Identities endure not because they are ancient, nor because they are invented. They endure because they make the future cheaper. Everything else—origin stories, bloodlines, myths of awakening—is post-hoc decoration. Consider the Greeks, who manage the extraordinary feat of being Greek for centuries before thinking to mention it. Homer's warriors know nothing of fighting for Hellas or invoking "the Greek people" in their interminable speeches about honor and inheritance. In th

Orthodoxy is usually encountered in full dress. You know the drill: there’s domes 'afloat,' mosaics 'suspended between heaven and earth,' and (over)confident hierarchies. Seen from this angle, survival appears almost tautological; a system so ceremonially complete, so intellectually self-assured, and so visibly intertwined with power has endurance in its DNA. History, however, has a habit of stripping costumes. Byzantium did not survive as an empire; it survived empire. And

I t would be an error to treat the Christian story as merely the gradual sedimentation of various Greek philosophies narrowing and...

I t is impossible to understand the actions of the martyrs––though Roman reactions to Christianity were fluid and erratic––without...

T he fate of parties engaged in the intersectarian fighting that marked much the late Second Temple period was often decided by levels of...

B y the early second century AD gentile forms of Christianity began to dominate sources. Exactly how this transition occurred is...

N arratives concerning the journey from Christ to Nicene Christianity tend to fall into two camps with one implying that its...

‘A love-hate relationship.’ [1] Spyros Troianos on Christians and Jews ‘This Jew would be dear to my heart were it not for his abominable...

C5th Vergilius Romanus, Folio 101 recto, Biblioteca Apostolica, Cod. Vat. lat. 3867. The conventional view of late antiquity is that...

Recently I enjoyed talking about Byzantine Thessaloniki at the Hellenic Centre, Marylebone, London, at an event held by the Macedonian...

SLAVIC BRAKES (3.1) The first half of the ninth century saw Croats and other polities emerge. A group named Narentines were particularly...

REMILITARISATION OF ITALY (2.1) Italian society had not contributed large amounts of manpower to the Roman military since the mid-third...

St Theodore’s Column, Venice, Sydney Vacher (1919) AIM: This paper is split into four parts and seeks to address the source scarcity that...

During the Reformation Protestants accused Catholics of harbouring ideas that were less Christian than Greco-Roman i.e. pagan. It was a...

“To go to Rome Is much trouble and little profit. The King whom you seek there Unless you take Him with you, you will not find.” – An...

I spent 2021’s Indian Summer (Sept–Oct) in Rome documenting the city’s Byzantine churches. My appetite had been whetted by days 5–7 of...

You ought to know that the pontiffs of Rome preside in that city in order to maintain peace like a common wall occupying the middle...

[Fashion] represents a long… legitimate hope to actualise a lost image… [which] retains… an unquiet fascination with an allusive glory...

Profile of Rome As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, pastoral care in early Christian Rome was looked after by the tituli. These numbered twenty...

Egypt mattered. Though no emperor since Diocletian had travelled to the country, its tax revenues accounted for roughly a third of the...