Citations:archontes

English citations of archontes

• 1930: Georges Bataille, Base Materialism and Gnosticism; quoted in:
• 1997: Jonathan Veitch, American Superrealism: Nathanael West and the Politics of Representation in the 1930s, page 34 (University of Wisconsin Press; →ISBN, →ISBN)

  In practice, it is possible to see as a leitmotiv of Gnosticism the conception of matter as an active principle having its own eternal autonomous existence as darkness (which would not be simply the absence of light, but the monstrous archontes revealed by this absence), and as evil (which would not be the absence of good, but a creative action). This conception was perfectly incompatible with the very principle of the profoundly monistic Hellenistic spirit, whose dominant tendency saw matter and evil as degradations of superior principles.²²

• 1985: Aryeh Kasher, The Jews in Hellenistic and Roman Egypt: the struggle for equal rights, page 140^{{1} & {2}} (Mohr Siebeck; →ISBN)

  ^{1} He may however have been one of the local archontes, who are mentioned in another document (CPJ, II 432, see below) as representing the community in regard to public water consumption.

  ^{2} It was translated by the editor, Fuks, as “from the archontes of the synagogue of the Theban Jews”¹⁰³ which implies that the Thebans had their own leadership, and in that case it is surprising that no archontes are mentioned in connection with the local synagogue (line 60).

• 1995: Rosamond McKitterick, Timothy Reuter, David Abulafia, and C. T. Allmand, The New Cambridge Medieval History: c. 1198–c. 1300, page 537^{{1} & {2}} (Cambridge University Press; →ISBN, →ISBN)

  ^{1} Social as well as economic differentiation among freemen was not expressed in legal terms, and all of them were subject to the same imperial laws and courts. The Byzantine elite composed of archontes, great landlords, high- and middle-ranking imperial officers and imperial dignitaries who mostly lived in cities, thus lacked a legal definition.

  ^{2} With the breakdown of imperial government in the years immediately preceding and particularly those following the fall of Constantinople the archontes in many areas of Romania exercised effective rule over the local population.

• 1999: K. van der Toorn, Bob Becking, and Pieter Willem van der Horst, Dictionary of deities and demons in the Bible DDD, page 84 (Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing; →ISBN)

  The archontes play an important mythological role in some Gnostic cosmologies. The seven spheres (the sun, moon, and the five planets Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn, bounded by the region of the fixed stars) are controlled by supernatural beings designated by various terms including archontes. Seven archontes are usually presided over by a chief archōn, who is also the demiurge who created the world, and resides in the Ogdoad, the eighth region above the seven planetary spheres.

• 2000: Sally McKee, Uncommon dominion: Venetian Crete and the myth of ethnic purity, page 69 (University of Pennsylvania Press; →ISBN)

  The archontes’ resistance to the Venetians arose far more from a sense of threatened hegemony than from a sense of national violation, as evidenced in part by the Greek nobles’ inability ever to unite in coalition against the occupiers. Their anger instead arose out of their being dispossed of their lands and status. In the process of consolidating their hold of the island, the Venetian authorities had confiscated all the land that had belonged to the Byzantine imperial fisc and to the Greek archontes.