Download PDF | Byzantine Readings Of Ancient Historians Texts In Translation With Introductions And Notes By Anthony Kaldellis
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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 translated text is accompanied by an introduction and notes to highlight the specific context and purpose of its composition. In order to present 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 commentaries. 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.
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 anonymous 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 discussion 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 chapter (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 following introduction explores these two themes.
RECEPTION IN A STRONG SENSE
Among many classicists and even more Byzantinists, “reception” usually 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 curiosity 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 challenging. 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.! What if our artifact came into being gradually, through the accretion of layered meanings and the interventions of later “users”? We must remember that our vantage point is backward: what we see first, our first impressions of a cultural artifact, 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 monuments, 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, that brings it into being and gives it shape. This is true on an obvious semantic level, as it is only in retrospect that the classical appears to have been classical: it becomes that only in relation to something that is defined as different from it, and that can be done only by reception. It is also true in many of the particulars: the selection of artifacts for survival (or loss); the form in which we receive them; and the values that we associate with them. All bear the imprint of millennia of reception, which have constituted them as classical for us.
The process never begins or ends, for every point is a point of reception. The challenge for scholars is to examine how it gradually gave rise to what we know as the classical tradition, and how the ancient material was molded by the needs and values of self-consciously post-classical societies. Imagining possible alternatives is one way to escape the determinism and teleology urged upon us by the tradition that we face. The Athenocentrism of that tradition and its focus on the period of the democracy is one place to start: we are now beginning to understand that it was the product not only of Alexandrine literary tastes but also of Roman political interests in settling
the conquered Greek territories.” But we can imagine alternative Hellenisms that might have emerged under other circumstances, for example one centered on Lesbos, which produced the most writers and poets after Athens in the archaic and classical periods. What would a Hellenism focused on lyric rather than tragedy, on song rather than rhetoric, and on Hellanikos rather than Thucydides look like?> And the Byzantines too played a part in exacerbating classical Athenocentrism. It is likely that, in terms of texts, potential alternatives survived until late antiquity, even if not valorized as much as their Athenian counterparts, only to disappear later, mostly through neglect.4
Similar processes have shaped famous archaeological sites, often in subtle ways. Few today realize that the “sacred way” at Delphi along which visitors go up from the Roman agora to the temple of Apollo was in fact a creation of the early Byzantine phase of the site, possibly of the sixth century AD, so after the oracle had ceased to function and right before the abandonment of
the site. The “classical” experience had been different.” At Athens too, the valorization of the Parthenon as the supreme and defining monument of the city, and the beginning of targeted pilgrimages to it, date to the Byzantine period, when it was a church of the Virgin. It was then that literal worship of the Parthenon began in earnest, and when the temple was associated with a rhetoric of divine light that passed, imperceptibly, into the experience of early modern and then modern visitors to the site. Byzantine ways of viewing the monument were thereby assimilated and then projected back
onto the classical period, when they are not in fact attested. We have only begun to explore the manifold ways in which Byzantine choices, despised or denied for so long, actually fashioned the classical experiences that modernity has valued so highly. Consider for example the different fates of texts and statues. Almost everything that we have of classical Greek literature we have because the Byzantines chose to preserve it, selecting it out from all the rest that had survived down to late antiquity. After the foundation of Constantinople, the emperors also sent out agents to search through the Greek cities and bring to the capital the best and most emblematic works, including the statues of Olympian Zeus, Lindian Athena, and works by many masters, presumably the authentic ones. But all of those were subsequently destroyed, except the Serpent Column from Delphi. Therefore, what we have of texts is by and large what the Byzantines chose to keep, but what we have of statues is what they chose to leave behind, a lot of it second-rate stuff and Roman copies.
How different our notion ofclassical art would be if we had the Constantinopolitan collections instead.’ This is a goal toward which classicists and Byzantinists can — indeed, must — collaborate. One area includes all the technologies and ideologies of learning through which the Byzantines studied the classical tradition, repackaged it, and transmitted it to the next phase of scholarship, in the west. These include codices (as opposed to papyrus rolls), the minuscule script, the transformation of ancient self-standing commentaries into marginal scholia, lexika, epimerismi, anthologies, gnomologia, and, starting dynamically in the twelfth century, original Byzantine scholia and
commentaries.° Another area of collaboration would be to explain the selection of surviving ancient literature, that is why, out of the hundreds of texts that were written during antiquity in each field (e.g., philosophy, tragedy, rhetoric, and historiography), we have around 5 per cent or less. The factors behind this selection were late imperial Roman and Byzantine, with different ones operating in each field.
In a recent article, I outlined a tentative argument regarding the corpus of ancient Greek historiography: what Byzantine interests in history might
explain the selection of texts that we have?” It is important that we not extrapolate them only from that selection, which would make the argument circular, but instead look at the points of interest in the past which the Byzantines displayed in their own chronicles of world history and other writings. The following areas can be identified, and indeed it turns out that they map closely onto the surviving body of ancient Greek historiography: interest in the mythistory of the most important peoples of the Mediterranean, especially those whose traditions competed with the Old Testament; the Near Eastern (e.g., Persian) context of sacred history; the foundation of Rome; the Roman civil wars at the end of the Republic; and early imperial history, especially of the Christian empire. It was these interests that shaped the selection of ancient texts. So rather than see Byzantine historiography as a worthy sequel to its ancient counterpart, as is often done, we might reverse this perspective and see ancient historiography as a corpus created to function as an auxiliary to the real thing, namely the Byzantine view of history.
The texts translated and discussed in this volume complement rather than directly reinforce this argument, by displaying a variety of ways through which Byzantine scholars, intellectuals, and courtiers interacted with the ancient texts. These include poetic dedications that allusively recast ancient figures to encode contemporary relationships (ch. 1); thematic anthologies (ch. 2); pagan—Christian polemics about the emperor Constantine (ch. 3); scholarly debates (stemming from the classroom) over the style of Thucydides (ch. 4); poems on reports about the exotic customs of ancient peoples (ch. 5); essays on Greek history and its relevance for the present (ch. 6); and a long commentary that interrogated anew the relationship between the Greeks and the Romans at a time (the fifteenth century) when it had again become a pressing question for Greek-speakers under Latin rule (ch. 7).
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