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Please reference as: Tamboukou, Maria. 2025. 'Ethics and Aesthetics', https://sites.google.com/site/mariatamboukoupersonalblog/home/research-projects/soundscapes-and-echoes-women-in-classical-music/research-context-questions-and-ideas
When we think of Byzantine literature, we often imagine an empire of sacred words and golden icons — a civilization whose art and theology sought the radiance of divine truth. Yet within that luminous world, voices like Kassia’s break through with a distinctly personal clarity. Kassia’s secular epigrams — terse, elegant reflections on wealth and poverty, beauty, envy, and folly — invite us to think about how ethics and aesthetics intertwined in Byzantine culture.
In Byzantium, beauty (κάλλος) was never merely an aesthetic category. It was inseparable from the good (ἀγαθόν), the true (ἀλήθεια), and the holy (ἀγιοσύνη). Τo be beautiful was to be rightly ordered, to participate in divine harmony and virtue. Byzantine aesthetics then is a moral aesthetics; beauty functions as a sign of virtue and divine presence. This moral-aesthetic ontology shaped not only art and theology but also language, conduct and emotion. The relevant literature identifies a foundational link in Byzantine culture between aesthetics and moral life, where the beautiful is a sign of the good, and the good is expressed in forms of harmony, rhythm and proportion. [1]
Kassia’s secular verses reveal precisely this moral-aesthetic sensibility. They inhabit a space of tension: she turns the moral maxim into a miniature artwork, and the poetic image into an ethical gesture. Her epigrams condense entire philosophies into a single, finely balanced line. Some admonish arrogance, others mock hypocrisy or greed, but always with a rhythm that makes the moral lesson a work of art. The precision of her form — her choice of meter, her play with antithesis — enacts the very order she advocates. In Kassia’s hands, ethical reflection becomes an aesthetic practice, and her epigrams become a form of thinking aloud about what it means to live meaningfully in a world of divine and human imperfection. To read Kassia’s secular writings today is to glimpse the Byzantine conviction that beauty can be a mode of truth, and that a well-wrought phrase might hold the same moral weight as a theological argument. Her voice reminds us that ethics, for the Byzantines, was never just about behaviour — it was about attunement, proportion, and grace.
In her epigram on Wealth and Poverty she writes:
Wealth covers the greatest of evils,
but poverty strips all evil naked.
It is better to be poor than to be rich unjustly.
The line’s symmetry is not only rhetorical but ethical: form enacts virtue. The balance of opposites — covering/uncovering, wealth/poverty — mirrors the Byzantine conviction that moral truth manifests through proportion and rhythm.
Her epigram on Beauty offers a still clearer articulation of this ethos:
It is better to possess grace from the Lord
than beauty and wealth that lack grace.
Here, grace (χάρις) mediates between ethical and aesthetic value; beauty devoid of moral grace is counterfeit, mere surface. Ιn Byzantine poetics grace is the aesthetic form of divine energy — that which renders both virtue and art radiant. This epigram’s simplicity conceals a complex interplay between body, virtue, and visibility. it opposes κάλλος and χάρις— beauty and grace — yet only to reconcile them in the divine. In Byzantine thought, κάλλος was always shadowed by moral ambiguity: beauty could uplift or corrupt, depending on its orientation. [2] Kassia resolves this tension not by rejecting beauty, but by reconfiguring it as ethical disposition — as grace, the inner radiance of right relation.
Now, layering in feminist aesthetics allows us to see another dimension of this interplay. Feminist aesthetics as a field has long challenged the presumed neutrality of “beauty” and the “aesthetic” in the Western tradition by interrogating gendered assumptions embedded in aesthetic categories — who creates, who is represented, and whose gaze is privileged. (see Eaton 2021) Feminist art criticism asks: how does the aesthetic function as a site of power — what voices are silenced, what bodies made invisible? In Byzantine studies, this feminist lens is still relatively nascent but growing. Andrea Mattiello (2024) has shown how female agency in late Byzantium can be traced via visual and material culture — an approach that aligns with feminist aesthetics by seeking the emergent, the fragmentary, the non-canonical texts and images.
Through a feminist aesthetic reading then, Kassia’s epigram on beauty becomes an act of reclaiming moral authority through language traditionally reserved for male theologians. By writing about beauty as a woman — and as one known for her physical and intellectual allure — Kassia intervenes in the gendered discourse of virtue. She transforms grace (χάρις) from passive charm into active moral intelligence. What Byzantine theology described as divine illumination, she translates into a poetics of embodied grace: beauty that thinks.
Yet Kassia’s vision of beauty is never naive. Her moral aesthetics remains alert to its own shadows — to the emotions that distort perception and corrode virtue from within. If beauty embodies measure and harmony, envy represents their undoing: the dissonance born when admiration turns to resentment, when the gaze upon another becomes self-consuming. Her verse on Φθόνος (Envy) likens envy to a serpent devouring itself:
Just as a viper tears apart the one who bore it,
so envy tears apart the envious one.
