronation and the mediation of priests became a point of divergence. Emperors in Christian Byzantium are to be crowned by the patriarchs in ritual practice, but they are frequently crowned by the iconographic representation of the ‘hand of God’. This chapter engages in a comparative analysis of the reality of church intervention in the real performative ceremony of the imperial coronation and the imaginative fiction of the crowning of the emperor directly by Christ and his angels and saints, as established in some iconographic representations. In Byzantium, imperial art was given the task of translating into a visual and symbolic – but not necessarily referential – language the values and ideology that prevailed in each dynasty concerning the source of its power.

Basileus and anax in Homer (gwasileus and wanax in Mycenaean Greek) are non-Indo-European power terms adopted by the predominantly Greek-speaking Mycenaean palatial culture of the late Greek Bronze Age (1450‒1200 b.c.e.) and used to signify respectively local or regional ruler and high or paramount king in the oral song-poems known as the Homeric epics and the texts written on clay tablets in the open-syllabic and peculiarly logographic script known as Linear B. Here we trace the likely root meaning of wanax when adopted from a non-Greek culture (likely the Minoan high culture of the island of Crete) and the specific semantic uses of both terms in the Homeric song-poems alongside the Indo-European power term koiranos, a term with decidedly military implications in the Homeric texts.