Suchergebnisse

This paper examines annotations inscribed in three manuscripts by Demetrios Laskaris Leontares (1418 – post-1475), an aristocrat whose possession or use of a dozen codices is documented. Palaeographic and historical criteria place all three texts in his adolescence around the 1430s. The primary focus is tenth-century Laur. gr. 55.4, a well-known collection of military treatises, in which successive generations of the Laskaris Leontares family inserted notices on personal and imperial events (1408-50). Overlooked by previous scholarship, on blank folio 197v Demetrios Leontares penned and signed a short letter addressed to an emperor, which constitutes a rare autograph specimen of Byzantine epistolography. This item was previously transcribed by Bandini (1768), who declined to edit and interpret its 'barbaric and utterly illiterate' script. Providing a new edition and first translation, this study situates the text within the evolution of epistolographic conventions in the early fifteenth century, as evidenced in contemporary letters and/or prescribed in letter-writing manuals. Whether interpreted as a draft or copy of an actual letter or a classroom exercise, this short private text adds uncommon 'domestic' and documentary dimensions to the study of Late Byzantine rhetoric, ideology and epistolary culture. The investigation widens to include two other undated annotations that can likewise be assigned to Demetrios Leontares' youth: a co-ownership notice in recently commissioned Marc. gr. Z. 399 (5r) and a previously unpublished missive to an unnamed relative in twelfth-century Vat. gr. 586 (429v). Collective consideration of these three modest informal texts assists in clarifying their contexts and chronology, while elucidating broader themes of children, education, language and books in an aristocratic household.

James T. Chlup – Conor Whately (eds), Greek and Roman Military Manuals. Genre and History (Routledge Monographs in Classical Studies). London – New York: Routledge Taylor & Francis Group 2020. xi, 295 pp. – ISBN 978-1-13833514-1 ; James T. Chlup – Conor Whately (eds), Greek and Roman Military Manuals. Genre and History (Routledge Monographs in Classical Studies). London – New York: Routledge Taylor Francis Group 2020. xi, 295 pp.– ISBN 978-1-13833514-1

Frontmatter --Contents --Acknowledgements --List of Contributors --Abbreviations --Introduction --1 Kings, Tyrants and Bandy-Legged Men: Generalship in Archaic Greece --2 Commemorating Thermopylae: The andreia of Glorious Defeat as a Literary Construct --3 Plato on Military and Political Leadership --4 Reconstructing Early Seleucid Generalship, 301-222 bc --5 Generalship and Knowledge in the Middle Roman Republic --6 Command Assessment in the Bellum Gallicum: Caesar and Fortuna --7 Remembering P. Quinctilius Varus: Opposing Perspectives on the Memory and Memorialisation of the Failed General in the Annales of Tacitus --8 Decius and the Battle near Abritus --9 Ammianus and the Heroic Mode of Generalship in the Fourth Century ad --10 The Fine Line between Courage and Fear in the Vandal War --11 The Generalship of John Troglita: Art in Artifice --12 The Best of Men: Cross-Cultural Command in the 630s ad --13 Tian Yue Marshals His Tropes: Public Persuasion and the Character of Military Leadership in Late Tang China --14 The Ideal of the Roman General in Byzantium: The Reception of Onasander's Strategikos in Byzantine Military Literature --15 Generalship and Gender in Byzantium: Non-Campaigning Emperors and Eunuch Generals in the Age of the Macedonian Dynasty --16 The Politics of War: Virtue, Tyche, Persuasion and the Byzantine General --Epilogue --Bibliography --Index