Middle and Late Byzantine Poetry: Texts and Contexts

422 Pages·2018·2.643 MB·English

by  Andreas Rhoby, Nikos Zagklas

MIDDLE AND LATE
BYZANTINE POETRY
Texts & Contexts
ς
BYZANTIO
Studies in Byzantine History and Civilization
14
Series Editors
Michael Altripp
Lars Martin Hoffmann
Christos Stavrakos
Editorial & Advisory Board
Michael Featherstone (CNRS, Paris)
Bojana Krsmanović (Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Belgrade)
Bogdan Maleon (University of Iasi)
Antonio Rigo (University of Venice)
Horst Schneider (University of Munich)
Juan Signes Codoñer (University of Valladolid)
Peter Van Deun (University of Leuven)
Nino Zchomelidse (Johns Hopkins University)
MIDDLE AND LATE
BYZANTINE POETRY
Texts and Contexts
Edited by
Andreas Rhoby & Nikos Zagklas
H
F
© 2018, Brepols Publishers n.v., Turnhout, Belgium.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a re-
trieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher.
D/2018/0095/107
ISBN 978-2-503-57886-6
ISSN: 1371-7677
eISSN: 1371-8401
DOI 10.1484/M.SBHC-EB.5.114744
Printed on acid-free paper.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Acknowledgements VII
Nikos Zagklas and Andreas Rhoby, Introduction 1
PART I: STUDIES IN THE POETRY OF THE MIDDLE AND
LATE BYZANTINE PERIOD
Section I: Forms, Perceptions & Functions
Floris Bernard, Rhythm in the Byzantine Dodecasyllable:
Practices and Perceptions 13
Nikos Zagklas, Metrical Polyeideia and Generic Innovation in
the Twelfth Century: The Multimetric Cycles of Occasional Poetry 43
Section II: Authors & Texts
Maria Tomadaki, The Reception of Ancient Greek Literature in
the Iambic Poems of John Geometres 73
Przemysław Marciniak & Katarzyna Warcaba, Theodore
Prodromos’ Katomyomachia as a Byzantine Version of Mock-Epic 97
Andreas Rhoby, The Poetry of Theodore Balsamon: Form
and Function 111
Krystina Kubina, Manuel Philes – A Begging Poet? Requests,
Letters and Problems of Genre Definition 147
Marina Bazzani, The Art of Requesting in the Poetry of
Manuel Philes 183
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Section III: Hymnography & Its Contexts
Theodora Antonopoulou, Imperial Hymnography: The Can-
ons Attributed to Emperor Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus. With
the Critical Edition of the First Canon on St John Chrysostom 211
Dimitrios Skrekas, Translations and Paraphrases of Liturgical
Poetry in Late Byzantine Thessalonica 245
PART II: THE EDITIO PRINCEPS OF A COMPLETELY
UNKNOWN TEXT
Renaat Meesters & Rachele Ricceri, A Twelfth- Century
Cycle of Four Poems on John Klimax: Editio princeps 285
Renaat Meesters, A Twelfth-Century Cycle of Four Poems on
John Klimax: A Brief Analysis 387
General Index 407
Manuscript Index 412
VI
Acknowledgements
The present book goes back to a workshop held at the Austrian Aca­
demy of Sciences, Division of Byzantine Research, Institute for Medi­
eval Research, in Vienna on July 4, 2014 with the title “Middle and Late
Byzantine Poetry: Text and Context”. Some of the participants of the
workshop do not contribute to the volume, while it has been expanded
by papers of scholars who were not present at this event. We would like
to thank all of them for their stimulating ideas during the workshop
and the collaboration for the preparation of the volume. We would also
like to thank Claudia Rapp and the Division of Byzantine Research for
the constant support. In addition, we are indebted to the editors of the
Byzantios series for accepting the book. The completion of the volume
has also benefited from the FWF project (P 28959­G25) “Byzantine Po­
etry in the ‘Long’ Twelfth Century: Text and Context” (2016–2020)
awarded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) and hosted at the Aus­
trian Academy of Sciences.

