The Hikanatoi ( Greek : Ἱκανάτοι , lit. 'The Able Ones'), sometimes Latinized as Hicanati , were one of the Byzantine tagmata , the elite guard units based near the imperial capital of Constantinople . Founded in the early 9th century, it survived until the late 11th century.
58-559: The exact date of the unit's establishment is uncertain: the Vita Ignatii , a hagiographic account of the life of Patriarch Ignatius of Constantinople , records that the unit was said to have been established c. 809 by Emperor Nikephoros I ( r. 802–811 ). A brief notice in the Chronicle of 811 fragment also records that in his ninth regnal year (which began on 1 November 810) Nikephoros I, in preparation for
116-424: A pejorative reference to biographies and histories whose authors are perceived to be uncritical or excessively reverential toward their subject. Hagiography constituted an important literary genre in the early Christian church , providing some informational history along with the more inspirational stories and legends . A hagiographic account of an individual saint could consist of a biography ( vita ),
174-543: A pitch accent . In Modern Greek, all vowels and consonants are short. Many vowels and diphthongs once pronounced distinctly are pronounced as /i/ ( iotacism ). Some of the stops and glides in diphthongs have become fricatives , and the pitch accent has changed to a stress accent . Many of the changes took place in the Koine Greek period. The writing system of Modern Greek, however, does not reflect all pronunciation changes. The examples below represent Attic Greek in
232-503: A campaign against the Bulgars , created a bodyguard for his son and heir Staurakios , recruiting into it the sons of the aristocracy. This date is generally accepted, although sigillographic evidence as to its establishment is vague, and could support a late 8th-century establishment. According to the Vita , Niketas, the grandson of Nikephoros and future patriarch Ignatius, was appointed as
290-556: A description of the saint's deeds or miracles, an account of the saint's martyrdom ( passio ), or be a combination of these. The genre of lives of the saints first came into being in the Roman Empire as legends about Christian martyrs were recorded. The dates of their deaths formed the basis of martyrologies . In the 4th century, there were three main types of catalogs of lives of the saints: The earliest lives of saints focused on desert fathers who lived as ascetics from
348-525: A fifth major dialect group, or it is Mycenaean Greek overlaid by Doric, with a non-Greek native influence. Regarding the speech of the ancient Macedonians diverse theories have been put forward, but the epigraphic activity and the archaeological discoveries in the Greek region of Macedonia during the last decades has brought to light documents, among which the first texts written in Macedonian , such as
406-560: A largely illiterate audience. Hagiography provided priests and theologians with classical handbooks in a form that allowed them the rhetorical tools necessary to present their faith through the example of the saints' lives. Of all the English hagiographers no one was more prolific nor so aware of the importance of the genre as Abbot Ælfric of Eynsham . His work Lives of the Saints contains set of sermons on saints' days, formerly observed by
464-550: A prefix /e-/, called the augment . This was probably originally a separate word, meaning something like "then", added because tenses in PIE had primarily aspectual meaning. The augment is added to the indicative of the aorist, imperfect, and pluperfect, but not to any of the other forms of the aorist (no other forms of the imperfect and pluperfect exist). The two kinds of augment in Greek are syllabic and quantitative. The syllabic augment
522-542: A strong Northwest Greek influence, and can in some respects be considered a transitional dialect, as exemplified in the poems of the Boeotian poet Pindar who wrote in Doric with a small Aeolic admixture. Thessalian likewise had come under Northwest Greek influence, though to a lesser degree. Pamphylian Greek , spoken in a small area on the southwestern coast of Anatolia and little preserved in inscriptions, may be either
580-622: A total of 4,000 for all tagmata more plausible. The lists of the Cretan expedition of 949, included in the De Ceremoniis of Emperor Constantine VII Porphyrogennetos ( r. 913–959 ), include mention of 456 Hikanatoi , but it is unclear what part of the unit's strength they represent. Hagiographic A hagiography ( / ˌ h æ ɡ i ˈ ɒ ɡ r ə f i / ; from Ancient Greek ἅγιος , hagios 'holy' and -γραφία , -graphia 'writing')
