Byzantine Readings of Ancient Historians; Texts in Translation with Introductions and Notes

198 Pages·2015·1.568 MB·English

by  Kaldellis, Anthony

BYZANTINE READINGS OF
ANCIENT HISTORIANS
The survival of ancient Greek historiography is largely due to its
preservation by Byzantine copyists and scholars. This process entailed
selection, adaptation, and commentary, which shaped the corpus of
Greek historiography in its transmission. By investigating those
choices, Kaldellis enables readers to gain a better understanding of
the reception and survival of Greek historical writing.
Byzantine Readings of Ancient Historians includes translations of
texts written by Byzantines on specific ancient historians. Each trans-
lated text is accompanied by an introduction and notes to highlight
the specific context and purpose of its composition. In order to pre-
sent a rounded picture of the reception of Greek historiography in
Byzantium, a wide range of genres have been considered, such as
poems and epigrams, essays, personalized scholia, and commentar-
ies. Byzantine Readings of Ancient Historians is therefore an important
resource for scholars and students of ancient history.
Anthony Kaldellis is Professor of Classics at the Ohio State
University. His areas of expertise include Byzantine studies and
Greek historiography.
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BYZANTINE READINGS OF
ANCIENT HISTORIANS
Texts in translation with
introductions and notes
Anthony Kaldellis
First published 2015
by Routledge
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© 2015 A. Kaldellis
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work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and
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ISBN: 978-0-415-73232-1 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-72006-7 (ebk)
Typeset in Garamond
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CONTENTS
Preface vi
Introduction 1
1 Xenophon in Byzantium and the coded poem for Leon VI 22
2 The Excerpta historica of Konstantinos VII
Porphyrogennetos 35
3 The scholia on the Zosimos manuscript 47
4 Ioannes Tzetzes’ verse scholia on Thucydides 65
5 Scholia on Diodoros of Sicily by Niketas Choniates
and others 80
6 Theodoros Metochites and the Greek Historians 98
7 Ioannes Kanaboutzes’ Commentary on the Roman
Antiquities of Dionysios of Halikarnassos 113
Bibliography 171
Index 183
PREFACE
The present volume contains translations of a range of texts which
illustrate how Byzantine readers interacted with ancient historio-
graphy between the ninth and fifteenth centuries. It excludes the
major corpus of such discussions in Photios’ Bibliotheke, which will
hopefully appear separately in a later volume of this series. I thank
Matthew Gibbons at Routledge for supporting this series, an ideal
venue for classicists and Byzantinists to talk to each other. Also, for
valuable help with the translation and discussion of many of the texts
in this volume, I thank Ilias Anagnostakis, Stephanos Efthymiades,
Scott Kennedy, Charis Messis, Ioannis Polemis, and the two anony-
mous readers of the press, who also made valuable suggestions.
INTRODUCTION
The core of this volume is a series of translations of texts that reveal
the multifaceted ways in which Byzantine intellectuals read and
responded to ancient historiography. It includes poems, the prefaces
to the Constantinian Excerpta, scholia in manuscripts, essays with
reflections on ancient history, and a longish commentary – though it
excludes the entries on historians in Photios’ Bibliotheke, to which a
later volume in this series will be devoted. This book is addressed to
a general scholarly audience. It hopes to draw classicists into a dis-
cussion with Byzantinists about questions of reception, transmission,
and the reciprocal influence of ancient historiography and Byzantine
intellectual culture. But as Byzantium is an arcane and inaccessible
field to non-specialists, and as even most Byzantinists themselves
specialize in various subdisciplines and are not necessarily familiar
with all the authors who make up the polyphony of this volume,
detailed introductions or commentaries were deemed necessary. Thus
the translated text is sometimes a smaller part of its respective chap-
ter (as with the Excerpta), but sometimes it accounts for the bulk of
it (as with Kanaboutzes’ commentary on Dionysios). The goal of this
project is, as mentioned, to expose reciprocal influences: how, out of
the many hundreds of historical texts that were written in antiquity,
Byzantine tastes, needs, and choices fundamentally shaped the canon
of Greek historiography that we have today; and, conversely, how the
Byzantines were themselves shaped in their historical thinking by
the works of the ancient masters that they chose, for so many various
reasons, to keep, copy, and study through the centuries. The follow-
ing introduction explores these two themes.
INTRODUCTION
RECEPTION IN A STRONG SENSE
Among many classicists and even more Byzantinists, “reception” usu-
ally refers to “the later history of a thing,” to the ways in which it was
perceived, adapted, and used by individuals or cultures subsequent
to the moment of its creation. The “thing” in question may be a text,
artifact, monument, person, moment in history, or entire culture.
The study of its reception is thus a subordinate project to the study
of its original form and meaning and of the context and purpose of
its creation, or “first life.” In most cases, it is an exercise in curios-
ity that offers little or nothing of importance to the classicist. At
best one may turn up an interesting Byzantine reading of an ancient
author that complements or confirms a modern reading arrived at
independently by other means, but usually it yields readings that
tell us more about Byzantium than about the ancient author; or it
may explain why the thing in question, or knowledge of it, survived
at all. But most of the time the results are trivial or nonexistent for
the classicist, good for footnotes at best. No scholar of Plato cares
how Prodromos read Plato, and no modern scholar of ancient Greek
historiography has turned to Byzantine authors for guidance.
This is a weak sense of reception, and it is not theoretically chal-
lenging. Perhaps we should just call this version the Nachleben
(“afterlife”) of a subject, and use “reception” for a different project
of inquiry. What if the form, identity, or constitution of our artifact
was not a settled matter at the point of reception but in fact took
shape after it, through the very process of reception? A great deal of
modern theory (often called postmodern) challenges the notion that
things have fixed essences and finite moments of creation that encode
specific original intentions.1 What if our artifact came into being
gradually, through the accretion of layered meanings and the inter-
ventions of later “users”? We must remember that our vantage point
is backward: what we see first, our first impressions of a cultural arti-
fact, are precisely the later interventions. These often form our basic,
“common sense” view of it, which we often mistake for a (putative)
original. This is the predicament of reception.
The classical tradition as we know it, embodied in texts and mon-
uments, does not consist of a series of self-explanatory artifacts, some
of which survived and some of which were lost. Its configuration,
contours, technologies of use, and more importantly its meanings and
symbolic associations were not fixed for us at the (classical) moment
of their creation but are also the product of a continuous process of
subsequent selection, adaptation, recombination, reinterpretation, and
of course political use. It is the post-classical that defines the classical,
2