Nikos Zagklas – Andreas Rhoby
Introduction
In the middle and late Byzantine period the empire started witnessing a
number of challenges and military failures, which triggered a gradual de-
cline – especially after the Fourth Crusade – and resulted in its eventual
fall to the Ottoman Empire in the mid-fifteenth century. Although Byz-
antium became significantly smaller and its political and financial author-
ity became less influential throughout this period, its literary production
did not follow suit; despite the dreadful socio-historical developments,
the literary culture in Byzantium continued to evolve and blossom. The
strong revival of classical learning in the ninth and tenth centuries, the lit-
erary “in-betweenness” 1 of the eleventh century with Michael Psellos and
other contemporaries, the unprecedented literary innovation and experi-
mentation of many authors of the “long” twelfth century (1081–1204), 2
the rich production of literature against all odds during the Nicaean peri-
od (1204–1261), 3 and the so-called “revival” of Byzantine literature dur-
ing the Palaeologan period speak for the continuous literary flourishing
from the ninth to the fifteenth centuries in Constantinople, Nicaea and
various other centers (e.g. Southern Italy, Athens, and Thessalonica).
Prose may hold the reins of Byzantine literary production through-
out these centuries, but verse comes to play a significant role and very
often is preferred over the former for various literary developments; 4 for
1 See Marc D. Lauxtermann and Mark Whittow, Byzantium in the Eleventh Cen-
tury. Being in Between (London and New York: Routledge, 2017), p. XV.
2 See I. Nilsson, Raconter Byzance: la littérature au XIIe siècle (Paris: Le Belles Let-
tres, 2014) and W. Hörandner, Forme et Fonction. Remarques sur la poésie dans la société
byzantine (Paris: Le Belles Lettres, 2017), pp. 97–116.
3 Panagiotis A. Agapitos, ‘Literature and Education in Nicaea: An Interpreta-
tive Introduction’, in The Empire of Nicaea Revisited, ed. by Pagona Papadopoulou and
Alicia Simpson (Turnhout: Brepols) (forthcoming). See also C. N. Constantinides,
Higher Education in Byzantium in the Thirteenth and Early Fourteenth Centuries (1204 –
c. 1310) (Nicosia: Cyprus Research Centre, 1982) who deals with intellectual life in the
Nicaean Empire as well as in the Early Palaeologan period.
4 In order to understand the use of prose vs. poetry one has to know that for Byz-
antines both belonged to the group of “οἱ λόγοι”; see F. Bernard, Writing and Reading
Byzantine Secular Poetry: 1025–1081 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), pp. 31–
57.
NIkOS ZAgkLAS – ANDREAS RHOBY
example, the vernacular made its first appearance in verse form with the
long narrative poem of Digenis Akritis and the Ptochoprodromic po-
ems.
In order to describe the production of works in verse during this
long time-span, we opted for the term “Middle and Late Byzantine Po-
etry”. However, it should be stressed that this is something of a blanket
term that enables us to set some chronological boundaries and shape the
scope of this volume. In contrast to other aspects of Byzantine culture,
“middle” by no means stands as an indicator for maturity and “late” does
not suggest decline for poetry. This label does not aim to signify a clas-
sification in terms of value or to set conceptual boundaries, which usu-
ally bring about a number of problems in our understanding of various
aspects of Byzantine literary culture. 5 Of course there is a degree of varia-
tion throughout this long time-span. The extent of the use of verse by the
Byzantines varies from century to century, and so does the use of various
genres and techniques. Certain text types, tendencies and practices may
be more popular in one period than another.
It would not be a platitude to claim that our understanding of all
these aspects of middle and late Byzantine poetry is still incomplete.
Much remains to be done even on a foundational level. A considerable
amount of poetry is either unpublished or accessible only in outdated
and unreliable editions. It is hardly surprising that this is usually the
case for poems that do not teem with rich historical information. The
most telling example is Byzantine didactic poetry. Not being a reposi-
tory of prima facie historical evidence, these texts usually fail to attract
the attention of modern scholars. Take, for example, some well-known
twelfth-century didactic poems: the astrological poem written by kon-
stantinos Manasses at the behest of Irene the Sevastokratorissa is still
extant in a very outdated and problematic edition published in 1875 by
Miller. 6 The same goes for the corpus of didactic poems by John Tzetzes;
his Iliad Allegories are still to be found in the completely outdated edi-
tion of Matranga and Boissonade, 7 while his little known didactic poem
5 Panagiotis A. Agapitos, ‘Contesting Conceptual Boundaries: Byzantine Litera-
ture and its History’, Interfaces, A Journal of Medieval European Literatures, 1 (2015),
62–91, esp. 76 and idem, ‘karl krumbacher and the History of Byzantine Literature’,
Byzantinische Zeitschrift, 108 (2015), 1–52.
6 Emmanuel Miller, ‘Poème moral de Constantin Manassès’, Annuaire de
l’Association pour l’encouragement des études grecques en France, 9 (1875), 23–75.
7 Ed. Petrus Matranga, Anecdota Graeca e manuscriptorum bibliothecis Vati-
cana, Angelica, Barberiniana, Vallicelliana, Medicea, Vindobonensi deprompta (Rome:
Bertinelli, 1850), pp. 1–295 and Jean François Boissonade, Tzetzae Allegoriae Iliadis:
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