638-510: A vowel or /n s r/ ; final stops were lost, as in γάλα "milk", compared with γάλακτος "of milk" (genitive). Ancient Greek of the classical period also differed in both the inventory and distribution of original PIE phonemes due to numerous sound changes, notably the following: The pronunciation of Ancient Greek was very different from that of Modern Greek . Ancient Greek had long and short vowels ; many diphthongs ; double and single consonants; voiced, voiceless, and aspirated stops ; and
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#1732782609711696-432: Is a biography of a saint or an ecclesiastical leader, as well as, by extension, an adulatory and idealized biography of a preacher, priest, founder, saint, monk, nun or icon in any of the world's religions. Early Christian hagiographies might consist of a biography or vita (from Latin vita , life, which begins the title of most medieval biographies), a description of the saint's deeds or miracles, an account of
754-418: Is added to stems beginning with consonants, and simply prefixes e (stems beginning with r , however, add er ). The quantitative augment is added to stems beginning with vowels, and involves lengthening the vowel: Some verbs augment irregularly; the most common variation is e → ei . The irregularity can be explained diachronically by the loss of s between vowels, or that of the letter w , which affected
812-448: Is considered by some linguists to have been closely related to Greek . Among Indo-European branches with living descendants, Greek is often argued to have the closest genetic ties with Armenian (see also Graeco-Armenian ) and Indo-Iranian languages (see Graeco-Aryan ). Ancient Greek differs from Proto-Indo-European (PIE) and other Indo-European languages in certain ways. In phonotactics , ancient Greek words could end only in
870-679: The Archaic or Epic period ( c. 800–500 BC ), and the Classical period ( c. 500–300 BC ). Ancient Greek was the language of Homer and of fifth-century Athenian historians, playwrights, and philosophers . It has contributed many words to English vocabulary and has been a standard subject of study in educational institutions of the Western world since the Renaissance . This article primarily contains information about
928-525: The Church of Scientology is commonly described as a heavily fictionalized hagiography. Ancient Greek language Ancient Greek ( Ἑλληνῐκή , Hellēnikḗ ; [hellɛːnikɛ́ː] ) includes the forms of the Greek language used in ancient Greece and the ancient world from around 1500 BC to 300 BC. It is often roughly divided into the following periods: Mycenaean Greek ( c. 1400–1200 BC ), Dark Ages ( c. 1200–800 BC ),
986-604: The Cornish-language works Beunans Meriasek and Beunans Ke , about the lives of Saints Meriasek and Kea , respectively. Other examples of hagiographies from England include: Ireland is notable in its rich hagiographical tradition, and for the large amount of material which was produced during the Middle Ages. Irish hagiographers wrote primarily in Latin while some of the later saint's lives were written in
1044-606: The Epic and Classical periods of the language, which are the best-attested periods and considered most typical of Ancient Greek. From the Hellenistic period ( c. 300 BC ), Ancient Greek was followed by Koine Greek , which is regarded as a separate historical stage, though its earliest form closely resembles Attic Greek , and its latest form approaches Medieval Greek . There were several regional dialects of Ancient Greek; Attic Greek developed into Koine. Ancient Greek
1102-567: The Ge'ez language are known as gadl (Saint's Life). There are some 200 hagiographies about indigenous saints. They are among the most important Medieval Ethiopian written sources, and some have accurate historical information. They are written by the disciples of the saints. Some were written a long time after the death of a saint, but others were written not long after the saint's demise. Fragments from an Old Nubian hagiography of Saint Michael are extant. Jewish hagiographic writings are common in
1160-526: The Martyrology of Tallaght and the Félire Óengusso . Such hagiographical calendars were important in establishing lists of native Irish saints, in imitation of continental calendars. In the 10th century, a Byzantine monk Simeon Metaphrastes was the first one to change the genre of lives of the saints into something different, giving it a moralizing and panegyrical character. His catalog of lives of
