Meaningful mingling: classicizing imagery and Islamicizing script in a Byzantine bowl

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Although Apollo leans back toward the left, he turns his head and extends his arm to the right, drawing the viewer's gaze to the next roundel, which represents the god Zeus as a bearded man seated on a throne, resting his feet on a stool (Fig. 14). His muscular chest and arms are adorned with gold bands, and a mantle is draped around his hips. He raises one hand in a gesture of speech. The pose is similar to that of the god in a silver plate of about 400 CE in which Zeus holds a sphere (Fig. 15). (54) In the S. Marco bowl, Zeus grasps in his left hand a small round object decorated with a human face; the object may be his aegis, a shield emblazoned with the head of the Gorgon. (55)

Like Apollo, Zeus was closely associated with divination, particularly through his oracle at Dodona in Epirus, Greece, which was cited in Homer's Odyssey (14.327-31). (56) The ninth-century chronicler George Synkellos mentions that the ancient Greeks consulted the oracle at Dodona, offering evidence for the continued association of Zeus with prophecy in middle Byzantine literature. (57) Zeus was also invoked in late antique divinatory rituals, for example, necromantic (conjuring the dead), oracular dream, and lecanomantic spells. (58)

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By the middle Byzantine period, the oracles of Apollo and Zeus had long since fallen into disuse, but memory of them persisted. In his Chronographia, the eleventh-century scholar and courtier Michael Psellos responds to a physician whose diagnosis contradicted Psellos's own by invoking the gods' mantic devices: "Let us hope your Dodonian cauldron is right and my [Delphic] tripod wrong ... my own studies have not been advanced enough for me to play the oracle." (59) The divinatory sites of Zeus and Apollo are also discussed and illustrated in two eleventh-century Byzantine manuscripts that negotiate the relation between pagan divination and Christian revelation. One of these manuscripts (Mount Athos, Esphigmenou 14) is a Panegyrikon, a liturgical text privileging three homilies dedicated to the Nativity of Christ and citing select saints' lives to be read during the liturgy. It includes numerous textual passages and illuminations that discourse on themes such as oracles, pagan statues, and magic arts. The other manuscript (Jerusalem, Greek Patriarchate Library cod. Taphou 14) consists of several tracts, including an illustrated commentary on the Homilies of Gregory of Nazianzos and a homily on the Birth of Christ, which discuss and illustrate oracles of Zeus, Apollo, and Athena (Fig. 23). (60) These texts, which argue for the insufficiency of pagan divination in comparison to the prophecy of Christ, visualize middle Byzantine conceptions of ancient Greek oracles in a manner that departs significantly from antique representations. Attitudes toward divination in these two manuscripts differ from that evinced by the S. Marco bowl, and the illuminations are narrative rather than emblematic, depicting the priests and priestesses of the cults rather than the gods themselves. Nonetheless, all three works of art attest to knowledge of and interest in antique oracular cults in eleventh-century Byzantium.