Search results for ""author anthony kaldellis""

Although Greek and Roman authors wrote ethnographic texts describing foreign cultures, ethnography seems to disappear from Byzantine literature after the seventh century C.E.—a perplexing exception for a culture so strongly self-identified with the Roman empire. Yet the Byzantines, geographically located at the heart of the upheavals that led from the ancient to the modern world, had abundant and sophisticated knowledge of the cultures with which they struggled and bargained. Ethnography After Antiquity examines both the instances and omissions of Byzantine ethnography, exploring the political and religious motivations for writing (or not writing) about other peoples. Through the ethnographies embedded in classical histories, military manuals, Constantine VII's De administrando imperio, and religious literature, Anthony Kaldellis shows Byzantine authors using accounts of foreign cultures as vehicles to critique their own state or to demonstrate Romano-Christian superiority over Islam. He comes to the startling conclusion that the Byzantines did not view cultural differences through a purely theological prism: their Roman identity, rather than their orthodoxy, was the vital distinction from cultures they considered heretic and barbarian. Filling in the previously unexplained gap between antiquity and the resurgence of ethnography in the late Byzantine period, Ethnography After Antiquity offers new perspective on how Byzantium positioned itself with and against the dramatically shifting world.

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A major new history of the eastern Roman Empire, from Constantine to 1453. In recent decades, the study of the Eastern Roman Empire, also known as Byzantium, has been revolutionized by new approaches and more sophisticated models for how its society and state operated. No longer looked upon as a pale facsimile of classical Rome, Byzantium is now considered a vigorous state of its own, inheritor of many of Rome's features, and a vital node in the first truly globalized world. The New Roman Empire is the first full, single-author history of the eastern Roman empire to appear in over a generation. Covering political and military history as well as all the major changes in religion, society, demography, and economy, Anthony Kaldellis's volume is divided into ten chronological sections which begin with the foundation of Constantinople in 324 AD and end with the fall of the empire to the Ottoman Turks in the fifteenth century. The book incorporates new findings, explains recent interpretive models, and presents well-known historical characters and events in a new light.

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By exposing the perversion, repression, corruption, and injustice at the heart of Justinian's regime, Prokopios' The Secret History destroyed forever that emperor's reputation as the great and benevolent ruler of a vast Byzantine state.Faithfully rendered here in blunt and idiomatic English, Prokopios' tell-all is as shocking today as it was in the sixth century. Kaldellis' substantial Introduction addresses, among other topics, the historical background to The Secret History; Prokopios' literary style and major themes; and the relationships between Prokopios, Justinian, and Empress Theodora. Maps, genealogies, a glossary, and a selection of related texts (including excerpts from Prokopios' Wars and Buildings and several contemporary documents) enhance and support the reading of this scandalous and suspenseful book.

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By exposing the perversion, repression, corruption, and injustice at the heart of Justinian's regime, Prokopios' The Secret History destroyed forever that emperor's reputation as the great and benevolent ruler of a vast Byzantine state.Faithfully rendered here in blunt and idiomatic English, Prokopios' tell-all is as shocking today as it was in the sixth century. Kaldellis' substantial Introduction addresses, among other topics, the historical background to The Secret History; Prokopios' literary style and major themes; and the relationships between Prokopios, Justinian, and Empress Theodora. Maps, genealogies, a glossary, and a selection of related texts (including excerpts from Prokopios' Wars and Buildings and several contemporary documents) enhance and support the reading of this scandalous and suspenseful book.

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Saints of Ninth- and Tenth-Century Greece collects funeral orations, encomia, and narrative hagiography. Together, these works illuminate one of the most obscure periods of Greek history—when holy men played central roles as the Byzantine administration reimposed control on southern and central Greece in the wake of Avar, Slavic, and Arab attacks and the collapse of the late Roman Empire. The bishops of the region provided much-needed leadership and institutional stability, while ascetics established hermitages and faced invaders. The Lives gathered here include accounts of Peter of Argos, which offers insight into episcopal authority in medieval Greece, and Theodore of Kythera, an important source for the history of piracy in the Aegean Sea.This volume, which illustrates the literary variety of saints’ Lives, presents Byzantine Greek texts written by locals in the provinces and translated here into English for the first time.

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A fully-outfitted edition of Prokopios' late Antique masterpiece of military history and ethnography--for the 21st-century reader."At last . . . the translation that we have needed for so long: a fresh, lively, readable, and faithful rendering of Prokopios' Wars, which in a single volume will make this fundamental work of late ancient history-writing accessible to a whole new generation of students." --Jonathan Conant, Brown University

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Psellos and the Patriarchs: Letters and Funeral Orations for Keroullarios, Leichoudes, and Xiphilinos contains translations of the funeral orations written by Michael Psellos, the leading Byzantine intellectual of the eleventh century, for the three ecumenical patriarchs of Constantinople whom he knew best: Michael Keroullarios (1043-1058), Konstantinos Leichoudes (1059-1063), and Ioannes Xiphilinos (1064-1075). The orations are significant sources for the lives and reputations of these patriarchs; they are also a prime source for the educational reforms made by the emperor Konstantinos IX Monomachos in the mid-1040s, and for many events of that turbulent century that Psellos witnessed, including popular uprisings, plots, civil wars, and the battle with the Catholic legates in 1054. Never before translated into English, the orations and letters are introduced by a detailed analysis of Psellos’ historical relationships with the patriarchs and an interpretation of the works. The orations are not only important historical sources: they are crucial specimens of Byzantine rhetoric in a period of transition, as well as being key texts in the corpus of Psellos himself. Psellos used them to score important points in support of his own philosophical agenda and to make broader claims about ethics and metaphysics and the role of learning in political and ecclesiastical life. The orations are here accompanied by translations of a long letter that Psellos wrote to Keroullarios and a pair of letters to Xiphilinos, in which he defended key aspects of his philosophical project.

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A fully-outfitted edition of Prokopios' late Antique masterpiece of military history and ethnography--for the 21st-century reader. "At last . . . the translation that we have needed for so long: a fresh, lively, readable, and faithful rendering of Prokopios' Wars , which in a single volume will make this fundamental work of late ancient history-writing accessible to a whole new generation of students." --Jonathan Conant, Brown University

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