1218-501: The Pella curse tablet , as Hatzopoulos and other scholars note. Based on the conclusions drawn by several studies and findings such as Pella curse tablet , Emilio Crespo and other scholars suggest that ancient Macedonian was a Northwest Doric dialect , which shares isoglosses with its neighboring Thessalian dialects spoken in northeastern Thessaly . Some have also suggested an Aeolic Greek classification. The Lesbian dialect
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#17327826097111276-497: The bandophoroi , sēmeiophoroi and doukiniatores . As with the other tagmata , the exact size of the unit and its subdivisions is a matter of debate, since it is chiefly based on Arab accounts, whose accuracy and veracity is open to question. Warren Treadgold , who accepts the Arab figures as accurate, considers the tagmata to have had a standard size of 4,000 men each, while Haldon, who considers their numbers inflated, considers
1334-603: The epic poems , the Iliad and the Odyssey , and in later poems by other authors. Homeric Greek had significant differences in grammar and pronunciation from Classical Attic and other Classical-era dialects. The origins, early form and development of the Hellenic language family are not well understood because of a lack of contemporaneous evidence. Several theories exist about what Hellenic dialect groups may have existed between
1392-501: The present , future , and imperfect are imperfective in aspect; the aorist , present perfect , pluperfect and future perfect are perfective in aspect. Most tenses display all four moods and three voices, although there is no future subjunctive or imperative. Also, there is no imperfect subjunctive, optative or imperative. The infinitives and participles correspond to the finite combinations of tense, aspect, and voice. The indicative of past tenses adds (conceptually, at least)
1450-581: The tagmata , it probably ceased to exist sometime in the latter half of the 11th century. According to John Haldon , the Hikanatoi were apparently modelled on the tagma of the Vigla . The regiment was headed by a domestikos ( δομέστικος τῶν Ἱκανάτων , domestikos tōn Hikanatōn ), usually with the court rank of prōtospatharios , although they could theoretically advance to the ranks of patrikios and anthypatos patrikios . His chief subordinate
1508-437: The 16th. Production remained dynamic and kept pace with scholarly developments in historical biographical writing until 1925, when Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (d. 1938) placed an interdiction on Ṣūfī brotherhoods. As Turkey relaxed legal restrictions on Islamic practice in the 1950s and the 1980s, Ṣūfīs returned to publishing hagiography, a trend which continues in the 21st century. The pseudobiography of L. Ron Hubbard compiled by
1566-518: The 4th century onwards. The life of Anthony of Egypt is usually considered the first example of this new genre of Christian biography. In Western Europe , hagiography was one of the more important vehicles for the study of inspirational history during the Middle Ages . The Golden Legend of Jacobus de Voragine compiled a great deal of medieval hagiographic material, with a strong emphasis on miracle tales. Lives were often written to promote
1624-1031: The 5th century BC. Ancient pronunciation cannot be reconstructed with certainty, but Greek from the period is well documented, and there is little disagreement among linguists as to the general nature of the sounds that the letters represent. /oː/ raised to [uː] , probably by the 4th century BC. Greek, like all of the older Indo-European languages , is highly inflected. It is highly archaic in its preservation of Proto-Indo-European forms. In ancient Greek, nouns (including proper nouns) have five cases ( nominative , genitive , dative , accusative , and vocative ), three genders ( masculine , feminine , and neuter ), and three numbers (singular, dual , and plural ). Verbs have four moods ( indicative , imperative , subjunctive , and optative ) and three voices (active, middle, and passive ), as well as three persons (first, second, and third) and various other forms. Verbs are conjugated through seven combinations of tenses and aspect (generally simply called "tenses"):
1682-495: The Archaic period of ancient Greek (see Homeric Greek for more details): Μῆνιν ἄειδε, θεά, Πηληϊάδεω Ἀχιλῆος οὐλομένην, ἣ μυρί' Ἀχαιοῖς ἄλγε' ἔθηκε, πολλὰς δ' ἰφθίμους ψυχὰς Ἄϊδι προΐαψεν ἡρώων, αὐτοὺς δὲ ἑλώρια τεῦχε κύνεσσιν οἰωνοῖσί τε πᾶσι· Διὸς δ' ἐτελείετο βουλή· ἐξ οὗ δὴ τὰ πρῶτα διαστήτην ἐρίσαντε Ἀτρεΐδης τε ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν καὶ δῖος Ἀχιλλεύς. The beginning of Apology by Plato exemplifies Attic Greek from
