Despite increased interest over the last fifty years in childhood in Byzantium, the bibliography on this topic remains rather short and generalized. Becoming Byzantine: Children and Childhood in Byzantium presents detailed information about children's lives and provides a basis for further study. This collection of eight articles drawn from a May 2006 Dumbarton Oaks symposium covers matters relevant to daily life such as the definition of children in Byzantine law, procreation, death, breastfeeding patterns, and material culture. Religious and political perspectives are also used to examine Byzantine views of the ideal child, and the abuse of children in monasteries. Many of these articles present the first comprehensive accounts of specific aspects of childhood in Byzantium.

Volume 60 of this annual journal explores a range of Byzantine subjects: the classification of stamping objects (including six previously unpublished metal stamps); the date and purpose of the construction of Constantinople’s church of Saints Sergius and Bacchus; the Coptic Church’s literary construction of its identity in post-conquest Egypt; the evidence for the tenth-century revision of the so-called Chronicle of 811; an unusual development in the iconography of St. Menas; and versions of Niketas Choniates’ History.

Also included are editions and translations of Byzantine Communion prayers newly discovered in Massachusetts and two funerary epigrams written by Manuel Philes; both articles include commentary. The volume concludes with reports from 2003 and 2004 on Dumbarton Oaks–supported archaeological fieldwork projects on a church in Bizye and an aristocratic rock-cut Byzantine settlement in Cappadocia.

In The Web of Athenaeus, Christian Jacob produces a completely fresh and unique reading of Athenaeus’s Sophists at Dinner (ca. 200 CE). Jacob provides the reader with a map and a compass to navigate the unfathomable number of intersecting paths in this enormous work: the books, the quotations, the diners, the dishes served, and—above all—the wordplay, all within the simulacrum of an ancient Greek library. A text long mined merely for its testimonies to lost classical poets, the Sophists at Dinner has now received a full literary re-imagining by Jacob, who connects the world of Hellenistic erudition with its legacy among Hellenized Romans. The Web of Athenaeus simultaneously offers a literary history of the rarest and finest of Greek culture along with a creative anthropology of a Roman imperial world obsessed with the Greek past.