1. Introduction In ancient Judaism and Christianity, the fascination with numbers and number symbolism was widespread. Just think of the 12 tribes and 12 apostles, Enoch’s 365 years on earth, and 40-day periods of fasting or mourning. In such patterns, Jews and Christians shared a common vocabulary with all ancient societies, which used numbers to adorn their lore, order their calendars, and frame their cosmology. In the… Read more
2. Generating the World of Numbers: Pythagorean and Platonist Number Symbolism in the First Century Two intellectual traditions from classical antiquity laid the foundation for the early Christian theology of arithmetic. The first, and most easily identified, was the rich tradition of number symbolism in the ancient Mediterranean. Numbers had been used symbolically from very early times and in many cultures, as attested by cuneiform tablets and… Read more
3. The Rise of the Early Christian Theology of Arithmetic: The Valentinians The New Testament shows that the earliest Christians were attuned to the number symbolism of their day. Christ itemized his followers symbolically, choosing 12 disciples and 70 apostles. The Book of Revelation is adorned with numerous sevens and twelves, and a single, infamous 666. That impulse continued after the apostolic period. In the so-called Epistle… Read more
Chapter 16. The Web of Athenaeus: The Art of Weaving Links “Every time we meet, my friend Timocrates, you repeatedly ask me what was said at the meetings of the deipnosophists, thinking that we discover new things…” That is the opening to Book 6 (222a). In Book 14, Athenaeus once again mentions the ever new speeches that took place within Larensius’ circles (613c–d), and at the beginning… Read more
Chapter 17. The Epitome of the World The Deipnosophists crystallizes a fluid chain of texts, fragments, and words, connected by the memory threads of a circle of literati and, ultimately, by the memory of Athenaeus himself. A double logic can be recognized in this, namely a centrifugal and a centripetal logic. By bringing together a vast complex of reading notes, the Deipnosophists condenses the library until it… Read more
Chapter 18. When a Culture Reflects on Itself The work of Athenaeus would thus be a periodos tēs bibliothēkēs, a “tour of the library”, perhaps the library of Larensius, but certainly also that of memory, and also the ideal library whose reconstruction is enabled by textual tradition, direct and indirect. That trip does not link the books between them but creates a multiplicity of links between the… Read more
Works Cited Anderson, G. 1974. “Athenaeus: The Sophistic Environment.” In Aufstieg und Niedergang der römischen Welt, Teil II: Principat, Band 34.3, 2173–2185. Berlin. ———. 1993. The Second Sophistic: A Cultural Phenomenon in the Roman Empire. London. ———. 2000. “The Banquet of Belles-Lettres: Athenaeus and the Comic Symposium.” In Braund and Wilkins 2000:116–126. Arnott, W.G. Read more
Introduction: Imperial Geographies in Byzantine and Ottoman Space Dimiter Angelov, Yota Batsaki, Sahar Bazzaz [In this on-line version, the page-numbers of the printed version are indicated within braces (“{” and “}”). For example, “{69|70}” indicates where p. 69 of the printed version ends and p. 70 begins. These indications will be useful to readers who need to look up references made elsewhere to the printed version… Read more
1. Constantine VII and the Historical Geography of Empire Paul Magdalino History and geography were fundamental to the identity of Byzantium as an ecumenical empire with a long existence in time and an outreach that extended to three continents. Yet while the Byzantine elite maintained a long and distinguished tradition of history writing, it produced no geographers and travel writers to compare with those of antecedent… Read more
2. “Asia and Europe Commonly Called East and West”: Constantinople and Geographical Imagination in Byzantium Dimiter Angelov Writing in the years shortly before the fall of Constantinople to the Ottomans, Ioannes Kanavoutzes, a Greek teacher living in Genoese Phokaia in Asia Minor, addressed Palamede Gattilusio (1431–1455), the Genoese lord of Samothrace and Ainos, with a treatise on the ancient history of the island of Samothrace. In… Read more