1740-595: The Bulgars, at the Battle of Acheloos in 917. In the Cretan expedition of 949, 456 soldiers of the unit from Bithynia , as well as an unspecified number of members garrisoned in the European themes of Thrace and Macedonia took part. The unit's continued existence in the 11th century can not be safely attested, as the few occurrences are either modern emendations or may refer to a family name "Hikanatos". Like most of
1798-545: The Dorians. The Greeks of this period believed there were three major divisions of all Greek people – Dorians, Aeolians, and Ionians (including Athenians), each with their own defining and distinctive dialects. Allowing for their oversight of Arcadian, an obscure mountain dialect, and Cypriot, far from the center of Greek scholarship, this division of people and language is quite similar to the results of modern archaeological-linguistic investigation. One standard formulation for
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1856-683: The English Church. The text comprises two prefaces, one in Latin and one in Old English , and 39 lives beginning on 25 December with the nativity of Christ and ending with three texts to which no saints' days are attached. The text spans the entire year and describes the lives of many saints, both English and continental, and harks back to some of the earliest saints of the early church. There are two known instances where saint's lives were adapted into vernacular plays in Britain. These are
1914-475: The Sikh Janamsakhis ) concerning saints, gurus and other individuals believed to be imbued with sacred power. Hagiographic works, especially those of the Middle Ages , can incorporate a record of institutional and local history , and evidence of popular cults , customs, and traditions . However, when referring to modern, non-ecclesiastical works, the term hagiography is often used today as
1972-550: The aorist. Following Homer 's practice, the augment is sometimes not made in poetry , especially epic poetry. The augment sometimes substitutes for reduplication; see below. Almost all forms of the perfect, pluperfect, and future perfect reduplicate the initial syllable of the verb stem. (A few irregular forms of perfect do not reduplicate, whereas a handful of irregular aorists reduplicate.) The three types of reduplication are: Irregular duplication can be understood diachronically. For example, lambanō (root lab ) has
2030-419: The augment when it was word-initial. In verbs with a preposition as a prefix, the augment is placed not at the start of the word, but between the preposition and the original verb. For example, προσ(-)βάλλω (I attack) goes to προσ έ βαλoν in the aorist. However compound verbs consisting of a prefix that is not a preposition retain the augment at the start of the word: αὐτο(-)μολῶ goes to ηὐ τομόλησα in
2088-793: The case of Talmudic and Kabbalistic writings and later in the Hasidic movement. Hagiography in Islam began in the Arabic language with biographical writing about the Prophet Muhammad in the 8th century CE, a tradition known as sīra . From about the 10th century CE, a genre generally known as manāqib also emerged, which comprised biographies of the imams ( madhāhib ) who founded different schools of Islamic thought ( madhhab ) about shariʿa , and of Ṣūfī saints . Over time, hagiography about Ṣūfīs and their miracles came to predominate in
2146-532: The cult of local or national states, and in particular to develop pilgrimages to visit relics . The bronze Gniezno Doors of Gniezno Cathedral in Poland are the only Romanesque doors in Europe to feature the life of a saint. The life of Saint Adalbert of Prague , who is buried in the cathedral, is shown in 18 scenes, probably based on a lost illuminated copy of one of his Lives. The Bollandist Society continues
2204-615: The dialect of Sparta ), and Northern Peloponnesus Doric (including Corinthian ). All the groups were represented by colonies beyond Greece proper as well, and these colonies generally developed local characteristics, often under the influence of settlers or neighbors speaking different Greek dialects. After the conquests of Alexander the Great in the late 4th century BC, a new international dialect known as Koine or Common Greek developed, largely based on Attic Greek , but with influence from other dialects. This dialect slowly replaced most of
