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.

About the Author
Anthony Kaldellis is Professor and Chair of the Department of Classics at The Ohio State University. He is the author of many books, including The Christian Parthenon, Hellenism in Byzantium, and The Byzantine Republic, which have been translated into French, Greek, and Russian. Ioannis Polemis is Professor of Byzantine Philology at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens.

Reviews
This volume offers an essential selection of texts. Kaldellis and Polemis need to be commended not only for their enterprise to put them together and provide information on their importance and topics that emerge through these compositions and the intertextual sources that seem to be present in these works, but also for their translation from Medieval Greek given their various styles. -- Michail Kitsos * Medieval Review *



Book Information
ISBN 9780674237360
Author Anthony Kaldellis
Format Hardback
Page Count 384
Imprint Harvard University Press
Publisher Harvard University Press