Here, Kassia condenses a moral allegory into a single image: the serpent that devours its mother. The violence of the metaphor produces its own aesthetic charge — precision as cruelty, the beauty of measure applied to destruction. Byzantine rhetoric often linked form to moral proportion; excess in language was akin to excess in behaviour (see Maguire 1996) Kassia’s discipline of style thus becomes a moral stance: ethical restraint rendered as aesthetic control.
From a feminist perspective, this epigram also reflects on the social dynamics of visibility among women. Envy here can be read not merely as vice, but as a symptom of hierarchical constraint — a recognition that beauty and virtue circulate within unequal economies of value. The epigram’s formal perfection mirrors the impossible standard imposed upon women: the demand to be flawless in appearance, yet silent in ambition. Kassia’s image of the self-devouring serpent becomes a metaphor for a culture in which women’s creativity threatens its own containment.
If envy exposes the corrosive effects of comparison and confinement, foolishness reveals their cognitive counterpart — the failure to discern, to measure, to know. Moving from the inward violence of envy to the outward absurdity of folly, Kassia turns her moral gaze from passion to intellect, from the ethics of emotion to the aesthetics of reason.
Μωρός (Foolishness)
There is absolutely no cure for stupidity,
nor help except for death.
Knowledge in a stupid person is a bell on a pig’s nose.
This is Kassia at her sharpest. The image of the bell and the pig is grotesque, comic, unforgettable. Here, ethical critique becomes aesthetic pleasure — wit as moral pedagogy. In the Byzantine monastic milieu, folly was often spiritualized, yet Kassia’s μωρός is resolutely secular: the fool as moral and intellectual failure. A feminist reading draws our attention to her tone — her unapologetic voice of judgment. Women’s speech in Byzantine culture was often confined to modesty and lament, yet Kassia writes satire. Her mockery destabilizes the decorum expected of her gender. The poem’s rhythm, its cutting brevity, embody a distinctly female form of ethical authority — irony as resistance.
Between Form and Freedom
Across these brief compositions, Kassia practices what we might call an ethics of aesthetic measure: the conviction that beauty, when rightly formed, is a mode of moral truth. Yet her voice complicates this Byzantine synthesis from within. She takes up inherited forms — the gnomic maxim, the moral epigram — and infuses them with wit, irony, and a distinctly gendered consciousness.
In doing so, Kassia participates in what contemporary feminist aesthetic theory calls the politics of form: the understanding that how one shapes experience — rhythm, tone, proportion — is itself an ethical act. For thinkers Rita Felski (2015) the aesthetic is not an escape from the world but a mode of engagement with it. Kassia’s verses anticipate this insight by over a millennium: her beauty is not ornamental, but argumentative.
Her secular writings remind us that in Byzantium, to live beautifully was to live well — and that for Kassia, to write beautifully was to think critically.
Notes
[1] See amongst others, Arabatzis 2020, Maguire 1996, Μainoldi 2018, Psellos 2017, Zografidis 2020.
[2] For a discussion of beauty in Byzantium see Karahan 2012.
References
Arabatzis, George. 2020. “La catégorie de l’éthico-esthétique dans l’étude de la philosophie byzantine”. Peitho. Examina Antiqua 11 (1):171-84, https://doi.org/10.14746/pea.2020.1.7.
Eaton, A. W., (2021) “Feminist Aesthetics”, in Kim Q. Hall, and Ásta (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Feminist Philosophy, 295-311, https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190628925.013.23.
Felski, Rita. 2015. The Limits of Critique. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Karahan, Anne (2012). Beauty in the eyes of God. Byzantine aesthetics and Basil of caesarea. Byzantion 82:165-212.
Maguire, Henry. 1996. The Icons of Their Bodies: Saints and Their Images in Byzantium. New Jersey: Princeton University Press.
Mainoldi, Ernesto Sergio (2018) “Deifying Beauty. Toward the Definition of a Paradigm for Byzantine Aesthetics”. Aisthesis 11(1): 13-29. doi:10.13128/Aisthesis-23269
Mattiello, Andrea. 2024. “Art and Female Agency in Late Byzantium: Three Methodological Case Studies”, Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies 48(1): 100-119.
Psellos, Michael. 2017. Michael Psellos on Literature and Art: A Byzantine Perspective on Aesthetics. Edited by Charles Barber and Stratis Papaioannou, University of Notre Dame Press.
Zografidis, Georde (2020). Aesthetics, Byzantine. In: Lagerlund, H. (eds) Encyclopedia of Medieval Philosophy, 61-64. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-024-1665-7_14
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