Flowers, Trees and Forests in Early Chinese and Byzantine Encomium Literature

The Research Centre of Greek and Latin Literature of the Academy of Athens is pleased to announce the joint lecture by Di Wang (Hunan) and Marina Bazzani (Oxford) on “Flowers, Trees and Forests in Early Chinese and Byzantine Encomium Literature”. The lecture will take place online on Thursday 25 June (08.00 New York /13.00 London / 15. 00 Athens / 20.00 Beijing / 21.00 Tokyo).

Abstract
This joint lecture examines vegetal imagery in the encomiastic traditions of early China (pre-1st c. BCE) and Byzantium (12th–14th c. CE). Despite geographic and chronological distance, both share botanical catalogues, layered plant metaphors, and a fluid blend of observation and imagination. Di Wang traces how the two major traditions of early Chinese poetry, Shijing and Chuci, differently invested nature with symbolic meaning, converging in Sima Xiangru’s fu poetry, which turns textual landscapes into imperial gardens—marking a key moment in China’s encyclopedic (bowu) knowledge production, where classifying nature became an act of imperial power. Marina Bazzani surveys plant and flower imagery in Geometres, Theodore Prodromos, and Manuel Philes, focusing on Prodromos, where vegetal metaphors function not merely as aesthetic devices but as potent political instruments that legitimise Komnenian imperial authority. Together, the joint lecture reveals a shared rhetorical logic: in both cultures, the plant world was not mere ornament but a language of power, a means of imagining political order, and a poetic tool for transforming natural abundance into imperial vision.

To receive the ZOOM link contact mkonaris@academyofathens.gr