ABSTRACT
Personifications of various kinds can be found in many contexts in the Byzantine world. In the Paris Psalter, for example, the linguistically facile personifications of grammatically gendered nouns as female figures – Good Sense (Phronesis) and Megalopsychia (Magnanimity), for example – hover in the background to the scenes from the life of David not merely as an elegant and classicizing decoration but as an admonitory counterpoint, as it were, for the benefit of the Psalter’s recipient. In another paper in this volume (infra pp. 263–77), Liz James discusses the female figures who personified the City – Rome, Antioch, Constantinople – who were developed from the City Tyche of late antiquity but lingered on in strange ways. Here I would like to consider figures representing the months, which have both verbal and visual currency in Byzantium.
