Qualifications: DPhil (Oxon 2010), MPhil/DEA (La Sorbonne-Paris IV, 2004-2005), and BA (Athens, 2003); BA in music, piano (Attikon Odeion, 2003); Licence 1 en Lettres Françaises, (Sorbonne III, 2000)
This article is about the reconfiguration of the Iliadic heroic code in a fifth-century biblical ... more This article is about the reconfiguration of the Iliadic heroic code in a fifth-century biblical hexametric poem, the Homerocentones attributed to the Empress Eudocia (401–460 c.e.).3 The analysis focuses on the epic heroes’ anti-climactic moments, namely their despair when their glory and renown is thwarted, by inviting a comparison of two divine and mortal beings, Jesus and Achilles. More precisely, it explores what had long been thought of as the highlight of heroic emotion, allegedly commensurable to one’s bravery, tears.
This chapter traces the evolution of Homeric centos into Biblical centos and examines the ancient... more This chapter traces the evolution of Homeric centos into Biblical centos and examines the ancient audiences’, as opposed to that of the early modern editors’, reception of secular and Christian centos-, the techniques of excerpting and reusing Homer in the Empire, and the apologetic motivation of the centonists within the context of classicizing Christian poetic production in Greek and Latin. This analysis unweaves the Homeric from the biblical threads in the I HC in order to show how they are used in the new Christian context and demonstrates the variety of secular and religious cento compositions that had existed in antiquity. It shows how the I HC is Homeric with respect not only to its compositional units but also to other Homeric features yet is still a late antique epic poem. The conclusions emphasize that the I HC is stitched with both Homeric and biblical threads in a dense composition whose craft offers insight into both the classicizing technique and the Christian message.
This article illustrates how a classicizing verse rendering of the Fourth Gospel, Nonnus’s fifth-... more This article illustrates how a classicizing verse rendering of the Fourth Gospel, Nonnus’s fifth-century Paraphrasis of St John’s Gospel, evokes a twofold concept of Christian rulership that is simultaneously heavenly and terrestrial. It argues that the description of the Crucifixion and Entombment scenes offer a twofold panorama of the late antique world with an emphasis not only on the religious symbolism of these events but also on their importance for the crafting of the aspirations of the imperial church. Through typological interpretation, Platonic hues, classical intertextuality, and descriptions of objects connecting the heavenly and earthly realms, the poem hints at the universalist aspirations of Roman imperial Christianity, as seen from the focus on material details that the poem uses to map its version of the Christian ecumene.
This article argues that the Paraphrasis of St John’s Gospel by Nonnus offers a response to late ... more This article argues that the Paraphrasis of St John’s Gospel by Nonnus offers a response to late antique concerns as to why the salvific message of Jesus failed to be recognised by authorities of the Roman Empire in the Gospels. By reworking the portrait of Pilate found in John’s Gospel, Nonnus transforms the governor into an unambiguously late antique pepaideumenos, one who ultimately participates in the promulgation of Christian salvation and truth. The analysis shows that Nonnus accomplishes this portrait through the use of Homeric parallels and allusions to Plato’s Apology of Socrates, which transform Jesus’ trial before Pilate from John 18 into a philosophical dialogue about justice, kingship, and truth. The poem invites its late antique audience to better identify with Pilate and to see his inscription of the title (titulus) on Jesus’ cross as an early gentile confession of faith, ultimately making Pilate into an apostle avant-la-lettre and rehabilitating the role of Rome vis-...
The journal Trends in Classics and the accompanying Supplementary Volumes publish innovative, int... more The journal Trends in Classics and the accompanying Supplementary Volumes publish innovative, interdisciplinary work which brings to the study of Greek and Latin texts the insights and methods of related disciplines, such as narratology, intertextuality, reader-response criticism, and oral poetics. Both publications seek to publish research across the full range of classical antiquity. This innovative volume focuses on the generic and thematic experimentations that took place within late antique Christian poetry. The contributions are written by experts in their respective fi elds, who explore specifi c case studies of how a poem manipulates, and alternates between, major and minor registers, how it negotiates readerly expectations, and how much it deviates, like a fugue, from a given theme or genre. This volume is about the reception, reworking, subversion, and reinvention of classicizing genres in the Christian poetry of Late Antiquity, a period that, in this volume, is loosely defined as dating from Constantine to Heraclius. Some of the papers in this volume were presented in two International Workshops held in Lisbon (1-2 June 2017) and Heidelberg (15-16 December 2017), while some others are new additions. We hope that this work will increase our understanding of the changes that Christianity brought about in the classical world, with genre as our main focus but also touching upon the cultural and intellectual developments. The selection of papers and topics, far from being exhaustive, is intended to further discussions about the transformation of the classical heritage in the moyenne and longue durée of Classical Antiquity.
