International congress of byzantine studies belgrade, 22 27 august 2016

Laura Borghetti
Università degli Studi Roma 3, Rome, Italy; 
[e-mail]
When Rhetoric Tells a Story. 
Beauty and Grace in Cassia’s Female Euchologic Discourse
In the field of Byzantine studies, Cassia’s 
μηναῖα 
have always drawn scholars’ attention due to 
the highly expressive and evocative features in her poetry. Nevertheless, the study of the text and the 
manuscript tradition of these liturgical hymns, which date back to the early 9
th
century, have raised 
neither a modern critical edition nor a complete commentary. My current research focuses on the 
study of Cassia’s poems having a woman as main character and aims to bridge this gap.
Cassia’s conception of woman’s role is plainly stated in her 
corpus
of epigrams and gnomic 
verses. The shortness of these poems, in most cases couples of verses, allows her to express her ideas 
quite unequivocally and incisively. On the one hand, in fact, the γνῶμαι clearly define the value that 
beauty, industriousness and composure should have in women’s life. On the other hand, they state 
to what extent these three qualities can be an aid in order to gain grace.
Since it has been observed that Cassia tends to imprint her personality, ideas and, sometimes, 
even life experiences in her verses, aim of this paper is to investigate if and how her conception 
of women’s role, by being transferred from the gnomic verses to the properly liturgical ones, has 
contributed to constitute a particular kind of rhetoric in her female euchologic discourse. If Cassia 
managed to inset biographical elements and personal points of view in a rigorously structured 
poetical canon, it could be stated that Cassia let her history talk through rhetoric.
Dragoljub Marjanović
University of Belgrade, Faculty of Philosophy, Belgrade, Serbia; 
[e-mail]
Is there a Hero in the 
Short History
of Patriarch Nikephoros?
The main focus of this paper is an attempt to determine whether Nikephoros of Constantinople as 
the author of the 
Short history
displayed an overall and totally positive image of the Byzantine emperor 
among characters whom he depicted in his work. From our previous research it was determined that 
emperors Herakleios and Constantine V receive most attention in the narrative and together occupy 
more than half of the entire 
Short history.
However, these emperors were presented in a complex 
manner with positive and negative elements in their reigns, providing valuable authorial messages 
on basis of the entire work. Among fourteen Byzantine emperors mentioned in the 
Short history
, 
there exists a relatively short portray of the reign of Constantine IV. Nikephoros mentions that it was 
during his reign that both 
East and West 
found peace after the emperor concluded peace treaties with 

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Arabs and Bulgarians, successfully ending the two year siege of Constantinople and convening the 
Sixth ecumenical council and thus reintroducing orthodoxy in the Church of Constantinople after 
a long Christological polemic which arouse from the monothelitic doctrine propagated by emperor 
Herakleios earlier in the 7
th
century. In connection with Nikephoros’ own time, when he wrote his 
Short history
, most probably soon after the Seventh ecumenical council in 787 and his own adherence 
to the ecumenical ecclesiology of the patriarch Tarasios, the image of the emperor Constantine IV 
who was the last emperor to convene an Ecumenical council from the perspective of the 8
th
century, 
and also able to introduce peace in his empire, argues towards a conclusion that his might be an image 
of the ideal emperor on the pages of the 
Short history
, and on a literary level and its narration a specific 
type of a 
hero 
who could provide a type of a ruler in the time of Nikephoros’ literary feat to present his 
view of the past which could engage his own contemporaries.