ABSTRACT
The acceptability of the traditional Graeco-Roman education for the Christian society of Byzantium, where some of its main beneficiaries were clerics, suggests that the secular underwent a transformation but was not completely effaced or rejected. It should be possible, therefore, to identify points of intersection between the persistence of paideia in the silver of the first half of the seventh century and the Christianized domestic sphere implicit in the cross-monogram plates. Although the Coptic textiles are not luxury items, they belong, as the David Plates probably do, to the domestic sphere. This chapter focuses on their role as luxury items in a secular context, and how this might have shaped their meaning for a Byzantine viewer, while bearing in mind that the biblical narrative of the plates challenges the concept of the domestic as a secular sphere. It discusses the relationship between the David Plates and the luxury illustrated manuscripts of late antiquity.