Eudocia’s cento, in portraying the bleeding woman weaving a cloth after being healed by Jesus, st... more Eudocia’s cento, in portraying the bleeding woman weaving a cloth after being healed by Jesus, stands as the earliest testimony to the tradition that will lead eventually to the Veronica legend.
Poetry, Bible and Theology from Late Antiquity to the Middle Ages, 2020
Études comme celles de Effe (1977) ou de Vollk (2002) sont très rigoureuses et ne peuvent pas ... more Études comme celles de Effe (1977) ou de Vollk (2002) sont très rigoureuses et ne peuvent pas être appliquées au corpusd el ap oésie didactique antique. C'est pourquoi j'adopterai ici le terme plus flexible mais aussi plus inclusif suggéré par Fowler (2002) 205.
Cet article explorera deux cas de réception de l'Iphigénie d'Euripide dans l'antiquité tardive à ... more Cet article explorera deux cas de réception de l'Iphigénie d'Euripide dans l'antiquité tardive à travers les adaptations romanesques d'Achilles Tatius et d'Héliodore. Le premier texte est le De Virginibus d'Ambroise écrit à Milan en 374, et le deuxième est la légende du martyre de Matthieu en Éthiopie, le Passio Matthaei, dont la date de composition pourrait remonter au vi e siècle ap. J-C. Je tenterai ici d'entrer dans le monde du lecteur occidental entre le iv e et le vi e siècle. J'examinerai comment des récits chrétiens anciens et des romans hellénistiques ont influencé la forme du mythe d'Iphigénie dans l'Antiquité tardive et comment les mythes classiques ont été reconfigurés et récrits à l'intention d'un public chrétien. This paper sets to investigate two cases of a late antique reception of the Euripidean Iphigenia through the novelistic adaptations of her story by Achilles Tatius and of Heliodorus. The first test case is Ambrose's treatise De Virginibus written in Milan in 374, and the second the legend of St. Matthew's martyrdom in Ethiopia, the Passio Matthaei, dated in the sixth century Ce. My aim is to focus on the background of the readers of the fourth and the sixth century in the West. In the paper, I examine how early Christian narratives and the Greek novels influ enced the late antique version of the Iphigenia myth and how classical myths were rebranded and rewritten for their late antique Christian audiences. 2. On the fluidity of apocryphal texts see c. thomAs, "Stories without texts and without authors: the problem of fluidity in ancient novelistic texts and early Christian literature", in r. f. hocK, J. BrAdley chAnce, J. PerKins (eds), Ancient Fiction and Early Christian Narrative, Atlanta, Scholars Press, 1998, p. 273-291. 3. See the fundamental principles for the field studies by s. hinds, Allusion and Intertext. Dynamics of appropriation in Roman poetry, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1998 and d. fowler, "On the shoulders of giants: intertextuality and classical studies", in d. fowler (ed.), Roman Constructions:
While scholars have explored the profound influence of Iphigenia among the Taurians (IT) on Greco... more While scholars have explored the profound influence of Iphigenia among the Taurians (IT) on Greco-Roman fiction, including Christian apocryphal Acts, the play has yet to be considered seriously as a potential inspiration on the canonical Acts of the Apostles. A close comparison of IT with the story of the Ephesian riot (Acts 19:21-20:1) reveals a compelling relationship in matters of plot, setting, characterization, purpose, and themes. The Ephesus saga in Acts achieves a creatively miniaturized and satirized recasting of this famous Euripidean play.
