ABSTRACT
‘Pride and vanity have built more hospitals than all the Virtues together.’ So wrote the Dutch physician Bernard de Mandeville in The Fable of the Bees. The philanthropia of the empire’s inhabitants in general, and its particular expression in charitable institutions, has been lauded from early Byzantine times onwards. Most recently and influentially, some of those charitable institutions have been the subject of an ‘upbeat’, optimistic monograph by Tim Miller, The Birth of the Hospital in the Byzantine Empire. Despite the endorsement of prayers for the dead by such figures as John the Almsgiver onwards, and the clear evidence of liturgical commemoration, some monastic moralists and church authorities discouraged the idea that the prayers of others can have any effect on one’s soul in the afterlife. Paul of Evergetis in his Synagoge offers a stern warning: repent now, because there is nothing or anyone else can do after death to change one's fate in the other world.