2262-530: The dialects is: West vs. non-West Greek is the strongest-marked and earliest division, with non-West in subsets of Ionic-Attic (or Attic-Ionic) and Aeolic vs. Arcadocypriot, or Aeolic and Arcado-Cypriot vs. Ionic-Attic. Often non-West is called 'East Greek'. Arcadocypriot apparently descended more closely from the Mycenaean Greek of the Bronze Age. Boeotian Greek had come under
2320-567: The divergence of early Greek-like speech from the common Proto-Indo-European language and the Classical period. They have the same general outline but differ in some of the detail. The only attested dialect from this period is Mycenaean Greek , but its relationship to the historical dialects and the historical circumstances of the times imply that the overall groups already existed in some form. Scholars assume that major Ancient Greek period dialect groups developed not later than 1120 BC, at
2378-522: The genre of manāqib . Likewise influenced by early Islamic research into hadiths and other biographical information about the Prophet, Persian scholars began writing Persian hagiography , again mainly of Sūfī saints, in the eleventh century CE. The Islamicisation of the Turkish regions led to the development of Turkish biographies of saints, beginning in the 13th century CE and gaining pace around
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2436-512: The hagiographer's native vernacular Irish . Of particular note are the lives of St. Patrick , St. Columba (Latin)/Colum Cille (Irish) and St. Brigit/Brigid —Ireland's three patron saints. The earliest extant Life was written by Cogitosus . Additionally, several Irish calendars relating to the feastdays of Christian saints (sometimes called martyrologies or feastologies ) contained abbreviated synopses of saint's lives, which were compiled from many different sources. Notable examples include
2494-402: The hero-warrior figure, but with the distinction that the saint is of a spiritual sort. Imitation of the life of Christ was then the benchmark against which saints were measured, and imitation of the lives of saints was the benchmark against which the general population measured itself. In Anglo-Saxon and medieval England, hagiography became a literary genre par excellence for the teaching of
2552-508: The older dialects, although the Doric dialect has survived in the Tsakonian language , which is spoken in the region of modern Sparta. Doric has also passed down its aorist terminations into most verbs of Demotic Greek . By about the 6th century AD, the Koine had slowly metamorphosed into Medieval Greek . Phrygian is an extinct Indo-European language of West and Central Anatolia , which
2610-486: The original life stories of their first saints, e.g. Boris and Gleb , Theodosius Pechersky etc. In the 16th century, Metropolitan Macarius expanded the list of the Russian saints and supervised the compiling process of their life stories. They would all be compiled in the so-called Velikiye chet'yi-minei catalog (Великие Четьи-Минеи, or Great Menaion Reader ), consisting of 12 volumes in accordance with each month of
2668-487: The perfect stem eilēpha (not * lelēpha ) because it was originally slambanō , with perfect seslēpha , becoming eilēpha through compensatory lengthening. Reduplication is also visible in the present tense stems of certain verbs. These stems add a syllable consisting of the root's initial consonant followed by i . A nasal stop appears after the reduplication in some verbs. The earliest extant examples of ancient Greek writing ( c. 1450 BC ) are in
2726-405: The popular heroic poem, such as Beowulf , one finds that they share certain common features. In Beowulf , the titular character battles against Grendel and his mother , while the saint, such as Athanasius ' Anthony (one of the original sources for the hagiographic motif) or the character of Guthlac , battles against figures no less substantial in a spiritual sense. Both genres then focus on
2784-533: The regiment's first commander. The name of the unit derives from the Greek word ἱκανός , "able", and the Latin ending -atus . The unit is well attested in the 9th through 10th centuries. The first battle the unit participated in was the disastrous Battle of Pliska on 26 July 811 against the Bulgars, where Emperor Nikephoros I was killed. The unit is often recorded under Basil I the Macedonian ( r. 867–886 ), and participated in another defeat against