This article is about the reconfiguration of the Iliadic heroic code in a fifth-century biblical ... more This article is about the reconfiguration of the Iliadic heroic code in a fifth-century biblical hexametric poem, the Homerocentones attributed to the Empress Eudocia (401–460 c.e.).3 The analysis focuses on the epic heroes’ anti-climactic moments, namely their despair when their glory and renown is thwarted, by inviting a comparison of two divine and mortal beings, Jesus and Achilles. More precisely, it explores what had long been thought of as the highlight of heroic emotion, allegedly commensurable to one’s bravery, tears.
This chapter traces the evolution of Homeric centos into Biblical centos and examines the ancient... more This chapter traces the evolution of Homeric centos into Biblical centos and examines the ancient audiences’, as opposed to that of the early modern editors’, reception of secular and Christian centos-, the techniques of excerpting and reusing Homer in the Empire, and the apologetic motivation of the centonists within the context of classicizing Christian poetic production in Greek and Latin. This analysis unweaves the Homeric from the biblical threads in the I HC in order to show how they are used in the new Christian context and demonstrates the variety of secular and religious cento compositions that had existed in antiquity. It shows how the I HC is Homeric with respect not only to its compositional units but also to other Homeric features yet is still a late antique epic poem. The conclusions emphasize that the I HC is stitched with both Homeric and biblical threads in a dense composition whose craft offers insight into both the classicizing technique and the Christian message.
This article illustrates how a classicizing verse rendering of the Fourth Gospel, Nonnus’s fifth-... more This article illustrates how a classicizing verse rendering of the Fourth Gospel, Nonnus’s fifth-century Paraphrasis of St John’s Gospel, evokes a twofold concept of Christian rulership that is simultaneously heavenly and terrestrial. It argues that the description of the Crucifixion and Entombment scenes offer a twofold panorama of the late antique world with an emphasis not only on the religious symbolism of these events but also on their importance for the crafting of the aspirations of the imperial church. Through typological interpretation, Platonic hues, classical intertextuality, and descriptions of objects connecting the heavenly and earthly realms, the poem hints at the universalist aspirations of Roman imperial Christianity, as seen from the focus on material details that the poem uses to map its version of the Christian ecumene.
This article argues that the Paraphrasis of St John’s Gospel by Nonnus offers a response to late ... more This article argues that the Paraphrasis of St John’s Gospel by Nonnus offers a response to late antique concerns as to why the salvific message of Jesus failed to be recognised by authorities of the Roman Empire in the Gospels. By reworking the portrait of Pilate found in John’s Gospel, Nonnus transforms the governor into an unambiguously late antique pepaideumenos, one who ultimately participates in the promulgation of Christian salvation and truth. The analysis shows that Nonnus accomplishes this portrait through the use of Homeric parallels and allusions to Plato’s Apology of Socrates, which transform Jesus’ trial before Pilate from John 18 into a philosophical dialogue about justice, kingship, and truth. The poem invites its late antique audience to better identify with Pilate and to see his inscription of the title (titulus) on Jesus’ cross as an early gentile confession of faith, ultimately making Pilate into an apostle avant-la-lettre and rehabilitating the role of Rome vis-...
The journal Trends in Classics and the accompanying Supplementary Volumes publish innovative, int... more The journal Trends in Classics and the accompanying Supplementary Volumes publish innovative, interdisciplinary work which brings to the study of Greek and Latin texts the insights and methods of related disciplines, such as narratology, intertextuality, reader-response criticism, and oral poetics. Both publications seek to publish research across the full range of classical antiquity. This innovative volume focuses on the generic and thematic experimentations that took place within late antique Christian poetry. The contributions are written by experts in their respective fi elds, who explore specifi c case studies of how a poem manipulates, and alternates between, major and minor registers, how it negotiates readerly expectations, and how much it deviates, like a fugue, from a given theme or genre. This volume is about the reception, reworking, subversion, and reinvention of classicizing genres in the Christian poetry of Late Antiquity, a period that, in this volume, is loosely defined as dating from Constantine to Heraclius. Some of the papers in this volume were presented in two International Workshops held in Lisbon (1-2 June 2017) and Heidelberg (15-16 December 2017), while some others are new additions. We hope that this work will increase our understanding of the changes that Christianity brought about in the classical world, with genre as our main focus but also touching upon the cultural and intellectual developments. The selection of papers and topics, far from being exhaustive, is intended to further discussions about the transformation of the classical heritage in the moyenne and longue durée of Classical Antiquity.
