Ancient history, family past, present day - all collide in this intricately woven first novel about three generations of one family, set against seventy years of political turmoil in Europe. At the outbreak of World War I, renowned archaeologist Lionel Richardson flees Sarajevo to begin an excavation at Ano Meri, an ancient palace in Crete. His success there becomes a lifelong obsession for which there is a very high price - one that his family must pay.

First published by CUP in 1989, The Medieval Greek Romance provides basic information for the non-specialist about Greek fiction during the period 1071-1453, as well as proposing new solutions to problems that have vexed previous generations of scholars. Roderick Beaton applies sophisticated methods of literary analysis to the material, and the bridges of the artificial gap which has separated Byzantine'literature, in a form of ancient Greek as both homogenous and of a high level of literary sophistication.
Throughout, consideration is given to relations and interconnections with...

A wide-ranging study of popular poetry and song in the Greek language from the last years of the Byzantine Empire to the present day. The folk poetry of the title includes the songs, composed and handed down by word of mouth, of unlettered villagers, of wandering minstrels with pretensions to professionalism, and, in more recent times, of the poorer inhabitants of Ottoman and Greek cities. The creative period of this folk poetry covers, at the minimum, 500 years of history and a geographical area stretching from Corsica in the west to Cyprus and Trebizond in the east, as well as northwards...

The twelfth century was a time of cultural renewal and innovation in Byzantium, just as it was in the west. In literature, the long disused genres of epic, satire and the novel (or 'romance') took new forms during that century; at the same time, in language, the vernacular made its first tentative literary appearances. These developments continued uninterruptedly through the late Byzantine and early modern periods. Scholarship since the nineteenth century has been sharply divided over these texts: do they represent the first 'breakthrough' of an emergent 'Modern Greek' literature, or merely a...

'It is no great matter, supposing that Italy could be liberated, who or what is sacrificed. It is a grand object - the very poetry of politics. Only think - a free Italy Why, there has been nothing like it since the days of Augustus.' So wrote Lord Byron in his journal, in February 1821, only days before the outbreak of revolution in Greece, where three years later he would die in the service of the revolutionary cause. For a poet whose life and work are interlaced with action of multiple sorts, surprisingly little attention has been devoted to Byron's engagement with issues of politics....

Called variously the Byzantine epic, the epic of Modern Greece, an epic-romance and romance, the poem of Digenes Akrites has, since its rediscovery towards the end of the nineteenth century, exerted a tenacious hold on the imagination of scholars from a wide range of disciplines and from many countries of the world, as well as of writers and public figures in Greece. There are many reasons for this, not least among them the prestige accorded to national epics in the nineteenth century and for some time afterwards. Another reason must surely be the work s uniqueness: there is nothing quite...