Resorting to rare sources of antiquity: Nikephoros Basilakes and the popularity of Plutarch’s <i>Parallel Lives</i> in twelfth-century Byzantium

This article examines the Byzantine adaptation of the anecdote of the Lydian king Pythes within Nikephoros Basilakes’ &lt;i&gt;Progymnasma&lt;/i&gt; 11 in relation to its earliest surviving source, Plutarch’s &lt;i&gt;Mulierum virtutes&lt;/i&gt; 262D–263A. By looking at the ascription accompanying Basilakes’ progymnasma, it additionally argues for the popularity of Plutarch’s &lt;i&gt;Parallel Lives&lt;/i&gt; in Komnenian Byzantium

Images of Trebizond and the Pontos in Contemporary Literature in English with a Gothic Conclusion

A Byzantinist specializing in the history of the Empire of Trebizond (1204–1461), the author presents four books of different genres written in English and devoted to the medieval state on the south coast of the Black Sea. The most spectacular of them is a novel by Rose Macaulay, Towers of Trebizond. Dąbrowska wonders whether it is adequate to the Trebizondian past or whether it is a projection of the writer. She compares Macaulay’s novel with William Butler Yeats’s poems on Byzantium which excited the imagination of readers but were not meant to draw their attention to the Byzantine past. This is, obviously, the privilege of literature. As a historian, Dąbrowska juxtaposes Macaulay’s narration with the historical novel by Nicolas J. Holmes, the travelogue written by Michael Pereira and the reports of the last British Consul in Trabzon, Vorley Harris. The author of the article draws the reader’s attention to the history of a rather unknown and exotic region. The Empire of Trebizond ceased to exist in 1461, conquered by Mehmed II. At the same time the Sultan’s army attacked Wallachia and got a bitter lesson from its ruler Vlad Dracula. But this Romanian hero is remembered not because of his prowess on the battlefield but due to his cruelty which dominated literary fiction and separated historical facts from narrative reality. The contemporary reader is impressed by the image of a dreadful vampire, Dracula. The same goes for Byzantium perceived through the magic stanzas by Yeats, who never visited Istanbul. Rose Macaulay went to Trabzon but her vision of Trebizond is very close to Yeats’s images of Byzantium. In her story imagination is stronger than historical reality and it is imagination that seduces the reader

Marquette University Slavic Institute Papers NO. 19

https://epublications.marquette.edu/mupress-book/1010/thumbnail.jp

1. The Heirs of the Roman Empire: Byzantium, Islam, and Medieval Europe

The fall of Rome did not, as many contemporaries had expected, preface the end of the world. Rather, it was the end of a world, of a way of life which had characterized the Mediterranean basin for centuries. Amid the ruins of Greco-Roman Civilization, three new civilizations arose in the old imperial territories and their borderlands. One of these new civilizations -- the Western - is our major interest and its first phase -- the medieval -- will here demand our closer attention. The other two -- the Byzantine and the Islamic -- were Eastern and influenced rather than fathered the Western World of today. Therefore, these Eastern civilizations need be treated here only briefly. [excerpt