This chapter presents the first detailed study of afterlife heroic power in the Oresteia. Aeschylus only uses the word “hero” (hērōs) once in his plays, for the anonymous powerful ancestors who send and receive the expedition to Troy in the Agamemnon. But in the Choephoroi, Agamemnon is prayed to as powerful at his tomb, and in the Eumenides, Orestes predicts his own heroic power from beyond the grave. The Oresteia famously relocates these two mythical heroes to Argos to associate them with that city’s treaty with Athens. This chapter demonstrates that the representation of father and son after death reverses expectations not only from the world external to the play, but also from their living actions within the trilogy. Agamemnon becomes an ethically whitewashed ancestor figure; conversely, Orestes, who killed his mother, becomes a political hero. These radical afterlife transformations are a major part of the Oresteia’s “poetics of the beyond.”

In his Parekbolai on the Odyssey, the twelfth-century polymath Eustathios of Thessalonike often uses the figure of Odysseus as a starting point to meditate upon crucial themes such as the role of poetry, the duties of the exegete and the qualities of the ideal rhetor. The first part of this chapter focuses on one such passage, where Eustathios analyses the famous ‘linguistic stratagem’ concocted by Odysseus to fool Polyphemus. The sophistic subtlety of Odysseus’ plan leads Eustathios to insert a long excursus on schedography, a rhetorical exercise that was increasingly popular in Komnenian Byzantium. As I argue, in Eustathios’ eyes, the Homeric text is nothing more than a sort of schedographic display ante litteram. More interestingly still, this interpretation provides Eustathios with an ideal pretext for a lesson on rhetorical ‘good taste’. The second part of the chapter examines an extract from John Tzetzes’ Histories in which Odysseus and his adventures again feature as a starting point for reflecting upon contemporary schedography. In this section, I show that, despite some similarities with Eustathios’ ideas, Tzetzes takes a more dogmatic position. As a matter of fact, Tzetzes’ careful depiction of Odysseus might even be interpreted as a subtle criticism of Eustathios’ standpoint.

The Moschopoulean comments on Sophocles are among the many materials for the teaching of high-register Medieval Greek that emerged from the well-regarded school of Maximos Planoudes and Manuel Moschopoulos in Constantinople between the end of the thirteenth and the beginning of the fourteenth centuries. The aim of this contribution is to explore this complex material, examining what its focus was and what this can tell us about Medieval Greek education in the late Middle Ages. This chapter takes as a case study the Moschopoulean scholia on Sophocles’ Electra. Previously unpublished passages from its prologue are here edited and discussed.

This chapter analyses John Tzetzes’ Theogony, a long poem in political verse that narrates genealogies of mythical gods and heroes following the example of Hesiod. The poem was dedicated to the sebastokratorissa Irene, a powerful patron of the Komnenian aristocracy, and is an important witness to the role of classical learning in twelfth-century Byzantium. The first part of the chapter examines the relation of Tzetzes’ poem to Hesiod’s Theogony, the Homeric epics and the Catalogue of Women, a fragmentary ancient work ascribed to Hesiod. It also provides a list of the main literary sources of the poem, which demonstrates Tzetzes’ dependence on other ancient poets. The second part analyses the narrative voice of Tzetzes, his linguistic style and the didactic character of the poem. The chapter concludes with an examination of the audience of the Theogony and its function as a didactic poem, which reflects patronage relationships in the Komnenian period. The chapter thus sheds light on Tzetzes’ attitude towards the ancient authors by situating the Theogony within his broad activity as a professional poet and commentator of ancient texts.

Between the eleventh and twelfth centuries a new class of authors specifically interested in classical philosophical texts appeared in Byzantium. After a long hiatus, these authors embarked upon a new adventure by producing commentaries on ancient philosophical texts. Their works are highly sophisticated and came to shape the Byzantine cultural landscape in this period and beyond. This chapter presents a survey of the middle Byzantine commentaries on philosophical works. For the first time, issues such as the conception of authoriality displayed in these commentaries, the different textual approaches, the transmission of these texts and the peculiar way of life of the Byzantine commentators are discussed and investigated from the point of view of the material and social conditions that favoured the production of these new texts.

Taking its cues from John Tzetzes’ commentaries on Aristophanes, this chapter investigates the idea of exegesis as performance. Commenting on texts was far from a disembodied act in Byzantium; on the contrary, it required an effort that was both intellectual and physical. Not unlike today, holding a class was an exercise calling for a series of structured bodily and mental practices to be successful. The first part of this chapter addresses the entanglements between performativity and manuscript production by looking at what Tzetzes’ scholia on Aristophanes tell us about the setting and the execution of the actual exegetical activity. The second part focuses on Commentary on Aristophanes’ Frogs 843a in order to show that appropriation of non-Hellenic traditions played a part in the performative and exegetical engagement with the classics in Constantinople toward the end of the twelfth century.

The Ghost of Clytemnestra is the first afterlife figure in extant Greek literature to call for vengeance instead of ritual burial. Speaking for the sake of her own soul (psychē), the Ghost cites the ethical wrongs done to her as a mother killed by her own son and as a queen dishonored in the afterlife. The Ghost’s claims, however, have never been seriously considered by scholars. By contrast, the Erinyes do take up her cause, chasing down Orestes and arguing a universal version of Clytemnestra’s case in the trial. This chapter delves into the specifics of the Ghost’s rhetoric, her metatheatrical self-awareness, and her first-person depiction of the afterlife. The living Clytemnestra has already proven manipulative, politically usurping, and murderous; she continues these behaviors after death. Further, the Ghost’s lack of substance (as image, soul, or dream of the Erinyes) distances her from the living world. How can a character so far outside of societal norms demand serious ethical consideration?

Theodora Palaiologina Kantakouzene Raoulaina was a wealthy educated patron, a true bibliophile with a rich collection of books, among which her autograph Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, gr. 1899 holds a prominent place. Raoulaina copied forty-three out of the fifty-three works of Aelius Aristides, a highly popular orator in the Palaiologan period for the teaching of rhetoric. The manuscript was copied most probably before 8 October 1273 and was intended to be Raoulaina’s gift to future generations. This chapter paper offers the first edition of hitherto unedited scholia to Aristides’ two Platonic discourses, Ὑπὲρ Ῥητορικῆς Λόγος Α΄&Β΄.

Announcing victory in the Trojan War, the Herald has been seen as a cheerful character, thoroughly enjoying life. Why, then, does he dwell on his own grave from the moment of his arrival? Why does he attempt to silence lament and, unsuccessfully, any speech about his fallen companions? The Herald never directly mentions the afterlife and insists on treating death as the end of all ties to life. Nevertheless, his approach to his own death and to the war dead serves as indispensable background for the rest of the trilogy. The Herald’s traumatized approach to warfare and death contrasts with his official function. His attempt at guiding social memory excludes the dead as impinging on society’s profit (kerdos) or glory from war. He reckons them out of the account with the language of calculation and voting. We thus see individual and societal values being formed in response to death as closure, in ways the Oresteia will later overturn and complicate. Moreover, the Herald provides the first mention of heroes as worshipped beings, of Hades, and of the “unseen” forces that affect human fate.