The Christian Parthenon: Classicism and Pilgrimage in Byzantine Athens

Description

Byzantine Athens was not a city without a history, as is commonly believed, but an important center about which much can now be said. Providing a wealth of new evidence, Professor Kaldellis argues that the Parthenon became a major site of Christian pilgrimage after its conversion into a church. Paradoxically, it was more important as a church than it had been as a temple: the Byzantine period was its true age of glory. He examines the idiosyncratic fusion of pagan and Christian culture that took place in Athens, where an attempt was made to replicate the classical past in Christian terms, affecting rhetoric, monuments, and miracles. He also re-evaluates the reception of ancient ruins in Byzantine Greece and presents for the first time a form of pilgrimage that was directed not toward icons, Holy Lands, or holy men but toward a monument embodying a permanent cultural tension and religious dialectic.

Anthony Kaldellis is Professor of Greek and Latin at the Ohio State University. He has published widely on topics in late antiquity and Byzantium, focusing on the literary and philosophical aspects of historiographical texts. His studies on the reception of classical culture in Byzantium recently culminated in the book Hellenism in Byzantium: The Transformation of Greek Identity and the Reception of the Classical Tradition (2007). He has also translated many Byzantine authors into English (among them Hesychios, Genesios, and Psellos) and one of his side-interests is the Byzantine history of the island of Lesbos.

'Kaldellis creatively uses what literary sources exist, along with architectural and glyptographical evidence, to reveal the spiritual power and reputation now accumulated by the Christian Parthenon.' The Expository Times ' ... although Kaldellis' work should be recognized for its contribution to our knowledge regarding this time and place, it should also be counted among important paradigm-shifting studies.' The Journal of Church History