Eudocia’s cento, in portraying the bleeding woman weaving a cloth after being healed by Jesus, st... more Eudocia’s cento, in portraying the bleeding woman weaving a cloth after being healed by Jesus, stands as the earliest testimony to the tradition that will lead eventually to the Veronica legend.
Poetry, Bible and Theology from Late Antiquity to the Middle Ages, 2020
Études comme celles de Effe (1977) ou de Vollk (2002) sont très rigoureuses et ne peuvent pas ... more Études comme celles de Effe (1977) ou de Vollk (2002) sont très rigoureuses et ne peuvent pas être appliquées au corpusd el ap oésie didactique antique. C'est pourquoi j'adopterai ici le terme plus flexible mais aussi plus inclusif suggéré par Fowler (2002) 205.
Cet article explorera deux cas de réception de l'Iphigénie d'Euripide dans l'antiquité tardive à ... more Cet article explorera deux cas de réception de l'Iphigénie d'Euripide dans l'antiquité tardive à travers les adaptations romanesques d'Achilles Tatius et d'Héliodore. Le premier texte est le De Virginibus d'Ambroise écrit à Milan en 374, et le deuxième est la légende du martyre de Matthieu en Éthiopie, le Passio Matthaei, dont la date de composition pourrait remonter au vi e siècle ap. J-C. Je tenterai ici d'entrer dans le monde du lecteur occidental entre le iv e et le vi e siècle. J'examinerai comment des récits chrétiens anciens et des romans hellénistiques ont influencé la forme du mythe d'Iphigénie dans l'Antiquité tardive et comment les mythes classiques ont été reconfigurés et récrits à l'intention d'un public chrétien. This paper sets to investigate two cases of a late antique reception of the Euripidean Iphigenia through the novelistic adaptations of her story by Achilles Tatius and of Heliodorus. The first test case is Ambrose's treatise De Virginibus written in Milan in 374, and the second the legend of St. Matthew's martyrdom in Ethiopia, the Passio Matthaei, dated in the sixth century Ce. My aim is to focus on the background of the readers of the fourth and the sixth century in the West. In the paper, I examine how early Christian narratives and the Greek novels influ enced the late antique version of the Iphigenia myth and how classical myths were rebranded and rewritten for their late antique Christian audiences. 2. On the fluidity of apocryphal texts see c. thomAs, "Stories without texts and without authors: the problem of fluidity in ancient novelistic texts and early Christian literature", in r. f. hocK, J. BrAdley chAnce, J. PerKins (eds), Ancient Fiction and Early Christian Narrative, Atlanta, Scholars Press, 1998, p. 273-291. 3. See the fundamental principles for the field studies by s. hinds, Allusion and Intertext. Dynamics of appropriation in Roman poetry, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1998 and d. fowler, "On the shoulders of giants: intertextuality and classical studies", in d. fowler (ed.), Roman Constructions:
While scholars have explored the profound influence of Iphigenia among the Taurians (IT) on Greco... more While scholars have explored the profound influence of Iphigenia among the Taurians (IT) on Greco-Roman fiction, including Christian apocryphal Acts, the play has yet to be considered seriously as a potential inspiration on the canonical Acts of the Apostles. A close comparison of IT with the story of the Ephesian riot (Acts 19:21-20:1) reveals a compelling relationship in matters of plot, setting, characterization, purpose, and themes. The Ephesus saga in Acts achieves a creatively miniaturized and satirized recasting of this famous Euripidean play.
This volume is about the reception, reworking, subversion, and reinvention of classicizing genres... more This volume is about the reception, reworking, subversion, and reinvention of classicizing genres in the Christian poetry of Late Antiquity, a period that, in this volume, is loosely defined as dating from Constantine to Heraclius. Some of the papers in this volume were presented in two International Workshops held in Lis-bon (1–2 June 2017) and Heidelberg (15–16 December 2017), while some others are new additions. We hope that this work will increase our understanding of the changes that Christianity brought about in the classical world, with genre as our main focus but also touching upon the cultural and intellectual developments. The selection of papers and topics, far from being exhaustive, is intended to further discussions about the transformation of the classical heritage in the moyenne and longue durée of Classical Antiquity.
