[5] Few of these anecdotes were as extended as the first-person narration about a statue of "Maximian" in the theatre of the Kynegion, which fell upon the investigator's companion, killing him; the narrator, who had taken refuge in Hagia Sophia, was exonerated when a certain philosopher, Johannes, found a text attributed to Demosthenes, predicting that the statue was fated to kill a prominent man.
Liz James[8] reinterpreted the text as exemplifying Byzantine views of the daimones inhabiting such three-dimensional figural representations as potential sources of power, for those Christians who understood how to harness it.
[9] With no sense of "Antiquity", the Byzantines did not distance themselves or their art from their classical Roman forebears, and had no sense that their interpretations of subject matter, often given Christian reidentifications, or the artistic style in which these representations were dressed, had drifted; by contrast, "we notice the distance that separates the Byzantines from the original meaning of pagan statues", given new identities as Christian figures or Emperors.
[10] More recently, Benjamin Anderson has argued that the Parastaseis represents an attempt by a group of self-styled aristocrats to claim the statues as repositories of secret knowledge about the future of the empire, and thus to gain leverage in their dealings with the eighth-century emperors.
[12] Though it is virtually the only secular text from the Byzantine age of eclipse that preceded the Macedonian Renaissance, surviving in a single manuscript, its modern commentators have not esteemed it highly: Alan Cameron[13] found it "so stuffed with such staggering absurdities and confusions (especially where Constantine is concerned) that it is seldom worth even attempting to explain them, much less sift out the few grains of historical fact behind them."