2842-732: The saint's martyrdom (called a passio ), or be a combination of these. Christian hagiographies focus on the lives, and notably the miracles , ascribed to men and women canonized by the Roman Catholic church , the Eastern Orthodox Church , the Oriental Orthodox churches , and the Church of the East . Other religious traditions such as Buddhism , Hinduism , Taoism , Islam , Sikhism and Jainism also create and maintain hagiographical texts (such as
2900-463: The saints became the standard for all of the Western and Eastern hagiographers, who would create relative biographies and images of the ideal saints by gradually departing from the real facts of their lives. Over the years, the genre of lives of the saints had absorbed a number of narrative plots and poetic images (often, of pre-Christian origin, such as dragon fighting etc.), mediaeval parables , short stories and anecdotes . The genre of lives of
2958-591: The saints was introduced in the Slavic world in the Bulgarian Empire in the late 9th and early 10th century, where the first original hagiographies were produced on Cyril and Methodius , Clement of Ohrid and Naum of Preslav . Eventually the Bulgarians brought this genre to Kievan Rus' together with writing and also in translations from the Greek language. In the 11th century, they began to compile
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#17327826097113016-438: The study, academic assembly, appraisal and publication of materials relating to the lives of Christian saints (see Acta Sanctorum ). Many of the important hagiographical texts composed in medieval England were written in the vernacular dialect Anglo-Norman . With the introduction of Latin literature into England in the 7th and 8th centuries the genre of the life of the saint grew increasingly popular. When one contrasts it to
3074-517: The syllabic script Linear B . Beginning in the 8th century BC, however, the Greek alphabet became standard, albeit with some variation among dialects. Early texts are written in boustrophedon style, but left-to-right became standard during the classic period. Modern editions of ancient Greek texts are usually written with accents and breathing marks , interword spacing , modern punctuation , and sometimes mixed case , but these were all introduced later. The beginning of Homer 's Iliad exemplifies
3132-467: The time of the Dorian invasions —and that their first appearances as precise alphabetic writing began in the 8th century BC. The invasion would not be "Dorian" unless the invaders had some cultural relationship to the historical Dorians . The invasion is known to have displaced population to the later Attic-Ionic regions, who regarded themselves as descendants of the population displaced by or contending with
3190-511: The year. They were revised and expanded by St. Dimitry of Rostov in 1684–1705. The Life of Alexander Nevsky was a particularly notable hagiographic work of the era. Today, the works in the genre of lives of the saints represent a valuable historical source and reflection of different social ideas, world outlook and aesthetic concepts of the past. The Oriental Orthodox Churches also have their own hagiographic traditions. For instance, Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church hagiographies in
3248-480: Was Aeolic. For example, fragments of the works of the poet Sappho from the island of Lesbos are in Aeolian. Most of the dialect sub-groups listed above had further subdivisions, generally equivalent to a city-state and its surrounding territory, or to an island. Doric notably had several intermediate divisions as well, into Island Doric (including Cretan Doric ), Southern Peloponnesus Doric (including Laconian ,
3306-452: Was a pluricentric language , divided into many dialects. The main dialect groups are Attic and Ionic , Aeolic , Arcadocypriot , and Doric , many of them with several subdivisions. Some dialects are found in standardized literary forms in literature , while others are attested only in inscriptions. There are also several historical forms. Homeric Greek is a literary form of Archaic Greek (derived primarily from Ionic and Aeolic) used in
3364-510: Was the topotērētēs ("lieutenant"), of spatharokandidatos or spatharios rank, while the rest of the unit's officials were below the rank of spatharios . Following the pattern of the Vigla , there were a chartoularios (financial official), a number of komētes ("counts") and their subordinate kentarchoi commanding the banda into which the unit was divided, a prōtomandatōr (head messenger), and three classes of standard-bearers:
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