As a rule in the historical tradition, over time the larger cast of characters behind a series of events, the king and his court, is distilled down to the person of a single actor, the king, while his ministers and lieutenants are consigned to oblivion. Alexander the Great is by and large an exception to this rule. His Companions play important roles in his reign and campaigns, his character is developed to a great extent in his relations with them, and they rise to prominence in their own right as his successors; they form an indispensable part of the memory of Alexander. This is certainly true of the account of Alexander in the Chronographia of John Malalas, the seminal work of the Byzantine chronicle tradition. The men surrounding Alexander are referred to repeatedly, in marked contrast to the other historical personages who feature in the Chronographia . The terms that Malalas uses of Alexander’s Companions, however, are unusual, and require some interpretation. And the prominence of his Companions in this narrative seems intended to contribute to an essentially, but subtly negative depiction of Alexander by recalling the most disreputable incidents in Alexander’s career, which usually involved his Companions.

This article sheds light on a hitherto unexplored phenomenon that alters our picture of Byzantine monasticism: the monastic culture of the Black Mountain outside Antioch. From 969-1084, the Black Mountain thrived as a destination for a variety of Chalcedonian monks: Greek-speaking Romans, Arabic-speaking Melkites, Georgians, and Armenians. I illustrate the prosperity of monastic life on the Black Mountain, the scholarly activity flourishing in and between languages, and the networks connecting the mountain to monasteries inside and outside of Byzantium. In this paper, I examine three bodies of source material: manuscripts produced at the Black Mountain, texts produced by its scholars, and the letters of Nikon of the Black Mountain. Colophons in Greek, Arabic, Syriac, and Georgian manuscripts display the active scribal culture of these monasteries. Scholars centered at St. Symeon produced scores of translations from Greek into Arabic and Georgian that illustrate the lasting impact of this multilingual intellectual atmosphere. Nikon’s letters provide the basis for a cultural history of Antiochene monasticism. From these and other sources, I show that the Black Mountain was a major hub in middle Byzantine monastic networks. At the same time when Athos was assuming a primary role in the western Orthodox monastic world, the Black Mountain was performing a similar function in the east.

A large dossier of primary sources survives for Symeon the Stylite the Younger from Late Antiquity. These sources include not only hagiographical evidence, but also archaeological remains from his cult site, homilies, and at least one letter. They offer insight into the varied voices which shaped Symeon’s identity, sanctity, and ministry in the sixth and early seventh centuries CE. The state of scholarship on these sources is uneven, however, with the result that scholars have primarily studied the saint and his cult through the lens of the hagiographic material, the Life of Symeon Stylites the Younger in particular. In order to lay the foundation for a full inquiry into the saint and his cult, this article disentangles the dossier of evidence on Symeon in Late Antiquity. It introduces each source in chronological order; provides an overview of authorship, date, and the state of scholarship for each source; and makes preliminary recommendations for paths forward. It is meant to be a guide for art historians and archaeologists unfamiliar with the sizeable literary corpus, textual scholars who do not often work with material sources, and, for both groups, an introduction to problems in the dossier. It encourages scholars to treat each source on its own terms and re-evaluate the rich interconnections between the textual and archaeological evidence.

The paper focuses on one of the most productive wheat-growing regions in the entire Roman Empire, the Arsinoite nome (modern Fayum) in Egypt. Towards the end of the third century CE, multiple formerly thriving farming villages at the edges of the district went into decline and were eventually abandoned. This paper presents a new perspective on causes of this abandonment by synthesizing existing research. The papyri as well as the archaeological record imply that irrigation problems arising simultaneously from the third century CE lay at the heart of the problem and led to the progressive desertification of formerly agricultural land. The surviving documentation allows us to trace what increasing water stress meant on the ground for the local population and what adaption strategies they undertook to deal with the degradation and desertification of their farmlands. While socio-economic factors certainly played a role in the decline of these settlements, a change in environmental conditions should be considered as well. In fact, natural proxies record a general shift in East African Monsoon patterns at the source areas of the Nile and consecutively lower Nile flood levels from the beginning of the third century on.

The Defense of Holy Images by John of Damascus stands as the archetypal exposition of the Christian theology of images. Written at the outbreak of the Iconoclastic Controversy, it has been mostly valued for its theological content and given scholarly short shrift as a narrowly focused polemic. The work is more than that. It presents a complex and profound explication of the nature of images and the phenomenon of representation, and is an important part of the “history of looking”in western culture. A long chain of visual conceptions connects classical Greek and Roman writers, such as Homer and Quintilian, to John: the living image, the interrelation of word and image, and image and memory, themes elaborated particularly in the Second Sophistic period of the early Common Era. For John to deploy this heritage so skillfully to the thorny problem of the place of images in Christianity, at the outbreak of a violent conflict that lasted a further 100 years after his writing, manifests an intellect and creativity that has not been sufficiently appreciated. The Defense of Holy Images , understood in this context, is another innovative synthesis of Christianity and classical culture produced by late antique Christian writers.

Two recently-published works involved in the representation of women in the Christian past show two contemporary but divergent historiographic modes. The following essay examines each study within a larger frame of inquiry as to how patriarchy continues to shape both the institutional and embodied orders within which feminist historiography of early Christianity and Late Antiquity takes place. Using Critical Race Theory as the best available perspective from which to engage with systems of oppression, I articulate certain revisions which should be made to current efforts towards equality and consider what it would mean to write feminist historiography as counter-narrative or counter-storytelling without that becoming a decorative or extra-curricular practice in the academy. When feminist historiography is treated simultaneously in institutional, embodied, and epistemic terms it becomes evident that the way we think about women is part of a high-stakes conflict around the use of the past.

While a considerable amount of scholarly energy has been devoted to the Latin versions of the Passion and Acts of the African martyrs Perpetua and Felicitas, by comparison rather little serious attention has been devoted to the Greek translation of the narrative of their martyrdom. Such an investigation requires a focus not just on technical problems of the similarities and differences between the Greek translation and a putative Latin original, but also attention to the more strategic problem of its place in the context of translations of Latin Christian texts. Although a Greek translation could have been made soon after the first appearance of the Latin narrative, this essay argues that a more likely context for the translation and for a heightened interest in the cult of Perpetua in Italy and in the East is a much later fifth- and sixth-century one. When we consider the cultural as much as the literary “translation” of Perpetua's martyrdom, we see that the drive to exploit the images and social power of a specific group of African martyrs explains the emphasis placed on them not only in Africa (specifically at Carthage) but also in a cluster of sites at the head of the Adriatic. These particular connections logically suggest concomitant ones with the eastern Mediterranean of the Byzantine state of the fifth and sixth centuries C.E.