The present volume goes back to a conference held at the Georg-August-Universität Göttingen in Oc... more The present volume goes back to a conference held at the Georg-August-Universität Göttingen in October 2011 on “Reading the Way to the Netherworld: Education and the Representations of the Beyond in Later Antiquity”. For the generous funding of the conference we are indebted to the Courant Research Centre EDRIS (“Education and Religion from Early Imperial Roman Times to the Classical Period of Islam”) and the Graduiertenkolleg “Götterbilder – Gottesbilder – Weltbilder” (both Georg-August-Universität Göttingen). The volume explores imperial and late(r) antique discourses about the Underworld in literary, theological, and philosophical texts.
This study is the first attempt to contextualise the First Edition of Homeric Centos, a biblical ... more This study is the first attempt to contextualise the First Edition of Homeric Centos, a biblical epic in Homeric hexameter, within the cultural milieu of Late Antiquity and with regard for its intellectual, literary, and religious aspects. What today we call centos are poems, typically Christian, written in a technique that flourished from the third to the seventeenth century CE, and eventually came to be known as cento poems, κέντρωνες, or κέντρα.
Today, thirty years after the publication of Michael Roberts (1989) magisterial Jeweled Style, the number of studies on late antique poetry, both Christian and secular, has exploded. Although these have focused primarily on the Latin authors, some have been also devoted to the Greek ones, especially their chief representative, Nonnus of Panopolis. The time is thus ripe for re-contextualising the first edition of Homeric Centos within the framework of Late Antiquity and re-evaluating it with an eye for the biblical poetry of that period. The present study aspires to examine the first and longest edition of Homeric centos, which date roughly to the first half of the fifth century, to peel back the layers of its thick textual fabric in order to contextualise it within the literary and religious milieu of Late Antiquity: by unpicking and unweaving the poem’s Homeric and biblical strands, the present reading will show that the Homerocentones is a biblical poem representative of the late antique Homeric reception and biblical exegesis, which, intriguingly, displays a stark female focus.
The book in progress suggests a different take on intertextuality via a structural analysis of my... more The book in progress suggests a different take on intertextuality via a structural analysis of myths and intertexts. The Greek novels, I argue, shape their plot according to the anticipations of a readership well versed both in mythical and novelistic narratives. Taking axiomatically the novel’s emphasis on mutual love and chastity as indispensable narrative means of achieving the happy ending, I explore four relevant major mythical megatexts of the Greek novels inspired from Homer and Euripides - the myths of Iphigenia, Phaedra, Penelope and Helen - and I analyse their contribution in the shaping of the reader’s expectations regarding the novelistic narrative at a metaliterary level.
Dr Anna Lefteratou, Lecturer in Patristics at the Faculty of Divinity, University of Cambridge, ... more Dr Anna Lefteratou, Lecturer in Patristics at the Faculty of Divinity, University of Cambridge, presented her second book, The Homeric Centos: Homer and the Bible interwoven (OUP, 2023), which was nominated for the London Hellenic Prize 2023 https://www.londonhellenicprize.eu/.
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Papers by Anna Lefteratou
Today, thirty years after the publication of Michael Roberts (1989) magisterial Jeweled Style, the number of studies on late antique poetry, both Christian and secular, has exploded. Although these have focused primarily on the Latin authors, some have been also devoted to the Greek ones, especially their chief representative, Nonnus of Panopolis. The time is thus ripe for re-contextualising the first edition of Homeric Centos within the framework of Late Antiquity and re-evaluating it with an eye for the biblical poetry of that period. The present study aspires to examine the first and longest edition of Homeric centos, which date roughly to the first half of the fifth century, to peel back the layers of its thick textual fabric in order to contextualise it within the literary and religious milieu of Late Antiquity: by unpicking and unweaving the poem’s Homeric and biblical strands, the present reading will show that the Homerocentones is a biblical poem representative of the late antique Homeric reception and biblical exegesis, which, intriguingly, displays a stark female focus.
Title:
Modulations and transpositions: the contexts and boundaries of ‘minor’ and ‘major’ genres in late antique Christian poetry
Organizers:
F. Hadjittofi (Universidade de Lisboa) and A. Lefteratou (Universität Heidelberg).